All the Things You Are (33 page)

D
onna wonders whether they take her for some kind of prissy church-mouse school-marm Mid-West mom. Then she reminds herself that that, after all, has been her entire plan, her way of coping with, that is to say, avoiding, life. But it doesn't take long for her reptile self to reengage. First time, the dude with the Badgers hat and the sexy redhead were neighbors, civilians, just a couple on their way home. Second time, they were what the cops would call people of interest. This is the fourth time Donna has spotted them, and she was never even a lookout when she ran with her bikers, she was a diversion, a moving violation in a skirt up to there and a top down to here,
get you an eyeful while my boyfriend raids the till
. Are they amateurs? The guy looks like he knows what he's doing. There's something evasive about him, as if he knows to keep his face out of the light. But the redhead in the kitten-heel boots and the ribbon of skirt, apart from the obvious, what is she for?

Oh, stop it. They could be here for myriad reasons. They could be a young couple out for a leisurely Halloween walk who want to remind themselves of the joys of trick or treating, this being the only neighborhood in which such a thing is possible. Maybe she's pregnant, and they're here to envision the future. Maybe they're pedophiles, sizing up prey. There's an innocent explanation for everything.

‘I think we're done, girls,' Donna says, tamping her voice down a panic tone or two.

‘There's a few more houses over there,' Irene says hopefully, looking towards a section of the estate they've not been through.

Donna glances at their bulging tote bags. ‘Yeah, but where would you put the stuff they give you? No more room in those sacks.'

‘You could put it in your pockets,' Barbara says. ‘Since you're not doing anything else.'

‘I'll put you in my pockets. Pumpkin time, princesses.'

‘Are we taking the scenic route again?' Barbara says.

‘Mud is the new sand.'

‘It's kind of dark down there,' Irene says.

‘Well,' Donna says, ‘that's what you've got those bats for.'

Donna looks behind her several times as they cut down the lane between two houses and down the wooden steps and set out along the path, but she sees no one – no sexy redhead, no guy in a Badgers hat, no zombies, no werewolves. In truth, the walk is quite well illuminated from the houses perched forty or fifty feet above it and from the faint but resilient moon. It is muddy, though: the water level has been high and has seeped through into the path; the trees resound to the mulch and slap of their duck paddle steps and Donna feels the splashes on her cheeks and brow. If only she had a mask herself, she thinks, and not for the first time.

One side is banked high and steep with mud and scrub. Lakeside there are stands of trees and occasional clearings with picnic tables and moorings for small boats. After about half a mile, the path follows the lake away from Ripley Fields and the slope gets a little less precipitous and more trees appear to their right. It's darker now, without the houses, but they are only minutes from Donna's house. The girls aren't minding the dark so much. They are excited and full of plans.

‘If we get two tubs. Do you have two tubs, Aunt Donna?' Irene says.

‘Tubs. What do you mean,
tubs?
Like, bowls?' Barbara says.

‘They'd have to be big bowls, for all this. No, tubs, like you'd put plants in.'

‘They'd be covered in mud. We don't want tubs.'

‘Basins. I have a couple plastic basins.'

‘That's what we need. And we can put our stuff in them, separately. And see what we've got.'

Barbara always lags behind, and Irene always skips ahead, and that's how Donna sees Irene stopped, thirty feet in front, a figure approaching her: the redhead from Ripley Fields.

‘Irene,' she yells, scanning the trees on her right for the guy in the Badgers hat. She spins around to see Barbara halted, staring, then spins back.

The redhead reaches for Irene and it looks like she's got some kind of cloth in one hand to muffle or gag or subdue her, and the Glock, which has been out of the clutch since they started down the walk anyway, is in Donna's hand and her hand is pointing at the redhead.

‘Leave her alone,' Donna says.

And as she speaks, she catches the guy on her right, the guy in the Badgers hat, moving slowly through the trees, heading past her towards Barbara. She sways, trying to cover him too.

‘Get away from her,' she says, and she can see something glint out of the corner of her right eye, but this motherfucking redheaded bitch has some kind of rag or gag over Irene's face, trying to chloroform her? She should shoot the guy she thinks has the gun, but she gets things in the wrong order because she is so incensed and shoots the redhead instead, in the middle of her face, and then she nearly has enough time to shoot the guy as well; she wheels around and he is staring at the redhead where she dropped like he can't believe what just happened, and Irene is screaming, she's kind of being dragged down by the weight of the dead woman. Donna pivots and brings the Glock up and squeezes the trigger and feels like she's running in a dream and thinks
if I don't hit this guy God knows what will happen to the girls
and sees a firework's trail across the sky illuminate the leaves on the surrounding trees and these are the last things she will ever feel and think and see.

T
he salon is closed, and Detective Nora Fox can't get Dee St Clair on the phone, so she goes to the apartment building on East Wilson and raises the building superintendent, whose name is Steve and who, with long dark hair and a goatee, is kind of cute, and actually looks a bit like Dave Grohl from Foo Fighters and is also younger than she expected, which is a change from the police officers looking younger every year, she supposes, although maybe not a welcome change. Steve, who has somebody blonde with him, is uneasy about giving her Dee's key and Nora talks about a potential missing-persons situation and a double murder case, and Steve still looks doubtful and mentions a warrant and Nora holds her hand up and says:

‘Steve, there are children in danger. Tonight!'

Even though she doesn't realize yet that in fact, there
are
children in danger. Steve goes to get the key. She can see that he feels obliged to come with her and she doesn't want that, and neither does he on account of she can smell the blonde's perfume and hear the clink of ice in a glass and if she were him she'd be in there and avid because blondes tend to wilt from lack of attention so she tells him to try Dee on the phone every ten minutes and if he gets through, to let her know.

In the apartment, Nora quickly notes a laptop on the couch by the glass wall overlooking the lake and then comes to rest at a recessed space off the main living room that seems to do dual duty as office and dining area. There's a brown mahogany table here, and its surface is piled high with newspaper cuttings and photocopies of news stories, some loose, some collected in ring binders. Nora checks her time. It's seven-thirty. It's not late. Not yet. She sits at the table and begins to work through the paper.

Danny and Claire are on the I-90 from Chicago, headed for Madison, or for Cambridge, they're not sure which. Danny hasn't been able to talk to Donna, but he's left her messages saying they will come to her and collect the kids, or alternatively if she wants to come to Arboretum Avenue, although that's probably unwise given the house has been cleared out, so in fact, if they manage to get to her place, could they spend the night?

It's not a happy atmosphere in the car. They were genuinely overwhelmed to see each other, and each cried a little, but they barely touched, a squeeze of the hand, a quick brush of the cheek, and what words they did exchange were stuttered and stammered like they had barely met before. They can't seem to bring themselves to talk, maybe because there is so much to talk about, and so few ways they can find to get started, so the journey has been conducted mostly in uncomfortable silence. Claire is driving. Danny offered to drive, but Claire said no, it was fine, and then wished she had said yes, because she feels she has rebuffed him, whereas she just thought it would be easier if she drove since she had gotten used to the car on the way down. It was a little thing, but it was about so much more than who should drive the fucking car.

It was like they were a couple who had gone on vacation to solve their problems, and instead their problems overwhelmed them, because of course their problem was themselves. Each of them thought separately, in those first few silent miles through the industrial outskirts of Chicago: if this is all that's left of us, then for God's sake, let it die. Each maddened by resentment and rage, and then as quickly exhausted, enervated by it all.

Claire doesn't want to get into the whole thing with Paul Casey in Chicago, because she doesn't know which lie she should tell. She can barely believe Danny came to Chicago in the first place. Where was he? What did he see? What
could
he have seen? He wasn't in the room. And there was nothing to see anyway. Although there was a lot more than she wanted to own up to. And maybe she might have gone much further. Thank God she hadn't. She had been bored and lonely and wanted some attention, and she had had a lucky escape. Tell a white lie or two, and then get down on her knees and apologize.

Also, Claire doesn't really want to tell Danny that, if anyone sinister is behind this, it's more likely to be Dave Ricks than Gene Peterson, because then she'll have to explain that she nearly slept with Dave years ago in Chicago, only he was pretending to be Gene, and obviously she wants to steer clear of the entire Claire-sleeping-with-guys-in-Chicago thing as she feels it's not going to endear her to her husband, and if she knows anything at this stage, it's that she desperately wants to keep her marriage together. Maybe even to the extent of actually getting married. In order to do that, she'll have to go through the whole process of finding out who her birth parents were, and by extension, who she is, or was. She's not sure she wants to, but clearly she's been cast in some kind of mid-life drama, and looking at her birth certificate is probably a more grown-up way to act than fumbling about with old flames in hotel rooms.

Danny doesn't want to talk about the Bradberry fire, because if he does, he's going to get into Claire's parentage and the part he played in that fire, even if it's nothing like what he had thought. In fact, he thinks, maybe he
should
bring it up, confess to her that he has been haunted by a guilt he should never have borne. But it's not up to him, is it? It's not his place to reveal to Claire a truth she'd prefer to live without. Of course, if he doesn't, how is he going to come clean about all the money they've lost? By admitting he was a greedy fool, that's how. The blackmail was one thing, but nobody made him borrow all that extra money to invest with Jonathan Glatt.

He knows that they're going to have to tell each other everything, even if, in the end, it means they're finished. He doesn't want that, despite what happened in Chicago, which might well be nothing, and even if it wasn't, fair enough, everyone's human, there've been a couple of late nights in Brogans where, if he didn't step entirely over the line, he put his foot right on it, and wanted to keep going. But what about Claire's Facebook page, and those messages to Paul Casey? That was a little more than stepping over the line. That was forward planning, calculation, intention.

He thinks suddenly about Gene sending Danny an email telling him to get out of Jonathan Glatt's fund – and somebody had responded, pretending to be Danny.

‘Claire, did you have anything happen with your computer?'

‘How do you mean?'
Oh please, don't let Danny have read those Facebook messages

‘I don't know. Someone hacking into it, or setting up accounts you didn't know about?'

‘I … I think something like that did happen. Did you have the same?'

Tell her. Not everything. Never tell a woman everything. But you have to say something.

‘The money we lost … with Jonathan Glatt? Well, Gene Peterson … Gene sent me an email, he sent all the guys an email, warning us to get out, to get our money out. I mean, it was pretty short notice, but everyone else managed it. Because everyone else got the message.'

‘And what, you didn't? He didn't send you one?'

‘No, I told you, he did. He showed me it today, it's in the Sent folder in his email program.'

‘But you never got it? Did he not follow up to make sure?'

‘He didn't need to follow up. He got a reply.'

‘He got a reply? What do you mean?'

‘I mean someone sent an email from my address, claiming to be me, saying that's great and I'd withdraw the cash immediately, thank you very much.'

Claire feels a sudden rush, an excruciating combination of fear and excitement. She can tell Danny something.

‘That's so weird. Because you know … well, I don't know what you know, and there might have been a bit of stupidity, but it Wasn't. Actually. Anything. You know?'

‘Uh huh?'

‘In Chicago, I mean. With … with Paul Casey?'

‘I'm listening …'

‘How it might have happened was, and I only found this out today, right, I have a Facebook account—'

‘You never told me that.'

‘No.'

‘You were always like, “Oh, Facebook, Twitter, that stuff is for idiots.”'

‘I know. But Dee signed me up. You know Dee, she won't take no for an answer. When she did that website for me, which I hardly ever go to either, by the way, she said I had to be on Facebook too, and post on both, to increase the traffic. I didn't care, since I wasn't going to use it in the first place. But then I went back to Chicago today, um …'