Playing Dead (23 page)

The kind that promised something good.

It seemed odd that Rosalina would want to give me a gift—maybe something Anthony Marchetti had bought her once upon a time? Whatever it was, I didn’t want it.

Rosalina quickly shattered that sentimental thought.

“My daughter’s finger is in there.”

There weren’t words in the English language to respond to that, or at least I couldn’t find them.

“Be careful, don’t drop it!” Rosalina grabbed the box to keep it from falling. My hand didn’t seem to be working.

“Are you going to faint?
Ay, Dios mio
, don’t faint!” Actually, I didn’t think I was going to faint. I took a bottle of cold water from the ice bucket near my feet and placed it on my cheek.

“I’m sorry, Tommie,” she said. “I shouldn’t have surprised you like that.”

And then, “It’s mummified.” As if that made everything better.

Desperate not to lose me, she rattled on. “The cops gave it back to me years ago, six months after the kidnappers sent it. They told me that this could be my piece of her to bury. That she was dead, and I needed to accept that.”

“Have they tested it for DNA?” I heard my voice, calm and logical. An invisible part of me wandered up there in the lush foliage of the Mexican sage trees, an impartial observer to this mad tea party. I wondered vaguely how a gardener coaxed them to grow so well in Chicago. I could almost feel the leaves brush my cheek.

“No,” Rosalina replied. “They didn’t do DNA testing much back then. They seemed so certain it was her. And, frankly, I’ve never wanted to know for sure. Until now. I’m getting old. I don’t have that many years left.”

The box sat between us on the table, reminding me of the red coat in
Schindler’s List
, the single piece of color in a world gone insane. The red of Anthony Marchetti’s signature scarf. I picked up a cube of ice and rolled it around my neck. I tried not to let my imagination wonder what a thirty-one-year-old severed baby finger looked like.

“What do you possibly think I can do with this? I assume you’ve had investigators working on Adriana’s case for years.”

“Whatever you think you should,” Rosalina told me. “You are the daughter I never had.”

Her last scripted line.

The afternoon light had faded, and she sat in the shadow of a
tree, Rose Red exposed. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her Italian accent. She sounded like what she once was, a Mexican-American girl from the South Side, a scrapper who bent her morals until they strangled her. Despair leaked out of every pore. I could now make out the edges of her blue contacts. They couldn’t hide the misery that lurked behind them. I’d seen those eyes before—on my mother’s face, at Tuck’s funeral.

I willed myself to pick up the box. I could do this. Perhaps I had lived every moment of my life to get here, to this spot inside Rosalina’s vine- and pain-infested jungle. Maybe every research paper I’d ever written, every case I’d studied about childhood trauma, was preparation for this moment. Perhaps I was meant to find Adriana. Maybe she was still alive and held the answers.

I thought these things even while recognizing Rosalina Marchetti for what she was: a brilliant manipulator, a pathological liar.

I asked one more question, to test her.

“When you hugged me up on the terrace, you were looking for a wire, right?”

“Of course,” Rosalina said. “You can’t be too careful.”

I
let the water from the hotel’s luxury shower massager run like hot spikes down my spine. Rosalina and I parted on pretty good terms, considering—not enemies, not friends.

She seemed satisfied that I would at least make an attempt with Anthony Marchetti. I made no promises about the finger but placed it carefully in my purse, unable to bear the thought of opening the box, not yet, and certainly not in front of her.

Rosalina allowed me to walk out of the mansion grounds on the winding driveway much less dramatically than I arrived. I was two minutes late, but my cabbie had waited.

Even with all the lies, details in Jack’s and Rosalina’s stories matched so closely they were impossible to ignore. I turned and stuck my face in a blast of hot water, my mind drifting to Sadie and our conversation yesterday at the hospital.

I’d gone to check on Mama, but the truth is, I needed a Sadie fix more, my little sister’s assurance that it was all going to be OK before I took off for Chicago. We sat in a booth in the hospital cafeteria drinking cups of black coffee from the bottom of the pot and sharing a piece of dry lemon pound cake whose only saving grace was a drizzle of white glaze.

I had laid it all out: my jail visit with Anthony Marchetti; the
details of Jennifer Coogan’s unsolved murder; the little girl with my Social Security number buried in a Chicago cemetery; the emailed photo of Alyssa Bennett, slaughtered with her family in a Mafia frenzy more than thirty years ago; the almost comical warnings from a rodent-voiced husband killer on death row. My concerns that Jack Smith wasn’t really who he pretended to be.

“Three little girls,” Sadie mused, smashing the last crumbs into her fork. “If you include Rosalina’s missing daughter.” I hadn’t thought of parsing it that way. Sadie always had a way of tilting the world a little to change my view.

Her long legs were stretched out across her side of the booth. She wore a fitted white T-shirt, low-slung jeans held up by a tooled leather western belt, brown Reef flip-flops, and pink toenails with daisy decals, courtesy of Maddie. Silver hoops in her ears, not a whisper of makeup except a little black eyeliner, short wild hair she kept pulling her fingers through, big blue weary eyes, and still, the kid sweeping the floor two tables away couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

She cast a spell. Maybe this was a curse for the McCloud women or at least for whoever ran into them.

Later, Mama lay motionless between us, heavily medicated, her hospital bed at a forty-degree angle, the IV pumping in nutrients, the lines of the heart monitor spiking in a choreographed pattern. She was too young for this kind of ending. Some people were destined to live the most significant part of their lives all at once, in a brief, intense span of time. Maybe Mama was one of them. Maybe, I thought, she’d lived that part of her life before she ever saw my face.

“I can’t believe she told us all those lies,” I said to Sadie, finally, to break the depressing silence. “And maybe Daddy, too.”

I expected sympathy. I didn’t get it.

“Why not?” my sister shot back. “You always thought Mama
was perfect. That our childhood was perfect. You just wouldn’t look at the signs. Mama put on a good show, but she never,
ever
got over Tucker.”

She realigned the sheet over Mama for the third time since we’d been back in the room.

“After you left for college, I’d find her alone, staring at his high school baseball picture. She kept it in a box under the bed. She and Daddy officially moved into separate bedrooms my senior year, although I think they’d been sleeping apart for years. He loved her, but he couldn’t get inside her head. None of us could.”

“I didn’t,” I said, at a loss as to how I missed all the gouges in my family’s psyche, the ones I was trained to spot and buff out for everyone else.

While Sadie plumped up the pillow, I saw Mama and me at the piano. A hot afternoon. My little fingers, sweaty on the keys. I kept playing B flat instead of B sharp. I was doing this on purpose, angry that Mama wouldn’t let me go riding with Tuck.

I heard the normal tumbling sound of Tuck plowing down the stairs. He jumped over the last three stairs to the landing, sunglasses propped on his head, big grin, ready to fly. Reckless, Mama often said. I always thought he was just a boy.

He yanked on my ponytail. “B sharp, not B flat, Tommie girl.”

“Thanks,” I said sarcastically.

“Don’t be long,” Mama said to Tuck. “I’m having one of those days.”

Something silent and unhappy passed between them.

Words were Mama’s rope, always thrown with perfect aim, pulling you in, wrapping you a little too tightly. You never knew when she’d pick up her rope. She missed wide with Tuck that time. He and his horse didn’t come home until midnight. The tension in the house was so charged and heavy for the next three
days that I didn’t speak, terrified that a single word in the air would blow all of us up.

Was this normal? Kids don’t know what is normal.

But I didn’t express that to Sadie as she refilled Mama’s water, opened a new box of Kleenex, and set it on the tray. Pulled the call button closer even though Mama was too out of it to know.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have been there for you.”

“Don’t be sorry. I’m not really angry with you, Tommie. I’m not even angry with her. I’m just confused. And scared. I’m worried about Maddie’s safety. I want this to be over.”

Then I heard the tone, the pleading one she used all her life when she needed backup, when I was the big sister who secretly finished her report on the Roman Empire or helped her slip out our bedroom window on a school night for a quick make-out session in the dark.

The McCloud sisters were tight.

“You know you are my sister no matter what you find,” she had said. “Figure it out, Tommie. Make it go away.”

I pictured it like a Frito. Or maybe more like a Bugle.

But still I did not open the box.

It was 7:22 a.m. and I’d been awake in the hotel room for two hours, mesmerized by the stripe of the lamp’s blue neon light, thinking nightmarish thoughts about a decomposing baby finger while Rosalina’s bitter voice swam around in my head. Odd that I’d never seen another person besides Rosalina at her mansion. Not a maid. Not a security guard. Just that disembodied male voice over the speaker.

I didn’t wait on the hotel operator’s wake-up call for permission to get out of bed. I took a quick shower and threw on some
jeans, another of Sadie’s slightly too tight T-shirts, this one etched with a cheerful blue Buddha, a little mascara, and clear lip gloss. I jabbed two yellow No. 2 pencils into a makeshift bun on my head, the hairstyle I wore for studying since high school. Because, today, I planned to study.

I stepped out of the hotel into the pedestrian traffic on Michigan Avenue, which was vibrating with aggression to a ranch girl like me. A bike messenger cursed and swerved when I stepped into his path; a grinning homeless person punched me, hard, on the arm; a swinging briefcase rapped one of my knuckles, all before I reached a café a couple of blocks from the hotel. The businessman with the briefcase kept on walking and barking into his headset. In Texas, I would have wound up with an apology and maybe even a date.

I appreciated a city with a pulse, but I needed to live where I could see the sky. At home, sky loomed everywhere, a blue marble cereal bowl a benign giant child turned over to keep us safe from his dog. Here, it was an afterthought, little slivers between the walls of the skyscrapers if you happened to look up.

On the plus side, safety in numbers.

Once I retrieved my coffee, I walked as far to the right of the sidewalk as I could, balancing the paper cup in one hand while watching the traveling red dot on my phone’s GPS. I was the dot, of course, on a twenty-minute stroll to the Harold Washington Chicago Public Library, a granite and red-brick behemoth squatting on the corner of State Street and Congress Parkway. I stood still for a moment and endured the battering of passersby just to appreciate it.

Tall arched windows filtered in light from all sides, while creepy winged gargoyles leered from the top, waiting for someone with a wand to bring them to life. Inside, thousands of visitors
a day chose from among six million books, further proof that books would survive catastrophic events alongside the roaches.

I closed the door behind me, instantly insulated from the madness of people rushing, rushing, rushing. I drank in the silence like precious water.

Here, the world slowed to school-zone speed, controlled by librarians intelligent and methodical enough to be either great presidents or serial killers.

Visiting libraries in foreign cities was a hobby of mine. College libraries, city libraries, itty-bitty libraries. It didn’t matter. Today I had the bonus of a purpose, a suggestion from Lyle.