“Are you Francis Sweeney?” she said. “Is that your name?”
“Yes. Francis Sweeney. But my friends call me Frank. Dr. Frank. You may call me Frank too. That’s what your mother called me.” He added in a conspiratorial whisper, “And I called her Nettie.”
He waved one of the white obituaries in the air, and his voice resumed a jovial tone. “Just like the other Nettie. The one wrapped in a quilt. I took her, you know. I couldn’t resist when I saw her name, though she was already dead.”
“You . . . took Nettie?”
“Yes. Months ago. I left her for Eliot, but it seems I hid her too well. So . . . I had to put her somewhere he could find her.” He shook his head indulgently. “I leave him so many clues . . . but he never understands them. But you understood them, didn’t you, Daniela? You understand me.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t understand him at all.
He smiled and put the stack of obituaries back in the pocket of his trousers.
“You helped them find me. You told them who I was. I would have left you alone to do your work. Why couldn’t you leave me alone to do mine?”
Malone had just pulled into the driveway at five on Wednesday afternoon when Molly came rushing from the front door, waving her arms and calling his name.
“Thank God you’re home early. She’s been calling all day. All day. And I haven’t known what to tell her. She’s on the line now.”
He stepped out of the car and slammed the door. “Who, Molly?”
“It’s an old woman. She’s asking for Michael Malone. I didn’t know whether to admit I even know who that is, but she’s insistent.”
He followed Molly into the house, an odd weightlessness in his chest, a cold heaviness in his gut. He picked up the receiver and placed it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“Mr. Malone?”
“Lenka?”
“No, Michael. It is Zuzana.”
Zuzana was calling him. And she’d called him Michael. He hardly knew what to make of that, but in a millisecond his mind tripped over the possibilities. She would beg him to come back. She would tell him to never come back. She would call him a cad. An Irish dog. A miserable fool.
But she did none of those things.
“Mr. Malone . . . Daniela is gone. And we don’t know where.”
He couldn’t douse his terror, and speed didn’t help. He drove straight through, from Chicago to Cleveland, stopping once for fuel and crowding the poor attendant who couldn’t pump the gasoline any faster than he was. He threw a wad of cash at him and pulled away a mere five minutes after he’d stopped, frothing at the mouth and unable to feel anything but the fear that soaked his shirt and dried his mouth.
He couldn’t even think about her without his hands slipping from the wheel and sweat dripping in his eyes. By the time he pulled into the driveway at 5054 Broadway, it was nearing midnight, and he had half convinced himself that she would be there waiting, simply because he could bear no other thought.
If she was there, he would fall down at her feet and beg her to have him, if only to douse the burning in his veins. He was smoldering, yet he still had hope. The hope just made the burning worse.
But when he walked into the house, reeking of six hours of agony and horror, Lenka, Zuzana, and Margaret greeted him with hollow eyes and shaking hands. Dani had not come home, and the police had been slow to respond.
“She went to the morgue, just like she always does, but she never came back. And Mr. and Mrs. Raus are out of town.”
“Her wagon is here, by the back door,” Zuzana said. “She must have come back.”
“It was there when I arrived this morning,” Margaret interjected. “There was a bit of paper in it. A few lines from a poem, something in her hand. But I never saw Daniela.”
“She was not at breakfast,” Lenka moaned.
“She must have come home last night . . . but her bed has not been slept in,” Zuzana said.
“We didn’t know she wasn’t home.” Lenka shook her head, aghast. “We ate supper without her last night and retired early.”
“I heard that damnable squeaking, though. It woke me up. I know she came home,” Zuzana insisted.
The women were piling the details one on top of the other, and he threw up his hands, silencing them.
He started at the beginning, making sure he understood the timeline.
“Dani went to the morgue on Mead Avenue yesterday?” Yesterday.
Lenka nodded. “She left at five, when we closed the shop.” Thirty-one hours ago.
“You’re sure?”
“I watched her leave when I locked the front door. She was pulling her wagon,” Lenka said.
“Mr. Raus is out of town, and the building is locked,” Zuzana insisted again.
“She must have come home. Her wagon’s here,” Margaret reminded.
“Let me see the paper that you found in the wagon,” Malone directed. Margaret pulled it from her apron pocket and handed it to him.
“Unable are the loved to die, for love is immortality,” he read. It was in Dani’s handwriting, a slip of paper like the ones she tucked into the pockets of her dead. He stared at it, helpless. The paper was creased and soiled, and when he lifted it to his nose, it carried the sticky, sweet smell of rotting flesh. He recoiled violently.
“It’s Emily Dickinson,” Margaret said. “I know that. Just yesterday she was reading a book of her poems. She must have liked that one and copied it down.”
“She didn’t write this yesterday,” he whispered.
“We rang the safety director . . . but he hasn’t responded,” Lenka added, shaking her head.
“They’ve found another body,” Margaret blurted out, and Lenka broke down.
“Two. They found two,” Zuzana said. “At the dump near the Exposition site. That’s why no one has come to help us. Nobody has time for two old women when the Butcher’s been busy.”
“Oh no,” he groaned. “Oh no. Oh, Dani.”