Her question made my breath catch. Would Claudia have hidden in the closet, attacked me and run away? “I—I don’t know,” I said, but I was thinking yes. Yes, definitely. My mother used to punish Claudia and me by locking us in a closet. It made me frantic, but Claudia took to the shadows. When she’d lived with me I’d occasionally found her sitting cross-legged in the bedroom closet with the light off. It lets me be alone with my thoughts, she would say. Suddenly I remembered Jesse’s call. He’d said someone had turned up. Could that have been Claudia? If it was, who had been in her apartment?

“Do you want me to call the police, or would you rather do it?” asked Sarah.

“I need to call my friend first.” I looked around for a phone but didn’t see one. Sarah’s apartment was almost devoid of furniture. I was sitting on a clear Lucite chair that had a twin on the other side of a black wrought-iron table. The minimalist chic could have been a stage setting for a very modern play. I was uncomfortable there, as if I were an out-of-place prop.

Sarah passed me a cell phone. “I don’t have a land line,” she explained.

When I dialed Jesse’s number, I only got voicemail. I called his cell phone and got a recorded voice, too. Where had he gone? It hit me suddenly that maybe someone attacked him, too. Maybe the same person who had attacked me… No, that was paranoid. I sounded like my mother, and that was always a bad sign.

“Can I get you something to drink?” Sarah’s voice interrupted my thoughts. “Some brandy might be in order. Don’t laugh. That was my mother’s cure-all for everything.”

There was nothing shocking about what she’d said, but her words crackled through me like electricity. Brandy had been my mother’s cure-all, too, and it was administered when Claudia or I had a cold, a cough, or couldn’t sleep. My mother was, after all, an alcoholic. Before I could answer Sarah, a phone started softly trilling in the background.

Sarah heard it too. “That’s from your sister’s apartment,” she said. “I can hear it when there’s no other noise. No one else has that old-fashioned ring.”

“Who the hell would be calling there in the middle of the night?” I didn’t like the first thought that occurred to me—what if Claudia had been waiting in her apartment, knowing someone was going to call her? “I have to get over there.” I went to the door, still holding the ice.