“You can’t prove that!” Keisha said. “You think you’ve got the only brain in the family. I’m tired of, ‘Fannie Lou won the reading competition,’ ‘Fannie Lou is doing summer math camp,’ ‘Fannie Lou this,’ ‘Fannie Lou that.’”
“I’m tired of, ‘Keisha is such a gifted singer and dancer. Must be hard to have a cousin like her when you’re so fat yourself,’” Fannie Lou blurted, on the verge of tears.
“You didn’t even know about the competition until I told you.”
“Liar!” Fannie Lou said. “Ms. Milcek told me about it. I wrote about my daddy and she said it was brilliant and I should make it into a whole essay for the competition.”
“And then you’d send in your video clip and Ms. Love would swoon over your fat ass and put you on national television. I don’t think so,” Keisha sneered.
“Fannie Lou, are you sure Ms. Milcek submitted your essay?” Diaz asked. “Even the most dedicated teacher can drop the ball now and again.”
“Not Ms. Milcek,” Fannie Lou said. “When she said she’d do a thing, she’d do that thing.”
“Fannie Lou—Ms. Elgar,” I said. “Did you watch Ms. Milcek submit your essay?”
She nodded, choking back a sob. “I sat with her as she filled out the form, because some of the information was about me. My birthdate and things like that that Ms. Milcek wouldn’t know off the top of her head. Two other kids in my class wrote essays and she sent them all in on the same day. So it wasn’t that she was treating me special,” she added fiercely to her cousin. “Everyone mattered to her if we did the work.”
“And you, Ms. Dunne,” I said quickly, before Keisha could fire back. “How did you submit your essay?”
“Mom helped me, but we took it to my high school counselor.”
I asked the girls for the dates they’d made their submissions, but they couldn’t remember—it had been back in the spring, before the end of the school year, and it was late September now.
I felt a bit like King Solomon with the baby—who was really the mother of the essay? I called Marcena.
“Your winning student has a rival for the same essay. Can you check your files at The Edge for a submission by Fannie Lou Elgar?”
“I’m in the middle of something right now, Vic. Can’t it wait?”
“I’m not sure how you’d handle a public outcry if your winner was found to be guilty either of theft or plagiarism. That’s where this is heading, though.”
“What are you talking about?” Marcena demanded.
“Your winning essay, your mediagenic kid. It’s possible she stole her cousin’s work. I’m trying to figure that out.”
Marcena wanted to know where I was, how I knew this, damn it, I should have called her as soon as I heard about the problem—did I think I was God Almighty on a throne dispensing justice to the rest of the human race?
“We can sort out later who I think I am and who I think you are, but in the meantime, can you get that information from your paper’s database?” I said.
I heard a man’s voice in the background, a smothered noise of annoyance, and then Marcena said she’d call me back in ten. It was actually a bit under that when she phoned to say she’d gotten The Edge’s nightshift tech department to do a search. Nothing from Fannie Lou, nothing from Mirabal High, sorry, Vic.
“But that can’t be,” Fannie Lou protested. “I watched her, and so did Jordan and Artiya.”
“You just can’t admit you or your precious teacher made a mistake,” Keisha said. “Did you even do your video? Maybe your teacher didn’t know how to upload that.”
“Just because I don’t go to a fancy school doesn’t mean we all crawl around in the dirt down here,” Fanny Lou said.
“Girls!” Verena’s voice was a whip. “I will not have you turn yourselves into a public spectacle. That’s enough of this for tonight. You, Ms. Detective, do you have any advice on how to find out what happened to Fannie Lou’s essay?”
“Did Ms. Milcek do this at a school computer or on your laptop?” I asked Fannie Lou.
“At the school, in the computer lab, but I have my essay on my machine and it has the date stamp on it. That will prove I wrote mine before Keisha wrote hers!”
“Only if Keisha’s date stamp is later than yours, Missy,” Jasmine said. “Why can’t you let Keisha have a little glory for once in your life, Fannie Lou? You get your name in the paper every five minutes for some competition or other.”
Fannie Lou said, “She’s in the choir, she got a solo at the Youth Orchestra, she was an extra in The Chi. Why can’t she let me be best at this one thing?”
“Go get your computer, Fannie Lou,” her grandmother said. “At least we can find out what date you put your essay in your machine.”
Fannie Lou turned to go to the hall and up the narrow stairs to the second floor. Keisha was watching her, hands on hips, biting her lips.
“Sticky!” I called.
Fannie Lou stopped with her foot on the first step. She turned to look at me, but Keisha didn’t move.
“I’m pretty sure that answers the authorship question,” I said dryly. “We can get the computers and find Hana’s and check all the dates, but I think we’ll find that Fannie Lou wrote the original essay.”
Principal Diaz and the grandmother both looked bewildered. “Why? What does ‘Sticky’ have to do with it?” the principal said.
“The start of the essay,” I said. “The writer says the only remaining piece of the girl with ‘matchstick legs’ who was with Tyrone Elgar when he died is the nickname. Keisha went through the essay and found every reference to Mr. Elgar as ‘Daddy’ or ‘my father’ and changed them to ‘Uncle Ty’ or ‘my uncle.’ But she forgot the rest of the context. Why, though?”
When Keisha didn’t say anything, Verena Elgar demanded that she answer the question.
“Fannie Lou was, like, preening herself. ‘My essay’s so good, I’m going to win the big prize.’ I couldn’t take her boasting on herself.”
“What big prize?” I asked.
“The scholarship money,” Keisha whispered. “The winners all get scholarships to the college of their choice. I want to go to a real conservatory, and it seemed like—I read Fannie Lou’s essay and I thought, she’ll win this competition just like she wins everything. But even without this, she’ll get a scholarship to Stanford or Harvard or someplace, why can’t I have this one chance?”
“But why, baby?” Verena went to Keisha and took her in her arms. “You know I would help you; you know I’ve saved my pennies and dimes so that you and Fannie Lou could both go to college.”
“We don’t know that, Mama.” Jasmine’s voice was like a whip. “The whole time I was growing up, everything was ‘Ty, Ty, Ty.’ He was so special, it was like I didn’t even exist. And then after he died, you were the same with Fannie Lou. Keisha’s accomplishments never mattered to you the way Fannie Lou’s do. I work hard but the money isn’t there for the New England Conservatory or Cincinnati.”
Albertine Diaz’s jaw dropped in horror. “But, Ms. Dunne—surely you didn’t encourage your daughter to steal her cousin’s work!”
“No. But when she told me what she’d done, I thought, okay, why not? After all, Ty was my brother, but my grief never counted for anything. And he was like a second father to Keisha—her daddy left us when she was a baby. But it was always Fannie Lou’s grief, Mama’s grief, never what happened to us.”
“You must have known this would come out if Keisha won,” I said. “Didn’t you have a plan?”
“If she won, I figured she’d be in Washington and on TV before anyone at Mirabal High knew about it.”
“Oh, Jasmine.” Her mother’s voice crackled with misery. “I always said God was a god of mirth more than mercy. He and his angels laugh at the way we contort ourselves. Albertine, and you, Ms. Detective, I need to be alone with my family. You leave now.”
I nodded and said to the principal, “Can you get me into the school? I know it’s
almost midnight, but I’d like to get to the computers before some clever jerk decides to wipe the server.”
Chapter 8
Mirabal High was built like a giant E, but missing the middle prong. The computer lab was on the second floor of the wing farthest from the entrance. When we reached the end of the long hall and turned left, we saw the light from the lab at once.
The lab door was locked, but Albertine had a master key. The room was filled with rows of monitor-covered countertops; it took a moment before we saw Dexter Vamor at a machine by the windows. Marcena was standing behind him.
I raced across the room to him, shoving Marcena out of the way. I leapt onto Dexter, knocking his hand from the keyboard. He rolled back in his chair, pushing me off balance, and reached for an ankle holster.
I lunged forward, hands around his neck, fingers digging into his larynx. He still managed to fire twice before he lost consciousness.
Black hands covered mine, pulling me away from Vamor. “Ms. W, didn’t I specifically order you to keep me in the loop and not to hotdog?”
Chapter 9
Marcena and I sat with Albertine Diaz in the principal’s office. We both tried to pretend we could handle the bitter institutional coffee—neither of us wanted to look like overprivileged white women condescending to the Black and Hispanic South Side.
“Thank you for alerting the police,” Diaz said formally to Marcena. “It was a big help to have Lt. Rawlings see Dex actually trying to shoot us. And thank you, Vic, for figuring things out quickly enough to stop him before he erased Hana’s files.”
It was two days after the shoot-out in the lab. I’d spent most of the previous afternoon with the Elgar family. Verena was mourning her granddaughter Keisha’s theft of Fannie Lou’s work, but more than that, she was upset with herself for not seeing how she was hurting Jasmine.
“After Ty died, I wanted to weave this cocoon around Fannie Lou, and I didn’t see how I was cutting Jasmine and Keisha out. They were always here, Sunday dinner, girls playing together, going to swim lessons together, but I read the story wrong. Jasmine put Keisha in a private school and I thought she was cutting herself away from me, from us and the neighborhood. I didn’t see the world of hurt she was living in.”
Jasmine and her mother agreed that Keisha needed a meaningful penalty for stealing Fannie Lou’s work, but no one wanted to see her publicly shamed. She was sixteen, and sixteen-year-olds act without thinking about consequences ten times a day. We didn’t want a mark on her record that would add another barrier to any education or jobs she would try for in a few years. When I left, they were deciding on a combination of community service—Keisha coaching neighborhood kids one afternoon a week—and the curtailing of Keisha’s own social life.
“And Fannie Lou is going to join Keisha in coaching,” Verena said. “I’m distressed if she was boasting on herself and making Keisha feel like a lesser girl.”
What I didn’t understand was Dexter Vamor’s role in the story, but Marcena explained that.
“He saw the video clips the girls sent in. He knew the essays were identical, but he knew Keisha had the winning presence and he wanted a win. He wanted a job on cable and he figured if he ingratiated himself with ‘the lady from London,’ and had a beautiful poised girl like Keisha to be the face of Chicago’s South Side, he’d have a chance to make himself known nationally. So he deleted Fannie Lou’s submission.”
“And then Hana read Keisha’s essay,” I said. “She instantly recognized the language from Fannie Lou’s work; she called Marcena to say she had questions about the essay, but she wanted to talk to Vamor first, I guess.”
Marcena nodded. “That’s how I reconstruct it, too. She confronted him and he shot her. And then he tried to romance me. I suppose he thought he could dazzle me into not questioning his role in the essays, but I’m forty-five; when good-looking thirty-year-olds try to dazzle me, I always wonder what’s really going on with them.”
She looked at me with a smile half guilty, half mischievous; she would never apologize for the havoc she’d wreaked five years ago, but she wanted me to know she’d learned from it.
“And the prizes?” the principal asked. “I hope you’re going to readmit Fannie Lou’s essay. She may not be the most mediagenic girl in your database, but she did write the essay, and she is a gifted student in a community without very many of them.”
“Oh, yes.” Marcena produced her brilliant public smile, five hundred watts of dazzle. “The Edge is going to profile the whole family. We’ll fly the grandmother and the cousin out along with Fannie Lou. And I’m twisting some arms at the London Conservatory of Music; we think we’ll come up with a nice package for the cousin.”
I drove Marcena to the airport a few days later. I still wondered why she was in the computer lab with Vamor when Albertine Diaz and I arrived there.
“Vic, you’re such a Victorian.” She repeated the label in a voice light with scorn. “Just because an apple has a worm in it doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy tasting the apple. You take everything in life too hard. You want everyone to be moral and well behaved, but all you get is bruises when you try to make that happen. Relax; learn to take the pleasures that come your way. Life is too short; the time for rosebuds is here for an instant. Gather them while you can.”
I pulled up to the international terminal. “Maybe you’re right, Marcena. I guess I’m the person following after you, trying to get the worms out of the apples so they don’t choke an innocent bystander.”
She leaned across the gearshift and kissed my cheek. “None of us is innocent, darling. We all carry a shadow of guilt for something. I just let the world see mine.”
She grabbed her bag from the back seat and strode into the terminal without a backward glance.
A Note to Readers
Marcena Love first appeared in Fire Sale, where she crossed a line between reporting on a major crime centered on V.I.’s old South Chicago high school, and participating in it.
About the Author
Hailed by P.D. James as “the most remarkable” of modern crime writers, SARA PARETSKY is the New York Times bestselling author of nineteen previous novels, including the renowned V.I. Warshawski series. She is one of only four living writers—alongside John Le Carré, Peter Lovesey, and Lawrence Block—to have received both the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and the Cartier Diamond Dagger from the Crime Writers Association of Great Britain. She lives in Chicago with her husband.
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Also by Sara Paretsky
Shell Game
Fallout
Brush Back
Critical Mass
Breakdown
Body Work
Hardball
Bleeding Kansas
Fire Sale
Blacklist
Total Recall
Hard Time
Ghost Country
Windy City Blues
Tunnel Vision
Guardian Angel
Burn Marks
Blood Shot
Bitter Medicine
Killing Orders
Deadlock
Indemnity Only
Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
death on the edge. Copyright © 2018 by Sara Paretsky. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or herea
fter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins Publishers. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007.
Digital Edition SEPTEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-289584-4
Cover design by Patricia Barrow
Cover photograph © Erhard Nerger/imageBROKER/Shutterstock
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