I’d been at it for about an hour when I found the two books that had been in Billy’s trunk—Oscar Romero’s Violence of Love and the book that Aunt Jacqui said made her anorexic— Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. I put them into my parka pocket. I didn’t know what I’d expected, but that seemed to be the net of what I was going to find. I looked disconsolately at the area I’d been searching. The daylight had gone completely, and my car headlights seemed to be getting dimmer as well. There was one last piece of paper near where I’d found the books. I tucked it into Rich Christians, and climbed back into my car on stiff legs.
I turned the car around to face north, but parked it while the engine warmed up again to look at my haul. I thumbed eagerly through Billy’s books, hoping that some mysterious document would drop out, his will, for instance, revised to leave all his holdings to the Mt. Ararat church, or a proclamation to By-Smart’s board of directors. Nothing emerged but Billy’s round schoolboy hand making notes in the margins of Archbishop Romero’s book. I squinted at his notes, but what I could make out in the dim light didn’t seem very promising.
The paper I’d found by the books looked like a child’s drawing. It was a crude sketch of a frog, done in Magic Marker, with a big black wart in the middle of its back, sitting on a dubious-looking log. I almost pitched it out the window, but the South Side was everyone’s dumping ground—I, at least, could put it out with my home papers for recycling.
The car was finally warm; I could take off my mittens, which were cumbersome for driving, and head north. I needed to stop at Mary Ann’s; I had groceries in my trunk for her, and I wanted to talk to her about Julia and April. I wondered, too, if she might have an inkling where Josie would choose to go to ground.
It was seven-thirty. Overhead, the traffic was moving fast, but the streets around me were deserted again—anyone who crossed them to get home was long gone. My route took me near the corner where the Czernins lived, but I couldn’t see their bungalow. My heart ached for April, lying in bed with her bear, her daddy dead, her own heart doing something unknown and frightening inside her body.
My mother had died when I was only a year older, and it had been a terrible loss, one that still haunts me in difficult ways, but at least no one had killed Gabriella; she hadn’t died in a pit next to a foreign lover. And the father who stayed behind had adored her, and adored me—an easier journey than April was going to make, with her mother’s relentless anger scorching the house. I would have to talk to April’s teachers, see what could be done to get her academics up to a standard where she’d have a chance at college—if there were even a way she could afford college.
Sandra’s demand that I prove Bron had been on the job when he died was April’s only hope, either for her heart or her education, and I wasn’t optimistic. William had made it clear that the company would fight a comp claim to the bitterest possible limit. If I had Carnifice’s resources, maybe I could track down just where Bron had been at those odd times Grobian had quoted to me, ten-oh-something in Crown Point, Indiana, prove that he died on the job, but I didn’t even know where to look for his truck. For all I knew, it was in that pound over on 103rd Street, along with the Miata, or simply mingled with a lot of other By-Smart semis anywhere from South Chicago to South Carolina.
It made my head hurt, thinking about the number of things that needed to be done if I were going to figure anything out down here. And I still didn’t know where Billy and Josie could have gone. I’d wasted an hour in a landfill, and all I had to show for it was two religious books and a child’s drawing of a frog sitting on a—I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the curb.
The child’s drawing, of a frog sitting on a piece of rubber. Like the frayed piece of wiring Bron had in his workshop behind the kitchen. A drawing of how to make a nitric acid circuit breaker. Put a rubber plug in a froggy soap dish. Put it on top of the intake cable at Fly the Flag. Pour in some nitric acid. Eventually, the acid would eat through the plug, eat through the rubber casing around the intake line, the exposed wires would short out, spark, ignite the fabric nearby.
I tried to imagine why Billy would have had this sketch when it was Bron who’d been experimenting with the wire. I couldn’t picture Billy committing sabotage at Fly the Flag—unless the pastor had told him to do it because it would somehow be good for the community. The pastor was the only person he could trust right now, Billy had said, but I still couldn’t see his stubborn, earnest young face hovering over a wire with a dish of acid.
Bron, yes, Bron could do it, but if he was constructing the thing would he have carried a diagram around with him when he left the house? How had he gotten hold of the wretched frog, anyway? Julia, Josie, April. Julia had bought the frog, she’d said, as a Christmas present for Sancia. I’d thought at the time she said it she was lying; now I was sure of it. Josie could have taken it from Julia and given it to April, although that didn’t quite make sense.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. April, heartsore in every sense of the word, I didn’t want to push hard on her, but I did have the charger for Billy’s phone—I could question her while dropping it off, but I’d save that option for last. But Julia—Julia was another story. I turned the steering wheel hard to the left and made a U-turn back to South Chicago.
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