I shook my head. “Perhaps you don’t know this, but someone broke into the apartment. They did a lot of damage, but Nadia’s artwork is still there. I’m thinking you should go soon if you want to rescue her paintings.”
“Broke in? Oh, Dios, what next? What next?” The grandmother wrung her hands, but she tried to pull herself together, asking if I wanted tea or perhaps a Coke. “My daughter-in-law, she will be home soon. Come in, come in. It’s too cold here by the door.”
I followed her into the living room, where Ernest was watching the Three Stooges, clapping his hands and recapitulating the action for his sister and grandmother. Between the television and his shouts, it actually was easy to talk to Clara privately.
“Nadia told you she had the journal?” I asked.
“She showed it to me,” Clara said. “A friend of Allie’s sent it to Nadia, and she was so shocked, she had to talk to someone.” She bit her lips. “I wish it had been someone else. I wish—I don’t know—I wish I didn’t know these secrets!”
“The friend—that was Amani, your sister’s Iraqi friend?”
Clara hesitated, then nodded. Behind us, the grandmother had dozed off in her chair, even though Ernest was yelling, “Way to go, Curly! Way to go!”
“Nadia didn’t track down the Body Artist until this past Thanksgiving,” I said, “but Alexandra has been dead for nearly two years now. When did she actually get the journal?”
“It came about six months after Allie died,” Clara said, “but it—at first, Nadia said she didn’t want to read it. It was too hard, what with Allie dead and the fight with Mom over the insurance, so she made a little shrine for Allie instead and locked the journal in a reliquary. She made it especially so it would be the right size, out of papier-maché, painted with roses and other symbols of Allie’s beauty.”
I nodded. Relatives of Holocaust victims sometimes lived for decades with precious diaries or recipe books from their dead, unable to read them. It wasn’t so surprising that Nadia had waited over a year.
“So Nadia finally read Alexandra’s diary,” I said.
“Right before Thanksgiving, it was. It was so shocking, so hurtful, that Nadia felt she had to tell me. She couldn’t bear the knowledge all by herself, that’s what she said. How could Allie? How could she betray us all? And with a Muslim?”
I imagined Amani’s sisters—How could you—and with an American? And a Catholic?—but I only said, “That Muslim woman befriended your sister and kept her from feeling so lonely in a strange country.”
“You don’t understand!” she protested. “Allie told me she was going to Iraq to make more money so I could go to a good college. Then it turned out it was an act of penance for her—her week in Michigan with that body painter.”
“Nadia was a painter,” Ernest announced, catching part of our conversation, “before she went to heaven.”
“Nothing is ever just one thing,” I suggested. “It was penance, it was good money, she believed in you. The smartest of the Guaman sisters, she called you. She did love you, you know. She did want a bright future for you.”
Clara played with the zipper on her sweater, but some of the tension in her face eased.
“And then you went to Nadia’s apartment when?” I asked.
“Right after we left the cemetery. Everyone came back here for food and drinks, and I just went out through the alley and caught the Blue Line up to Nadia’s place. Everything was fine—I mean, everything was awful—but you said there’d been a break-in and her apartment had been trashed. Well, that hadn’t happened when I was there. Everything was just like she left it, except the little box was gone, and so was the journal.”
Her amber eyes were clouded with fear.
The front doorbell rang. After a glance at her grandmother, who woke up with a start, Clara went to the door. I peered around the corner. It was Cristina Guaman, waiting for someone to undo the chain so she could get in. Mother and daughter spoke, and then Cristina came into the living room, eyes flashing, chin thrust out.
“You have no right to be here. Leave now!”
The grandmother said something in Spanish, an apology to Cristina for letting me in, but her daughter-in-law ignored her. “You take advantage of my daughter’s trusting nature, but I know your kind, feasting on the bones of the dead. Leave now!”
I got to my feet and picked up my coat. “When Alexandra died,” I said, “you threatened Tintrey with a wrongful-death suit, didn’t you, Ms. Guaman? And then Rainier Cowles came along and offered you a settlement. Ernest needed extra care, his bills were killing you, you didn’t have a choice, you took the money.”
“Who’s been talking to you? Clara, what have you told this . . . this parasite?”
“Please, Ms. Guaman, it’s not a big secret. Why turn it into one? What kind of threat did Rainier Cowles hold over you? If it was to reveal Alexandra’s private life to the world, it’s not a world that cares very much about that kind of secret.”