“How so?”
“Are you telling me that you can love Ruby as you love your own child?”
There was a long pause on the monitor, then footsteps. Ruby worried that Felicia might have left the room in anger and she would be caught snooping. She should leave to be on the safe side. But she couldn’t. She had to hear Felicia’s answer.
“I could,” Felicia said. “If she’d let me.”
That had been yesterday. Now, hiding out in the school library on the pretext of working on a term paper, Ruby thought about Felicia’s words again. They sounded nice. But were they true? Grandma Dee wasn’t the only one who was dubious on this score.
Ruby checked her watch. School was out in an hour. Getting to her appointment was easy, but then there would be the problem of getting home without anyone knowing where she had been. She had told Felicia that she had to go to the Central Library to research something and Daisy’s mother would drive her home. But wouldn’t Felicia find it odd if “Daisy’s mother” didn’t come in and offer her condolences?
Secrets used to make Ruby feel powerful. Now she felt loaded down, as if she had eaten all her Halloween candy the first night. She wanted to make everything okay. But could anything ever be okay again? Had it ever been? She didn’t even remember Isadora, not really. She remembered being told about her and about a time when things in the family had been good, actually good. It was like being told that the stories in her childhood books were true—that there was a monkey who lived with a man in a yellow hat, that a boy fell through the sky, that a lonely doll made friends and your mother would love you forever. She yearned to believe it all, but it only made her sadder.
Was it so wrong to wish that she could have been born into a happy family?
8:30 P.M.
“Ready for a eureka moment?”
Tess, cradling the phone between shoulder and ear, was ready for many things. A glass of wine, bedtime, her daughter’s or her own. An easy compromise over what to watch on Netflix tonight. She wanted peace on Earth, a Democratic majority in the House and the Senate, and a national health care system that didn’t make people insane. She wanted a pair of really comfortable boots that looked dressy enough to wear with skirts. She wanted good Chinese food within a ten-mile radius and home delivery from her favorite pizza places. She wanted someone to figure out who had the secret recipe for the Asiago cheese dip known as Federal Hill crack, a commodity that was currently MIA since the woman who held the recipe had changed jobs again.
But she would settle for a eureka moment.
“What do you have, Sandy?”
“So you’ve heard of Facebook—”
“Yes, I remember mentioning it to you. And have you heard about this thing called the horseless carriage?”
“I had no reason to know this stuff. But now that I do—interesting.”
“I looked for both girls last week and couldn’t find them.”
“You looked under Dawes, right?”
“Yes.”
“Alanna’s there under her mother’s maiden name, Harris. And that led me to her sister, who goes by Ruby Dee. Even has a photo of the real Ruby Dee for her picture.”
“How did you figure out to check Alanna under the mother’s maiden name?”
“I got to thinking—Alanna Dawes, Ruby Dawes—those names come up, on a Google search. Harris falls between the cracks. Anyway, her friendship circle is relatively small. Alanna’s.”
“Define relatively.”
“Fewer than three hundred.”
“Have to put the phone down for a sec and put you on speaker, okay?” Tess soaped Carla Scout’s back. “Good work finding Alanna, but I don’t see how that’s going to be helpful. What are we going to do with three hundred random names on Facebook?”
“’Scuse me, Mama. ’Scuse me, Mama. ’Scuse me, Mama.”
“Don’t need to look at all three hundred—”
“MAMA STOP TALKING UNCLE SANDY STOP TALKING.”
“Well, yes, I guess there are ways to filter—maybe by location or certain circles, but even—”
“MAMA MY SHARK IS GOING TO BITE YOU ON YOUR BOOTY IF YOU DON’T STOP TALKING.”
Carla Scout rose from the bath, ribbons of soap running down her ridiculously perfect body, a toy shark in her hand. Whenever Tess looked at her daughter, she had to wonder how a flat stomach had become the aesthetic ideal for women. All women should be convex. Carla Scout’s belly was a taut little drum and it was glorious.
“Carla Scout! Sometimes Mama has to talk. Uncle Sandy has something important to tell me.”
“Uncle Sandy is BORING.” Carla Scout was not being rude. She had been told frequently, when Tess had to head out the door for work, that she was going to talk about “boring stuff with Uncle Sandy.” Carla Scout had no idea what boring was, only that she was against it.
“Yeah,” Sandy said. “It’s a big old haystack all right. But when you see that little heart thingie next to one name—that’s something, right? Especially when the guy looks to be in his twenties.”
“Alanna has a boyfriend?”
“Uh-huh, and he’s twenty-three. Tony Lopez. Sealed juvie record, some burglaries, although he hasn’t been picked up for three years and hasn’t done time. Yet. Unemployed since December, when he got fired—from his job as a bellhop at the Wyndham. If you go to his Facebook page, you discover he has lots and lots of friends in what they call the hospitality industry. Including three at the Four Seasons. And one is a room service waiter.”
Tess was glad the phone was balanced on the back of the toilet, as Carla Scout seized this moment to throw a virtual tsunami in her face. She couldn’t even get mad. She shouldn’t be trying to multitask this way. Carla Scout had been with Daddy all day. This was supposed to be Mama time.
“You there?” Sandy asked.
“Yes, just mopping up a spill. So—do you think—I mean, it could all be a coincidence, right?”
“Could be. But I think the first order of business is visiting Tony Lopez at his residence. What do you bet he sleeps in most mornings? Let’s get there early. I’ll bring the coffee.”
10:00 P.M.
When the phone rang, Kitty knew it would be Melisandre. She also guessed the call would be urgent, as that had always been the tenor of Melisandre’s calls, even before she had any real right to urgency. There has been a development. It can’t be discussed on the phone. It can’t wait until morning. It has to be discussed now face-to-face.
Tyner wasn’t happy about being at her beck and call. But that only made it worse, watching him go grumbling into the night. He had confided in Kitty that he was worried about Melisandre’s mental state, that he didn’t dare ignore her for fear she would harm herself.
What was it like, Kitty wondered, to always get your way, or to expect to? She wanted to point out that the one thing Melisandre had never done was harm herself. Instead, she kissed Tyner, said she understood. The problem was—she did understand. Kitty almost always understood why people did what they did. Guilt worked on Tyner. Guilt and getting to be a hero.
The temptation was to play armchair analyst, break it down, connect his desire to be a hero to the accident that had taken a physically vital man, an Olympic-caliber athlete, and made him someone—not dependent so much as a person who had to fight for his independence every day. Thirty years ago, Tyner had been forced to remake his entire world. Not just the physical spaces but his interior ones as well.
Once—only once—Tyner had asked Kitty how many wheelchair-bound men she could name, from life and pop culture. Her list had read:
Ironside
FDR
Bobby Udeki (neighbor)
The lawyer in The Player
Everybody in Murderball
Lincoln What’s-his-name in Jeffery Deaver’s novels
“No Coming Home?” he asked. “You don’t harbor fantasies of being awakened to life by sensitive, sensual Jon Voight?”
“Never seen it,” she lied. Tyner later sa
id that was when he realized he was in love with her. Kitty was happy. Kitty was complete. She saw Tyner as being—well, not happy but also complete. She had never understood the point, to continue with pop culture clichés, of one person saying to another, “You complete me.” She didn’t want someone with a hole inside that she had to fill. She was not a half. She was not, Yeats be damned, part of the platonic ideal described in “Among School Children.” She was yolk and white. She was complete.
She was also alone on a Monday night, an intact egg, while her husband was figuratively, perhaps literally, holding the hand of a woman who had no problem saying, “I need you. Now.”
Kitty’s first love had snuffed out the neediness in her. She had fallen, hard, for the biggest lunkhead in the neighborhood. Handsome, an athlete. He had attended Mount St. Joe. Her parents had approved of him. Her brothers had not. She had thought them overprotective and silly, but they knew Paul, or his type, much better than her parents did. Later, much later, Patrick, Tess’s father, would tell her that he had predicted it all. He told her this with real sorrow. Patrick became a father the summer that Kitty was sixteen. That same summer, Kitty went to a stone house on a bluff in Hampden, a hidden place because the girls there were to be kept hidden until they gave birth.
Oh, Paul had wanted to marry her and Kitty had even announced to her parents that they were engaged. They would have let her go through with it, too. It was her band of brothers, six strong, who told her she did not have to do this. Brendan, the oldest, even dared to speak of abortion. But she saw how that would rend her family—her parents would disown her and take hard against the brothers who supported her. So Kitty went to the stone house on the bluff in Hampden, gave birth in August, and returned to school in September. No one was fooled. A Catholic girl’s high school uniform could not hide a pregnancy into the sixth month. But her family had held fast to the lie that Kitty had a glandular problem and that “surgery” had cured it over the summer.
Paul was angry. He should have been relieved. His young life had been spared, too, by Kitty’s decision. But knocking up Kitty Monaghan was the only real achievement of his life outside of basketball and baseball. He told his friends that she was a slut, that no one knew who the father of her child was. He did not tell them how he bought a cheap ring and got down on one knee. Or how he cried when Kitty gave the ring back to him three days later, saying: “I cannot be married to you. I don’t think I want to be married to anyone. I don’t want to be a mother or a wife.”
And for decades, this had held true. She had lived life on her own terms. She still did. Those terms had expanded to include marriage to Tyner, but never motherhood. She was not meant to be a mother. Marriage was tough enough. Were there moments when she yearned for the solitude she had taken for granted? Did Tyner have habits that grated? Of course. The phone rang late at night and he rushed out. Always to help someone. There had been a client out in the suburbs, a striking redhead who was almost certainly involved in prostitution, not that Tyner would ever say. Other times, it was Tess who needed him, although she had been less likely to get into trouble over the past few years. And now there was Melisandre. No different from anyone else. Just another client.
A client who happened to be his gorgeous ex-girlfriend.
Kitty trusted Tyner. He was a professional. He wouldn’t attempt to represent a woman toward whom he had unresolved feelings.
Now there’s a sad little rationalization if there ever was one, Kitty thought, turning off her bedside lamp. I know my husband isn’t cheating on me because it would be unprofessional.
He didn’t come home until almost two. She pretended to be asleep even when it was clear that he saw through the pretense. It was lonely, inside her shell, but no one had ever promised that being complete could save you from loneliness. Quite the opposite.
Tuesday
8:30 A.M.
Sandy brought steaming travel mugs of his homemade Cuban coffee for their morning field trip, but the caffeine was superfluous. Both Sandy and Tess were amped on the adrenaline of this mission. It was an ugly feeling, she conceded to herself, but when their target was a twenty-something man in a relationship with a seventeen-year-old girl—well, why the hell not? This was legitimate bullying. Even Crow, who disliked this side of Tess, approved of the plan to make Tony Lopez sweat. Crow had a daughter now.
Lopez’s last known address was an East Baltimore rowhouse, one that had been cut up into more apartments than would seem possible in a fourteen-foot-wide building. Sometimes as many as thirty men, usually Central American immigrants, crowded into these rowhouses, which allowed them to send more money back home. There had been a horrific fire a few years back, flames feeding on the plywood partitions the men had used to create tiny sleeping lofts.
But Tess had a hunch that Lopez, despite his surname, was at least one generation removed from the hardworking immigrant class. His rowhouse had been carved up into only six apartments, two per floor. She leaned on the buzzer to 3B with great glee, assuming that Lopez, who was still drawing unemployment checks, was not someone who usually rose at 8:30 A.M.
“WHAT THE FUCK?” he shouted down the stairwell after releasing the door. “Haven’t I told you a million times not to ring my fucking bell when that bitch in 2A doesn’t answer?”
“But we’re not looking for the lady in 2A,” Tess said, bounding up the stairs. “We’re looking for you, Tony Lopez.”
The face that stared down from the top floor was handsome enough. At least, a teenage girl would consider it so. Dark eyes, olive skin, a full mouth. Points to Alanna for not picking the pallid vampire type. It was a shrewd face, too, the brown eyes quickly taking in the situation. What did Tony Lopez see? Two strangers, on official business, a man and a woman. She could almost hear the calculations clicking off in his head: Should I run? I’m in bare feet and sweatpants, no shirt. And I have to knock down two people, not one. I could take the woman. I could take the old guy. But I can’t take them in combo. Cops? Maybe. Okay, they’ve got me. For now.
He stood in his door, wary, his arm up.
“May we come in?” Tess asked, after providing their names but not pulling out ID.
He didn’t drop the arm.
“Who are you?”
“Investigators.”
“Not cops.”
“Former cop,” Sandy said.
“I know my rights,” Lopez said. “I’m not just off the bus, you know? I was born here, I’m legal as they come. You can’t fuck with me.”
“Is Alanna Dawes? As legal as they come, I mean.”
He had been resting more on one leg than on the other, cocking his hip, thrusting his crotch forward. Now he planted himself on both feet, crossed his arms over his chest.
“She told me she was eighteen, a freshman at UB.”
“The law doesn’t care what she tells you,” Tess said. Sure, Alanna, at seventeen, was legal. But Tess was willing to bet that Lopez wasn’t up on Maryland’s statutory rape laws, much less Alanna’s official birth date. “She’s fifteen.”
“No way, man. She drives.”
“Did you ask to see her license? ’Cause you sure didn’t ask to see her birth certificate.” This was Tess again. Sandy’s job was to glower over her shoulder, eye-fuck this kid into jelly. So far, so good.
“No, I mean—”
“Let us in, Tony. We’ll sit down on your futon—I just know you have a futon—have a nice talk. It’s not really about Alanna so much as it is about her mother.”
“Who’s her mother?” he asked. But he let them in.
Tony Lopez did have a futon. A futon and a very sad chair that looked as if it were made from two squares of foam rubber. The two pieces of furniture filled what had probably been a child’s bedroom on this top floor. Small to begin with, it was even tinier now that a galley kitchen and bathroom had been carved out of it. Tess walked around, checking to see if there was a fire escape outside the bathroom. No, it was the complete firetrap.
“So
you worked at the Four Seasons,” Tess began. She took a seat on the futon and almost fell into the cavernous crack in the frame. Sandy remained standing. Standing and eye-fucking.
“Before the Wyndham, yeah. I worked a lot of places.”
“Where you working now?”
“I’m between gigs.”
“How do you pay the bills?”
“Unemployment.”
“You got unemployment after being fired from the Wyndham?”
“That’s how you get unemployment. You get fired.”
“Even if you get fired for stealing stuff?” A guess, but a reasonable one for a guy with a rap sheet of burglaries. He’d either defend himself or rationalize.
“That was bullshit. They were just looking to trim the staff at the end of the summer.”
“You’ve got priors.”
“Juvie, mostly. And not from hotels.”
“Still—is that why you got fired?”
“I was the fall guy. Some stuff went missing. It wasn’t me and they couldn’t prove anything, which is why I got unemployment.”
“Who was it, then?”
“I didn’t tell them and I won’t tell you. I’m not a snitch.”
On this point, Tess believed him. He wasn’t a snitch. Just a guy who liked teenage girls. And to be fair to him—as much as it killed her to be fair to him—Alanna probably had lied about her age. The girl could pass for a college freshman. A little creepy, but not illegal.
“Alanna’s mom lived at the Four Seasons for a while.”
“So?”
“Yeah. But she had to leave, just last week. Bad things happened to her there.”
“Like what?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know.”
“Really? You don’t know? Your friends didn’t help you gain access to her suite?”
“What would I want to get in her suite for? I told you, I don’t do that anymore.”
I don’t do that anymore. He was stuck on burglary. Strangely, that made him more credible. He didn’t seem to have any idea what Tess was alluding to. She decided to switch up. “How did you meet Alanna?”
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