Mr. Contreras and she had long since moved out of the worry-and-fear phase of her experience to revenge fantasies, which they’d spelled out over burgers on the grill. They were sitting on the back porch, my neighbor with some of his abominable homemade grappa, my cousin with a beer.
Petra said her boss had called, to tell her that enough parents had canceled their daughters’ participation in the Malina book groups that they were consolidating the groups from seven to four.
“But they’re keeping me half time,” Petra said. “They like what I’m doing, and maybe something else will open up with kids that doesn’t require an advanced degree. You don’t have to worry that I’ll want to be on your payroll or anything.”
I grinned. “You are right about that, my sister. I’ll buy StreetWise from you before I put you on my payroll again.”
Mr. Contreras began a protest, but Petra just laughed. I kissed them both good night and was on my way out the door when Petra called to me.
“I forgot to tell you, but Murray phoned me to talk to me about the protest at the foundation today.”
“Murray?” I echoed. “How did he know you were there?”
“I guess me and Kira showed up on TV when we were trying to get back to the Malina Building. So he had some questions about what it felt like, the attack and all.”
“Did he ask you about the cemetery?”
“I can’t remember. I’m pretty sure he did, but of course, I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t tell him anything.”
I was too tired to figure out why that made me uneasy. I just told Petra to make sure her boss knew she’d been talking to the press. “The one thing bosses hate is surprises, especially surprises involving their underlings and publicity.”
As I climbed the stairs, my legs so itchy with fatigue that I could hardly lift them, I thought enviously of Lotty’s high-rise. Glossy floors, elevators, doormen. I should have become a surgeon instead of a private eye.
I fell instantly and heavily asleep, but my night was filled with unquiet dreams. Over and over, Leydon jumped or flew or fled from terror while I stood frozen to the spot, watching but not acting. She taunted me, reminding me that she could quote James Joyce, poets, Puritans, while I was only a bailer of bilge.
In another dream, Chaim Salanter knelt on Miles Wuchnik’s chest, sticking darning needles into his neck and sucking his blood. Arielle and Nia Durango danced around him, shrieking, “Do it again, Grandpapa, do it again!”
I got out of bed the next day leaden of brain and foot. I drove the dogs to the lake, too groggy to run that far. The air was already hot and heavy, but the water was icy, and the flies were biting hard. The dogs could keep swimming to get away from the swarms of insects, but the water was too cold for me. I threw balls for the dogs as long as I could stand it, running up and down the beach, swatting at the flies that were stinging me, but I finally had to drag my pair back to the car. At least my frenzied movements had taken my mind off my troubles and brought some life to my dull brain.
16.
ANGEL MOTHER—NOT
I LEFT THE DOGS TO THE COOL OF MR. CONTRERAS’S FRONT-ROOM air conditioner and drove myself to the eighteen-room mansion in Lake Bluff where Leydon Ashford had spent her childhood. The journey took me along congested expressways, where grinding trucks belched gray smoke into the heavy air.
The route north led past the city’s sleeper suburbs, past Ravinia, where the Chicago Symphony had its summer home, and decanted me into paradise. As soon as I left the expressway, the air was bright and clear, the lawns a miracle of tightly clipped emerald. No empty chip bags or McDonald’s wrappers spoiled the gutters. Children biked or skateboarded along the streets, terriers barking happily at their heels. It was as if the drawings in my first-grade reader had been pasted onto cardboard and set in motion.
There must be an app for this somewhere in the Apple or Droid worlds. You clicked on it and suddenly the temperature dropped eight degrees, pollution and congestion evaporated, and everyone around you turned miraculously wealthy. And white.
It had been a good twenty years since I’d last been to the Ashford home, but I found my way there without stopping to check apps or maps. I’d spent a lot of weekends there with Leydon, swimming off the private beach between bouts of studying, and then going inside to argue about civil rights or economics with Sewall and Mr. Ashford. There’d been an especially hideous Thanksgiving when my dad was in the hospital and I’d let Leydon persuade me to come north with her. I’d almost come to blows with Mr. Ashford over the laziness of immigrant workers.