Ghost Country (27 page)
Authors: Sara Paretsky
And then Hanaper and Stonds boiled over on me at the same time, I was an ignorant jackass, a fool, God knows what else, for not knowing that the Stonds girl had been present at the wall last night with Starr, Luisa and Madeleine. Harriet the Glacier had seen her sister, and tried to talk her into going home, but the kid, presumably sick of living with an iceberg and a rottweiler, took to her heels. Stonds actually thought one of the three women who disintegrated so totally last night might have paid attention to a stranger on their perimeter.
Then Hanaper said, well, the night charge nurse Millie says a couple of homeless women accompanied Madeleine and Starr to the ER last night—where are they now? Hanaper and Stonds ordered me to go back to the Hotel Pleiades and see if I could find Jacqui and Nanette, and bring them in to talk to Stonds. A bird dog, go into the swamp, Hector, and fetch us some homeless women.
I went down to the hotel garage. They were building a barricade in front of it, shoring it up, the garage manager told me. It looked like a medieval fortress, with great spikes sticking out of it. No one would get close to the wall now—those spears would impale them first.
I looked around the area but saw no signs of any of my crazy ladies, Starr or Luisa, Jacqui or Nanette. Or Mara Stonds, for that matter. Nothing but the shattered remains of the Westinghouse box where I examined
Madeleine last month. I asked the garage manager how the box came to be destroyed. A sly look crossed his face. “We were getting complaints about rats. Someone was storing food back there and it was attracting vermin. I was too tired to take up the matter. Tired, chicken, I don’t know. Hector the bravest of all the Trojans.
He staggered punch-drunk toward the stairs to the upper world, his body weightless, barely connecting to the ground with each step he took. As he grasped the handrail he felt as though he were flying, skimming the surface of the earth.
“Doctor! Wake up!” Jacqui was shaking him as he leaned against the stairwell. “Haven’t you been in bed?”
He blinked at her, not sure if she was part of a dream. He thought he’d just been searching for her in this very spot.
“We know how to hide.” she said briefly, and then he saw Nanette at her elbow. “What are we going to do about Maddy, Doctor? She’s really going to lose her mind when she gets out of the hospital and sees these spikes. You can’t even touch the wall, they’re so long.”
“Is anyone else with you?” He felt a surge of eagerness. “Luisa, or Mara Stonds—or—or Starr?”
“We can’t take on that drunk Luisa, and certainly not Starr. Wherever she is people get too stirred up. It’s hard enough looking after Maddy, but at least she’s got a sweet temper.”
I had to tell them that Hanaper was releasing Madeleine in a few hours, I’d visited her before leaving the hospital. Very frail. Don’t know how long she’ll live if she’s oack on the streets. Trying to get a social worker involved, but it’s the same damned story. Since she’s uninsured, cost containment won’t allow hospital’s social services. Spent an hour calling different social agencies, talking to Patsy Wanachs at Hagar’s House, to a woman at the Leiore Foundation, but nothing will happen fast—if it happens at all.
Jacqui and Nanette told me various places where Luisa might have
gone. They don’t know her, don’t know her habits, but suggested some of the drop-in shelters, some of the coffee shops where women can sit for a few hours nursing a single cup of coffee.
I wandered the city searching, but heard no tale of anyone like Starr. Reached home a little before six and fell into bed without undressing.
Big Sister Lets Go
A
UNT LUISA’S ON
television,” Becca Minsky called to her mother.
Becca was perched on a kitchen stool, waiting for Kim Nagel to pick her up for a sailing party with Kim’s family. Karen had the little kitchen set turned to he five o’clock news while she did laundry and started supper.
Karen turned from the washing machine to look. She was expecting some old clip of her sister-in-law, not the flood scene from Underground Wacker. Channel 13’s Don Sandstrom was explaining what had happened at the Hotel Pleiades, using footage his crew had shot during the height of last night’s deluge. Luisa—Janice—was standing in the background. Judging by the tilt of her jaw she was singing.
“What’s she doing there?” Becca demanded.
“Singing in the rain.” Karen couldn’t get Becca to smile.
“Apparently the trouble Degan over a crack in the concrete,” Sandstrom was saying. “A group of homeless women believe the Virgin Mary’s blood has appeared in a crack on this wall. The hotel cemented it over, but last night, in an effort to get back to what the homeless women claim is blood, they chipped away the cement and
managed to start a geyser. No one is sure yet what happened, although the hotel’s lawyer, Harriet Stonds, assured Channel 13 that the stains on the wall are just rust from a leaking pipe, not blood as the women assert. Joining them in their protest was Chicago opera great Luisa Monterief.”
The camera zoomed briefly on Luisa’s face. She seemed thin and ill to Becca. Before she could point this out to her mother, the picture shifted to Harriet’s office. The lawyer sat behind her burled desk, wearing a royal blue suit that matched her eyes, but looking formidable despite an earnest smile.
“We’re concerned about structural damage, of course. To minimize any risk to the public we’ve had engineers on the scene today constructing a cradle to hold the wall in place until any underlying damage can be ascertained. I would like to note that three requests we sent to the city to have the pipe repaired were ignored.”
“Out of curiosity, Ms. Stonds,” Sandstrom asked from behind the camera, “did you test the fluid coming out of the wall?”
The film switched to a shot of Harriet last night at the wall, talking to the cameras while the water swirled around her.
“To see whether it was blood?” Harriet’s smile tightened. “We were all ankle-deep in water last night. I think the fire department and the city water engineers would have realized fast enough if ten thousand gallons of blood had been spilling on us.”
The picture returned to the hotel wall and the spiked girders that were being screwed into position. “The hotel’s foundation here is built into bedrock, so guests should not be worried that the building will collapse. Reporting live from Underground Wacker, I’m Don Sandstrom, Channel 13 news.”
“That must be Dr. Stonds’s granddaughter,” Karen said. “You wouldn’t know him, but he was the surgeon who operated on your Grandmother Minsky. She’s beautiful, isn’t she? Totally unlike her sister—the other granddaughter—she was arrested with your aunt last week.”
“I know: you told me then,” Becca said, in the universal adolescent
tone that indicates adult stupidity. “Aunt Luisa doesn’t look very well. They shouldn’t have let her out of the hospital.”
“They couldn’t keep her.”
“Because she doesn’t have insurance and her family doesn’t care if she dies.”
Karen turned back to the towels. “Let’s not fight that war again. Even if she had insurance they would have discharged her. Your aunt’s only hope is to acknowledge her alcoholism and get help. We’ve got to agree on that as a family if she’s ever going to change.”
“I know she’s an alcoholic, but you’re thrilled to see her career in ruins. You loved it last year at my bat mitzvah when I talked about responsibility to the homeless and the orphan, but you’re a hypocrite, you don’t want to see me actually doing anything about a real homeless person, because you hate her.” Becca slid off the stool and ran from the kitchen.
“If you are planning on going into the city to rescue her, you’d better stop in your tracks because I will not permit it,” Karen yelled after her, wondering what she would do if her daughter disobeyed her.
Becca’s feet pounded on the stairs; the house shook as she slammed her door, Karen stood in the hall, holding her breath, waiting for what Becca might do next. Her daughter made her feel helpless, like a reed bowing in the wind, and yet Becca was such a fundamentally good child—teenager—young woman—whatever it was she was these days. Not into drugs, or sullen depressions, the kinds of things that really bedevil a household. Still, Karen shouldn’t be standing tensely in the hall: Becca should be huddled in her room wondering how to appease her mother, not the other way around.
The mother returned to the laundry, the back of her head aching with the strain of listening. Then she heard a click and a buzz from the kitchen extension and relaxed: Becca’s private line and the house line were imperfectly separated, so you were always
aware when one or the other was in use. Becca was telling someone her woes—probably Corie, since she was about to go out with Kim.
Karen might not have been so sanguine if she’d known her daughter was talking to Judith Ohana at the First Freedoms Forum: did you see the news? Doesn’t this mean the hotel violated Aunt Luisa’s civil rights, and did the same to all those women who were with her?
Harriet Stonds wouldn’t have been pleased by Becca’s call, either: she didn’t want any action that would keep the Pleiades in the spotlight. Harriet hadn’t slept much the night before, but she felt almost exalted with happiness. All the indecision she’d been experiencing since her sister ran off—no, since Mephers’s heart attack—had dropped away. She spent the morning with engineers, going over specs to the wall for the Hotel Pleiades garage, the survey lines for the hotel’s property, and the specs for the pipes. Her mind was once more alert, handling ten different clients, a dozen unrelated details, putting them together like a child solving a Rubik’s cube: thirty seconds, with the adults dazzled to see it come together under their noses.
Her paralegals and many of her colleagues had watched her on the early morning news. You looked wonderful; you’re so poised, I would have been too scared to open my mouth; you got caught in that storm last night? No one would have guessed it by looking at your hair when they showed you in front of the wall. And you look radiant today.
As if she’d been laid, her paralegals muttered to each other, hoping to be well out of earshot. Harriet heard them, but didn’t mind. Sex? Sex never left her feeling this free. She felt Mara dropping away from her as though she were standing at the gates of Paradise losing all her earthly troubles. Mara’s grimy face last night, trying to connect Harriet to that bestial woman who’d appeared at the wall, as if Harriet’s mother looked anything like that bloated, obscene creature, the swollen monster of Harriet’s nightmares, Which had been more repulsive—the naked woman or Mara’s
suggestion that the creature was their mother? It didn’t matter. In that moment Harriet withdrew from her completely. She dashed Mara’s fingers from her arm. It’s time to end the play, Mara, and come home, she said. You’re not going to drag my name in the mud with some disgusting homeless woman you’ve dug up.
Her sister stammered, I didn’t dig her up, she just appeared, but I’ve been longing for Mother or for Grannie Selena. I think she felt me wanting her and showed up.
Grandfather had been right all along. Mara was a self-dramatizing brat. Harriet, her face as rigid as carved jade, offered Mara two choices—either admit she was playacting, and come home, get a job, and grow up; or admit she was seriously disturbed and get the kind of help she clearly needed, and that Grandfather was loving enough to want to give her. And Mara, her own face a mask of pain, screamed something and ran off into the maze of alleys behind the garage.
As if Harriet cared enough to give chase. She went home to her lavender-scented sheets, almost singing, despite having to walk two miles in her ruined heels because she couldn’t find a taxi. In the morning she stayed in to have breakfast with Grandfather, instead of going to the gym for her usual early morning workout. She kissed him warmly, and apologized for her abstraction during the last week.
“I let Mara suck me into her fantasy world for a while there. But I saw her last night: she seems to be hanging out with some homeless women down by the Hotel Pleiades. I don’t know whether it’s because the hotel fired her, and she’s trying to embarrass them, or because they’re my clients and she wants to embarrass me. But either way, I’ve had it. Let her act it out, let it run its course.”
When Grandfather got the whole story of last night’s events, he said he thought he owed it to the brat to make a push to rescue her. You know, Harriet, it could be that these women are taking advantage of her, of her instability. Maybe they know her family has money and think they can extort some from us through her. Since
the women Mara had hooked up with had been taken to Midwest Hospital, he’d interrogate them, find out what they were up to.
She kissed him again: that’s typical of your generosity, she’d said, or something to that effect, and called down to Raymond to find a cab for her. Her good mood lasted through lunch, which she ate at the Saddle Club, with three of the partners and the engineering firm that was one of their most important clients. Instead of the undressed green salad that was her usual meal she ate real food, fish with a sauce, roasted potatoes, green beans with butter. She would get up an hour earlier tomorrow and do double duty on the treadmill before work.
She had another full night and half a day of bliss, before Gian Palmetto called her back to misery.
A Night at the Opera
I
N HER PRACTICE
room high above the street at the opera house, Luisa played the piano for Starr. She wanted music, but her throat was too parched for her to risk her voice, Luisa wasn’t skilled on the keyboard—she’d only ever learned enough to pick out accompaniments to vocal pieces she was studying, but today she felt the music in her fingers. After a time Starr began to sing.
The words, if they were words, were in a language Luisa didn’t know. The gutturals were harsh and Starr’s voice was strong without being melodic, but Luisa listened as intently as if Mozart himself were performing. The rough voice seemed to blend with Luisa’s playing, with half-forgotten chords to half-remembered arias. The diva forgot her sore throat, her grievances against Harry and Karen, against her agent and the director of the Met. All her being was concentrated in her ear.
