I left the house slowly, hoping he might change his mind and come after me with more information. A couple of men taking a cigarette break out front gave me a cheerful greeting as I passed, but Andrés remained in the kitchen.
I walked to the Czernins’ house from the jobsite, since it was only three blocks away. The day continued cold, the sky filled with clouds that rolled and twisted over the lake. Despite the bitter weather, I went slowly, not eager to face Sandra Czernin and her unpredictable rages. And wondering, too, about Andrés.
I wanted to hang him upside down from the roof joists and shake him until whatever he knew about Billy and his family and Fly the Flag came tumbling out of his head. I found it impossible to believe Andrés had set the fire at the factory, but he was an electrician. He would know where the wiring came into the plant and how to use it to cause maximum devastation. But I didn’t think he would engineer a man’s death, and I couldn’t imagine any reason he’d shut down a business that provided good jobs to the community.
Since I couldn’t get Andrés to talk, it was even more important that I find Billy. The Kid had run away right after his grandfather insulted Pastor Andrés at the church service, so it didn’t seem as though his quarrel with his family had anything to do with Bron and Marcena. The next day, he’d gone to work in the usual way: it wasn’t until he got to work that something happened to make him disappear altogether. That sounded like Billy’s problems lay in the warehouse, not around Fly the Flag. That meant, presumably, something his Aunt Jacqui was doing, since she was the one family member who showed up regularly at the warehouse. So the warehouse had to be my next port of call, once I’d gotten past Sandy Zoltak. Sandra Czernin.
Despite my foot-dragging, I’d reached the Czernin house, a bungalow near the corner of Ninety-first and Green Bay Avenue, catty-corner to the six-hundred-acre wasteland that used to be the USX South Works.
I stared at the rubble. When I was a child and we had to wash the windows every day because of the thick smears of smoke that settled on them, I would long for twenty-four hours without the mills, but I could not have imagined them gone, those giant sheds, the miles of conveyor belts ferrying coal and iron ore, the orange sparks filling the night sky that told you they were pouring. How could something so big disappear into a pile of rubble and weeds? I couldn’t fathom it.
My mother insisted on facing unpleasant chores head-on, whether washing windows, or talking to people like Sandra Czernin. I always thought it would be better to play first and see whether there was time left in the day to do the dirty work, but I could hear Gabriella’s voice: the longer you indulge yourself over that steel mill, the harder it will be in the end to do the job you came here for.
I squared my shoulders and walked up to the front door. On a street of sad and sagging houses, the Czernins’ place was neatly painted, all the siding intact, the small yard tidy, with a lawn that had been trimmed for the winter and some chrysanthemums lining the short walk. Sandra’s anger at least took a constructive turn, if it drove her to maintain her home like this, or to push Bron into doing it.
Sandra came to the door within seconds of my ringing the bell. She stared as if she didn’t recognize me. Her stiff bleached hair hadn’t been washed or combed recently and stood out from her head at wild angles. Her blue eyes were bloodshot, and the shape of her face indistinct, as if the bones had dissolved behind the skin.
“Sandra, hi. I’m sorry about Bron.”
“Tori Warshawski! You have one hell of a nerve coming around here now, two days late. Your sympathy doesn’t mean shit to me. You found him, that’s what that cop told me. And you didn’t think you owed me even a phone call? I found your husband, Sandra, go order a coffin, because you’re a widow now?”
Her anger sounded forced, as though she were trying to whip herself into feeling something, anything, and anger were the only emotion she could come up with when she couldn’t muster grief. I almost started justifying myself—my night in the swamp, my day in the hospital—but I swallowed it all.
“You’re right. I should have called you right away. If you let me in, I’ll tell you what I know.” I pushed forward, not waiting for her to decide if she could stand for me to be in her house, and she backed up automatically, the way people do.
“He was with that English whore, wasn’t he?” she said when we were in her entryway. “Is she dead, too?”
“No. Very badly injured, too much to talk and tell the cops who attacked them.”
“Yeah, dry your eyes while I start playing ‘My Heart Cries for You’ on the violin.” To my dismay, she rubbed the tip of her middle finger against the top of her index finger, the way we did as kids when we were being sarcastic—a flea playing “My Heart Cries for You” on the world’s smallest violin, we used to say.