Playing Dead (28 page)

She was gooping it on pretty thick. Maybe I hadn’t pressured her enough. And she seemed oddly relieved. How far to go was always the psychologist’s dilemma. It occurred to me that she hadn’t asked any questions at all.

Barbara opened up a black patent-leather shoulder bag that cost more than most people’s monthly mortgage and reached into a back pocket of a wallet, behind a lineup of shiny credit cards. She pulled out a tattered 3 × 5 photograph with a white creased line down the middle from being folded in half for a very long time, and handed it over.

It was a picture of a sweet-faced little girl perched behind a cupcake with a single lit candle. On the back, in faded blue ink, I could make out the name “Adriana Marchetti.” I’m pretty sure my face remained blank, something I’d become better at in the last week.

Barbara Monroe continued to contradict herself. A powerhouse PR woman and a matter-of-fact caregiver to down-and-out strays. A $1,600 purse, and a photograph memento of someone else’s probably dead little girl.

Barbara hesitated for a second and then reached inside her purse again, this time for a large manila envelope.

“I’ve decided to give you this, too. My husband—my
third
husband,” she corrected with a wry smile, “thinks I’m a little nuts to do this. But about two years ago, I did a press packet for a start-up company that specializes in age progression. You know, for missing kids and stuff. I asked him to age Adriana forward as one of the press kit samples. She was so young when this picture was taken that it’s a bit of a crapshoot. But if she’s alive today, she might look something like this.”

Before I could lift the flap on the envelope, Cricket howled from his gut—the slow, pitiful howl of a dog that knows he’ll soon be without human company—and Barbara hustled us out the front door. “Every time we leave, he’s still sure we’re never coming back. My daughter will be home from school to walk him in a minute. Or rather, Cricket will walk
her
.”

Barbara flicked her remote at the blue Audi sitting in the driveway, eyes now hidden behind dark, sexy sunglasses that gave her an instant pass into her forties.

She vanished behind the tinted glass, with words that I’d wonder about later.

“Don’t disappoint me,” she said.

I
kept the manila envelope sealed until Hudson and I were crammed onto the Chicago El in two plastic blue seats that were sticky with a substance I thought best not to identify. We sat directly across from a public service ad recommending the use of pink condoms for Breast Cancer Awareness. I guess that isn’t much odder than NFL players wearing fuchsia shoes on a field where they are trying to kill each other.

Hudson had chosen our mode of transportation for the morning. He’d been quiet, almost sullen, ever since I ran the slide show for him back at the hotel. He didn’t like being a sitting duck in a cab he wasn’t driving, but a crowded train that allowed us to dodge and duck and leap from car to car was apparently acceptable. Just one of his many control issues.

Then again, I felt lucky that he agreed to this side trip to see Barbara Monroe at all and that at this moment his thigh was pressed against mine like a hot waffle press. It was a bonus that either one of his fists could concuss someone with a glancing blow.

While Hudson casually scoped the occupants of our car, I did the same. In one corner, a man and woman in jeans and matching turquoise Cancer Fun Run T-shirts were quietly arguing. In the
other, a businessman in an ugly tie read a weathered John Grisham paperback. Everybody else appeared equally harmless, but then, I’d lost my instinct for this sort of thing.

I turned my attention to the envelope.

Actually ripping it open turned out to be a letdown, not the dramatic eureka moment in the movies. I realized that a tiny part of me wondered whether the face inside would look like Sadie, a sure sign my senses had left me, since I held her the day she was born. Rosalina’s missing daughter would be older anyway. My age.

“Barbara Monroe was ripped off,” Hudson said, leaning over to look. “The nose is crooked. Sort of Michael Jackson-y.”

“She didn’t pay for this,” I said, but Hudson had already started a conversation with the middle-aged Hispanic man nursing a Starbucks next to him. They slipped into a highly animated stream of Spanish about last night’s Cubs game.

I stared at the computer-generated color composite in my hand. An unhappy woman in her late twenties with short black hair and funky red highlights stared back. She had Rosalina’s eyes and a small, pursed mouth that looked like it wanted to spit out, “Who the fuck are you?” The nose tilted up and left, as if the artist couldn’t quite decide what to do with it. There was no resemblance to the gleeful copper angel in Rosalina’s fountain.

The image radiated an unreal quality, like someone improperly embalmed.

Waxy, shiny skin. Parts that didn’t fit together. The hair, stiff, like it had been sprayed to death. How in the hell did the artist commit to red highlights?

I flipped over the picture and found a note that Barbara had scribbled to me, saying that she’d provided the artist with a picture of Rosalina and a blurry police mug shot of the guy she says raped her. What a crapshoot. She signed off with, “Hope this
helps!” and a giant
B
scrawled underneath like two perky cartoon boobs.

Age progression had advanced significantly beyond the scope of the amateurish portrait in my hand. How did Barbara Monroe think this could possibly help me?

The sweaty, extra-large man on my other side stunk like a combination of Old Spice, onions, and garlic. His thigh crept onto my side of the blue plastic seat by about two inches. I smiled politely and pulled out the first of Barbara’s notebooks.

They were a newspaper lawyer’s worst nightmare. Barbara used a bastardized shorthand that was, at best, cryptic: sweeping, curlicued handwriting with bursts of short phrases or words and the occasional full quote, often marked with three or four exclamation points. Like her stories, the notebooks read a little fast and loose, mostly posing questions and notes to herself.

Lttle grl’s white shoe
.

Rosalina drunk???

Blck sedan
.

I knew psychologists who worked like this—scribbled diligently, using their notebooks more as a prop than anything else. But they also backed themselves up with a tape recorder. Then again, maybe I was being too hard on her. I’d met and envied a few people with photographic memories, including an autistic nine-year-old able to describe the peacock tattoo of the man who mugged his grandmother in such exquisite detail that the jury returned a verdict in ten minutes.

A name stood out amid the rubble of words: Rosalina’s witness.

Not Gabriella, but Gisella. Gisella Russo, which looped at a slant across a whole page, along with the single descriptive phrase
pretty fat for a stripper
.

And the name of the first cop on the scene—Milt Dobrzeniecky
with a large
SP? Check it!!!
by his name. At least she was careful about some things. I tried to make out the near-illegible phrase beside his name, holding the page up to the window as a row of track houses zipped by, playing havoc with the shadow and light in the train.

I nudged Hudson, now dozing with his head slumped as if he’d had sex all night with me instead of sleeping for nine straight hours.

“What do you think that says?” I demanded, pointing to the words. He picked up the pad and gave it a cursory glance before tossing it back in my lap, confirming what I thought.

“It says ‘nose hairs,’ ” he said. “What’s for lunch?”

I stepped inside my hotel room, suddenly overwhelmed with the certainty that Mama was taking her last breath, right now, a thousand miles away from me. I tapped out the number to the hospital with shaking fingers.

The nurse on duty was calm.

No change. Wade was sitting with her.

No change
, I thought bitterly.

I threw the phone with such force that it bounced off the bed and onto the floor. Childish, I knew, but I was consumed with anger. Hot, bitter anger, stoked a little more every day by the knowledge that the woman staring blankly at the cracks in a hospital ceiling had waited too long to ever tell me the truth.

Were there moments when the words hung on her lips? When we swung high in the hammocks staring at the stars or at spectacular cloud shapes? When she helped me with a genealogy tree in sixth grade? When I took off for college? I’d never know.

I heard the faint clicking sound of a keycard in the lock and
the door burst open, slamming into the wall. It happened so fast, I only had time to slip halfway behind the heavy curtain at the window.

Hudson.

Back from his trip to the vending machine, Coke in hand. I didn’t remember giving him a key.

“Where the hell is the guard?” he asked angrily.

“Do you ever,
ever
make a quiet entrance?” I emerged from the curtain, my heart still knocking around. “I have no idea why there isn’t a guard anymore.”

“We’ll see about that.”

He went to work on his phone.

“Agent Waring? Hudson Byrd.”

Even four feet away, I could hear the high chatter of a female voice rolling in an uninterruptible stream.

“Right,” Hudson said finally. “Yes. I do want to be there. About twenty minutes. Where’s the detail on Tommie’s room? Sorry to hear that. Uh-huh. I agree. She can stay in the room while I’m gone.”

This lit a little fuse in me.

“Thanks. Be there soon.” He tucked the phone back in a case hanging off his belt. I caught the glimpse of a gun tucked into the band of his jeans underneath his loose-fitting fishing shirt. A Hawaiian shirt or a fishing shirt on a Texas man was a big clue that he was concealing a piece. Fashion be damned.

“Louie’s lawyer showed up. They’re inviting me to sit in on the second round of questioning. Your guard was called off to a school shooting.” He held up his hand when he saw my expression. “Nobody hurt bad. As for Louie, the safest place for you is right here. He was caught in the act. All they need for now is the statement you gave them. I’ve got the feeling they want to use
your kidnapping to get Louie to roll on something bigger. Like his family’s drug op.”

He tugged open the nightstand drawer and pulled out a Gideon Bible, blue with gold lettering. In perfect shape, like it had never been touched. Placed in hotel rooms since 1908. Gideon, I remembered, did whatever God wanted him to do. No matter what.

“Swear you’ll stay in the room. That you’ll throw the deadbolt when I leave.”

The tough-guy soldier stood in front of me holding a Bible.

Pleading.

“Swear on this Bible and the soul of the Virgin Mary.”

I’d forgotten he was a devout Catholic. He’d forgotten I couldn’t always be trusted even when there was a Bible involved.

I nodded imperceptibly.

He glanced at his watch. “I’ll be back at five. That will be enough time to navigate the security lines at the airport.”

As soon as he left, I sucked in the feeling of a hotel room nipped and tucked into shape and reminded myself to leave a big tip for the tired maid I’d seen in the hallway.

Then I imagined the tiny skeletal bone of a finger under the rigid eye of an airport X-ray machine. In the bathroom, I stuffed the little red box into my cosmetic bag, hoping it would blend in with the mess of lipstick tubes and mascara.

I was itching to get out of the room. Instead, I popped open my laptop and stuck in an old flash drive I’d found in the bottom of my computer bag, copying the slide show and carefully zipping it into a side compartment of my purse.

With even less enthusiasm, I tackled the canvas book bag that held the disarray of clips I had copied at the library the day before. I painstakingly separated the stories about Adriana Marchetti’s kidnapping and the stories about the Fred Bennett
murder case, then arranged them in chronological order and highlighted the names of people whose brains I might want to rattle out of retirement. More phone numbers to chase down. This was like cleaning the oven—drudgery coupled with the nagging feeling that it wouldn’t matter a bit if I didn’t do it at all.