“You want me to investigate?” I asked.
“Give it a few hours. Not until your voice is better: no one’s going to take you seriously when you sound like this.”
“Thanks, Darraugh: chicken soup for the PI’s soul,” I said, but he’d already hung up. Just as well. He has plenty of options among the big security companies that handle most of his heavy-muscle jobs. He stays with me not because he likes to support small businesses, but because he knows there will be no leaks out of my tiny operation-I get the jobs that he wants total confidentiality for, but, if he got fed up enough, he’d take the work elsewhere.
When Mr. Contreras finally left with the dogs, I lay down on the couch. I didn’t go back to sleep-I actually felt better after being on my feet for a bit. I put on an old LP of Leontyne Price singing Mozart and watched the shadows change on the ceiling.
I had one little bit of information that no one else did: the teenage girl. It wasn’t only a wish to keep a hole card, although of course I wanted one, but that her spunk and ardor reminded me of my own youth; I felt protective of her the way you do of your childhood. I wanted to find her on my own before deciding whether the cops or reporters ought to have a crack at her.
I assumed she lived in one of the Coverdale Lane estates. I tried to imagine a strategy for going door-to-door looking for her. I was her scoutmaster coming to collect her Girl Scout cookie sales money. I was looking for my lost Borzoi. I’d found emerald earrings when I was jogging and wanted to restore them to the owner.
Perhaps I could check the area high school, although who knows where people in mansions like those in New Solway send their children. Not only that, I’d only seen the girl briefly, by moonlight. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her again, let alone be able to describe her.
I shut my eyes and tried to conjure her face, but all I remembered was her long braid and the soft cheeks of youth, the planes or lines that might show character not yet formed. Had she said anything that might lead me to her? I was a pig, she’d bet with some of the other kids, she knew someone was in the attic. What had I said that got her so mad she’d run away? Something about not taking responsibility for And then I remembered the little thing that had come loose in my hand when she jerked free. I had stuffed it into my jeans pocket. And my jeans were in the garbage bag the sheriff’s deputy had given me.
I’d dumped the bag in the front hall when I came in this morning. With a ginger hand, I fished out the damp, mud-caked pants. Rotted leaves and threads of plant roots fell away when I shook them out. I had a feeling I was lucky be too congested to smell them. I had to pry the pocket flap open and pull the whole pocket inside out to get the thing I’d torn from my teenager’s backpack. It was black with mud.
When I ran it under the kitchen tap for a few minutes, the mud washed off to show an ancient teddy bear. The last few years it’s become kind of a fetish with kids, putting the toys of early childhood on their backpacks or binders. A high school senior had told me that the coolest kids use ratty crib toys; wannabes buy them new. So my girl was cool, or aspired to be: this little guy was missing both his eyes, and even without a night in my muddy pocket his fur had been pretty forlorn, worn down to the nub in places.
The distinguishing feature of the bear was a tiny green sweatshirt with gold letters on it. At first I thought it was a Green Bay Packers shirt, which would only narrow my search to the million Packer fans in the ChicagoMilwaukee corridor, but then I saw the tiny V and F monogrammed around a minuscule stick. The Vina Fields Academy.
Vina Fields Academy used to be a girls’ school when Geraldine Graham had gone there, where they’d learned French, dancing and flirting. Since turning coed in the seventies, it’s not only become the most expensive
private school in the city but an important academic one. The stick on the teddy bear’s little shirt was supposed to be the candle or lighthouse or whatever the school uses to illustrate that it’s a beacon of light.
I only know all this because I see a life-sized version of the sweatshirt every time I go into La Llorona on Milwaukee Avenue. The owner, Mrs. Aguilar, wasn’t noticeably proud of her daughter, Celine, getting a scholarship to attend Vina Fields: she only had one entire wall papered with her yearbook photos from sixth grade on, along with pictures of Celine with the school field hockey team, Celine accepting the top prize in mathematics for her class three years running, and the sweatshirt.
I hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours. I might as well drive down there for some of Mrs. Aguilar’s chicken soup with tortillas.
CHAPTER 6
Neighborhood Joint