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“Anyway, he’s cleaning out his house, or his daughter is—he has to move, which is really sad, but he has diabetes, same as Ron Santo, and it’s getting hard for him to walk or climb stairs. He asked if you were still interested in photos of the day your cousin came to Wrigley Field. I said I didn’t know how far along you were with your book, but I’d ask you.”

“Not very far,” I admitted.

My voice came out as a thick croak. I carried the phone with me to the bathroom and tried to gargle in a discreet and soundless way while Natalie went on.

“Well, his daughter came on a box of photos up in the attic, and some of them are from the day your cousin came to the open tryouts. Mr. Villard would love to show them to you.”

I told her I was a little under the weather but would be glad to visit Mr. Villard early next week.

“I’m sorry if you’re not feeling well, but it would be best if you could come today. His daughter is packing up his baseball collection, what the thieves didn’t steal—she’s going to auction it off to give to Cubs Care. He’s afraid if you wait, she’ll get rid of all those photos.”

That threat gave me enough of an adrenaline boost to say I’d be at Villard’s place within the hour. I held an ice cube over my eyes for a few minutes to make my sinuses retreat, washed my face, decided makeup would only make my green-and-purple eye more lurid, and headed north, to the Evanston address Natalie had given me.

Pierre Fouchard called while I was driving. “Bernadine called me. She seems well, but what do you think?”

“She’s very resilient but she’s showing some delayed shock,” I said. “Even though she’s saying she doesn’t want to go home, she’ll probably feel a lot better when she’s back in Quebec.”

“
Oui
, yes, I mean. But this is the story, Vic: the Canadiens, they are playing the Bruins tomorrow night in Boston. The Canadiens want me to go to the game. I have scouted many of these Bruins, you see, and the management, they think my opinion can help the team. Arlette says no, but—Bernadine will be all right for two more nights, do you think?”

My heart sank: until that moment I hadn’t realized how much I was counting on unshouldering my caretaking burden. “I hope so. I hope so, but maybe I’ll hire some extra protection, just to be on the safe side.”

“
Bien.
I will be in Chicago for sure by Monday afternoon.”

I pulled over to a side street when Pierre hung up. Between the gang attack, Stella’s message and the threat about my dad, I was unusually nervous about how to look after Bernie. I called Mr. Contreras to double-check on her. To my dismay, she’d gone off to meet with the girls from the peewee league she was coaching.

I bit back a sharp remonstrance: the old man was easily wounded, and I knew how hard Bernie was to keep in check. I hung up and called her cell. She was well, she was impatient with me, yes, her dad had phoned her, she was happy to stay in Chicago as long as possible.

“I’m not the scaredy-cat,” she said.

“Yep, that’s me, meow, meow. Don’t leave the rink alone, okay? Seriously, Bernie, word of honor or I’m driving straight there to collect you.”

“Oh, very well. Word of honor.” She cut the connection.

I didn’t have the time or energy to bird-dog her. I needed backup. The Streeter brothers, whom I’d called on to help get access to Stella’s bank account, do body-guarding, furniture hauling, anything that takes a lot of muscle. They are quiet, they are smart, and fortunately Tim, whom I most often work with, was free. He’d go to the rink where Bernie was working, he’d make sure she got back safely to Mr. Contreras’s apartment. He’d keep an eye on the street until midnight; his brother Tom would cover the midnight to eight
A.M.
shift.

Mr. Contreras was huffy when I phoned with the details—maybe he was ninety-something, but he didn’t need some kid showing him how to look after Bernie. Bernie herself was even huffier: I was
une lâche, beu platte
, it was surprising I didn’t have spiders weaving webs in my hair I was so old.

“Yep, my precious one, and those spiders are attached to you until your dad gets here, so you’ll have to put up with the sticky webs for the duration.”

I texted Tim’s picture to her, texted hers to Tim. He’d let me know when he’d connected with her. I looked up
beu platte
and
lâche
in my online dictionary. I was not only an antique fuddy-duddy, but a coward. As I turned back onto Sheridan Road, I realized I was hurt by the accusation. I was the risk-taker, the person who skated close to the edge—how could she possibly think—until I had to laugh at my own absurdity. The next time Lotty got on my case, I’d put her in touch with Bernie Fouchard.

HIGH SPIRITS

When I saw
Villard’s house—mansion—on a cul-de-sac overlooking Lake Michigan, I realized why a man having trouble walking needed to move. An old stone building with graceful lines, on a bluff overlooking Lake Michigan, it was three stories tall, with a high staircase to the front door. Even with the ramp he’d installed over the marble steps, just getting into the house would be a challenge.

Villard’s daughter, a brisk woman of sixty or so, let me into the house. “I hope you’re going to take some of Daddy’s memorabilia with you—he’s an impossible packrat—he still has all of Mother’s clothes in their bedroom closet and she’s been gone over twenty years now! When he had the break-in, he finally realized how vulnerable he is out here. I don’t even know how the thieves had the patience to dig through his baseball memorabilia to steal anything of value!”

She flung these remarks over her shoulder as she led me to a sitting room on the Lake Michigan side of the building. Villard was in an easy chair facing the lake, but he struggled to his feet when he heard his daughter and limped over to greet me. Although he had bedroom slippers on his swollen feet, he was dressed as he must have been all the years he went to work, in trousers, a white shirt and a sports jacket with a large Cubs logo pin in the lapel.

He politely didn’t look at my face while shaking my hand. “It’s a pleasure to meet you, Ms. Warshawski. Like everyone else in this city, I was a big fan of your cousin’s.”

His daughter turned the chair around to face me and bundled him back into it. “Daddy, I’ll get Adelaide to bring you and your guest something to drink, but I have to get back to the papers in your den. I’ve left all the photographs you were interested in on the table here, and Adelaide will find me if you need anything else.”

“It’s a pity my daughter didn’t want to go into baseball,” Villard said. “She’s such a brilliant organizer, she’d have whipped the Cubs into a World Series or two by now.”

His daughter kissed his cheek. “Daddy, it’s enough I take flak for wearing my Cubs gear in Diamondback country. Anyway, someone has to stay on top of getting you packed and moved.” She looked at me. “I live in Tucson and I can’t stay away too long; I’m the associate dean of the nursing school down there. My sister’s flying in from Seattle next week to finish up.”

She was off, her jeans making a rustling sound that conjured an old-fashioned starched white uniform. A few minutes later another woman came in—Adelaide, who was Mr. Villard’s attendant, not, as I’d supposed, another daughter. She was as unhurried in her movements as the daughter had been brisk, but she managed to make Mr. Villard comfortable without taking anything from his dignity.

Besides his diabetes, Villard’s fingers were swollen and distorted by arthritis. Adelaide brought over a table that fitted onto the front of the easy chair and opened the box of photos for him. I pulled up a chair next to him and helped him start turning over pictures.

They were all taken either at Wrigley Field, or were candid shots at players’ homes or on trips to away games.

“My girl found these in the attic yesterday. I don’t really want to leave this house, so I’m having trouble concentrating on the job. My wife and I, we lived here together for forty-seven years. We raised our family here. We used to have magnificent Christmas parties—you can see here—this was the year before she died—it was so sudden, cancer of the pancreas, it came like a grand piano crashing down from the sky onto our heads—this was her last healthy year and she was in magnificent form.”

I admired the pictures of his wife, a handsome woman in her older age, who was laughing joyously with Andre Dawson and another man—a neighbor, Villard said.

Adelaide brought ginger tea for me, gin and tonic for Villard. We went through Christmas photos, and grandchildren photos, and finally came to the spring day that Boom-Boom and Frank had gone to Wrigley Field. The pictures I’d seen at the ballpark had all been with the would-be prospects, either in the dugout or on the field, but these were more candid shots, some in the stands or the locker room. Boom-Boom was in many of them.

The official photos in the dugout had been in color, but this set was in black-and-white. It wasn’t my cousin’s face that made me stop and carry one to the window for more light, but the young woman in the frame. Annie Guzzo, in jeans and a man’s white shirt, grinning up at Boom-Boom from the bottom row of the bleachers, a look that dared him to chase her.

I had forgotten what she looked like, and anyway, I’d never seen her like this, face alive with high spirits, with sexuality. I’d never seen her with my cousin, either, not like this, I mean. Maybe Boom-Boom had been in love with her. Maybe she’d been in love with him.

She’d been seventeen the day they were at the park together. Seven months later she would be dead. I wanted to be able to go inside that picture, that day, and warn her—stop, don’t look so carefree, your mother (your sister-in-law?) is about to murder you.

Villard saw my face. “That young lady—she’s someone you know?”

My mouth twisted involuntarily. “Her older brother was one of the guys who came to try out that day. I didn’t realize she’d been there, too—no one ever mentioned it to me. She’s been dead a long time; it’s wrenching to see her looking so vital. She wasn’t in the dugout shots.”

“No,” Villard said. “Family weren’t allowed in the dugout or on the field. She’d have been watching from the stands. The photographer took a liking to her, or maybe he was a fan of your cousin, because he seemed to follow the two of them around the park.”

There were nine shots that included Annie and three more of Boom-Boom alone, two seen from behind in what looked like a narrow passageway. Villard picked these up, shaking his head over them in puzzlement.

“I don’t know why I never noticed these before. Maybe because that was the spring my wife . . . I thought I was so tough, unbeatable, coming in to work every day, but I couldn’t pay attention to much of anything, I see now.

“You can tell from the overhead pipes that those two kids got into one of the restricted sections of the ballpark. The bowels of Wrigley Field are unbeautiful space. You can see in this shot—too many dangling wires, unsealed conduits—it’s worse now because they’ve added more wiring for the electronics the media folks have to have, but it was bad enough back then. Maybe your cousin . . . But the photographer worked for us, he should have had enough sense to stop them.”

“When Boom-Boom had a full head of steam he was hard to stop,” I said. “But from the looks of these, it was Annie who was leading him on a dance.”

She’d been playing hide-and-seek, I guessed, from that daredevil grin she’d been flashing at Boom-Boom.
Find me if you can, follow me if you dare.
Seventeen years old, feeling her powers start to unfold. Whether she’d cared for my cousin or just been enjoying being alive didn’t matter.

I sat back in my chair, wishing my head weren’t quite so clogged. For a week I’d been arguing with Bernie that the putative diary didn’t matter, but now it started to feel important to me again.

Annie had flirted with the lawyers at Mandel & McClelland—maybe even had sex with Mandel. There was no sin or crime in her flirting with Boom-Boom, too, but how had he responded? Someone else—Joel Previn, or Spike Hurlihey, or Mandel himself, maybe would have gotten angry enough to threaten her with the classic male complaint: You led me on, how could you have been playing with me?

Not Boom-Boom: my cousin would not threaten any woman for having multiple strings to her bow. Or for any other reason. Even on the ice, where he was fast and cunning, Boom-Boom did nothing out of malice.

Mr. Villard was studying the prints, trying to figure out where Annie and Boom-Boom had been. He put them down with a rueful smile. “I haven’t been underneath those stands for years now and I don’t remember them clearly. Some of the boys used to go down there to smoke marijuana before the game—I pretended not to notice and they assumed an old fart like me wouldn’t recognize the smell.”

“Would you let me take these home with me?” I asked. “I can scan them and get them back to you.”

Villard laughed. “Take them, keep them. My girls want to sell all my memorabilia for charity, so if you bring them back, chances are they’ll sell these, too.”