Playing Dead (43 page)

I didn’t flinch as the correctional officer grabbed my arm. “Ma’am, no contact. Sit down.” He was giving me a chance to behave.

“You owe me,” I said fiercely to Marchetti, not letting go. Wasn’t that what Rosalina had said to me not that long ago?

It occurred to me that he probably hadn’t been touched like this in more than thirty years. That he might like it.

Everything around us was happening in slow motion. The guard yanking me back, barking into his walkie-talkie, the human black bugs running in.

“I don’t know,” Marchetti said quietly.

One of the bugs pulled me by my sling and the pain dropped me to my knees.

My father didn’t move. His face twisted into something inhuman.

And I knew.

Unchained, he would have killed the man who hurt me.

We were halfway home before Hudson spoke.

“You remember that phone call I got at the prison?”

I roused myself from half slumber.

“Your library kidnapper got a toothbrush shiv to the throat last night in jail.”

I sat up straight, ignoring the pain. “Is he dead?”

“Very dead. Coincidentally, his father, Azzo Cantini, died in his sleep last night.”

You’re safe
, my father had told me.

“Marchetti told me he is innocent of the Bennett murders,” I said dully, face pressed against the window, brown scenery whirring by.

“Marchetti was knee deep in their blood.” Hudson said it sharply. “Those murders benefited every single mobster dealing drugs in Chicago. Who knows how much the Feds had on him?”

He hesitated.

“I’ve been able to trace Jack Smith, aka little Joe Bennett. He did survive a crappy childhood in the foster care system. He did go to Princeton on a full-ride scholarship. Until six months ago, he was a computer software engineer at one of the large insurance companies in Hartford. That’s when he took an extended leave of absence, claiming a family tragedy. His boss was talkative on the phone. Smith is very gifted with computers, apparently. Nobody knows where he is right now.”

I nodded, absorbing this. A brilliant guy. A computer expert. Jack Smith was probably his own best source.

Hudson rested a hand on my knee, concerned, and asked the question of the day.

“Are you all right?”

“Almost,” I said.

I still had a little dead girl to find.

M
addie and I stood, hand in hand, in front of Rosalina Marchetti’s gate. Up the hill, I could glimpse one of the mansion’s shiny copper turrets, barely visible above the forest of trees and thick green vegetation. A September chill blew through our paper-thin Texas skin, and we huddled a little closer.

I wondered how we looked in the fish-eye lens of the security camera. Harmless, I hoped.

I pressed the buzzer again. We weren’t expected. So when the electronic gate swung open, I was surprised, but only a little.

Rosalina had unfinished business with me, too.

I’d been sling-free for a week. The bruises painted on the right side of my face were now a poisonous yellow and green.

My niece had returned to her joyful little self and this weekend in the city was our personal celebration of survival. We cursed out the Cubs like natives, made faces in the Bean, and checked out the American Girl store although Maddie insisted she was too old and just wanted to take a brief look inside. We left with a red bag. Of course, I had ulterior motives for picking Chicago.

Maddie and I climbed the driveway that wound like a wide ribbon to the top of the hill, arriving a little breathless at the mansion.

“This place is awesome.” Maddie’s face was enthralled. “A fairy tale. I feel like we’re coming to visit the queen.” She pointed up. “There she is!”

On a small, curlicued balcony, Rosalina struck a pose like a 1930s movie star, her silky red robe glimmering in the sun. She pretended not to see us, her profile turned, staring off at something only she could see. I prepared for her to swoon and wondered how we’d catch her. Something white flashed briefly in the upstairs window beside her. A nurse?

A black-uniformed maid met us outside, leading the way up a curving staircase to the balcony in the back where Rosalina and I first met. Like magic, our hostess was already in place, sitting near the ledge at a table set with two martinis and a crystal dish of mixed nuts.

“Hello again, my dear,” she said, not getting up.

As we reached the table, her gaze drilled into Maddie, clearly an unexpected nuisance. “Run on down to the garden and play in the maze. Little girl, when you get lost, just yell. There are cameras. Someone will lead you out.”

“Don’t go far,” I added, not sensing any real danger. I now believed the cameras were there more to keep Rosalina in than to keep anyone out.

Maddie bounced off with the maid, who was already offering up chocolate chip cookies and milk, and I confronted this woman whose vanished child had made a permanent home in my dreams.

“Where is Adriana?” I asked.

She sighed, and pointed to her heart. “She’s here, and …” pointing melodramatically down to the fountain, “… she’s there.”

It took me a second to get it.

Adriana wasn’t missing.

She was buried below us.

The fountain was her tomb
.

Maddie was roaming the gardens. Alone. What the hell else was buried there?

I tried to keep my voice steady. “She wasn’t kidnapped. How did she die?”

“It was an accident. I was high on something. Some of Cantini’s special juice. I was about to put her in her crib and I dropped her. She hit her head. Wouldn’t stop crying. Then she went to sleep. The next morning, she wouldn’t wake up.”

Her lack of emotion chilled me.

“Anthony knew, of course. He was in constant contact from jail. His lawyers are always busy maneuvering his money and I’m always signing things. I think that’s why he married me. Not to protect your mother—to hide all his dirty business.”

That had occurred to me, too.

“One of his men came up with the finger thing. Did the chopping. Mailed the package.”

I winced at the word
chopping
, but Rosalina appeared unbothered.

“And then there was that pesky little reporter. Barbara Thurman. She couldn’t stop bugging me about the kidnapping. I let something slip once, and she wouldn’t let go. She never liked me.”

Rosalina twirled the olive to marinate it and gracefully popped it in her mouth, the perfect socialite, the studied actress. She and Jack, co-stars.

“So what made her stop pursuing the story?”

“Money, what else? Lots and lots of money.”

“So you were responsible for the break-in at her house?”

“One of my boys followed you. I wanted to know if Thurman broke her word. She was paid too much for that. I planned to tell you in my own good time. Or not.”

“You shouldn’t have worried.” I thought of Barbara’s misdirection,
the drawing of a woman with funky red highlights who had never existed.

Poor Adriana. I felt the finality of her small death, the immense sadness that came with it, and a weight lifting off of me, rising like a balloon.

You didn’t die in place of me
.

“Why the hell did you give me that fake finger?” I asked Rosalina. “Why did you beg me to come up here?”

“Honey, I didn’t really think you’d take it. What kind of person would? It was for effect. I made it in my ceramics studio one day when I was missing Adriana. The real one is buried with her. When the police gave it back to me, they said it had been chopped off after death. Of course, I already knew that.”

I shivered at the image of Rosalina casting the finger of her baby, maybe singing a lullaby as she worked at it.

“You know, your mother had everything.” Her voice grew ugly with bitterness. “A daughter who lived. Men who adored her. A nice reporter doing a piece on Anthony told me all about it. He suggested that you and I should meet. The letter was his idea.”

Jack. Of course. Jack’s fingers were everywhere. Pulling me down with him.

Rosalina’s face took on a dreamy quality. “I thought maybe you’d believe me. That you could become the daughter I never had. That reporter told me your mother had lost her mind. So the timing was perfect. You were the same age as my Adriana. You’d have been like sisters if all of this had never happened.”

She reached across the table to cover my hand with hers, a creepy albino spider.

“It was absolution,” she said. “A full circle.”

I felt a deep, urgent need to find Maddie.

“Don’t you judge me,” Rosalina said petulantly, sensing my abrupt mood change. “Everybody’s always judging me.”

I stood up to go, knocking my half-finished martini across the table, bitter liquid spilling onto Rosalina’s red silk, the stain spreading, reminding me of blood.

So much blood.

“I’ve spent years atoning with my charity work. I’m a good person!” Rosalina’s voice was rising now, out of control.

Peering down on the shiny copper Adriana, I frantically called Maddie’s name.

Seconds later, she appeared out of a path on the opposite side of the courtyard from which she’d disappeared, looking pleased with herself.

“She’s the first one to find her way out,” Rosalina said, surprised.

I hoped those words were prophetic.

I
couldn’t let go of Jennifer Coogan.

The last piece.

I knew that her story was linked to mine.

I like to think that she led me here, to this spot, on this snowy January night in Rochester, New York. I stared across the street through the icy film on my rental car window at a boy shooting hoops in the driveway of a blue Victorian house painted with cheerful yellow trim. I closed my eyes and listened to the ringing echo as the ball hit the concrete, a steady pound, pound, pound. Then I drove away.

Thirteen hours later, I waited at a table in a coffee shop on a quaint little street called Park, twisting Hudson’s ring on my finger, nervously smoothing the newspaper articles Mama had so carefully safeguarded. I sipped a fully leaded mocha cappuccino. The caffeine was a tough call.