Depending on who you ask, her name is either Kay, Kathleen, or Brenda. Before she moved out here, she wore her hair in a tidy, blonde bob.  You wouldn’t even recognize her now in that jet black, Priscilla Presley style cascading beehive.

It wasn’t easy to leave California, but she had no choice. When the speculations started at work, she packed up the car and headed across the country.  She was guilty, but she’d be damned if she was going to get caught. After all, if it weren’t for her, the company never would have gotten those key account sales last year.  The bills were piling up and Jim hadn’t come back to their little ranch house in the Valley in over two months.

It was almost too easy. The money was just…there. At first, she took just a little bit of cash just to see if anyone noticed–a twenty here and there to pay for gas.  After awhile, it became clear that no one was going to notice. She dutifully went to work every day and planned and plotted, careful not to take too much on any given day. Daily runs to the bank and some careful shifting of the deposits and she was in the clear.  In her mind there was no way to finger her for embezzlement. Besides, everyone trusted her. Without her, the company would have been out of business years ago. When she looks back at all of her hard work and dedication, she can almost convince herself that she deserved the money anyway.

People are so different here in St. Louis. It’s funny. You’d think that in a big place like California, you’d be just a speck, an anonymous person in a sea of subdivisions and strip malls.  She’s been living in Town and Country for six months, and still, no one in town knew her. They don’t know anything about the lies, the money, about California, or how it is that a single woman manages to spend all of her summer afternoons lounging by the pool at the Bellerive Country Club. These people have no idea how she got into the country club in the first place. She knows that it makes them nervous to see her in that white bikini nursing a Tom Collins. Once, she heard them talking when she went to the ladies room. “I think there’s something wrong with that woman. How is it that she’s not tan when all she does is sit there by the pool?”

She used to care about them. She wanted them to know her. She thought it might be nice to meet people, to have a friend to go shopping with or spend the afternoon having lunch and pedicures. But, she can’t afford to take those chances. The gossip is the least of her worries. Now they seem to be putting things together. Someone said they heard she had a husband and kids, even though no one ever saw them.

She was last seen wearing this dress at lunch. She was with an older man. Everyone was sure they knew him from somewhere, but nobody could remember where they might have met him or how they knew him, just that he looked familiar.

It’s this dress–the one with the green embroidered dragons–that makes her eyes light up as she punches the accelerator of her gold Cutlass Supreme and heads for the freeway. She lights up a Benson & Hedges and mutters, “It was the car.”  This damn car just never seemed to fit in around here.