Red, White & Dead

Red, White & Dead Laura Caldwell A few short months before, I’d juggled three men in my life, and then suddenly there were none. Today, one was staging a comeback, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. In the meantime I was free to date whoever I wanted. Even a ranking member of the mafia as part of a part-time job. Izzy McNeil is hot on the trail of one of Chicago’s most notorious gangsters.Not that he realizes the crimson-tressed enchantress, a self-proclaimed “lapsed lawyer,” is moonlighting as a private investigator. But when an unexpected run-in trashes Izzy’s cover, she’s swept into an evil underworld where she is definitely not safe.That is until Izzy receives help from an unlikely source: the ultimate guardian angel. And the last person she ever dreamed she’d see again. Now Izzy is racing from Chicago to Rome, all the while battling personal demons, Mafiosi killers and red hot emergency desires.… Praise for the novels of LAURA CALDWELL Red, White & Dead “A fresh, intelligent and emotional thriller. Laura Caldwell writes with an assured ease, showing a true sense of style and story, delivering a brilliant and complicated heroine.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Berry Red Blooded Murder “Aims for the sweet spot between tough and tender, between thrills and thought—and hits the bull’s-eye … A terrific novel.” —No.1 New York Times bestselling author Lee Child “Take Izzy McNeil to bed tonight. You won’t get much sleep, but you’ll spend tomorrow smiling. Red Blooded Murder is smoking hot and impossible to put down.” —Marcus Sakey, author of Good People and The Blade Itself Red Hot Lies “A legal lioness—Caldwell has written a gripping edge-of-the-seat thriller that will not disappoint.” —New York Times bestselling author Steve Martini The Good Liar “A massive achievement, in one novel, launching a woman right up there with the top thriller writers around.” —International bestselling author Ken Bruen The Rome Affair “A fabulous, hypnotic psychological thriller. Laura Caldwell is a force we can’t ignore.” —New York Times bestselling author Stella Cameron Look Closely “A haunting story of suspense and family secrets … you won’t want to put it down.” —New York Times bestselling author Mary Jane Clark The Night I Got Lucky “Caldwell is one of the most talented and inventive … writers around.” —Booklist The Year of Living Famously “Snazzy, gripping … an exciting taste of life in the fast lane.” —Booklist A Clean Slate “A page-turner about a woman with a chance to reinvent herself.” —Chicago Tribune Burning the Map “A touching story of a young woman at a crossroads in her life.” —Barnes & Noble.com on Burning the Map, selected as one of “The Best of 2002” RED, WHITE & DEAD LAURA CALDWELL www.mirabooks.co.uk (http://www.mirabooks.co.uk) Dear Reader, The Izzy McNeil series is fiction. But it’s personal, too. Much of Izzy’s world is my world. She’s proud to be a lawyer (although she can’t always find her exact footing in the legal world) and she’s even more proud to be a Chicagoan. The Windy City has never been more alive for me than it was during the writing of these books—Red Hot Lies, Red Blooded Murder and Red, White & Dead. Nearly all the places I’ve written about are as true-blue-Chicago as Lake Michigan on a crisp October day. Occasionally I’ve taken licence with a few locales, but I hope you’ll enjoy visiting them. If you’re not a Chicagoan, I hope you’ll visit the city, too, particularly if you haven’t recently. Chicago is humming right now—it’s a city whose surging vibrancy is at once surprising and yet, to those of us who’ve lived here a while, inevitable. The Izzy McNeil books can be read in any order, although Izzy does age throughout, just like the rest of us. Please e-mail me at [email protected] to let me know what you think about the books, especially what you think Izzy and her crew should be doing next. And thank you, thank you, for reading. Laura Caldwell Thanks also to everyone who read the book or offered advice or suggestions, especially Dustin O’Regan, Jason Billups, Liza Jaine, Rob Kovell, Katie Caldwell Kuhn, Margaret Caldwell, Christi Smith, William Caldwell, Matthew Caldwell, Meredith Caldwell, Liz Flock, Kris Verdeck and Les Klinger. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you so very much to Margaret O’Neill Marbury, Amy Moore-Benson and Maureen Walters. Thanks also to everyone at MIRA Books, including Valerie Gray, Donna Hayes, Dianne Moggy, Loriana Sacilotto, Craig Swinwood, Pete McMahon, Stacy Widdrington, Andrew Wright, Pamela Laycock, Katherine Orr, Marleah Stout, Alex Osuszek, Erin Craig, Margie Miller, Adam Wilson, Don Lucey, Gordy Goihl, Dave Carley, Ken Foy, Erica Mohr, Darren Lizotte, Andi Richman, Reka Rubin, Margie Mullin, Sam Smith, Kathy Lodge, Carolyn Flear, Maureen Stead, Emily Ohanjanians, Michelle Renaud, Linda McFall, Stephen Miles, Jennifer Watters, Amy Jones, Malle Vallik, Tracey Langmuir, Anne Fontanesi, Scott Ingram, Deborah Brody, Marianna Ricciuto, Jim Robinson, John Jordan and Brent Lewis. Grazie mille to Andrea Rossi in Rome for answering my many questions about the Camorra and the anti-Mafia efforts in Italy, and grazie to Francesco Marinuzzi and Laura Roberts for their assistance with all things Italia. Much gratitude to my experts—Chicago Police Officer Jeremy Schultz; criminal defence lawyers Catharine O’Daniel and Sarah Toney; pilot Jonathan Sandrolini, private investigator Paul Ciolino; journalist Maurice Possley and physicians Dr Richard Feely and Dr Roman Voytsekhovskiy. PART I 1 When it happened, it happened at night, the way bizarre things often do. For a Sunday, and nearly midnight, the restaurant was buzzing. That’s the way Sundays work in Chicago. Often the city is quiet—most people tucked under sheets by 10 p.m., newspapers sprawled on the floor below them. Other times, on a Sunday in June like that night, when the weather plays nice—the occasional puffed cloud skimming across a crystallized blue sky, a sky that gently settles into a soft black without losing the day’s warmth—things can get a little raucous. And I’m the kind of girl who likes a raucous Sunday now and again. So even though Rush Street wasn’t my usual hangout, if I’d been surrounded by friends at that corner table at Gibsons Bar, the one by the windows that looked onto the street where people still strolled and lights still burned, I would have been very happy. But I wasn’t with friends. Dez Romano threw his arm over the back of my stool. Dez, short for Desmond, had dark black hair, even though he was surely a few years past forty, and it curled in pleasing twists, like ribbons of ink around his face. The somewhat thick bridge of his nose was the only coarse thing on Dez Romano’s face, and he managed to make that look spectacularly handsome. He was so confident, so lit up with energy that you began to think every man should have such a face. The story I’d been told by John Mayburn, the private investigator I moonlighted for, was that Dez had been named by his mother after a Catholic cardinal whom she admired. The religious connotation hadn’t helped. Dez was now the head of his family business, as in the family business. Dez was, as Mayburn had said, “the new face of Chicago’s organized crime.” Dez smiled at me now. I thought a smile by such a man would be flashy, a surface grin that easily revealed danger underneath. But it was genuine. Or at least it appeared so. I’d been told that, in some ways, Dez was the new kind of Mafia—the kind who had friends from all walks of life around the city, who opted, when possible, for courting rather than strong-arming, who made large donations to charities, not because he or his family business wanted something from them, but simply because every respectable business did so. I returned Dez’s smile, thinking that the problem with Dez wasn’t his looks and it wasn’t that he lacked generosity, whether toward a woman like me, whom he’d met at the bar, a woman supposedly stood up by a flaky friend or toward his associates. The problem was, at least according to the suspicions of the federal government, Dez ran an intricate business, an arm of the Italian Camorra, believed to be more ambitious and more ruthless than the Cosa Nostra faction made famous by The Godfather movies. In other words, Dez was also the old kind of Mafia. He wasn’t afraid of strong-arming or something much more violent. No, not at all. “So, Suzanne,” Dez said, using the alias I’d given him, “where to from here?” I laughed, looked at my watch. “It’s almost midnight. I’d say home is where I’m going from here.” “And where is home?” “Old Town,” I answered vaguely. I really did live in Old Town. When Mayburn first taught me to assume a cover name in order to conduct surveillance, he told me to always blend in some reality—some truth that couldn’t be easily tied to your real life—or otherwise you’d forget or confuse yourself, and you could land in some very real trouble. The blending of such truths hadn’t exactly helped. My occasional moonlighting gig for Mayburn had gotten me into more than a little trouble, but I hadn’t been able to turn him down this time. I need a favor, Izzy, he’d said, earlier that night. I want you to hang out at Gibsons. Act like you’re meeting a friend at the bar, act like the friend canceled on you. Dez Romano is always there on Sunday. Throw that red hair over your shoulder and give him the famous Izzy McNeil smile. Talk to him. See if he says anything about Michael DeSanto. I didn’t say that there was no “famous Izzy McNeil smile” that I knew of. I didn’t point out all the things that could go wrong with this little “favor.” Instead, I agreed rather quickly. Not because I needed the money, which I did, but because Mayburn was in love, the first time I’d witnessed such a thing. And yet it appeared he was about to lose his beloved to Michael DeSanto, a banker we’d helped put in jail for laundering money for the Mob. Correction: laundering money for Dez Romano. “My car is outside,” Dez said. “Let me give you a lift.” “That’s all right. I’m a taxi kind of girl.” I pointed out the window, where a few Yellow Cabs and Checkers floated by. “I won’t have a problem. But thank you for dinner.” I waved at the table toward the bottles of wine and grappa and the desserts in which we’d barely made a dent. Dez answered that it had been wonderful, that he’d like to see me again. “I guess I should have asked before,” he said, with a shy shrug that surprised me. “You’re single, right?” I answered honestly—”I am.” A few short months before, I’d juggled three men, and then suddenly there were none. Today, one was staging a comeback, and I wasn’t sure what to do about that. In the meantime, although I was occasionally tortured about those who had left my life, I was free to date whomever I wanted. Even a ranking member of the Mafia, if only as a part-time job. If I hadn’t known who he was and what he did for a living, I wouldn’t have blinked before agreeing to go out with Dez. I was about to turn thirty, and with my birthday fast approaching, it seemed the dating gods had flipped a switch in my head. I had never dated anyone much older than me, never really been interested, but now Dez’s forty-some years compared to my twenty-nine seemed just fine. Dez leaned his elbows on the green-and-white tablecloth and shot me a sexy kind of smile. “Would you go out with me sometime? Officially?” Officially, I was about to say, Sure, This was what Mayburn had hoped would happen. I would listen for anything having to do with Michael DeSanto, and if nothing came up, I’d establish a contact with Dez so I could see him again, so I might learn something about Michael in the future. I looked out the window once more, thought about how to phrase my answer. And then I saw him. He was standing across the street at a stop sign, wearing a blue blazer and a scowl. He glanced at his watch, then up again, and as the cars slowed, he began to cross the street, right toward us. I opened my mouth. I must have looked shocked because Dez followed my gaze. “Hey, it’s DeSanto,” he said fondly. He looked back at me. I clamped my mouth shut and met his eyes, trying to cover my panic with a bland expression. His eyes narrowed. “You know DeSanto?” “Urn …” What to say here? Actually, we met when I was pretending to be friends with his wife, Lucy, in order to sneak into his office and download files to incriminate him. Isn’t that ironic? Mayburn and I had decided that if I was successful tonight and got to Dez Romano, and if I could somehow steer the conversation toward Michael DeSanto’s name, I would ask about Michael, maybe volunteer that I’d once met Lucy—the woman Mayburn was now in love with—at my gym, or someplace similarly benign. But that plan had assumed I wouldn’t actually see Michael; it assumed that Michael wouldn’t pull open the door to Gibsons, and walk right in, and find me with his buddy, Dez. I stood up. I leaned forward, hoping to distract Dez with a little cleavage. It worked. His narrowed stare relaxed. He glanced up at me and, to his credit, then kept his eyes there. Meanwhile, my eyes shot toward the door. And there was Michael DeSanto, stopping to say hello to the ma?tre d’. Frig, I thought, attempting to stick with my stop-swearing campaign despite the circumstances. But I gave up quickly. Fuck, I thought. What is he doing here? According to Lucy, her wayward husband was out of jail on bond, and although he was friendly with his compatriots of old, like Dez (all of whom had managed to avoid prosecution through one loophole or another), he wasn’t doing business with them anymore. Rarely saw them much at all. As such, Lucy had felt it her duty, especially for her kids, to break up with Mayburn and give it a go with Michael, the father of her children, the man she was, or at least had been, in love with. And so their Lincoln Park home once again blazed bright, as did the lights on the security gates surrounding it. The whole thing had rendered John Mayburn bordering on positively vacant, which spooked me. Which was why I’d found myself agreeing to try and infiltrate the world of organized crime. Yet now Michael was here, just out of jail, clearly stopping in to see Dez Romano. And about to come face-to-face with the person who was instrumental in putting him in jail. Me. I took a step away from Dez, muttering, “Be right back.” I moved in the direction of the bathrooms, but when I realized it would put me in a collision course with DeSanto, I shifted, started to go the other way. I froze when I realized the exit and the bathrooms were both just beyond where Michael was standing. He stopped then, completely still, looking at me with his eerily light brown eyes. He froze in exactly the same way an animal does when assessing a dire situation—with the knowledge that this might be the end, this might be the time to meet the maker, but with a sure clarity that there was going to be a fight before the end came. I froze, too. I wished at that moment that I was better at this stuff, but no matter how much I’d learned from Mayburn, the whole undercover thing was simply not in my blood. And so, lacking anything better to do, I gave Michael DeSanto the same smile I gave lawyers at Chicago Bar Association events when I didn’t recognize them—a sort of Hi, how are you? Good to see you kind of smile. Physically, DeSanto looked a little like Dez Romano, but he wasn’t even glancing at his friend right now. His intent stare stayed focused exactly on me. He cocked his head ever so slightly. His face jutted forward then, as if he were straining to understand. And I knew in that moment that it was one of those situations—he’d recognized me, sort of, but he couldn’t place me. Yet. I was sure he’d figure it out any second. I didn’t wait for the wheels to start clicking in his mind. Instead, I averted my gaze and hightailed it to the right, then veered back behind him. I glanced across the room at the front door. It was clogged with a huge group of people saying goodbyes, giving each other boozy pats on the back. I could sense Michael turning around to stare at me, so I darted up the staircase and bolted for the bathroom. I panted inside the stall, trying to work out what to do. Should I somehow try to say goodbye to Dez? Should I give up on the infiltration job and just take off for the calm confines of my condo? It wasn’t much of an infiltration job anyway, just a job that required chatting up someone at a bar, a task I used to be rather good at, if I say so myself. However, that skill had gone rusty over the last few years. Who could blame me after my series of, shall we say, unfortunate circumstances. Two friends killed and a disappearing/reappearing fianc?, who was now officially off the map, had caused me to spend a lot of time in my condo, licking my wounds. Eight months ago, I’d been on top of the world—the highest paid associate at a big, glitzy law firm, en route to partnership not only with the firm but with my fianc?. And then poof, all gone, rendering me tired and stunned and jobless. What I’d been doing for the last few months consisted of nothing more than feeling guilty about doing nothing. Shortly, my funds would literally drop to zero, causing my fears about being forced to sell my Old Town home to become a reality. And so this request from Mayburn, who believed Michael DeSanto wasn’t as squeaky clean as he was telling his wife, led me to Dez Romano. But enough was enough. Heartbroken or not, Mayburn would understand that I had to get out of there. I left the bathroom, went down the first flight of stairs, peeked down the rest of the way, my hands on the silver banister. I saw no one. The large group appeared to have left. I trotted down as fast as my high heels would allow, past the signed photos that plastered the walls—everyone from local judges to international celebrities seemed to have autographed a glossy for Gibsons. My breath was managing only shallow forays into my lungs, so I stopped once to suck in air. A few more steps and I was at the bottom, the front door only a few feet away. The ma?tre d’ gave me a bored nod as if to say goodnight. But then he glanced to the right, and a questioning expression overtook his face. I peeked to see what he was looking at. Michael. Across the room, Michael was talking to Dez, his arms waving, gesturing. Right then, Dez looked over Michael’s shoulder and saw me. “Hey!” he said, his eyes narrowed in anger. There were only a handful of diners in the restaurant, but Dez’s voice was loud enough to get everyone’s attention. They looked at Dez, then at me. Suddenly, Dez and Michael were on their feet and coming toward me, the furious expressions on their faces enough to catapult me into action. I reached down, pulled off my high heels and dashed out the door onto Rush Street. “Cab!” I yelled, waving at one. But the taxi’s light was off, and it blew by. Same with the next one and the next. I took off running toward Oak Street, hoping desperately for the shimmering vision of a cab with its light on. I heard someone shout. Glancing back, I saw Michael and Dez sprinting after me. Behind them was another man, also running, his head down, face obscured by a baseball cap. Was he security for Dez? I tucked my shoes under my arm and ran faster. When I reached a tiny alleyway, I dodged down it, running until I came to a parking garage. “Ticket?” a sleepy valet said. I heard footsteps pounding behind me in the narrow alley. Frantically, I looked around. The garage’s entrance was on State Street. I could leave that way, but if I did, surely Dez and Michael and their muscle would see me and keep up the chase. To the left, though, was a steep ramp that quickly curved up and out of sight. If I could get up the ramp before they reached the garage, I could hide and call Mayburn for help. I could call the police if I had to. I started in that direction. “Miss!” the valet yelled. “Your ticket?” “My car is up here,” I said as I kept moving. “No, miss! Only valet here. You have a ticket?” I hesitated for a moment. I thought about reversing and bolting for State Street, but it would take too much time. They would see me for sure. Then it dawned that if I kept running up the ramp, the valet would probably follow me, which would be a good thing, since he couldn’t tell Dez and Michael where I’d gone. I was about to start climbing the ramp again, but it was too late. Dez and Michael pounded into the garage. No sign of their security guard. Dez and Michael both wore blazers; both had that great Italian black hair. And both looked as though they would very, very much like to kill me. They ran up the ramp as if to do just that. I turned and sprinted off. When the ramp curved to the right, I figured I had only a few seconds to vanish. There were rows of cars parked in spots marked Reserved. I dodged behind a green Jaguar and crouched there, my heart banging violently against the walls of my chest. My dress, made of lavender silk, was damp with sweat and clinging to my body. I held my breath, afraid to make a sound. But meanwhile, I heard no sounds of Michael or Dez. Surely, they’d seen me. Surely, they were just behind me. I swiveled my head around, feeling exposed. All they would have to do was look around the side of the car and they would spot me. And then what would they do? I kept holding my breath. Silently, I placed my heels on the ground, bent down farther and tried to see under the carriage of the car. It was so low I had to kneel. Jagged concrete dug into my skin. My curly hair fell over my eyes. I brushed it away, bent lower and looked under the car. My breath filled my lungs with a rush, almost like a punch. Because there, on the other side of the Jaguar, were two pairs of beautiful Italian loafers. Michael and Dez were standing there. They clearly hadn’t heard me yet. But they were just waiting for me to make a sound. My mouth opened in a terrified O. I began to pant again, this time silently. I looked behind me and saw a door, maybe leading to an interior staircase. I peeked under the car again, and to my horror, I saw those beautiful Italian loafers start to move. I stood and lunged for the door. Locked. Fuck. I was immediately chastised by my internal swearword replacement monitor, but once again Frig just wasn’t going to cut it. I spun around and faced them, shooting frenzied looks around the place, trying to figure out if I could dodge them and make a run for the street. They were still on the other side of the car, moving slowly, almost creeping. Dez was nearly to the front of the Jag. “So what’s your real name, little girl?” Dez said. “It’s not Isabel Bristol,” Michael growled. Isabel Bristol was the name I’d used when I first met him. “And it’s not Suzanne,” Dez said, no shyness about him now, only a sinister sneer. “C’mere, little girl.” I took a step back, then another. I was backing myself into the locked door, I knew, but the only impulse my body could muster was to recoil from Dez and Michael. My eyes swung wildly. Where was their security guard? I took another step back. My bare feet stepped on something oily, then on the heels of my own shoes. Swiftly, I reached down and picked them up, thinking of some TV show I’d seen once where a stiletto was used to kill someone. I tucked my purse tighter under my arm. I brandished my high heels like ridiculous satin-covered weapons. There was nowhere else to go. I tried to think of something to say, but it was clear there would be no chatting with these guys, no talking my way out of the situation. It didn’t matter anyway, because Dez charged around the car toward me. Instinctively, I moved back again, bouncing against the door. And then I was propelled forward as the door opened behind me. I was only a foot from Dez now, Michael behind him. I felt a hand grip my arm and yank me back, hard, into the stairwell. The security guard. It must be. “No!” I yelled, thrashing against him. “No!” But the guy pulled me in farther, and then he did the strangest thing. He slammed the door, right on the puzzled faces of Dez and Michael. It was black in the stairwell. I could see nothing. Dez’s and Michael’s fists battered the door from the outside, sounding like tribal drums, loud and menacing and alerting everyone of more danger to come. I struggled against the grip of the security guard, and to my surprise he let me go. “You’re okay,” he said. I trembled a little, wanting to run but unable to see anything, not knowing where to go. It sounded as if Dez and Michael were pounding the door handle now, trying to break it. “You have to leave,” the man said. “You need to get out of here.” Why did his voice sound familiar, as if I were listening to the note of a song I had heard only a few times? I felt a touch on my wrist. “Stop!” I yelled out of sheer instinct, pulling it away. In the deep dark of the stairwell, the movement made me feel dizzy, and I willed myself to stand straight. “Let me show you the banister,” he said. “Walk down the steps and out onto the street. Get away from here as fast as you can.” “But …” Scratching sounded from the direction of the door handle now, as if Michael and Dez were putting something in the lock. “Hurry,” the man said. “They’ll be in here very soon.” Enough of a threat to get me moving. I tucked the purse tighter under my arm and clutched both shoes in my left hand. The man touched the wrist of my right hand again, and this time I let him lead me to the banister. “Hold tight,” he said. “Be careful. But please go as fast as you can.” I took one step, then another. Then I stopped. “Thank you,” I said. “You’re welcome.” Again, there was a distantly familiar quality to his voice. I turned and put one foot on the lower step and then the next. I began to get the hang of it, despite the blackness around me. When I got to a landing, I shuffled my feet forward, looking for where the next steps began. Upstairs, I could hear more thrashing at the door. Then, for a moment it quieted, and I heard the man speak. “Go. You’re okay now, Boo.” The pounding at the door continued. An injection of fear kept me moving, finding the staircase, taking the steps faster this time, until I reached the street and pushed open the door, the streetlights hitting my eyes like a blast. I blinked and looked around. No sign of Michael or Dez. Not yet. I saw a cab, lights on, across the street. I ran to it, yanked open the door and hopped into the back. Breathlessly, I gave my address on Eugenie Street. It was only when the cab had driven eight blocks that I stopped looking behind me. Then I closed my eyes, laid my head on the back of the seat and let myself hear the last words the man had said. You’re okay now, Boo. Was that right? Had he actually said that? I forced myself back to that moment, listening intently to the memory. You’re okay now, Boo. Boo was the nickname my mother used for me. No one else had ever called me that. Except my father. And he had been dead for almost twenty-two years. 2 “Let’s get tattoos.” I looked at my friend Maggie. “What are you talking about?” It was Monday, the day after my night with Dez Romano, and needing a warm and welcoming face or two, I had texted my best friend, Maggie, and my former assistant, Q, and was happily surprised when they were both available for lunch. Q, who was also unemployed but living with his very wealthy boyfriend, picked me up and took us into the Loop to meet Maggie at a pub near her office. Maggie and I ordered the fish and chips. Maggie ate greedily, the way she does when she finally remembers to stop working and eat, while I sort of picked at the fries and poked at the fish with my finger, unable to muster an appetite. Q, who was eternally on a diet to avoid a persistent belly, his personal nemesis to the perfect gay physique, gave a sullen stab at his plain chicken breast and pushed it away. You’re okay now, Boo. I’d called Mayburn when I got home last night, telling him about the debacle at Gibsons, about being chased, about hearing those words. He wasn’t too impressed by the “Boo” thing, but he’d been worried and upset about Michael and Dez being after me. He told me to keep a low profile, to watch for anyone tailing me. I don’t think he would consider having lunch in the Loop “low profile,” but sometimes you’ve simply got to be with friends. “We need something new,” Maggie said. “At least I do.” She dunked a piece of battered fish into a ramekin of tartar sauce and popped it in her mouth. “And a tattoo is a way to signify something new in your life, like a new chapter.” “Who told you that?” Q asked. She shrugged. “That’s what people say.” “That’s what they say after they get a tattoo, so they can justify it. So they can live with themselves.” Maggie stopped eating and gave a slightly dejected look. “Mags,” I said. “Your family would kill you if you got another tattoo.” Maggie came from a big South Side Irish family, and they barely tolerated the tiny shamrock she got on her ankle during a college spring break. “I’m thirty,” she said. “I can do what I want. I don’t care what they think.” Q and I laughed. Maggie did, too. Yes, Maggie was very much an adult, helping to run the criminal defense practice started by her famous lawyer grandfather, trying cases in courthouses all over the state. But her family was as thick as the thieves she represented. They spent most of their free time together, they knew everything about each other, and Maggie very much cared about their opinions. I bit into a french fry, thinking about my recent exposure to tattoos. The last guy I dated—a twenty-one-year-old wunderkind of the computer world named Theo Jameson—had boasted a plethora of tattoos around his stunning body. A gold-and-black serpent slithered sexily around one arm, a red ribbon on the other. High on his left pec was an Asian-looking symbol. I’d never learned what it meant. We only dated a short time. He’d been too young for me, although that wasn’t why we broke up. Lately, Theo lingered in my mind just as much as Sam, my ex-fianc?, maybe more so because Theo had started texting me again recently. I miss you … he’d say. I think about you 300 times a day. And the last one—I have blood oranges. One late night a couple months ago, Theo came to my apartment with a bag filled with small oranges tinged a sultry crimson color. He made us screwdrivers. He squeezed juice on my wrists and licked it off. I smiled as I chewed now, thinking about it. Q saw my look. Knowing me well, he asked, “Theo?” before attempting another bite of his chicken breast. “Yeah.” Q and Maggie hadn’t met Theo, but I’d given them a detailed description of him, as well as a somewhat sanitized version of the nights we’d spent together. “Is he still texting you?” Maggie asked. “Yeah.” “What are you going to do about it?” “I have no idea.” “Do you want to see him?” “I haven’t had sex in almost two months. And that kid is sex on a stick. What do you think?” Maggie groaned, stopped eating momentarily. “I so understand.” Recently, Maggie had taken a second shot at a relationship with an older, scoundrel type named Wyatt. And for the second time, Wyatt proved his scoundrel status, landing Maggie and me into singledom at the same time, something that hadn’t happened since we’d met our first year in law school. “A sexual dry spell?” Q said, smiling despite the lunch he’d pushed away again. “I can’t even remember what that’s like.” “Shut up,” Maggie and I said in unison. Q kept smiling. “What about Sam?” Maggie asked me. “What about Sam?” I repeated, as if by saying the question out loud someone external, or maybe someone deep inside me, would answer definitively. But as usual, only more questions popped up: Could we ever recapture what we had? Should we stop wondering about recapturing and consider redesigning? And then came that question, always that brutal question that scared the others, and even the other possible answers, into complete silence: Was it over between us for good? Sam and I had met through Forester Pickett, a Chicago media mogul we both worked for—me as a lawyer and Sam as a financial advisor at a private wealth management firm. When Forester was killed, our worlds spun out of control. And I’m not using that phrase—out of control—the way I previously used it when I was on trial or in the middle of a particularly nasty contract battle. Everything is so out of control, I would say back then, having no idea what that really meant. In the aftermath of Forester’s death, we tried to put back together the team that was Sam and Izzy, Izzy and Sam, but something was missing. And lacking the tools to adequately describe it, or maybe just lacking the tools to adequately ride it out and shift our worlds around, we dated other people and then officially broke up. The breakup came right about the time Theo and I ended, too—right about the time I ended the minor romance that sprung up with my friend Grady. And so for the last two months, it had been just me. I spent time with Q and Maggie. I saw my family, too— my brother, Charlie, my mom and her husband, Spence. That friend and family time had helped me to arise from the fog I’d started carrying around, but I agreed with Maggie that maybe we both needed something new. “Look,” I said, ignoring the question about Sam. “Tattoos aren’t going to help. We need something else.” “You do,” Q said. “It’s almost your birthday.” “That’s right!” Maggie said. “Ten days from now. What do you want to do?” I thought about it. “I guess I just want to be around family and friends. Does that sound too boring?” “Kinda,” Q said. Maggie pushed her plate away. “No, c’mon, you need something.” Suddenly, she sat up tall, brushing her wavy, golden-brown hair out of her eyes. “A vacation!” she said. “That’s it! We’ll celebrate your birthday by getting the hell out of Dodge.” “Shane and I are going to St. Bart’s,” Q said. “You could come with us.” I leaned back against the booth. “I don’t have the cash for a vacation.” Maggie sighed. “And what am I talking about? I don’t have the time. I’m on trial later this week. But maybe if we just started planning something it would motivate us, give us something to look forward to. We’ve always talked about going to Prague.” “And Paris.” “And London.” “And back to Italy.” Now I sat upright. Maggie and I had done a study-abroad program after our first year in law school. Maggie saw my excited look and read my thoughts. “Is your aunt still living in Rome?” I nodded fast. “As far as I know.” “Do you think we could stay with her?” Maggie asked. “That would help with the cost.” The truth was Maggie made more than enough to head to Rome for a week or two or four, but I appreciated that she was trying to be sensitive to her newly cash-strapped friend. “I haven’t talked to her in a long time, but I could ask.” I could definitely ask, and not only because we wouldn’t have to pay for a hotel, but because other than my mother and brother, my aunt was the only person who had also known my father. Elena, my father’s sister, had been living in Rome for decades. When Maggie and I went to school there eight years ago, Aunt Elena had taken us to our first meal in Rome—at a restaurant right next to the Pantheon called Fortunato. But unfortunately, she had been out of town the rest of that month, and we didn’t get to spend any more time with her. Yet she was exactly the person I wanted to spend time with now. You’re okay now, Boo. I hadn’t told Maggie or Q about last night. Under Mayburn’s rules, I couldn’t tell anyone about the fact that I was his part-time, off-the-books employee. I’d started working with Mayburn last fall when Sam had disappeared after Forester’s death, and in return for looking into the matter, I’d agreed to freelance for Mayburn. The whole reason I need you, he’d said, is because you’re a typical, normal North Side Chicago woman. If there’s any inkling that’s not the case, if anyone knows you do P.I. stuff on the side, it won’t work. I had argued that I should be able to tell my close friends, but Mayburn wouldn’t budge. If one of those people lets it slip to someone else, he’d said, it wouldn’t end there; word would get around. I wasn’t so sure I cared anymore about a freelance investigator gig, especially when it got me into the kind of scariness it had last night. I’m a girl who likes to be chased as much as the next, but only in a romantic sense, not in a Mob-is-about-to-kill-you kind of sense. And yet I couldn’t shake the sound of that man’s voice, the way he’d called me by my childhood nickname, Boo. Or at least that’s what I thought I’d heard. The further I got away from it, the more I doubted myself. But I still wanted to poke around a little, to see if I could find anything out about my father, if there was anything to find out. The man had been dead for almost twenty-two years after all. But no one aside from my mother, used that nickname. A way to fish around about my dad was to reestablish contact with my aunt Elena. “Mags,” I said, “I think you’ve got something here.” I lifted my napkin and tossed it onto my plate. “I’m calling her tonight.” 3 He watched her leave the restaurant, her steps casual, unhurried. And yet her shoulders were tight, her head swiveling. She pivoted once or twice, as if she couldn’t decide which way to go, but then he recognized what she was doing. She was getting a feeling, sensing surveillance. And she was right. He watched as she stopped at the window of an office-supply store. To passersby she probably looked as if she was simply smoothing the front of her yellow summer dress, merely tugging a few stray red curls into place. But he knew what she was really doing. She couldn’t identify the source of her suspicion, he could tell, and so after another few fast glances in the glass at the people around her, at the cars on the street, she turned and kept moving. Her body appeared more relaxed now. Apparently, she had decided she wasn’t being followed. She was wrong. He just hoped he was the only one. 4 I walked home from my lunch date to savor the summer weather—crisp without being cool, sunny without being blazing, breezy without the lake winds blowing your skirt around your ass. Usually, I would be on my scooter—a silver Vespa—but Q had driven me to lunch. With so much time on my hands and considering the fact that Chicago receives approximately four and a half-perfect weather days like this, I figured I had to make the best of it. The streets were crowded with people. Everyone had a bustle to their steps, it seemed. Everyone had a purpose. You could tell the lawyer types who were dashing to court or a deposition. You could spot the salespeople pulling product in small wheeled suitcases. When I’d been one of those dashing lawyers, I was always jealous of someone like me, someone dressed casually the way I was in flip-flops and a yellow cotton dress, someone who clearly didn’t have to rush anywhere. But being on the other side was starting to depress me—knowing that I wasn’t just playing hooky for the afternoon or taking a much-needed sabbatical, knowing that I was out of work and out of prospects and almost out of my twenties. Plus, all those people on the street, and the fact that a crowd made it easy to tail someone, began to make me nervous, made me think about Dez and Michael, and wonder if they knew who I was, if they were looking for me. And of course, thinking about Dez and Michael made me think of that stranger in the stairwell. It was one night, when I was about five years old, that my father had given me my nickname. I’d woken up crying after a sinister dream. He tried to console me, but nothing worked. In the span of six hours, I’d grown fearful of the dark. My dad told me then that if you were afraid of something, you should look it straight in the eye. I didn’t know what he meant, and he must have seen that. “What are you afraid of in here?” He gestured around my bedroom, lit only by the tiny lamp in the shape of a shell that sat on my nightstand. I looked around. Nothing appeared particularly scary. “I don’t know.” “Ghosts? You’re scared that they’ll say, ‘Boo’?” “I guess.” “Well, there’s nothing scary about that. Nothing scary about ghosts, either. They’re just people who aren’t here anymore, stopping back in to say hi. Except they say boo.” That sounded rather simple. And not at all terrifying. “Okay?” Under his round copper glasses, my dad’s eyes sparkled, as though a laugh was just about to hit him. I loved when he looked like that. It made everything seem fine. “I guess …” I said again, the fear still lingering a bit the way bad dreams do. “You guess? What kind of answer is that?” My father looked at the ceiling and acted as if he was thinking hard. “I’ll tell you what. I’m going to call you Boo. Just for a little while, so that if you ever do see a ghost and they say that to you, you won’t be scared. You’ll have heard it before. Okay, Boo?” I liked it. I’d never had a nickname before. “Okay.” It had been a thing between the two of us, just my dad and me. After he died when I was eight years old, my mother picked up the nickname, as if by using it she could keep him a little bit alive. But I had never seen a ghost, never heard one. Until last night in the stairwell. When I got to the Chicago River, I began to feel I was being watched. I swung my head around, but it didn’t appear as if anyone was following me. I kept walking, paying attention to everyone I passed, and it seemed as if a lot of people were looking right at me, expressions of recognition on their faces. It was hard to tell if any of the people were tailing me or if their expressions were simply the type I’d witnessed frequently over the last couple of months—looks that said, I saw her on the news, I think. Yeah, she did something wrong. The fact was, I hadn’t done anything wrong, but after my friend died in the spring, the Chicago cops had suspected me of her murder. As a result, my image was flashed across the news stations for a week or so. Thankfully, mine was a flash-in-the-pan story, but I still got those looks with some regularity. I hoped Dez hadn’t seen the story, or hadn’t remembered it. I dropped my gaze as I crossed the bridge in front of the Merchandise Mart, not wanting to meet anyone’s eyes for too long. I reached into my bag for my cell phone. “Hey, Iz.” My brother answered on the first ring, which he almost always does. He’s one of the few people I know who actually answers their phone on a consistent basis. “What are you doing? Want to take a walk in the park or something?” “Yeah, meet me at Mom’s. I’m over here, using their printer.” “Are they home?” “They” was my mother, Victoria McNeil Calloway, and her husband, Spence. The two were mostly joined at the hip, and mostly at home now that Spence had retired from his business—a real estate development company that provided consulting around the country. I loved being with my mom and Spence, but I wasn’t ready to see them now. You couldn’t just waltz up to someone on a beautiful Monday afternoon and say, “Hey, any chance your husband, who died two decades ago, is alive?” I could barely ask myself that question. It was really too ridiculous. But Charlie was hard to fluster. My mother lived on State Street in an elegant gray-stone house, a few blocks north of Division Street. Charlie was waiting for me on the steps, his tall frame leaning back casually on his elbows. His loose, curly brown hair glinted in the sun with a hint of red I’ve always told him he got from me. He came down the steps and we hugged, then wordlessly started walking down State Street to Lincoln Park. We wandered behind the Chicago History Museum, crossing the street and passing by the entrance to the zoo. When we reached Caf? Brauer, we went behind it to the small pond, where paddleboats were rented by tourists or families. Some of the boats were forest-green, others white and shaped like huge swans. Charlie pointed. “Remember when Mom used to take us on those?” I nodded. “Mom and I would paddle and let you think you were doing all the work.” Charlie shook his head. “Yeah, and being the sucker I am, I believed it. Thought I was the man of the house.” “You were the man of the house.” We both laughed. Charlie has always possessed a lazy streak. It’s not that he’s stupid. Quite the contrary. Charlie is a reader of history, a lover of art and music. And trumping those things, Charlie is a lover of red wine and naps. In fact, most of his friends—and sometimes even my mom and I—had taken to calling him “Sheets” because he spent much of his time in bed, a trait that had intensified after college. Charlie had graduated with a degree in English and a desire to do absolutely nothing. A friend’s father took pity on him and gave him a job driving a dump truck to and from work sites, which Charlie liked just fine because during down times, he was allowed to doze in the trailer. He might have gone on like that for decades, but one day the truck turned over on the Dan Ryan Expressway when a semi cut him off. He broke his femur, screwed up his back and ended up with a fairly hefty settlement from the semi’s insurance company. In his usual cheerful way, “Sheets” took it as a windfall and had spent the last few years sitting around, reading, getting the occasional physical-therapy session and, yes, drinking red wine. “Let’s sit.” Charlie pointed to a bench at the side of the lagoon that was shaded by a patch of vibrantly green trees. He took a seat, his long arm on the top of the bench. I arranged myself cross-legged and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell Charlie what I’d heard, or thought I’d heard, last night. I stared across the pond at a bridge that spanned one edge of it, at the Hancock building and the skyline beyond that. Ever since Charlie and I were little, I was the more serious, the one who worried enough for everyone, the one who analyzed a situation ten ways before deciding what to do, while Charlie mostly rolled along. I needed him to analyze this one with me, though. I wouldn’t tell him about working for Mayburn, but I had to tell Charlie that I thought I’d heard our father’s voice. “So I was on Mom’s computer,” Charlie said, before I could form my words. “Working on something for You Tube?” Charlie produced funny little movies filmed on the streets of Chicago. He shot them in black and white and set them to old-fashioned French music. It was kind of hard to explain, but they were really quite charming, and he had developed a coterie of people, mostly female college students, who loved them and as a result, loved Charlie, as well. “I was working on my r?sum?.” “Really?” I tried not to sound surprised. Charlie had talked about looking for a job—after years of living off his settlement check, it was starting to dry up—but somehow it was impossible to imagine him getting up and doing something besides deciding between merlot versus cabernet. “Yeah. Actually, I think I already have the job. They just need my r?sum? for office purposes, to put it in my file.” “What’s the job?” “An internship at WGN. The radio station.” “The one with the glass studio on Michigan Avenue?” He nodded. “Wow.” I couldn’t hide my astonishment. “That sounds like a big gig.” “No, it’s being an assistant—or intern or whatever—to the producer for the midday show.” “So you’ll be going there every day?” Somehow this concept seemed impossible. “Yeah. I’m going to be working, Iz.” There was a note of pride in his voice I didn’t recognize. He studied my face. “I mean, c’mon, I don’t know what I want to do with my life. Actually, I wish everyone would stop asking me what I want to do with my life. What does that even mean?” I shrugged. I couldn’t be of any help there. “But it’s time to do something,” he continued. “Maybe this radio thing could be for me.” He shrugged, too. “You know Zim?” I nodded. “Zim” was Robby Zimmerman, a friend of Charlie’s from high school. “Well, his dad is in radio sales, and he got me the job. There’s no money in it, like no money, but—” “You’re going to work for free?” Financially, I was appalled, but this sounded more like the Charlie I knew. “Yeah. At least at first. Because I have to try something, Iz. I’m twenty-seven.” He said this like, I’m eighty-three. Charlie’s birthday was just a few days ago, and he was taking it even more seriously than I was my upcoming thirtieth. “I can’t sit around on my ass forever.” He frowned and looked out at a duck being chased by a toddler who was being chased by her mother. “Why not? You do sitting on your butt better than anyone I know.” Somehow, this whole notion of Charlie as a member of the working class freaked me out, made me feel as if my world was shifting even more. Things in my life kept skidding around, and I hated the fact that I had no idea where they would all land. Charlie laughed. “You don’t want me to get a job, because you don’t have a job.” “Exactly. It’s the beginning of summer and both the McNeil kids are lazy good-for-nothings. Let’s make the most of it and spend the summer on the lake.” Suddenly, I could envision it—Charlie and I walking from my mom’s house to North Avenue Beach, maybe sitting on the roof deck of the restaurant that looked like a boat and eating fried shrimp for lunch, lying under an umbrella in the sand for the rest of the afternoon, barbecuing with my mom and Spence in the evenings. Ever since the breakup with Sam—and Theo and Grady—I craved my family like never before. Even more so now that it felt as if I was about to lose Charlie somehow. Or at least the Charlie I knew. “You should do that,” Charlie said. “Have yourself a lazy summer. Pretend you’re me, and I’ll go to work and pretend I’m you.” I frowned. I wasn’t enjoying the prospect of suddenly being the sloth of the family. I didn’t think I could pull off slothful with exuberance and elegance the way Charlie had. I was pretty sure I didn’t want to. Then I had an idea. “How about we go to Italy? Tell the radio station you can start in a month or even a few weeks.” If we could stay with our aunt and I could use my airline miles, it might be doable. Charlie loved the concept of traveling, had been talking about Europe the last year, and if I planned the trip for him, the ease of it all might just push him over the hump and get him to agree. “Can’t. Their other intern quit. They need me on Wednesday.” “Like in two days, Wednesday?” “Yeah.” “Wow.” I hardly knew what to say. “Congratulations, Charlie.” I squeezed his hand. “Thanks.” He smiled—that great Charlie McNeil smile that made the few freckles on his face dance and his hazel eyes gleam. If there was a famous McNeil smile, as Mayburn had suggested, it belonged to Charlie, not me. I turned and looked at the pond, at a dad with twin girls on a paddleboat. The girls were laughing, pointing. The dad appeared stressed and was trying to stop them from falling over the side. “Remember when we got to do things like that with Dad?” I gestured at the boat. Charlie crossed his arms and studied the family. “Not really. I don’t remember much about him at all.” “Really?” “I remember a few things. I remember what he looked like. I remember what Mom wore on the day he died. Remember that belt she had on?” I nodded. I could see the scene as if it were playing in front of me. When I was eight and Charlie five, my mother had to tell us that our dad was dead. We lived in Michigan then. It had been a magnificent, sunny fall day, and Charlie and I were playing in the leaves in the backyard. I would rake and form piles, then Charlie and I would take running, shrieking leaps and dive into them. Then Charlie would sit, and I would rake, and we would do the whole thing again. We had been doing that for at least an hour when my mother came out of the house. She wore jeans and a brown braided belt that tied at the waist. She walked across the lawn slowly, too slowly. She was usually rushing outside to tell us it was time to eat or time to go into town. The ends of her belt gently slapped her thighs as she walked. Her red-blond hair was loosely curled around her face, as usual, but that face was splotched and somehow off-kilter. I remember stopping, holding the rake and studying her, thinking that her face looked as if it had two different sides, like a Picasso painting my teacher had shown us in art class. She sat us down on the scattered leaves and asked us if we knew where our dad was that day. “Work!” Charlie said. My father was a psychologist and a police profiler. I knew that much, although I really didn’t understand what those things meant. “No, he—” my mom started to say. “The helicopter,” I said, jumping in. My father already had his pilot’s certificate and was training for his helicopter rating. “That’s right.” My mom’s eyes were wide, scared. The helicopter my father was flying had crashed into Lake Erie, she explained. And now he was dead. It was as simple and awful as that. Charlie seemed to take the news well. He furrowed his tiny brow, the way he did in school when he knew he was supposed to be listening to an adult. But when she was done, he leapt to his feet and scooped up an armful of leaves with an unconcerned smile. “I’m surprised you remember that,” I said to Charlie now. “I thought you didn’t really understand what was going on.” “I didn’t, not until later. But I remember that day. Always will.” We both stared at the pond. The father had gotten his twins to sit still, and they paddled away from us, all of them laughing. “Do you ever think you see him?” I asked Charlie. “Who?” “Dad. You know, do you ever think you see him or hear his voice?” “You mean, someone that reminds me of him? Not really.” “I do.” Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Charlie turn his head and look at me. “What are you talking about?” I said nothing for a moment, then, “I think I saw him last night.” “Are you serious? You think you saw Dad?” I nodded. “C’mon, Iz, don’t start losing it on me now.” I forced a fake laugh. “Maybe I am losing it. But last night …” How to explain? I took a breath, and in a rush, I poured out the story, leaving out the fact that I was working for Mayburn, making it sound as if I’d had some trouble with some weird dudes I met at a bar, but telling Charlie exactly how the man saved me, telling him exactly about those words—You’re okay now, Boo. Charlie said nothing for a while. I could tell he was thinking hard, turning over what I’d said in his mind. Charlie was the type who couldn’t be hurried, and he couldn’t be shamed into pretending to comprehend something he didn’t. Finally, he looked at me. I turned my body to face him. “What do you think?” He gave a one-shouldered shrug. “I think this guy probably said something, and you heard it as ‘Boo.’ I think it was a stressful situation, and you wanted someone like your father to save you.” It was possible. I’d heard that endorphins and adrenaline could do strange things to your mind. “You don’t think it was him?” “Iz, he’s dead.” “Supposedly.” Charlie searched my face. “I know,” I said. “I feel like a prize idiot now that I’m saying this out loud, but there was something familiar about him when I saw him.” “You said you didn’t really see him. He had a hat on and then it was dark in those stairs, right?” “Yes.” “And are you positive he said Boo? I mean, it could have been any word. He could have said you or something like that.” “I guess. That’s what I’ve been telling myself. It’s silly, right?” Charlie leaned forward and ruffled my hair. It gave me a pang of wistfulness because it seemed like something I would do to him. I was usually the stalwart of common sense, the logical one, and now it was Charlie getting a job, Charlie forcing reality into his sibling’s world. He looked at his watch. “I have to get back to that r?sum?.” “Right. I’ll walk you.” We strolled to my mom’s house in silence. We climbed the front steps and went inside. I thought I’d get a glass of water, then go home. But my mom and Spence were there, in the kitchen—a room with an octagonal breakfast table tucked into the big bay window. They were taking food out of grocery bags, talking rapidly as if they’d just run into each other, not two people who spent nearly all their days together. “Izzy, sweetie.” My mom kissed me on the cheek. Victoria McNeil was a graceful woman. Her hair was still strawberry blond, although slightly shorter and more styled than she used to wear it. She had a manner that drew people to her—a sort of mysterious melancholy that made people want to know her, to take care of her. “Hello, darling girl,” Spence said. It was what he’d always called me. Spence was a tall, slightly overweight guy with a perpetually pleasant air. He had thinning brown hair gone mostly white now, which he let grow more on the sides to compensate for the balding up top. Charlie shot me a look, as if to say, Are you going to tell them? I shook my head no. Spence glanced at the clock above the fridge. “Four o’clock,” he said. He looked around at the rest of us. “Well, it’s five o’clock somewhere, right?” He opened a bottle of wine, and we slid into the evening like so many others. Spence and my mom put out a series of small plates of food—some soft goat cheese surrounded by sliced figs; sliver-thin smoked salmon, small dishes of blanched almonds seasoned with truffle salt—and we sat at the breakfast table and feasted slowly, talking quickly. That table was my mother’s favorite spot in the house. She had decorated the living room at the front of the house in different shades of ivory, and the room was beautiful, but in the afternoons as the sun slid around the house, it fell into darkness, and my mother, who was prone to depression, always moved into the kitchen, where she could get a few more hours of the daylight that seemed to feed her. And on days like today, with the windows open, the backyard garden green and lush, my mother’s sometimes tight personality seemed to unfurl and relax. A former business associate of Spence’s had died that week, and he told us about the visitation service that morning. “I’ll just never get used to it,” he said, “seeing a body like that in a casket. I’ve been to probably a hundred funerals and wakes in my life, but I just can’t stand it.” He turned to my mother. “Remember, if I die—” “I know, my love.” She gave him a patient smile that said she’d had this conversation before. “A closed casket.” “There was a closed casket for Dad, wasn’t there?” I said. Everyone went still, looking at me. Spence often talked, even joked, about his death, and in general death was not a conversation we shied away from in my family. Except we rarely spoke of my father’s anymore. My mother had slipped into a severe depression after he died, and I’d often thought we all still acted afraid, as if any mention of the topic could send her reeling again. But my mother nodded and answered quickly now. “Yes, a closed casket. That’s what they’d always done in your father’s family. But it was also required because they never found his body.” “So no one ever saw him? Like, to identify him?” The silence returned, hardened. I felt Charlie nudge me with his knee under the table. “I’m just curious,” I said, as lightly as possible. “I don’t know why. I’m sorry …” My words trailed off. “Don’t be sorry,” my mother said. “You’re entitled to ask such questions. We probably should have had more discussions like this in the past. But the answer is no. When a helicopter goes down like that, the water is as unforgiving as the ground, and so it shattered on impact.” She closed her eyes, as if seeing it, then opened them again. “They found wreckage, which is how they knew the location of the crash. But they couldn’t find a body. I was told that’s fairly typical for a crash into a large body of water like Lake Erie.” “Something went wrong with the blades, right?” “From the wreckage and from his last call, it sounded like the blades flexed in a way they weren’t supposed to and they cut the tail off.” “Wouldn’t they notice a problem like that before he went up?” “He did an inspection with the instructor and didn’t see any problems. The instructor told me later they thought your father had gotten into some kind of problem, something about oscillation. They think he overcorrected and caused the blades to flex.” “Who was the instructor?” My mother looked up in the air, as if searching for the answer there, then shook her head. “He was with the local aviation company. R.J. was his first name. I can’t remember his last.” Another shake of her head. “Maybe I don’t want to remember.” I opened my mouth to ask another question, but I felt my brother staring intently at me. When I looked at him, he shook his head slowly and gave me a look that seemed to say, Enough, Izzy. Enough for now. 5 I climbed the stairs of the Old Town building—a converted brick three-flat—to my condo faster than normal. I didn’t stop at the threshold the way I usually did to appreciate the shiny pine floors and the marble turn-of-the-century fireplace with its bronze grate. Instead I walked quickly through the front room, then through the European kitchen on the other side, and went straight to the second bedroom, which I used as an office. I got on the Internet and did a search for any flight schools in the Detroit area that provided helicopter instruction. There was only one. I picked up the phone and dialed. The woman who answered the phone said they were about to close, but when I mentioned flight lessons, she launched into a sales pitch to get me signed up. “I’m in Chicago,” I finally said. “I really can’t take flight lessons there, but I have a question about someone who did about twenty years ago.” “Oh.” A pause. “Well, the owner has been around for thirty years.” “Is he available?” “Might have left for the day. One sec.” I was put on hold. I stared out the window at my neighbor’s side yard, watching a young dad pull a blond toddler on a wagon. Was it even possible that my dad was alive? What would he look like now? Would he still have the messy, curly brown hair that looked so much like Charlie’s? Would he still wear the copper wire glasses over eyes that always looked as if they were laughing, or would he have contacts now, or maybe he’d gotten eye surgery? I thought about the man last night. The only time I’d seen him in the light was outside of Gibsons, and his face had been down, his hair covered by the baseball cap. I’d turned so quickly, run so fast that no other details had registered. I looked at my watch. I’d been on hold for about five minutes and was considering hanging up when I heard a jovial, “Bob Bates, how can I help you?” I gave him my name, asked if he was the owner and when he gave me a friendly You bet, I forged ahead, saying I was looking for information about a flight instructor who used to teach there almost twenty-two years ago. “I believe his first name was R.J., but I don’t know the last.” “R.J. Hmm. Sometimes these guys come and go, but that doesn’t sound too familiar. I could be forgetting someone, though.” “I’m sure it’s hard to remember.” I tried not to let my disappointment creep into my voice. “Why do you ask?” “Well, my father used to take lessons from your company.” “Who’s that?” “Christopher McNeil.” “Ah, Jesus. You’re McNeil’s kid? Now, there’s a name I won’t forget. That’s something you never get used to in this business, losing a pilot.” “Do you remember now who his instructor was?” “Well, yeah, I do remember the guy. He wasn’t one of mine.” “What do you mean?” “He was government. Came in just to train guys when the government needed him to.” I blinked a few times, didn’t know what to think about that. “Which government exactly?” I told him my dad had worked for the Detroit police as a profiler. “Was the instructor someone from the county? Someone with the police?” “No, the instructor was with the Feds. That’s all I knew. They paid me up front for the flight time, runways, hangar fees, tie-downs. I leased them the choppers, same way I do to the news stations. Couldn’t believe it when he went down over Lake Erie. It’s awful when it’s on your watch.” “Do you remember the name of the instructor?” “Hold on, I’ll see if I still have any records.” He put me on hold for a few minutes, then came back. “Yeah, I found it. R. J. Ohman. O-H-M-A-N.” 6 My Internet search for R. J. Ohman revealed nothing. For the moment, I gave up on finding him and went to the closet in my office, removing boxes of winter stuff—the scarves and gloves that were so prevalent during the winter and seemed like foreign, faraway objects now. Chicagoans are seasonal amnesiacs. In the summer, we literally forget what the winters are like, the warm winds sloughing away our hard-edged memories of January. At the back of the closet, I found what I was looking for. For months after my dad died, my mother left his belongings exactly as they were. His ratty blue-and-maroon robe still hung on a brass hook on the back of their bedroom door in Michigan. His shoes—the tan boat shoes he wore so often—were right inside the garage door, as if he might step into them, and back into life, at any moment. His books were still in the office he’d made for himself in a corner of the basement, makeshift shelves lined with psychology texts, but also the mystery novels he loved to read. When we moved to Chicago from Michigan, my mother got rid of most of those things. She kept some of his books, divided up others between Charlie and me. The clothes she gave to the Salvation Army store. My brother and I used to love to play in that store, trying on goofy hats and ridiculous shoes that someone’s grandmother had left behind. But later it filled me with a queer sickness to think of some other kid trying on my dad’s ratty bathrobe, laughing at his scuffed boat shoes. From my closet now, I extracted a cardboard box, reading my mother’s handwriting on the side—Isabel/Christopher. Seeing my name next to my father’s like that always gave me a chill. Inside the box, I sifted through whatever my hands came across—cards, scraps of notes, a dinged-up metal glasses case my father used to carry with him. I put some items aside, studied others. I thought about the last time I’d seen my father, the night before he died when he put me to bed and he read to me. I searched through the box for the book—Poems & Prayers for the Very Young. I remembered the illustration of the boy and girl on the cover; they were looking out the window into a starry night. My father would point to that picture and say, That’s you, Izzy. And that’s Charlie, and I would gaze at him in awe and think that my father must have been the most spectacular man since he could get a drawing of his children on the cover of a book. I reached to the bottom of the box, and although there were a few more cards there, I realized that I didn’t have the book. I only had the memory of it, one that was sharp and vivid. I had other memories, too—of his soft voice reading to me, of the way he sometimes repeated phrases he loved or wanted to make sure I’d heard. I sifted through the stuff in the box some more. I found a birthday card he’d given me for my eighth birthday, just a few weeks before he’d died. The card was one that you might give an adult woman, not a child. On the front it had crimson cursive writing rimmed with gold that spelled out Happy Birthday on ivory linen paper. In a few weeks, I would be thirty. If he were alive, my father would have been fifty-seven. If he were alive. If … I read the words he’d printed inside the card. Happy birthday, Boo. I am so lucky that God chose me to be your father. You have been my little girl for 8 years, but I love you like it has been forever. Already you live life as if it is yours for the taking, with your big-eyed curiosity, your ability to embrace and overcome anything, and the unfailing kindness toward others that I know you got from your mom. You will be great, no matter what happens to me. Remember, you will always be in my heart. I love you, Boo, Dad When I’d read the card as an eight-year-old, I knew they were nice words. I knew my dad loved me. I was secure in the way children are, sure that nothing will ever change, that happiness will always be at the forefront of life. And so on that night of my birthday, the last birthday where I felt I was truly young, truly a child, I had put the card aside, moving on to the wrapped gifts that my mother and father had stacked on our kitchen table. I didn’t pick the card up again until six months after his death, and that’s when I really read it, studying the words like an archeologist who finds a shard of an ancient urn in the dust. No matter what happens to me. The words of the card had torn through me, stealing my breath. I kept that card in my nightstand for years after he died. And although it pained me to do so, I took it out of the drawer every few weeks, whenever I was really missing him, and I read it again, marveling at the words he had written, the words that made it seem as if he had somehow sensed his approaching death, although no one could ever have predicted a helicopter crash. After a few years, I put the card away. It was too sharp, caused too many knife slits in the still delicate skin of my psyche. But now, I looked at the card and examined it from more of an emotional distance. Had he told anyone about this sense of foreboding? Or did he carry it around by himself, thinking it too morbid, maybe embarrassed to be having such thoughts. He wasn’t sick. So why that wording, as if he were reassuring himself that I would be okay without him when he was gone? I thought back to my phone call with the owner of the airport, and then I thought about my dad’s profession as a psychologist and a profiler. The pilot thing was something I understood he did on the side, a hobby. But then why the government instructor? Was he working for the federal government? Did that mean the crash had something to do with his job? Maybe he’d been working on a case when he died; maybe it had to do with a helicopter? And … and … then what? It all seemed so vague. I flipped through some of the other cards and letters I’d taken out of the box and found those from my aunt Elena, my father’s only sibling. Most were postmarked from Rome. They all bore her small, pristine handwriting. In the left corners, she’d written her married name, Elena Traviata. When I was younger, she had sent me a card every year for my birthday, beautiful cards with Italian words that she would translate in her tiny penmanship, as if she hoped that from afar she could teach me Italian, that I could share her passion for the country and the language. There were other cards from her, too—some for graduations and other big life events. The last one I’d received was for my law school graduation. It was hard to believe we hadn’t shared any contact since then, but the years had slipped away, and I hadn’t been good about keeping up my end of things, either. I stood from the floor, groaning a little at the stiffness in my legs. Holding one of her cards, I moved to my desk and switched on the small light against the encroaching darkness outside. I looked for my date planner. Most of my friends, and nearly all the lawyers I knew, kept their calendars on their BlackBerrys or computers, but I liked the old-fashioned hard copy, liked seeing my days laid out in front of me. Those pages used to be chock-full of meetings, depositions and conference calls. Now there were only a few tragically mundane things. Take Vespa to get headlight changed. Buy tampons. Teeth cleaning. I found the date book—thin with a maroon cover embossed in gold—which my former client, Forester Pickett, had given me before he died. I kept some contacts written in the back. Flipping there, I found Aunt Elena’s phone number in Rome. Hoping it was still the same, I began to dial, but then I looked at my watch. Eight-thirty. Which meant it was three-thirty in the morning Rome time. I hung up the phone and sat back, disappointed. My cell phone rang. Mayburn. “Meet me for a beer?” he asked. I looked at my office floor, strewn with cards. “Don’t think so, but thanks.” “C’mon. Just one. I just need to get out. I’ll come to your hood. Meet me at Marge’s. Half an hour. One beer. Please.” I’d never heard him say please. He must be in a bad way. “All right. Just one.” Twenty minutes later, I walked down Sedgwick to Marge’s, a bar that had been in the hood for years and years, but had undergone a recent renovation. Inside, it was clean, the tin ceiling sparkling. Being a lover of dive bars, I missed the atmosphere it used to have. Mayburn was sitting at the bar. He turned when I came in and gave me a little wave. Mayburn was in his early forties, although he looked younger and acted older. He was cynical and sarcastic in that way people are when they’re using such traits as a shield. The only person I’d seen penetrate that defense of his was Lucy DeSanto, and now that she was back with her husband, Michael, it was as if Mayburn’s shield had been ripped away, leaving him a little colorless, a little flat. “Hey,” he said, when I reached him. “Thanks for coming.” His sandy-brown hair, which was usually styled well, was slightly messy. During the week he wore suits and jackets, but on nights and weekends he wore cooler clothes—great jeans, beat-up brown boots, stuff like that. At Marge’s now, he wore old jeans and a black T-shirt that had a skull and crossbones on it. I pointed at his shirt. “Feeling chipper today?” “Yeah. Really fucking chipper.” I sat and ordered a Blue Moon beer with an orange. It was what Sam used to drink, and recently—maybe I was missing Sam—I’d adopted Blue Moon as my beer of choice. Mayburn turned toward me on his stool. “So. Any other problems?” He meant the debacle at Gibsons, about being chased. “No.” “No one lingering around you? No cars tailing you?” “I don’t think so. I walked around all day and—” “You walked around all day?” His face was irritated. “Jesus, Izzy, I told you—” “You told me to keep it low-key, keep a low profile, whatever. But how am I supposed to do that? I’m looking for a job.” I thought of my day, which had consisted of lunch, sitting by a pond and drinking with my family. “Sort of. I mean, I can’t hang out in my condo all day, just because you got me into trouble last night.” He sighed. “I know. I’m sorry. But you have to be careful.” “I am. I kept my eyes open. Believe me, I don’t want those guys finding me any more than you do.” “But you’re hoping someone will find you,” Mayburn said. “You’re hoping your dad will step out of the shadows and introduce himself.” I hated that I was so transparent, but the tone of Mayburn’s words was kind. I took a sip of my beer. “I guess you can understand wanting someone to come back to you,” I said softly. A pause, a pained one. Mayburn turned back to his own beer. “I do understand. But, hey, let’s not lose sight of the fact that my someone is alive.” I said nothing. “Izzy, don’t get your hopes up here.” “Hopes? I have no hopes. Hell, if anything, I hope I’m wrong. Because if he’s really alive, what does that mean? What would that say about him?” He certainly wouldn’t be the man I knew, the father I thought I’d had. And somehow that would be worse than having him dead for all those years. “Did you talk to Lucy today?” I asked, changing the subject. He groaned a little. “Yeah. She isn’t real pleased with me. Michael came home last night, yelling about the friend she brought into the house, the one who sent him away to prison. She knows I sent you to investigate them.” “Does Michael know that you and Lucy had a relationship while he was in jail?” “She told him she dated someone when he was inside, but she wouldn’t tell him who. She wants me to back off now. She wants to give her marriage a shot.” “Even if Michael still seems pretty tight with Dez Romano?” “He tells her he’s not. Says he just went to see Dez to clean up some stuff, to tell him he’s out for good. I don’t believe that, but she does. Or at least she wants to.” I patted his hand, and surprisingly he let me. “You have to let her do whatever she thinks is best for herself and her family. If you don’t, you could lose her.” “She could get trapped again. She could get trapped with this guy forever.” “It’s her call, Mayburn. Let her make it.” He pulled his hand away, went silent for a second. “I don’t know what to do with myself.” “How about helping me look for my father?” He gave me a smile. “Even though I think you’re a little delusional, sure. Tell me what you need.” I told him about my dad’s flight instructor being someone from the federal government, someone named R. J. Ohman. “Can you find him?” “I’ll kick it around.” My cell phone rang. I looked at the screen. Theo. My pulse picked up. I answered. “Hey,” I said, trying to sound calm. I stood and moved away from Mayburn. “Girl.” He’d been texting me, but I hadn’t heard his voice in months. And with that one word, I felt a little short of breath. “Hey,” I said again. I went to the front window. The night sky was a sexy, deep orange from the last bit of the sunset. “I’m by your house,” he said. “Oh, yeah?” “Had a beer with a friend at Border Line.” “That’s not near my house. It’s in Bucktown.” “But it’s on North Avenue. And your place is near North Avenue.” “And so this is what? A booty call?” “Like you’d let me get away with that.” He laughed. “I had to drink a beer to get up the courage to call you since I screwed things up with you last time.” “You didn’t screw up. You just didn’t tell me something that I wish I’d known about.” “Exactly. I wasn’t totally honest, and I don’t feel good about it. Give me another chance.” I turned away from the window and leaned back against the wall. “At what? Theo, I’m about to turn thirty—” “When?” he interrupted. I told him the date. “But that’s not the point. I’m almost thirty and you’re twenty-one.” “Twenty-two.” “When was your birthday?” “May.” “I cannot believe you were born in the Eighties.” “You owe me a birthday present.” “I owe you?” “Let me say that a different way. You want to know what I want for my birthday?” “The ability to rent a car by yourself?” He laughed. That was one thing, among the several, that I enjoyed about Theo. Unlike many men, he had the ability to see himself with a sense of humor. Maybe it was due to the fact that he was gorgeous. And smart. And sexy. And wealthy. “I want to see you,” he said. “Just see you. Let me stop over and say hi. We can sit on your front stoop if you don’t want me to come up.” “We never did get to sit on the stoop last time, did we?” When we’d dated in April, my friend’s murder and me being a suspect meant the media had been camped out on my front lawn much of the time. “So what do you say?” I walked back toward Mayburn. I decided not to think too long about Theo, but rather to go with what I wanted. A baseline want, maybe, but I really didn’t care. “I’ll see you outside my house,” I told him. Fifteen minutes later, truly night now, and I was sitting on the stoop with a glass of water, moisture beading on its sides, waiting for Theo. Mayburn had given me crap about dumping him for, as he called Theo, “a twelve year old.” “He’s not twelve,” I said. “Sounds like he might as well be.” “He’s cool. Really.” “Oh, I’m sure your boy toy is cool.” “He’s not a boy toy! He’s—” “Look, Iz, you don’t have to explain it to me.” He pulled my beer toward him. “I’m going to sit here and finish the rest of your beer and then I’m going home.” “And you’re not going to call Lucy.” “Right,” he said. Then, again, “right,” as if he needed to convince himself. I put Mayburn out of my mind when I saw Theo turn onto Eugenie Street, a tall figure, solid and dark with the streetlights behind him. I could see the outline of his muscled shoulders, the rounded dip and curl of his biceps. I pushed my sundress between my legs and closed them. I waited until he was standing before me—looking down, his chin-length hair falling forward onto his face— then I said hello. I put my water down. He held out a hand and pulled me to my feet. He wrapped his arms around me and I thawed, curving myself around his abdomen, his chest, hugging him tight, surprised at the relief. The feeling was quickly followed by desire—shots of it, stinging through me, hitting my brain, my body. Theo looked up at the building above us. “Are your neighbors home?” I looked up with him. The lights were on in all three condos. “Yeah.” “Think they’ll come downstairs?” “Why?” “You think they’ll come downstairs?” “No. My neighbors usually have to be up early. They both work.” Unlike me. Theo reached an arm out and pushed the front door, which I’d propped open with a rock. He kicked the rock away and pulled me into the stairwell, a place constantly too dark, a complaint I’d made more than once to the management company. But now, with the door shutting behind us, Theo pushing me against the wall, kissing me deeply, I didn’t mind that the stairwell was shadowy and hot. Desire turned into frantic craving. I kissed him back hard, threading my hands through his hair, hearing myself pant, gasp. He lifted me up, legs around him, then pushed me back against the wall. I kissed him deeper, gulping at his mouth. I felt my body temp soar, my mind open. “Should we go upstairs?” His words were muffled by his mouth on my throat, my collarbone. “No. No way.” I yanked at the skirt of my sundress, pulling it up, and I wrapped my legs around him tighter. 7 The next morning, Theo was up by six and ready to leave ten minutes later, kissing me on my closed eyes, his soft hair brushing over my face. “I’ve got to get to work,” he said. “Bunch of meetings today.” Theo had founded a Web design software company while he was in high school. He went to Stanford on a full-ride scholarship, but dropped out after a year. I’d been told he was making millions and millions now. We didn’t much talk about work. Truly, we didn’t talk much at all. I pulled him toward me and kissed him, then we murmured our goodbyes. When he was gone, I lay in bed, eyes still closed, replaying the night. My bedroom felt thick with heat from the memories. I fell back to sleep, and when I woke up at eight, my mind drifted to my dad. Or, should I say, to that man in the stairwell. I called my brother. “How are you?” “Nervous. I have to go into the radio station today to fill out paperwork and meet with the head producer.” “Don’t be nervous. Everyone loves you.” He laughed. “Thanks, Iz, but c’mon, everyone loves me at a party. Everyone loves me at a bar. This is a job.” “It’s so weird to hear you say the J word. You want to do this, right?” “I do. I really do. I was up all night thinking about it.” “You were?” I couldn’t hide the surprise in my voice. Charlie never stayed up all night—not to party, not to be bothered about girls, not to fret about anything. If Chicago were in the grips of a natural disaster, the city being swept into Lake Michigan by a violent, massive tornado, Charlie would land in the lake, find something to use as a raft and lie down for the night, happy to let the jostling waves put him to sleep. “You’ll be fine,” I said. I told him what I used to look for when I was searching for a new assistant. As I thought of working at the law firm and how I’d eventually hired my amazing assistant, Q, I felt rather misty-eyed about those days in a way I hadn’t when going through them. Then I asked Charlie about the book, the one our dad used to read to us. “Do you have it?” That book was one of the few objects that reminded me sharply of my dad and made me feel close to him, or the man he used to be. After the other night, I wanted that. “I think I left it at Mom’s house with a bunch of other books the last time I moved.” “Perfect.” My mother had other books of my father’s, too. Maybe looking at them would give me some sense of him, tell me something about him. A pause. “Iz, be careful with all this.” “All what?” I threw back my sheets and stood up. The image that greeted me in the mirror over my dresser was comical. My long red hair was stringy in parts, extra curly in others, springing from my head and falling around my shoulders in crazed coils. My neck was splotchy from being kissed so many times. I tugged down a corner of the T-shirt I slept in. There was a red spot—a bite mark—on the top of my left breast. I’m scarred, I thought. And I was not unhappy about it. “You know Dad is dead, Iz,” Charlie said. “Has been for a long time.” “There was no body.” “When you crash a helicopter into a huge lake, there’s a good chance the body won’t be recovered. Seriously, Iz, don’t let being out of work and away from Sam make you nuts.” “I’m not nuts.” I looked at that bite mark. “And right now I’m okay about Sam.” “I know. But, hey, learn from your brother. Use the time you have when you’re out of work. Go have a glass of wine.” “It’s 9 a.m.” “Exactly. You’re already an hour late.” We hung up, and I walked to the kitchen, opened my fridge. I thought of Charlie’s words and considered a half-full bottle of pinot grigio. The thought made me nauseous. Charlie and I were simply different. We’d always known that. No reason to take my unemployment and turn it into alcohol dependency. An hour later, I was at my mom’s. It was one of my mother’s greatest pleasures to give or loan her children something, even something mundane, because it meant she was a part of our lives; it meant she was needed. If I was, for example, on the phone with my mother and casually mentioned I needed lightbulbs, my mother would inevitably say, in a quick voice, which counted as excited for her, “I’ve got lightbulbs. What kind do you need? What wattage?” I would tell her that the hardware store was closer than her house, that I would get them there, and inevitably she would be disappointed. So that morning, I called and asked if I could borrow a pair of earrings I liked and maybe a book. “Of course!” she said quickly, before giving me a summary of the three books she’d finished in the last week. When she opened her door, she was already showered and dressed for the day in a cream skirt and silver silk blouse. She hugged me. “Do you want me to make you some green tea?” I held up my Starbucks cup. “Already got it.” “There are four pairs of earrings on the counter in the kitchen. Take all of them. Meanwhile, I have to help Spence with something.” She stopped. “Oh, and take anything you want from the library.” I walked through her house to the library, a cozy, winter-hideaway room off the kitchen where none of us went in the summer. It was loaded with bookshelves and plump leather chairs. Although it had French doors that looked onto the back garden, they were partially obscured with yellow velvet drapes. My mother had a desk in there, where she worked on her charity, an organization called the Victoria Project, which helped widowed women with children. A few stacks of paper sat on the desk, but it was the slow time of the year for the project, and so the library was as pristine as the rest of my mother’s house. I drifted to her fiction section and perused some novels, but my eyes kept moving upward, to the shelf at the top right, the one above the autobiographies, the one that required a step stool to reach. A wooden stool with two steps was tucked to the side of the shelves. I pulled it over and climbed the steps. I felt a little dizzy as I did so, part of me remembering climbing down the dark steps the other night, another part of me woozy with the sense of climbing now into the past. These were my father’s books. I easily found the one Charlie and I talked about. Poems & Prayers for the Very Young. I took it off the shelf and stepped off the stool, drawing my fingers over the cover, over the drawing of the two children on the front. I felt flooded by snippets of recollection—my dad’s hands opening that book; me, excitedly pointing to a poem I wanted to hear. I flipped, reading the first lines. I wake in the morning early. And always, the very first thing … What did my dad do first thing in the morning these days? I chastised myself a little for asking the question. What were the chances that he was really alive? Was this something I’d concocted from the recesses of my mind to distract myself from the fact that my life was stuttering? Yet here I was on a Tuesday morning, when I should have been working (or at least looking for work), idly perusing my mother’s bookshelves, stepping back in time. Later, I told myself. Later I would look for a job, then I would sort through the night with Theo and what it meant, if anything. I would call Sam for the first time in weeks and see how he was doing, how we were doing. I put the book down on my mother’s desk and stepped back up on the stool. A few of my dad’s textbooks were there, a couple of those novels he used to read and some historical books dealing with the history of Southern Italy and others on uprisings in Italy and Greece. My father was half Italian on his mother’s side, and he always had a taste for learning about his heritage. I opened the history books one by one, flipping through them. The pages were golden with age. I searched for notes my father might have made, passages he might have underlined, but there was nothing like that. I looked at a book about urban regeneration in Naples. I flipped through the pages the way I had with the other books. Again, no idle thoughts were scribbled into the margins, nothing that told me what my dad was thinking as he read the lines. But at the end, I found something sandwiched tight between the back cover and the last page. A newspaper clipping, dated February 1970. The clipping was small, almost ashy to the touch, and like the book pages, it was yellowed. I unfolded it and read the headline. Thieves Kill Man at Shell Station. I began to read the text and flinched when I saw the name of the victim—Kelvin McNeil. Suddenly, I remembered my dad talking to me one night, telling me a story, but this one wasn’t from a book. It was about his own deceased father, the one who would never meet his grandkids. You would have called him Grandpa Kelvin, he’d said, and he was a great man. He loved your grandmother very much. He always said the best thing he did was marry her. Grandma O? I asked. My father had nodded, smiled. Grandma O was Oriana, my dad’s mom. She lived in Phoenix, having moved out there from the East Coast when it was still a desert and not a suburb. Because of the distance, I only saw her about once a year. She’d died in a car accident a month before my father. I got down from the step stool, held the article closer and read it. Kelvin McNeil, it said, had pulled his vehicle, a 1969 F100 truck, into a Shell Station. Five minutes later, a neighbor screamed from an apartment next door. Police arrived at the scene and found McNeil lying dead beside his truck, the victim of a stabbing to his chest and abdomen, his wallet stolen. The keys were still in the ignition. 8 Dez Romano watched Michael DeSanto pace his office. “We’ve gone over this,” Michael said, “but there’s got to be something I’m missing, you know?” Dez decided to say nothing. Michael kept pacing. “When my wife met her last year, she said her name was Isabel Bristol. She said she was a lawyer who moved here from L.A.” “Did you have someone check the California Bar records?” “Yeah. No one with that name.” Dez reached forward to his desk and picked up a program from the Naples opera house, which he’d gotten on his trip there two weeks ago. The opera had been Puccini’s Turandot. He leafed through the program, remembering the heat in the opera house, the women waving fans in front of their faces, the swell of the orchestra’s music, the lone, clear note of the alto that cut through the heat and made everyone think of no one but her. Michael kept pacing, kept talking about the redhead. Even though he was out on bail for the money laundering he’d done for Dez and the Camorra, the case, from what Dez had heard, was nearly lock solid. Michael would most likely be heading to a federal pen for something like ten years. Dez’s source had also told him that although the authorities could prove Michael had been laundering funds for a company in the suburbs called Advent Corporation, they couldn’t tie the ownership of the company to Dez or anyone in the Camorra. The attorneys Dez had originally paid to structure Advent Corporation had charged him astronomically, but they’d been worth every penny. As far as Dez could tell, it was only Michael, and his word, that could bring Dez down, and so Dez wanted to keep Michael as happy as possible, until he could pat him on the shoulder and tell him he’d see him after prison. He had promised Michael that he would always have a job with him, a place in Dez’s system, and a hell of a lot of money when he got out. And Michael was happy to be a cog in the wheel. So now Dez watched Michael stalk and talk in front of his desk. It was tough to take Michael’s energy. Dez tuned him out. He was thinking of that alto, and yes, he was thinking of the redhead. In fact, he’d been thinking of little but her since Sunday night when he’d first seen her at the bar, her head dipped down toward her cell phone, her face grimacing at what she read there, the way the purple silk of her dress had slipped down one shoulder. At that moment, she struck him as exactly the kind of woman he wanted now that he was divorced. She looked educated, well brought up. But she also looked like a hell of a lot of fun. And he’d been right. Dinner was a blast. And a turn-on. But sex wasn’t why he was thinking about her now. No, not at all. Another emotion drove his thoughts, one just as primal, but much more violent. 9 “What was dad working on when he died?” My mother turned from the kitchen counter, where she was collecting her cell phone, putting it in her purse. Since I’d come out of her library, she had been talking about Spence, how it was so funny that sometimes he couldn’t seem to dress himself. I hadn’t known how to segue into the topic again, so I just blurted it out. My mom cocked her head. I watched her intently for her reaction, not wanting to upset her, but she just blinked a few times, shook her head a little as if she was surprised, and said, “Why these questions all of a sudden?” I was sitting on a tall chair at the island. “I don’t know. I’ve just been thinking about him, I guess.” She turned back to her purse. “It makes sense, I suppose.” “What do you mean?” “Well, you’re at a transition point in your life, a time when you can go one way or another, and it’s usually at those times that we look back and try to make some sense of it all, see if we’ve done the right things, if we’ve ended up with the right people. And we remember people who aren’t with us anymore.” “Is that what you do? I mean, do you think about whether you ended up with the right people, wonder if you did the right things?” My mother turned around again and looked at me. She put her hands on the counter behind her and leaned back. In the last year, I had learned something about Victoria McNeil, something she thought no one else would ever know. We hadn’t spoken about it since. Not directly. But now, I think we both knew I was referring, obliquely, to the topic, and yet we both knew the specifics would remain unspoken. My mother was from the school of holding your emotional cards close to your heart, and after all she’d been through in her life, I respected that. A thump from above us, then another. Spence dropping something upstairs. He could be clumsy, especially when he was distracted and running late. My mother smiled at the sound. “I ended up with the right people,” she said. “And you?” “Well, since I haven’t ended up with anyone, it’s kind of hard to say right now.” “What about that young guy you mentioned?” I laughed a little. I hadn’t told my mother how young he was. “What?” she said. “Nothing. I saw him last night.” “Fun?” I remembered the feel of my legs around him, my back against the rough wall of the stairwell. I thought of him later in bed, curving around me, how he fell asleep first and I traced the ribbon of red tattooed in a trail down his arm. “Yeah, it was fun.” “And so?” I shrugged. “Who knows?” Theo hadn’t said anything specific about getting together again. It gave me a tickle of discomfort. Was all that stuff about dying to see me just about one thing—sex? Then again, what did I care? “And how’s Sam?” my mom asked. “We haven’t spoken in a few weeks.” “Do you miss him?” I shifted around on the chair. “Yes. And no. I mean, I miss lots of things about him, and I miss having someone in my life, but sometimes I don’t mind being alone. I don’t mind deciding what I want to eat for dinner and what I want to do for the weekend. I like that part a lot.” I looked down at the book my dad used to read me, played with its cover. Inside, I had tucked the clipping about my grandfather’s death. “But then again, sometimes it’s lonely.” My mother chuckled. “And so goes the circle of life.” She nodded at the book. “So all this about your dad …” “Yeah, I don’t know.” You’re okay now, Boo. My mother stood away from the counter, collecting other things in her purse—her keys, a small water bottle. “You asked what he was working on when he died. I don’t know all the specifics. I really never did. Your dad didn’t talk much when it came to his work.” “Didn’t that bother you?” “No. I knew he had to keep quiet because he was working sensitive cases.” “He worked for the Detroit police, right? Wasn’t it just the usual robberies and stuff?” “Your father worked out of the Detroit police office, and yes, he worked on things like robberies and even a serial killer, but he also profiled for the federal government. The primary case he was working on when he died was federal.” “What was it?” “A Mob case. The killing of the Rizzato Brothers.” “A Mob case?” I repeated. I thought of Dez Romano, Michael DeSanto. “Your dad had a certain knack for organized-crime cases. They were always asking him to consult.” “Did he ever get any threats from them?” “From whom? The Mob?” My mother shook her head. “He was just an average consultant. Never in the forefront.” I thought about the man running behind Dez and Michael as they chased me out of Gibsons. He hadn’t been at the forefront there, either. But somehow, whoever he was, I doubted that he was just an average consultant. 10 Louis (“Louie”) and Joseph (“Big Joe”) Rizzato were born and raised in Chicago after their parents emigrated from Ischia, Italy, an island off the Gulf of Naples. The Brothers Rizzato, as they were sometimes called, became involved in criminal activity early in life, eventually became Mob enforcers and were known for their violent and often cruel tactics. Louie rose to the position of Mob boss, but roughly six months after that, both brothers disappeared on the same night. I looked away from the computer for a moment. I had gone home from my mother’s and called Aunt Elena. No answer. I hung up without leaving a message. I wanted to get her on the phone, rather than crisscrossing with messages for weeks. I looked then at the stack of r?sum?s by my keyboard, copies of ones I’d sent out and now just waiting for me to follow up on them. When I worked at the firm of Baltimore & Brown, I specialized in entertainment law, mostly because Forester Pickett, the media mogul, had taken a shine to me and given me a large chunk of his work—negotiating contracts for radio and TV personalities, defending the company or hiring local counsel, when cases of all kinds were filed against it. The phrase “trial by fire” had never been more apt. I hadn’t known what I was doing when I started, but I learned, and I learned fast, if only because there was no other way to stay afloat. When Forester died and I lost all my work, I’d been set adrift, and unfortunately the city didn’t have much entertainment law work to go around. When actors, musicians and directors from Chicago hit it big, they usually headed for one of the coasts. And so, unless I wanted to move, I was going to have to start thinking creatively about my employment possibilities. I’d already contacted most of the big law firms months ago, and after that attempt rendered nothing I could get excited about, I tried a gig as an on-air legal analyst. I even initiated an investigative report on a very wealthy but very crooked attorney, and that investigation eventually uncovered a class-action lawsuit scam. But after my bizarre run-in with the law as a murder suspect, no station was jumping at the chance to put me back in front of the camera. Hence the pile of r?sum?s I’d sent out for in-house positions at different corporations. But I was too curious about that newspaper clipping about my grandfather, and what my mom had said about my dad, to make follow-up calls. I had pushed away the stack of r?sum?s and done an Internet search for the Rizzato Brothers. And found that description of them—known for their violent and often cruel tactics. I sat back, away from the computer, and tried to think. My father had been working on a Mob case—that of the Rizzato Brothers—when he died. The Rizzato Brothers were Mob enforcers, one eventually a Mob boss, and they had disappeared. Meanwhile, I had been hanging out, rather innocently, with a Mob figure and was being chased by him when suddenly a vision appeared—an auditory one at least—of my dead father. It sounded like a load of crazy. Enough of this. I turned off the computer monitor and lined up my stack of r?sum?s, then started making job-hunting calls. I got a lot of Sorry, nothing right now kind of responses. I got a few vague We haven’t decided anything yet, but we’ll let you know kind of answers. I got a lot of anxiety as it seemed that nothing was opening up and nothing would anytime soon. I looked at my watch. Six o’clock in the evening Rome time. I picked up the phone and dialed the number for my aunt Elena. She answered this time. “Cara!” she said, hearing my voice. It had been so long, and we chatted about everything—Charlie, my employment status, Chicago. We got into that seamless conversational space that weaves around in a pleasantly aimless way. I had always loved my aunt, and the older I got, the more I enjoyed her. But as with my mom, I couldn’t just dive in and say, Is it possible your brother is alive, or do you think I’m losing it? And although I’d told Maggie I would contact Elena about visiting, I hadn’t spoken with her in over a year. It seemed awkward to suggest a houseguest too quickly. Instead, it was less uncomfortable to say, “So, tell me about your mom and dad.” I had the book my father used to read on the edge of my desk. I pulled it forward, opened it and took out the yellowed clipping. Thieves Kill Man at Shell Station. “What about them, cara? They were wonderful people. I guess you never got to meet my father.” “No. And I’ve been thinking about family lately. Grandma O was Italian and Grandpa Kelvin was Scottish, right?” “That’s right. Their love affair was something of a scandal. No one in my mother’s family had been involved with anyone who wasn’t Italian. Actually, no one had ever been involved with someone who wasn’t originally from Naples, if you can believe that. She met my father at a drugstore. It was in the winter, and they were both buying cough drops. My mother, Oriana, was a few years out of high school. My father was a few years older than her. It was one of those things you hear about—they saw each other, they both looked at shelves without talking, and when my father finally got up the courage to speak to her, they didn’t stop. They talked for hours in that aisle.” “And that was that? They were just in love and they lived happily ever after?” When had I gotten so cynical? “Well, no. There was resistance to them dating. Her family wasn’t happy at all, especially when they got engaged only six months later. But like I said, they were in love.” I thought of Sam. We had been in love once. There had never been a doubt about that. “Did they stay in love?” “Yes, always.” She sighed a little. “I used to wonder if I was only seeing that love through the eyes of a child, if maybe it didn’t really exist, or maybe as an adult I would realize that it was very different than what I’d thought. But no, now that I am an adult …” She laughed. “Incredibilemente, I am much more than an adult. Well, I see how pure their love was. It wasn’t always easy for them, especially my dad, coming into this Italian family. His family was already scattered around the country and didn’t see each other often, but my parents had this powerful connection. Everyone could see it.” I drew my finger over the news clipping. “And then Grandpa Kelvin was killed.” Elena was quiet, then, “Yes, he was stabbed.” “At a gas station.” “How did you know that?” “I found a news clipping.” “Ah. Well, yes, you’re right. He was putting air in his tire one night at the side of a gas station, and he was killed.” A pause. “Did your father ever talk about that?” I got a zing through me—your father. “No. He never mentioned it. I guess we were too young.” “Yes, too young,” she repeated. “And you and I never spoke about this, either.” “No. How old were you when your dad died?” “Sixteen.” I felt envious for a second, thinking that she had eight more years with her father than I did with mine. “And my dad was eighteen then.” “That’s right.” “I know he went to college.” I could remember my father telling me this. “And you moved to Italy to be with family, right? After Grandpa Kelvin died?” “Yes. My mother was having a very hard time. She went to Phoenix to try and forget. Her family thought it would be best if I finished high school somewhere else instead of going with her. They thought it would be good for me to be away, too, somewhere new where everything wasn’t about my father.” “So you went to Naples?” “No, I lived with a cousin in a lovely area, in Frascati, in the hills, outside of Rome.” “Was it hard for you to be away from the U.S.?” “Yes and no. Italy is certainly different from the United States, different from every country, in fact. But throughout my whole life my mother had been telling us about Italy. The stories about Italy were our nighttime tales. I found much of that had sunk in and made a difference when I moved here.” “How often did you get to see my dad after that?” “Not very often.” Her voice was somber. “That was one of the hardest things.” “Were you not close?” “It wasn’t that.” She said nothing else. “So what was it?” “I suppose it was simply that he lived in the States, and I lived in Italy. I fell in love with the country, and I stayed.” Could he be alive? “What do you know about how he died?” “He died in a helicopter crash, Isabel.” She said it like Ee-sabel. “You know that.” A pause. “Did your mother not talk to you about this when you were young?” “Yes, but I suppose that as an adult, I wonder about the details.” “Such a tragedy. It was horrible.” “Do you still think about him?” “Of course. All the time.” Do you ever see him like I did? Do you ever hear him? But before I said anything, Elena was suddenly saying she needed to go, that it was lovely to talk to me. “I had some other questions about my dad,” I said. “And I’d love to answer them, but right now I must go. I have a work dinner.” “Where are you working?” “I’ll tell you next time we talk, cara.” It was obvious she wanted to get off the phone. “We should stay in better touch,” I said. “Yes, cara, you are right.” “Do you have an e-mail address?” “Of course. We e-mail, we text. We’re very forward in Rome. Everyone walks around the city with their cell phones attached to their cheeks.” She gave me her e-mail address. “Must go. Ciao, ciao.” And then she hung up. I leaned forward and turned on the monitor again. Although their bodies have never been found, copious amounts of blood (identified as blood from both Louie and Big Joe) were found in the basement of their parents’ home the day after their disappearance. No arrests have ever been made in the disappearance of the Brothers Rizzato. 11 The next few days skidded by quickly, an inefficient bunch of days where I thought of little but my father and checked my BlackBerry religiously for a call or e-mail from my aunt. I had e-mailed her the morning after our talk, mentioning that I might visit Italy. I heard nothing back. I called the next day and left a message this time. Again nothing. I sent out some more r?sum?s, made follow-up calls and a few halfhearted attempts to establish new contacts. Still nothing. I grew frustrated, short-tempered. I could think of little else to do about my job search or my dad search. I talked to Mayburn but he was in too much of a twist about Lucy and the fact that she was living with Michael to be of much help. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I could just speak to Aunt Elena again and find what else she knew, if anything, about my dad’s death, then maybe I would know where to go from there. Or, even better, I could just put the whole thing away. I didn’t want to go any further with my mother because she had endured a lot of loss over her life. The last thing she needed was her bored, out-of-work daughter shooting around assertions about what she’d maybe heard in a dark stairwell. Meanwhile, the one thing getting me through my week was someone else on a dark stairwell, and it wasn’t my dad. Theo had called Tuesday night, and again Wednesday and Thursday, and each night I met him on the stairwell, and each night it was the same. And yet even better. He worked during the days at his software company, and so he was gone every morning, leaving me flushed and sleepy and satisfied. It was as if Theo rounded down the sharp angles that I collected every day and that I’d been collecting from my months off work. Friday morning, I got up an hour after Theo left and found a message on my voice mail. It was from Elena. She’d left it at three in the morning Chicago time, a vague, “Hello, cara. I am sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you. Let’s chat soon.” And that was it. She didn’t mention my possible visit. I called her again. Heard nothing back. I e-mailed again, telling her once more that I was considering a visit and mentioning a few dates. I didn’t go so far as to inquire if I could stay with her. Even though we were family, our contact had been so minimal over the years it felt rude. On Saturday morning, I received an e-mail. Cara, she wrote, I do not think you would enjoy Rome in the summer. There are so many tourists, and it is about to get very hot. Also, I am busy working in a new galleria that has just opened in the last few years. It is a personal passion of mine, very close to my heart. Perhaps you should come in October or November? I sat back from the computer as my cell phone rang. “Izzy?” a woman’s voice said when I answered. “It’s Lucy DeSanto.” “Lucy!” My voice went high. She was about the last person I expected to hear from. In my mind, I pictured her—a tiny, toned blonde with a pixie haircut and a big smile. “Hi,” she said. “So, I heard that you ran into Michael.” Michael ran after me, I wanted to say, but instead I just mumbled a chagrined, “Yeah, I did.” Lucy and I had a brief but complicated history. The cold fact was that I’d originally met her because Mayburn asked me to pretend I was a neighborhood mom (and wanted to be her friend) so I could get inside her house and onto her husband’s computer. The ruse worked, and the evidence I collected landed Michael with a federal indictment. But it also worked its guilt on me. I genuinely liked Lucy, and I felt bad duping her. When she found out what Mayburn and I had been doing, I thought she would be pissed as hell. But instead, Lucy—sweet, elegant Lucy—had been forgiving. She’d always been in love with her husband, but she hadn’t known he was involved with the Mafia. That knowledge had devastated her, and yet she was glad the secret was out. Then she’d started up with Mayburn, and the last few times I’d seen her they’d seemed over-the-moon happy. And yet now here we were, back on familiar territory, where I found myself apologizing, once again, for messing around in her life. “That’s okay,” she said. “I know you did it for John.” I chuckled. “It’s funny to hear him called John.” I’d met Mayburn because he was the private investigator often hired by my former law firm. And no one called him anything but Mayburn. “He misses you,” I said. “I miss him.” She sighed. “But, Izzy, I have kids. And I want the kids to grow up with their dad, with a family that’s a whole unit. I loved Michael for a long time, and he says he’s done with that business.” I thought of Dez and Michael standing in Gibsons, looking so similar. “I hope I didn’t complicate things for you. Mayburn just wants to make sure you’re safe.” A moment of quiet. “I want to talk to you about John.” Suddenly, there was a shriek in the background. “Lucy?” I said, alarmed. Another sigh. “It’s my kids. I’ve been promising to take them to the nature museum for weeks now, and we’re finally going this morning.” She paused. “Is there any way you’d want to come with us?” “I’d love to see you, but …” “What?” “Well, does Michael know you’re asking me?” “No. He’s already gone this morning. He’s networking to try and find a new job.” “Hmm, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, too.” “Look, I’ll tell you one thing. I’m trying to make this work with my husband, and I’m trying to be honest with him so he’ll be honest with me. But I am not going to tell him I’m seeing you. No way. I’m just so confused.” A pause. “I really need a friend. Someone who knows John.” I trusted Lucy. It was impossible not to. But still … “I’m not sure, Lucy.” A pocket of silence. “I understand.” Then a tiny sniffle. “I just feel like I’m going crazy. Crazy.” “God, I’m so sorry.” One of her kids yelled in the background. “Noah, give me one minute!” she said, sounding as if her voice might break. “I have to go, Izzy. Don’t worry about it.” The heartache in her voice killed me. “Of course I’ll meet you.” “Really?” “Sure.” “Oh, thank you. Thank you. We’re going to the nature museum at ten. Do you know where it is?” “Fullerton, near Lake Shore?” “That’s it. Inside, there’s a big stuffed bear to the right. My kids love it, so we’ll be there for at least fifteen minutes.” Another shriek in the background. “I’ll see you there, Izzy.” I called Mayburn and told him. “She wants to talk to me about you.” “What about me?” he said quick, anxious. “I’m not sure.” “Well, as much as I want to hear what she says, I’m not sure I like this. What about Michael?” “She said he’d left the house. And she’s not telling him we’re meeting. Do you trust her?” “Hell, yes.” “Me, too. I’ll call you when we’re done.” At a few minutes before ten, I parked my Vespa outside the Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, an oddly unnatural-looking structure made of glass and sand-colored steel. It was surrounded, however, by the rolling, green lawns of Lincoln Park and gold ornamental grasses that fluttered in a balmy breeze. Behind the building, ducks in a pond glided by a snapshot view of the skyline. The North Pond Caf?, once a favorite of Sam’s and mine, was at the other end of that pond, and I stood outside the museum for a moment, gazing in that direction, thinking of the last time we were there. It was a few months ago, when we were trying, and failing, to patch up our relationship. I made myself shut down the memories. Inside the museum, the sounds of children’s voices filled the place. I paid and made my way past parents corralling kids inside the entrance. A few steps down the hallway, I easily found the giant white polar bear standing on its haunches, its mouth open in a ferocious, silent roar. I looked around, didn’t see Lucy or her kids. I checked my watch, wondering if I’d misunderstood her. I was about to call her cell phone, when I heard someone shout my name. Lucy was hustling down the hallway, wearing white jeans cuffed at the bottom and a light blue cotton blouse with short sleeves. She had a kid by each hand. Noah, a boy of about five or six, had a smear of something red on his face, which was also red with frustration. “I don’t want to see the bear again!” he whined. Noah’s little sister, Belle, was a three-year-old mini replica of Lucy, who looked at her big brother with a calm kind of wonder that said, What’s all the fuss about? I hugged Lucy when they reached me and took Belle by the hand. Lucy, in turn, hauled Noah up and onto her hip, although the kid looked too big to carry around. “Can you say hi to mommy’s friend?” she said. He shook his head hurriedly. “I don’t want to see the bear!” “How about the butterfly room?” I said. I’d heard lots about the museum’s famous butterfly exhibit but had never seen it myself. Noah’s eyes got big. He looked at his mom for confirmation. “Butterfly room?” She nodded, wiped at the red spot on his cheek and set him back on the ground, where he took off. He obviously knew the place. “Thanks,” Lucy said as we tailed Noah, pulling Belle along with us. We followed Noah upstairs, down a hallway, past exhibits of stuffed prairie animals to a dimly lit hallway with two sets of swinging rubber doors at the end. Noah jumped on his toes outside the first doors where a sign read Enter. “Can I, Mommy?” Lucy laughed, nodded. Noah pushed the doors open, and we followed him into a bright humid room full of lush green trees, shrubs and plants. And on every surface—butterflies. Some were small and bright yellow. Others were the size of a fist with complicated zigzag bolts of color on their backs. Some were as large as a human head, their wings spread wide on the high glass ceiling of the room. “Mommy, look!” Noah dashed into the room and grabbed a laminated card that was essentially a butterfly menu. “I see this one!” He gestured excitedly at a picture of a black butterfly with iridescent blue and white markings, then pointed at a bush where the real-life butterfly perched and fluttered. “I see one,” little Belle said, waving at a blue butterfly on a plant frond. Noah pointed at the huge butterflies on the ceiling. They were gray but with a glistening green sheen to them. “Look, Mom, those are moths.” “Let me see,” Belle said. She tugged at the card, trying to snatch it from her brother’s hand. “It’s mine!” “Belle Josephine, you play nice,” Lucy said. “Share with your brother. Now go find more butterflies.” Off they went, clutching the laminated card between them, two blond heads swiveling, four little hands pointing in awe. Lucy and I walked to the side of the room and took a seat on a stone bench. “Great to see you,” I said. “You, too.” “I’m sorry if I caused any trouble when I saw Michael the other night.” She ran a thumb over a fingernail on the other hand that was perfectly painted shell-pink. “John has to let me make decisions for myself. He has to respect me right now and give me space.” I nodded. “I know. I told him that, too. I think he’s just afraid to lose you forever.” “I’m afraid to lose him, too.” Tears popped into the inside corners of her eyes. She squeezed her eyes shut and wiped the tears swiftly with her hand. “But I need to do this for myself. I knew Michael still saw Dez socially. So telling me that they’re meeting at Gibsons doesn’t change anything. I need to be the one who decides if Michael is good for me or not, whether we can raise our family together or not.” She gave a sad laugh. “All I’ve ever wanted in my life is to marry one wonderful man and have a few wonderful kids and live a simple, happy life. For a while, I thought I had that. Then everything changed, and now I’m trying to put that dream back together …” She shrugged. “But the truth is I’m no longer sure what I want.” “I know what you mean. I had Sam, and I wanted to be married, and I didn’t think much about what would come after that, because it just seemed like our whole life was lined up—my work, his work, us together. And then the plug got pulled and now I have no clue what to wish for or what to plan.” “Are you and Sam talking?” I shook my head. “Not really.” I gently batted away a reddish butterfly that was flapping around in front of my face. “We’ve tried talking, and we’ve tried acting like we were back together, but neither seemed to work. It’s like we’ve lost this thing we had. This thing that was uniquely us. I’ve been meaning to call or stop by and see how he’s doing.” “So you miss him, and you love him, but you’re not sure if it’s right to be with him right now?” “Yeah.” Lucy nodded, her blue eyes scanning the room for her kids. “That’s what it’s like for me with John.” I studied her. “He’s in love with you, you know.” Lucy’s eyes zeroed in on mine. They gleamed with tears again. A huge, orange butterfly sailed by. “I love him, too. He knows that.” “I think he’s also afraid that Michael could be involved with those guys again.” “Mom, Mom!” Belle ran up to Lucy, waving the card. “I saw five butterflies!” “Good job, Belle,” Lucy said. Belle turned and toddled away again. Lucy looked at me. Two white butterflies quivered behind her head. “What do you think?” “I didn’t get a chance to chat with Michael that night.” I swallowed hard, thinking of the fear that had shot through my belly as I’d crouched behind that car. “But I think they looked like two men who worked together pretty closely. Now. Not like two people who used to work together.” Lucy shook her head, her light hair shimmering in the bright lights of the room. “He was just there to tell Dez a few last things.” She squeezed my hand. “By the way, Izzy, be careful. Dez is a bad guy.” “How so?” “I don’t know how to explain it. I mean, he seems charming, don’t you think?” I nodded. “If I hadn’t known he was shady, I would’ve definitely gone out with him.” “But there’s more beyond that charming front. For one thing, he can be really cruel, especially to Michael.” “Michael doesn’t seem the type to take shit from anyone.” “Well, that’s usually true. Michael can be obstinate and even scary when he’s angry.” “Oh, I know that. I remember when I was in his office, trying to get onto his laptop.” Both of us were silent for a moment. We had never talked specifically about how I had helped to bring her husband down. Lucy shook her head as if not wanting to think about it. “Anyway, Dez is incredibly arrogant. He expects everyone to jump around and do whatever he wants. It’s like he thinks he’s a king, and he’s entitled to being treated like a king.” She wore an irritated scowl on her face. “I wouldn’t see him again, Izzy.” “Trust me, I’m not going to be seeing Dez again. He doesn’t even know my real name.” “And I’ve never told Michael your name. I never even told him that we saw each other when he was in jail.” I started to reply, but something across the room caught my eye. Something dark. Something almost hidden behind a huge fern. I looked closer, jutting my head forward as I squinted across the room. It was a man, I realized. A man wearing black jeans and a black jacket. He moved to the left, blocking the doors we had come in. My eyes searched for the exit doors, saw another man. And right then I realized I was wrong. I would, in fact, be seeing Dez Romano again. He was standing right in front of the exit, his arms crossed, and he was looking right at me. 12 My eyes shot around the place. There had been at least six other people in the room when we entered. Now it was just Lucy and me and the kids, who were bending over a fern in the corner, pointing at hovering butterflies. “Lucy,” I said, my voice low. Her eyes narrowed. She looked at the man by the entrance. She called quietly for her kids to come to her. “Lucy,” I said again, pointing as surreptitiously as possible to Dez Romano, who stood, blocking the exit, giving a hostile, cold stare that scared the hell out of me. She stood. “Dez, what are you doing here?” He took a few steps toward us, arms still crossed. He wore soft-looking camel pants and a houndstooth jacket. “I came to say hello to Suzanne. Or is it Isabel? Or should I say ‘Izzy’?” He gave me a cool, level stare. “Or wait. Should I say Izzy McNeil? That’s right, isn’t it?” I stood alongside Lucy. We looked at each other; her eyes were pained. “I’m sorry,” she said, her voice still low. “Did you know this was going to happen?” I whispered. “No!” Her eyes went big, scared. “God, no.” “Then how?” “Michael must be taping my phone conversations. Or maybe everything in my house.” Her voice was anguished. “Lucy, you should get the kids out of here.” She glanced around, and raising her voice said, “Noah. Belle. Come here.” The humidity in the room seemed to be pushing downward, making it hard to breathe. Dez smiled at me. A triumphant smile. “You and I have some talking to do, little girl.” The kids ran up to Lucy. They were quiet, eyes big, as if they’d just noticed the heavy, frightening weight in the room. Lucy wrapped her arms around them. “Where’s Michael?” she said. Dez shrugged, didn’t take his eyes off me. “No idea. We don’t work together anymore. Why don’t you take off, Lucy?” “I’m not leaving my friend.” “Oh, you’re friends, are you?” I turned to her. “Just go. If something happened to the kids I’d feel terrible.” Lucy looked conflicted. “It’s okay,” I said. I leaned toward her and whispered, “Call Mayburn when you’re outside.” My whisper sounded calm, even authoritative, but panic was thumping in my chest. Dez glanced at the guy in black and nodded. The guy took a few steps into the room. He looked about my age, maybe thirty, but his face was twisted somehow, as if he’d seen centuries of wars and strife. His neck was tattooed with a multitude of what looked like grotesque images—bloody knives, disembodied heads and a large circle with a capital A inside it. “Mommy?” Belle said, her voice a scared whimper. “Lucy, go,” I said. The guy in black took another step into the room. So did Dez. He waved a hand behind him at the exit. “See ya later, Lucy. We’ve got everything we need here.” It was said in such a demeaning tone that I could feel Lucy bristle. She threw her shoulders back, then hugged her kids closer, hesitating. “Mom?” Noah asked. “We’re going home,” she said. “And Izzy is coming with us.” She started to move forward. She put a hand on my arm, tugging me with her. “Oh, no,” Dez said, laughing. “Izzy is not going anywhere.” Beyond one of his shoulders, two black butterflies circled lazily, like tiny vultures around a corpse. What did he want? What was he going to do? “We’re leaving,” Lucy said, “and you’re going to leave all of us alone.” Another chuckle, then the smile dropped. “Get the fuck out of here, Lucy, and take those kids, or I’m going to stop being nice about it.” A deafening siren pierced the room. The kids threw their hands over their ears. Dez pulled a cell phone from his breast pocket, opened it, typed something in as if he was texting. The siren stopped in the room, although we could still hear it outside. “The whole place is being evacuated,” Dez said. “Small fire apparently.” Lucy and I looked at each other. “Go.” I nodded. “I’ll be right behind you.” I didn’t know if I believed it, but she had to get the kids away from these guys. She took the kids, walked toward the exit. She shot a scared look over her shoulder. “Thatta girl, Lucy,” Dez said in the same demeaning tone. He tried to pat her on the shoulder, but she flinched and glared at him. She kept the kids moving and pushed through the exit doors. Dez looked at the guy in black. “Make sure she gets all the way outside.” The guy left. Dez flashed that cold smile again. “Finally. We’re alone. Just where I wanted you the other night.” His tone slithered. It seemed to wind through the heat to reach me. Why had I thought him fairly harmless on Sunday? I coughed and forced my mind into the mode I used when I was nervous about a case and had to step up in front of a judge. “What can I do for you?” “Oh, you’re going to do a lot for me. A lot. You’re going to start out by telling me who you work for.” “What makes you think I work for someone?” “A girl like you isn’t smart enough to try and fleece me on your own.” It was my turn to bristle. I’d rather be called anything other than stupid. Dez saw it. He smiled, then looked me up and down slowly, lecherously. I glanced at the exit door. The sirens outside kept screaming. “You know what?” I started to walk right toward him. “Let’s just cut the shit. I wasn’t trying to fleece you. I work for the federal government. You’re under surveillance.” I had no idea what I was talking about, but the words had the effect I wanted. An uncertain look crossed Dez’s face. “You don’t want to harm a federal agent,” I continued. I thought of all the times Maggie had talked to me about sentencing hearings. “That’ll get you another eighty-six months in prison.” My heart was banging in my chest now, but still I kept walking toward him. “Leave me alone and you’ll be fine. I’ve got nothing on you anyway.” Again, for a moment, he looked unsure. But he was still blocking the path to the exit. I seized the moment and veered to the right, toward the entrance doors. Apparently, Dez wasn’t as unsure as I’d thought. He moved fast, grabbing me by the arm, twisting it behind my back. “Don’t walk away from me,” he said. “Don’t ever walk away from me.” I started shaking. I couldn’t help it. “Yeah, baby,” Dez said in my ear, twisting my arm tighter behind me so that it felt it would pop out of the socket. “That’s how I like it. I like you scared. I like you trembling. That’s going to make this so much more fun.” I’d taken a self-defense class once in college. My mind scuttled about, trying to remember what I learned, what you were supposed to do. “No!” I yelled. That was the main thing I remembered from the class. “No!” I yelled again. It wasn’t super helpful given that the fire alarm was still shrieking outside the room. Yank. Dez twisted my arm tighter. I tried not to whimper, but a grimaced moan escaped from my throat. “Yeah, that’s it.” Dez pulled my arm up and even tighter. “Feels nice, doesn’t it? You’re into pain, aren’t you? That’s good.” His breath was hot, moist in my ear. “I don’t care who you work for. I really don’t. You stepped into the wrong pile of shit here, because I make an example of people who mess with me. I am going to fuck you up, girl. Bad.” He chuckled. “I mean really bad. But you’ll love it.” His wet breath was whispering in my ear now. Yank again with my arm. I turned my face away from his, then decided to try and use the momentum to my advantage. I swung my face back, and before he could react, Crack! I hit my forehead hard against his nose. “Goddamn it!” he said. One arm still clenched mine, but he raised his other hand to his face as if searching for swelling or blood. Suddenly, I remembered another tactic from that self-defense class. I raised my foot and brought it down hard on the top of his. “You cunt!” The blow to the foot seemed only to anger him, not to slow him down. The arm he’d raised to his face shot to me now, but in that second, I ducked fast and managed to squirm out of his grasp. A huge urn with an exotic tree was just to my left. It was about as tall as me. I grasped it at the top and heaved it. I couldn’t lift it, but I managed to get it rolling on its base, right at Dez. It hit him, but he deflected it and the urn crashed to the floor, breaking into hundreds of shards of pottery, water pooling around our feet. I turned to run toward the entrance doors, but right then they opened. The guy dressed in black stepped inside. He looked over my shoulder for a second at Dez, then lunged toward me, pulling both arms behind my back, and facing me toward Dez. Dez grinned coolly. “Isabel McNeil, meet Ransom. Ransom likes redheads, don’t you?” The guy behind me murmured something I couldn’t exactly understand, a garbled, guttural string of words. “After I get you, he gets you,” Dez said. “And he likes pain as much as you.” I started trembling again. What in the hell should I do? Dez took one step toward me, then another. I kept shaking, and Ransom kept gripping his meaty hands tighter around my arms, pulling me back against him. Just then I saw something above Dez—one of the massive moths that had been on the glass ceiling. It fluttered behind Dez’s head, almost as if it were dazzled by the sheen of his overapplied hair gel. “Dude,” Ransom said, followed by more guttural-sounding words. I could only make out, “You got some—” “I got some what?” Dez said, his voice coy but menacing. He stared at my breasts. Took a step toward me. But then the moth decided to land. Right on Dez’s head. “What the fuck?” Dez screamed, batting at his hair. “What the fuck?” But the moth wouldn’t leave. In fact, it fluttered up for a second, then landed again, this time on his face. “Fucking bug!” He squashed the thing with his hands, but it was as if he’d angered the moth’s posse, because suddenly there were four of them, all flapping around Dez’s face, while he swore and smacked at himself. Ransom tried to drag me over to Dez, I guess to help him, but the minute his grip lessened the tiniest bit, I surged out of his clutches and dashed to the doors. I pushed through them and started running, yelling for help. But there was no one in the museum, just the screams of the fire alarm. I heard another sound behind me, though, and I looked over my shoulder. Dez and Ransom, sans the moths, were running after me and fast. I turned and kept hauling. “Help!” I yelled once or twice, but I knew it was pointless. I ran downstairs, past an exhibit about rainwater. I could hear the footfalls of Dez and Ransom at the top of the stairs. I had to find somewhere to conceal myself before they got to the first floor. My eyes careened wildly around the place. But the floor plan was open—made so children could enjoy themselves and their parents could keep an eye on them. There were no nooks or crannies. I kept running. I had to get outside before they did. I turned a corner and just then an arm shot out from a photo booth and pulled me hard. Shit! Was it another one of Dez’s guys? Then I thought, Dad? Still, my instincts made me struggle against it, until I heard a fierce whisper. “Jesus Christ, McNeil. Relax.” “Mayburn?” He clamped his hand over my mouth and pulled me into the booth, one of those old-fashioned ones that print little strips of photos. Over the sirens, we heard footsteps pounding down the hallway. “Quiet,” Mayburn whispered. I held my breath, froze my body. The footsteps stopped. Where were they? What were they doing? With the sirens still ringing, we couldn’t hear them now that they weren’t running. I held my breath so that I wouldn’t move. With Mayburn’s hand still over my mouth, I felt I was going to pass out. I shook his hand away from my face. Sucked in quiet lungfuls of breath. “Hey, Ransom,” I heard Dez say loudly. He must have been fifteen feet from us. “Ever get your picture taken in one of those booths?” Ransom gurgled a response, which sounded like a sickening laugh. “Yeah, let’s get a picture.” Dez’s voice was closer now. “We’ve never had our picture taken together.” Ransom gurgled again, sounding closer, too. I tried to turn to see Mayburn, so we could figure out what in the hell we were going to do, but then we heard a crash of glass, followed by shouting. “It’s the Chicago Fire Department!” someone yelled. “Is there anyone in the building?” We heard the banging of boots on the floor. “Sir! Sirs!” It must have been one of the firefighters yelling at Dez and Ransom. “Sirs, we have to evacuate the building. This way.” “We’re okay,” Dez shouted. “Exit this way, sirs.” “Yeah, just a minute.” “Now!” yelled the firefighter. “We need you out of here.” Boots pounded closer. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/laura-caldwell/red-white-dead-39803961/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.