I thought they promoted me because I did such a great job. Turns out it was because I can’t keep my big mouth shut. I said some stuff about something that the Strangler wants to know more about, something that happened a million years ago that could come back to bite my candidate. It’s so confusing. It’s something I said, but I have no idea what, but now the Strangler says I have to dig it up, even though I don’t know anything about what happened or even what I’m really looking for.
It’s like Spy vs. Spy, and I have to spy on my DC, which in some ways is fun, seeing if I can outsmart a person who’s been a detective for twenty years. But mostly I hate it, because the Strangler says I can’t trust anyone. He says if I tell a single soul what I’m looking for, it could get people killed, especially if I tell my detecting cousin. The Strangler says she’ll go out of her way to hurt people I care about, and I know that when she’s angry she goes off the deep end. She saved this homeless guy’s life, but she almost killed me because I didn’t respect her mother’s dress. So watch Campaign Girl morph into Undercover Girl.
A week went by, and Petra made her final post.
If you say something that puts everyone you care about in danger only you don’t know that it’s a big secret, are you really to blame? And then how do you know who is your friend and who is your enemy? I can’t tell anymore. I wish I’d never come to Chicago, but it’s too late. I can’t go home.
I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. Petra, with her perpetual cheerful broadcasting of everything she knew, had said something that put the powerful people around her on alert. DEFCON 3 and dropping. I could hear the alarms ringing in Les Strangwell’s office.
I didn’t know the things that Petra might have talked over in the office—these clearly ranged from my breaking into her apartment for her, since one of her Web posts dealt with that, to my visiting Johnny Merton—because she’d even blurted that out at the Navy Pier fundraiser. Certainly, anyone reading the posts on her MySpace profile would know what she was doing. I imagined the Strangler coldly reading over her shoulder. He could be any one of those five hundred “friends,” invisible, like a shark floating under her toes.
I had an uncomfortable memory of the morning in my apartment when I’d blown up over her pawing through my trunk. My anger had frightened her, and it had created a gulf between us. I thought again of all the times my dad had told me my temper would get me into serious trouble. My God, he’d been right, but I’d never taken his words seriously to heart.
I had to find Petra. I didn’t even know where to begin my search. I felt like something large and clumsy, a rhinoceros, easy to spot as it crashed through the underbrush and about as effectual an ally in times of trouble.
I made a list of things I’d said or done and things Petra seemed interested in:
1. Johnny Merton and the Anacondas.
2. The house in South Chicago, where Petra had stood watching when the thugs threw their smoke bomb through the window.
3. The Nellie Fox baseball.
4. Her obsession with whether my dad had left a diary.
5. Her arrival at the Freedom Center the night I went to collect evidence.
6. Her nervous whisper that she couldn’t look for the contractors who’d been hustled into Sister Frankie’s apartment.
It was four in the morning. I’d slept for seven hours, until Rose Hebert’s phone call woke me. But fatigue, born of stress, my still-healing body, and my recent sleepless nights, was overwhelming me. I went into the little back area and reassembled my cot and air mattress. Oblivious to the threat of another breakin, I sank back into sleep.
39
A DIFFERENT CAR, A NEW CRIB
IN MY DREAM, MISS CLAUDIA WAS STANDING OVER ME. “Lamont will come back,” she said in clear, plain speech. “My Bible tells me so.” She was waving her red leather Bible under my nose. She shook loose the dozens of cardboard page markers. When I put my hands out to catch them, they turned into photographs and floated to the floor before I could reach them.
If I could only study them, they would tell me exactly where Petra was and why she’d run away. But when I gathered up the pictures, they burst into flames in my hands. And suddenly I was holding Sister Frankie, her skin yellow-white beneath the burning candle of her hair. Behind her, Larry Alito and George Dornick were laughing with Harvey Krumas and my uncle. And Strangwell was there, pointing to my uncle and saying, “You know why she had to die.”
I woke sweating and weeping. For a moment, I was disoriented in the black space. I thought I was back in Beth Israel, with bandages over my eyes, and I flailed around my cot trying to find the call button for the nurse. Awareness gradually returned. I swung my legs over the edge of the cot and fumbled my way to a light switch, moving slowly to keep from tripping over the drawers that had been dumped on the floor.