The comparison felt like a PR clunker—it was meant to make the girls seem all-American, but it was hard to believe kids that age would make the leap on their own. If I’d been Rachel Lyle, I would have pushed Nia to see when she’d read Tom Sawyer.
“Only then it got really scary,” Arielle chimed in. “A man was killed where we were having our Carmilla club meeting. We were lucky that our book group leader, Petra, sent her cousin to find us. Her cousin is a detective, see, and she helped us get home and be safe again.”
A nice smooth skate there over abandoning their friends and followers and running home—and trying to pretend to their mothers that they hadn’t left the Durango home all night even long enough to let the dog out.
The mothers said that they were grateful, too, to Petra and to me, but they wanted Nia and Arielle to understand that actions have consequences. “Like girls all over America, our daughters are swept up in Carmilla mania. Still, they know that it was wrong to sneak out of the house to meet with their school’s Carmilla club, and they’re grounded for two weeks.”
“Our moms have blocked each other’s numbers on our phones,” Nia pouted. “So no texting, either.”
I watched the performance through to the end. No mention of vampires, no mention of lying to their mothers, of sticking needles into one another’s hands. As the cameras rolled away from the tableau, I started flipping through the other channels.
The story was the number-one feature everywhere I looked. A number of channels already were rolling footage of the interview I’d just watched. No one seemed very interested in Miles Wuchnik, alive or dead, although they all made use of the Gothic murder backdrop, showing the crumbling pillars of the tomb where he’d been killed.
Most commentators focused on whether Nia Durango’s presence at Wuchnik’s murder site would kill her mother’s bid for senator.
“It’s July,” one pontificator pontificated. “People in Chicago have short memories and a deep tolerance for their politicians’ misbehavior. By November it’ll be forgotten.”
“Typical of Chicago corruption” was Global Entertainment’s response. Their color-balanced morning news team—a bleached-blond woman with a dark African-American man—said that Durango letting her daughter run wild in a graveyard was unsurprising, given the loose morals you could expect from a single mom, and did Illinois need more of that?
“Sophy’s on record as being against the Bible,” the female half of the sketch said. “As a result, her daughter belongs to a dangerous cult that worships vampires, or birds, or something, in a graveyard. Sophy can’t recover from this kind of revelation before election day.”
The Global Morning Show (motto: We Spin the Globe in Your Kitchen) also brought in Helen Kendrick to give her a chance to comment. All I knew about Kendrick’s personal life was that she had married wisely, into a family whose holdings included ethanol plants along with their international drugstore chain. Helen had taken charge of Kendrick’s online skin-care division and turned it into an international gold mine. Ken-Care for the skin, Ken-Hair for the head, Ken-Scare for the politics.
Her on-screen presence was a credit to the family business. Her skin glowed with health, and her hair had a gold-blond sheen that looked natural, although it was probably not as genuine as the jewel-studded crucifix at her throat. If the stones were genuine, the pendant probably represented a year’s rent for someone in my childhood neighborhood—where Kendrick’s support ran high in the Eastern European part of the ward.
As soon as Kendrick started speaking, it was clear that she’d avoided elitist vocal coaches who might have tried to tone down the grating nasal of the true Chicagoan. “I guess if you think your grandfather was a monkey, you don’t care if your girls are worshipping animals in a cemetery. I can’t believe Sophy Durango can be so casual about her daughter’s behavior, calling it an innocent prank. Nia Durango was out after curfew, she was in a cemetery, she was practicing a cult, and all the time a man was being murdered nearby.
“I raised five children and saw them safely into adulthood before I turned to public life, but, like the apes she thinks are her ancestors, Sophy Duran-goo believes in letting her one teenage daughter loose in the urban jungle on her own.”
Kendrick paused dramatically. “Who was Miles Wuchnik, and why doesn’t Sophy Durango want to talk about him? Was he her lover? Was her daughter in the cemetery because Sophy brought her child there with her while she met her lover? The voters of Illinois have a right to answers to these questions.”