It was, indeed—I ate two bowls of it. We drove the dogs to a park and let them romp in the dark.
I fell early to sleep. In the night, I had my most dreaded nightmare, the one where I was trying to find my mother and only came on her as she was lowered into her grave, wrapped in so many bandages, with tubes coming from every arm, that she couldn’t see me. I knew she was alive, I knew she could hear me, but she gave no sign. I woke from it weeping, saying Lotty’s name aloud to myself. I lay awake for an hour, listening to sounds from the world outside, wondering what the Rossys were doing, before falling back at last into a fitful sleep.
At seven, I got up to run to the lake with the dogs while Mr. Contreras followed us in my Mustang. The idea that I might be in danger worried him powerfully; I could see he was going to stick close at hand until the Edelweiss business was resolved.
The lake was still warm, even though the September days were drawing short; I went into the water with the dogs. While Mr. Contreras threw sticks for them I swam to the next rock outcropping and back. When I rejoined the three of them I was tired but refreshed, the misery of the previous night eased from my mind.
As we drove home I turned on the radio to catch the news at the top of the hour. Presidential election blah-blah, violence on the West Bank and Gaza blah-blah.
In our top local story, police have released the identity of a woman whose body was found early this morning in the Sundown Meadow Forest Preserve. A Countryside couple came on the body when they were running their dogs in the woods a little before six this morning. Countryside police now tell us that her name was Connie Ingram, thirty-three, of LaGrange. She lived with her mother, who became worried when her daughter did not return from work last night.
“She doesn’t have a boyfriend,” Mrs. Ingram said. “She often stayed late on Fridays to go for a drink with her girlfriends at work, but she always caught the 7:03.”
When her daughter failed to come home by the last train, Mrs. Ingram called local police, who told her they didn’t take a missing person’s report until someone had been gone for seventy-two hours. Still, by the time Mrs. Ingram talked to LaGrange police, her daughter was already dead: the Cook County Medical Examiner estimates that she was strangled around eight P.M.
Ingram had worked at Ajax Insurance in the Loop since graduating from high school. Coworkers say she had recently been troubled by accusations from Chicago police that she was involved in the murder of longtime Ajax insurance agent Howard Fepple earlier this week. Countryside and LaGrange authorities are cooperating fully with the Chicago police in the investigation.
In other local news, a South Side man was shot and killed in an apparent drive-by shooting as he was walking home from the L last night. Colby Sommers had been involved in Alderman Louis Durham’s Empower Youth Energy program as a boy; the alderman said he is sending condolences to the family.
Is the end of summer getting you down? Turn to—
I turned off the radio and pulled over to the curb.
Mr. Contreras looked at me in alarm. “What’s up, doll? She a friend of yours? You’re white as my hair right now.”
“Not a friend—the young woman in the claims department I’ve been telling you about. Yesterday morning when I went down to Ajax, Ralph Devereux taxed her with knowing something about these wretched old journals that Lotty’s wandered off with.”
Connie Ingram disappeared for a few minutes on her way to the elevator. I thought she was hiding from me, but maybe she was in Bertrand Rossy’s office, seeking advice.
Fepple must have sent a sample of his goods to the company: how else had they known he really could blackmail them? He’d sent them to poor little Connie Ingram, because she was in touch with him. She went directly to Bertrand Rossy because Rossy was taking a personal interest in the work she was doing on the Sommers file. It must have been almost unbearably exciting for a claims handler to be pulled out of the pit by the glamorous young executive from the new owners in Zurich. He swore her to secrecy; he knew she wouldn’t betray his interest in the case to Ralph, to her boss Karen Bigelow, to anyone, because he could gauge her excitement pretty clearly.
But she was a company woman; she was worried when she left Ralph’s office. She wanted to be loyal to the claims department, but she needed to consult Rossy first. So what did Rossy do? Arranged a secret meeting with her at the end of the day. (“We can’t talk now, my schedule is full; I’ll pick you up at the bar across the street after work. But don’t tell anyone. We don’t know who in this company we can trust.”) Something like that. Taken her to the forest preserve, where she might have imagined sex with the boss, and strangled her when she turned to smile at him.