Chapter 21
I left Kyler to store away the beer he’d brought and marched back to the alley door, Sicily trailing along behind.
“What’s going on?” Sicily said. “Dahlia? Do you think—”
My pounding on the door to the space next door shut her up. For a second.
“What’s wrong?” she whispered, pulling the sleeves of her sweater down over her hands and shivering.
Someone would be inside. They’d been thumping around all night and all morning, but suddenly it was all quiet behind the steel door. I imagined a lot of not-it glances between the construction guys, everyone’s tools paused in the air to wait me out.
I banged with my fist until it hurt, then switched hands. All my fingers were numb from the cold and my breath came out as white puffs against the closed door. Nothing. “Okay,” I said.
Sicily followed me back inside the pub’s back door and through to the office. “Why are you mad at the people next door?”
In the office, I scrounged up the card Detective Aycock had left behind and picked up the phone.
“Who are you calling?” Sicily mouthed at me, but I shook my head.
It took awhile to be transferred out of Aycock’s voicemail to a real person and then back to his number to catch him.
But when I reached him at last, he let me talk.
He accepted the information—too calmly for my tastes—in his taking-notes voice while Sicily listened to my half of the conversation, eyes wide. She took the seat across from me again.
After I had unloaded to Aycock about the truck in the alley, trying to make him see what I meant—without, of course, the benefit of video footage that wasn’t supposed to exist—he thanked me in a respectful, distant tone that made me feel like a crank reporting a UFO sighting.
“We have a theory of how Mr. Hartnett died,” he said when I had talked myself out.
My stomach sank, thinking of Alex shoving Joey out of the alley. Had someone seen?
“You don’t want to know?” Aycock said.
“How—” I had to clear my throat. “How did he die?”
“Blood evidence in the alley and a contusion on the victim’s head—a contusion is just a bruise—”
“I’ve seen TV in my lifetime,” I said. “Just not the show you mentioned.”
“Uh-huh. Well, then I don’t need to explain lacerations and abrasions—cuts and scrapes? All of it together would suggest the victim clipped his head on that dumpster out there in your alley.”
“What?” Sicily whispered.
I must have been wincing into the phone. I ignored her. “So it could have been an accident,” I said, a flower of hope starting to bloom. Oh, God, yes. An accident.
“An accident,” Aycock said, “where a dead man tucked himself up snug as a bug into some long curtains.”
“Right,” I said. “Okay. I forgot about the curtains.”
“A motor vehicle like the one you describe could have been involved,” Aycock said. “There were some interesting patterns left in the ice I’d like to have explained.”
“Patterns?”
“Drag marks,” Aycock said. “From boot heels.”
I had lost the ability to speak.
“We’ll just have to keep working the case and see what turns up,” he said. It sounded less like a promise and more like a threat.
I reached for the handset to hang up the call, the phone still to my ear. Drag marks.
Sicily shifted cautiously in the chair across from me. “Your boyfriend … died?” she said. “Don’t you think that’s weird?”
I hung up. “It’s certainly out of character,” I said.
“I mean, don’t you think it’s weird that he died the same week Mom went missing?”
I didn’t like this thing where Sicily had started referring to Marisa not as her mom, but as ours.
“Oh! That’s why the police wanted to know when we were together yesterday,” Sicily said. “Oh, wow, you’re a suspect.” She looked sort of thrilled by it. “Did you tell the police about Mom?”
I looked over at her. “Wait, you haven’t?”
“Well, we did, where we live,” she said. “They talk to each other, right?” She looked concerned they wouldn’t. “They said Mom was a grown-up and could leave her house anytime she liked and maybe she just needed a break. A break, for real. That’s what they said.”
Sicily flicked a stack of envelopes on the desk testily, and I reached for them, before she scattered them all over the floor again. Alex had a lock on where every piece of paper in this office should be and could spin out when he thought someone had messed with his system.
“Maybe she did need a break,” I said. “The holidays can mess people up.”
I looked down at the envelopes. A few of them looked official, bossy.
You ever seen that kind of envelope? If you got one, you know you owe someone money.
As I had noticed yesterday, some of them were for Michael Jordan.
You wouldn’t think a guy that tall would be hard to find.
But some of these were addressed to McPhee’s and from familiar sources.
Vendor invoices. All of it unopened, which was weird.
Very un-Alex, but then Alex had been very un-Alex for a while now.
If they were unopened, did that mean all of the bills were unpaid?
I found myself thinking about Edith Maxwell’s sly smile on that bus bench. If McPhee’s was in trouble, her best offer would be looking good indeed.
When I looked up, Sicily was scowling at me. “What?” I asked. “What did I say?”
“She wouldn’t just take off,” Sicily said.
“But this time of year is tough—”
“She loves the holidays.”
“Even for happy people,” I finished. “All the expectations high, all the prices and stressors and weather. But especially hard for people who, uh…”
“Who what?”
“Who are … you know.” I cast about for the right word. “Vulnerable.”
Maybe I’d said it like a swear. Maybe I’d only struck a bull’s-eye, and not just for Marisa. Sicily ducked her head, showing me the straight part in her hair.
Oh, man. I was terrible at tears. Generating my own, dealing with anyone else’s.
There were people finding out about Joey who wouldn’t have any trouble at all ginning up tears over his death. Heather, his sister. She would have heard by now. I would need to … call?
And here was this kid, who only wanted to know her mom was alive.
“Hey,” I said before I was quite sure what I would say. “Do you want a cup of coffee?”
Coffee is what Oona had offered me, and it had seemed like a nice gesture. One that I kinda wished I’d taken her up on. I wasn’t capable of making pancakes.
Sicily raised her head and smudged at her nose with her hand. “I want to find my mom. Will you help me? Please?” She sank back into tears. “Why won’t someone find my mom?”
At least she’d gone back to claiming Marisa for herself. I sighed and pushed a box of tissues at her. I was beginning to think I was nice.
IN A HALF HOUR WE were in Sicily’s SUV heading out to the suburbs again, this time northwest from Jefferson Park toward the town where Sicily lived with her parents when she wasn’t at college.
I had my hands under my thighs to keep my fingers warm—and to keep from wrenching the steering wheel away from Sicily as she drifted from her lane.
“What was the thing about the curtains?” Sicily said.
I was busy keeping the car on the road through sheer force of will. “What?”
“When you were on the phone, with the police?” she said. “You said you forgot about the curtains. What did that mean?”
“Concentrate on your driving.”
I was personally concentrating so hard I couldn’t even let Joey in right now.
But, yeah, the curtains hurt. Cheap blue ones we’d got at Value Village, too long for our windows, like the red ones at McPhee’s that people were always tying up in awkward knots to get out of their way.
At the apartment, though, we’d just let them pool up on the floor.
What could it have cost to get them shortened? Twenty bucks at the dry cleaners? But we hadn’t been building anything to last. At least that’s how I’d been operating.
I clutched the handle in the car door. “How far is your house?”
“Should we go to the train station?” Sicily said. “See if anyone remembers seeing Mom there, and which way she was going?”
“Good idea, teen sleuth,” I said sarcastically. “What makes you think anyone would talk to us?”
I didn’t think anyone would. And also I didn’t think Marisa would have gone anywhere on the train. And I wanted to see Marisa’s house, okay? She’d come to my place uninvited, and I was going to repay the favor.
I didn’t really know how I could help track Marisa down, honestly. She’d lived a few miles away all this time, and I hadn’t known it, so being a detective was probably a big stretch for me. But the kid had stopped crying, and that seemed like progress of a sort.
When Sicily finally put the bumper of the SUV into a snowdrift, I unleashed myself from the seat belt and jumped out to feel the glory of solid ground under my feet. Sicily came around and gave me a going-over. “What’s your problem?”
“Did Marisa teach you to drive?”
“She— Oh!”
“Right. Where’s her car?” Why hadn’t we considered this? How had Marisa arrived at the pub, and where had she been walking when she left?
Sicily hurried up the walk, talking fast and excited about trains and taxis and receipts.
I followed, taking a look at the place. “Maybe,” I said. I was remembering a mom wagon parked badly against the curb near McPhee’s, an orange parking violation tucked under the windshield. When was that?
Marisa’s house was homey, wreaths in all the windows and a massive, brightly lit tree framed in the front bay window.
Christmas, right.
You could forget it was coming at you, with all this distraction. I usually scraped some kind of gift together for Alex, and Oona was being so cool about the room, I should probably get her something this year. What gift would say please don’t kick me out? For ten bucks or less.
Sicily fumbled her keys, dropping them off the porch into virgin snow. I stared hard at the tree through the window. Marisa seemed to have claimed her portion of joy to the world. I said, “I should have listened when you warned me Marisa was big on the holidays.”
“She’s regular on the holidays,” Sicily said, retrieving her keys. “You don’t like Christmas? Oh. I suppose that’s another thing you’ll say Mom ruined for you.”
I sighed deeply, breath coming out in a cloud. “It would really save us time,” I said, “to say she ruined me entirely.”