“But the most interesting thing, I think”—I flip away the diary of Lydia’s reactions for another page—“was a patient file on Margaret Finnegan.”
Mariano’s dark eyebrows arch.
I nod. “When I realized that she was one of the Finnegans—you know, like the Irish gang family—I thought it was worth paying attention to. The notes are all there, but the gist is that six months ago, Margaret was treated by Dr. LeVine for an infected gall bladder. Directly after, she came down with a different infection and died. Her brothers pressed charges, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict Dr. LeVine of malpractice. And the Finnegans were . . . well, I copied down some of the correspondence. They were upset.”
Mariano scans the notes. “Were there any outright threats?”
“They didn’t threaten, no. But they were certainly not pleased.”
“Maybe that’s why Dr. LeVine chose not to mention the Finnegans when we asked about anyone who might have bad feelings toward his family . . . ?”
When Mariano looks at me, I can read the same question on his face that’s occupied my mind all afternoon. Is Lydia’s disappearance about payback?
The thought makes my breathing come in shallow bursts instead of long, even strokes. Father is careful to censor what he says around me about work, but Nick isn’t, and he has a slew of names for the Irish gang that controls the North Side—charmless thugs, brainless brutes, dumb paddies.
“Could I get you some coffee, Piper?” Mariano’s low words are like a life preserver in my sea of fears, calling me back.
“No, thank you.” Something drips onto my wrist. “Oh, blast, I’m crying.”
“You’re allowed to cry, Piper.”
I unfasten my handbag and pull out the handkerchief Mariano had loaned me just a few days before. “I brought this to return. I’m afraid I’m going to need to use it, though.”
Mariano leans back in his chair, his hands laced together behind his head. “Well, that solves the mystery of why you carry such a large handbag.” His lips curl in a smile. “Stolen handkerchiefs, of course.”
When he smiles, lines form on his cheeks. Not like dimples, exactly. More like parentheses, framing in his smile. The effect is charming; I don’t even feel bothered that it’s at my expense.
Mariano brings all four legs of his chair back to the ground. “As a lawyer’s daughter, I’m sure you know that none of this would be admissible in court, since there was no search warrant. Just”—Mariano gestures to the notes I gave him—“creative fact finding. But it does motivate me to stop in on the Finnegans and see what they might know about your Lydia.”
“Is that safe?” My mind holds images of crime scene photographs, men splayed in odd angles.
He grimaces. “As you might guess, my relationship with the Finnegan family isn’t exactly warm and fuzzy.”
“I’m sure they don’t like detectives.”
“Oh, they like some.” His smile is wry. “Not me, though. Not with who my family is in the business.” Mariano shrugs away the implied story, as if he thinks he might be telling me something I already know. Are other men in his family detectives? “But I’ll be fine. O’Malley will be with me, of course.”
The squeeze in my chest eases knowing he won’t be alone. “Okay, good. You can keep those notes, if you’d like. And I did pay a visit to the Barrows yesterday. I’m wondering, did Mr. Barrow tell you where he was at the time Lydia was taken?”
“You’re not asking me to share details of an investigation, are you?”
I make a show of fluttering my eyes several times. “Of course I am.”
Now he smiles. “Why do you ask?”
But his smile fades as I recount for him what happened when Walter and I went over there yesterday. I detail how different Cole was from the boy Lydia had always described, and how Mr. Barrow surprised us by coming home early. And that he made it clear that another visit would be unwelcome.
I hook my thumb around my necklace and trace the length of the strand of pearls. “So, I’m thinking about brushing up on my childcare skills.”
Mariano’s eyes narrow. “Childcare skills.”
“Yes. I’m terrible with kids. Just ask my sister-in-law. And since I’m getting older, and I’m, well, female and all, I think it’s time that I learn how to care for a child.”
I can’t read his expression. He doesn’t seem pleased or angry or fearful or . . . anything, really. He’s just looking at me with those intense eyes of his.
A shadow falls over Mariano’s desk as Detective O’Malley joins us. He tips his hat to me. “Miss Sail, pardon the interruption. Cassano, could I speak with you for a minute?”
“Of course. Excuse me, Piper.”
The two men step away, and I push the damp handkerchief deeper into my bag. My gaze catches on this morning’s issue of The Daily Chicagoan perched precariously on the edge of Mariano’s messy desk. Wealthy Detroit girl found alive in the underbelly of Chicago reads a headline near the bottom of the page. My heart hiccups at the byline—Jeremiah Crane.
Nineteen-year-old Willa Mae Hermann of the Detroit Hermanns went missing last month while on her way to Milwaukee to visit her aunt. Her father, mother, and four younger siblings had given her up for dead when they received a phone call from Willa Mae herself. Willa Mae made the phone call from Johnny’s Lunchroom on Clark Street in Chicago’s North Side—
“Piper, I’m sorry”—Mariano yanks his suit jacket from the back of his chair—“but I’ve got to go. I’ll ring you later. Hey, Jones!”
An officer several desks away looks up.
“Could you escort her out?” Mariano calls over his shoulder.
There isn’t even time to say good-bye before he and Detective O’Malley forge their way through the office.
Jones heaves a gusty sigh as he scoots back from his desk. I skim the article about how Willa Mae escaped the brothel she had been sold to—shudder—and her claims of being beaten and locked in a closet when she refused to comply with her captors.
I hope Mariano isn’t the only one who rings me tonight. Hopefully Jeremiah’s patience hasn’t been exhausted, and he intends to call me yet again this evening.
Tonight, I believe, I will feel up to a conversation.
“We’re a very quiet group this evening.” Jane casts a smile around the dinner table at Father and me. “Surely there must be something the three of us can all talk about.”
Father smiles thinly at her. “Sorry, dear. I’m afraid my mind is on a case, and Piper isn’t much for chit-chat these days.”
I spear a wedge of boiled potato. “Having a missing best friend will do that to a girl.”
“There’s no need to be snide.” Father pats my hand. “We understand this is a difficult time for you.”
Jane slices elegant bites of her pork chop. “Perhaps it would cheer you to know that I went with that peach color you liked so well for the bridesmaids’ dresses.”
I don’t recall the peach color or liking it so well. The little girl in me wants to tell Jane this, but a voice that sounds like Lydia’s curbs my instincts. Piper, it won’t hurt you to smile and say, “How nice.”
“How nice.” My teeth are gritted, and perhaps Father notices, because he jumps in with a question for Jane about the reception hall. While they chat, I mentally slip away to thoughts about Lydia, the Finnegan gang, and a war-hero doctor who’s brilliant enough to save lives on the front lines, but doesn’t seem to understand how to help detectives find his daughter.
After dinner, as I carry plates to the kitchen for Joyce, there’s a knock on the front door.
“I’ll get it,” I tell her as she turns off the faucet.
“You sure?”
“It’s no problem.” As I rush from the kitchen, my hopes soar that it might be Mariano. That whatever he and Detective O’Malley hurried off to this afternoon was related to Lydia. And now perhaps he’s come to tell me in person that she’s been returned home safely . . .
Bu
t I open the door to the grave faces of Jeremiah and Emma Crane. Jeremiah sweeps his hat off his head and clutches it in front of him. “We would have telephoned first, but our line was occupied. May we come in?”
“Of course.” I hold the door open wider. “May I take your hats?”
I hang his trilby and her brimmed cloche on the coatrack, and then lead them into the living room. Father and Jane are still in the dining room, discussing the wedding guest list over cups of coffee. “Have a seat.”
Jeremiah and Emma settle onto the couch beside each other. While they share a family resemblance, with the sandy hair and blue eyes, Jeremiah has a certain sheen to him that makes Emma appear washed-out. Like when Joyce takes the slipcovers off the arms of the couch, the rest of the fabric then looks faded.
Emma folds her hands primly on her lap. “We wanted to see how you’re holding up.”
The way they smile at me, heads tilted and no teeth showing, takes me back to how people smiled at Mother’s funeral.
“I don’t know, honestly.” I perch on an armchair and smooth my skirt over my bare knees. My silk stockings snagged on my way home from Mariano’s office and now are buried somewhere in my bag with his handkerchief. With Jeremiah and Emma looking so proper, I wish I had bothered to put on a fresh pair when I came home.
“I can’t even imagine, Miss Sail.” Jeremiah’s voice holds more sympathy than I would expect, but I suppose empathy is a smart skill for a man who’s destined to take over one of the biggest daily newspapers in Chicago.
“I was actually planning to ring you tonight.” Surprise registers on both their faces, but I press on as if I didn’t notice. “I saw your article about Willa Mae Hermann of Detroit. And I wondered . . . I wondered how you came to know of her.”
Emma’s cheeks pinken, but Jeremiah’s gaze is unflinching. “She called us. That’s almost always how it works for cases like this. We get a call.”
“Were you the one who spoke to her?”
“I took a train to Detroit to interview her.”
“And you think her story is true?”
“I wouldn’t have reported it if I thought otherwise. There’s no reason for a girl to make up a story like that.”
Emma’s voice—sweet and almost musical—breaks into the conversation. “I feel she’s bold for coming forward. Many girls in Willa Mae’s situation might have kept quiet for the embarrassment of it all.”
Including Lydia, should this turn out to be her situation. I can almost hear her saying she just wants to put the whole thing behind her, that she doesn’t want Matthew to find out. “I agree, Emma. She’s very brave. And I was glad to see it reported.”
“You’re worried Lydia might be in the same situation, aren’t you?” Her words are direct, but her tone soft.
“I am. I know they say white slavery is more buzz than sting . . .”
Jeremiah snorts. “The reason the politicians say that, Miss Sail, is because they don’t want to have to be responsible for it. But I’ll tell you the truth—for every Willa Mae Hermann who escapes, there’s dozens of girls who don’t.”
Emma flashes me a sympathetic glance before looking to her brother. “That’s not very uplifting, Jeremiah.”
He nods to me. “My apologies, Miss Sail.”
“Considering the frankness of this conversation, I think you had better call me Piper.”
Jeremiah’s mouth curls into a smile. A real smile, not his rakish grin or the closed-mouth pitying one from when he arrived. “Piper.”
I try to smile back at him, but I’m not sure I succeed. This should have been an exciting moment, having Jeremiah Crane drop by. We would have talked over superficial things, perhaps. The baseball season and Bessie Smith and Agatha Christie’s latest novel. I would have called Lydia and giggled with her. She would have preached to me out of our etiquette textbook on what to say and how to smile.
But instead, his first visit is somber and dark.
“Have the police any leads?” Emma’s voice breaks into my mental wanderings. Was I just sitting here staring off? “We had detectives come to our house, the same ones who were at school that day. But they weren’t sharing details, of course.”
“They’ve talked to all the neighbors in hope that someone saw something. But so far, no one did.”
“In a neighborhood like ours, doesn’t it seem unlikely?” There’s a suspicious tinge in Emma’s voice.
I think I like her.
“I agree.” Jeremiah settles against the back of the couch, looking so relaxed, I half expect him to loosen his tie. “If nothing else, you’d think Mrs. Applegate would have seen something. When I was a kid, Mama always said she never had to worry, because Mrs. Applegate had an eye on me at all times.”
“That’s because you’re trouble from the tips of your hair to the toes on your feet, brother dear.”
Jeremiah winks at me. “Everybody seems like trouble when compared to you, sweet Emma.”
I feel like I should jest back, but the part of me that knows how to be witty and flirtatious has been crowded out by emotions like dread and anxiety. “Jeremiah, did you take many notes during your conversation with Willa Mae? I would be interested in seeing them.”
The smiles on their faces fade.
“Yes, I took lots of notes.” His words are careful. “But I don’t know how helpful they would be if your hope is to find Lydia.”
“I just thought there might be something in there. Does she know who kidnapped her? What happened after that? Did she ever see any of the other girls, or was she isolated?”
Jeremiah’s gaze is steady on me. He opens his mouth. Closes it. Looks to Emma and then back at me. “The details that I didn’t put in the article . . . they’re so ill-suited for the public. I wouldn’t want to put you in the troubling position of reading them, Piper.”
“You’re not putting me in it. I’m asking it of you.”
“But you don’t know what’s in there. I do. And I don’t think it’s a good idea.”
Silence descends on the room. I hold Jeremiah’s gaze until he looks away.
Emma stands. “We should be going. I’m sure you don’t feel like entertaining. We just wanted you to know we’re thinking about you.”
Jeremiah stands as well.
“Thank you.” My words are stiff, despite my sincerity. “Hopefully, next time we get together, we’ll be celebrating her return.”
Kindness shines in Emma’s eyes. “I pray diligently for Lydia to be returned home safely.”
Tears—which seem so much closer to the surface than ever before—spring in my eyes. “Thank you, Emma. I’ve started to feel as though I’m the only one who still thinks she’ll be found . . .” The tightness in my chest won’t let me squeeze out the word alive. It’s a wonderful word that I should be able to shout—alive!—but it’s lodged in my lungs.
When Jeremiah’s fingertips graze the underside of my elbow, I know I faded out on them again. “Telephone if you need anything. Anything at all.”
I look at him, the fellow who’s antagonized me on a regular basis for the last year, yet now extends comfort in some of the darkest days I’ve ever known. “I need Lydia.”
The words are raw, and if I had more sense of myself, I would probably want to snatch them back and shove them away. But I don’t care that Jeremiah looks at me with pity or that Emma’s eyes shine with tears. My sense of pride is so far gone that I don’t even care that they might still be able to hear me when I close the front door behind them, slide to the floor, and sob.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
Lots of Presley’s girls take the L.”
But Father only repeats, “Walter will drive you,” and underlines a sentence on the document he’s reading.
“But—”
Father sits up straight in his desk chair and gives me a stern look. “I know you’re practically a grown woman, and that before too many more months you’ll be away at college, but for now, I need to know you’re being wa
tched over at all times. Can you understand that?”
His face may be stern, but his eyes are full of fear.
“Yes, Father,” I murmur.
“Thank you.” He reaches for his cup of black coffee. “Is there anything else?”
I think of him slack-jawed with sleep, a gun at his side, and his chair swiveled expectantly toward the front door. If I don’t ask him, the questions will keep pestering me.
“The first night we knew about Lydia, I came downstairs in the middle of the night.” I glance at him. He’s watching me, mouth pressed in a line. “You were asleep in your chair. You had your gun with you.”
He takes a long drink of his coffee. The steam curls into the air between us. “And that scared you, didn’t it?”
“Yes, sir.”
Father sighs and rests his cup on his desk. “I’m sorry to have scared you, Piper. But I was scared. I’m a single father, with a daughter whose best friend has vanished from the neighborhood. I guess it made me feel better to have the gun with me. I was overreacting, of course.” He reaches across his desk for my hand. “As a lawyer, I sometimes make men angry. Very nasty men. And my imagination ran wild.”
“What were you imagining?” I can’t seem to make my words louder than a whisper.
He regards me a moment. “Nothing that I could substantiate with evidence. It was just farfetched worrying, okay?”
“Okay, Daddy.” I haven’t called him that in years, but with my tiny hand pressed inside his large one, the term seems to fit the moment.
He squeezes my fingers before releasing me. “I hope your school day goes well. I know it’ll be a hard one for you.”
It will. But not for the reason he thinks.
He glances at the leather shopping bag on my shoulder, and I suck in a breath as I anticipate him asking about it. But I leave without any questions. Perhaps he thinks carrying a shopping bag instead of a handbag is some new rage among the secondary-school crowd.
The Lost Girl of Astor Street Page 10