she felt stupid or embarrassed. “Do you know the story of the Oracle of Delphi?” she asked.
Jim stared at her. “Sure. The Athenians went to her for guidance. She communed with the gods or something and could give them answers, see the future. That kind of thing.”
Trix stared at her beer. Someone came in, and she looked up hopefully, then turned again to Jim, dejected. “I don’t know about seeing the future.”
“What does this have to do with-”
She cut him off with a glare. “Just listen.”
“I’m trying,” he said sharply. “You’re not saying anything.”
Trix sighed. “All right. So, you know my father took off for L.A. when I was little and that after my mother died, my grandparents raised me.”
“Yeah.”
She started to strip the label from her beer bottle. “When I was maybe nine or ten my grandfather started to slip. Dementia. Alzheimer’s. He went downhill fast, and he died the day before my twelfth birthday.
“When I was in the fifth grade, I came home from school one day and my grandmother was a wreck. She totally flipped out. By then there were times when my grandfather had no idea who we were or where we were. He would think it was, like, the fifties again and that my grandmother was his sister Paulette. The neighbors all sort of kept an eye on him during those times. But this one day he’d been doing pretty well. My grandmother had been ironing in her bedroom, watching television, and when she went to look in on him, he’d disappeared.”
Jim felt a sick twist in his gut. “Vanished? You mean like Jenny and Holly? You’ve been through something like this before?”
But Trix shook her head. “No. Nothing like this. He just… he wandered off because he didn’t know where he was. He barely knew who he was. Well, how far can an old man get, right? But by the time I got home from school, six hours had passed with no sign of him and my grandmother had started to freak out completely. She said there was only one person she knew of who could really help, and we got on the bus-she didn’t have a car and couldn’t afford a cab-and she brought me to the Old State House, to that same spot.”
Jim frowned. “But what is it?”
“I’m surprised you don’t know. You’ve lived in Boston your whole life, and you’ve never followed the Freedom Trail?”
“Maybe when I was a kid. What does-”
“The Boston Massacre. That’s the spot, right there in front of the Old State House, within spitting distance of the balcony.”
He knew the story well enough-colonials throwing snowballs at British soldiers posted in the city, taunting them until the situation became so tense that there was musket fire, killing five men. It had been one of the events that fed the growing anti-British sentiment that led to the Revolution. “You’ve totally lost me,” he said.
Now when Trix glanced at the front door of Abruzzi’s, Jim looked as well.
“What are you waiting for?” he asked.
Trix smiled nervously. “I’m getting to that.”
“Fine. So your grandmother took you to that spot?”
“And she asked for help-”
“Why would she-”
“Just fucking listen!” Trix hissed, eyes full of pain.
The dad at the next table gave them a nasty look, but Jim stared him down and he finally turned away.
“I’m sorry,” Trix said, taking a swig of her beer.
The waitress came and slid a basket of bread between them. Jim waited for her to walk away, then he took a piece and tore off a chunk. “Go on,” he said.
Trix hesitated, looked at the door, and then squeezed her eyes shut again. “All right. Short version. I’m sorry, it’s just so… Jenny’s the only person I’ve ever told this story, and now when it matters, it’s hard to figure out how to explain.”
Jim said nothing, just listening. From a speaker set into the ceiling above them, Sinatra sang about coffee. He chewed the bread and found it too dry to swallow, so he chased it down with a sip of water, then more whiskey.
Opening her eyes, Trix seemed to have come to a decision. “I’ll tell you what my grandmother told me. She said Boston had an Oracle, like in ancient Greece. This woman knew everything about the city.” Trix shook her head. “No, it was more than that. It was like… I don’t remember the words my grandmother used, but it’s like she shares a soul with the city. She knows every brick, right? Every corner. Something happens in Boston, she knows, whether it’s a secret or not. You know that saying about when a tree falls in a forest when there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a noise? The Oracle would hear. So people go to her. If your kid runs away and is still in the city, the Oracle can find him. If someone stole your car and dumped it, she can tell you where they left it. She knows where all the bodies are buried, literally.”
Jim pushed back into the red vinyl seat. “So how are there still unsolved murders?”
“You think the cops are going to ask ‘the Oracle of Boston’? Seriously?” Trix said. “It’d be like calling a psychic hot line. They wouldn’t risk their careers.”
Jim narrowed his eyes, staring at her. “Jesus. And you really believe in this?”
Trix sipped her beer, glaring at him. “I have to. It’s our only hope. And it worked once before.”
“It did?”
“Just listen. My grandmother took me to that spot, and we asked for help finding my grandfather. Then she brought me here. Her friend Celia had told her this was the place-that you asked for help and then you waited at De Pasquale Brothers, which was the name of this place back then. I cried a lot that afternoon, waiting here. Not my grandmother. Her eyes were red but she didn’t cry. The woman looked like her face had turned to stone.” Trix shook her head, gazing at the wall as though she could see through it, back across the years.
“And?” Jim said. “Did she come? The Oracle?”
Trix reached up and pushed a matted lock of pink hair from her eyes. “Do you think we’d be sitting here if she didn’t?”
The waitress arrived and slid the metal pizza tray onto the table. Jim and Trix stared at each other, both drinking, as the woman served them each a slice and then asked if there was anything else she could get them. They both muttered noncommittally, and the waitress hurried off to her next customer.
“You found your grandfather?”
Trix took a swig that drained the remains of her Heineken. “He’d been a tailor in Chinatown in his thirties and forties. He was walking up and down Harrison Avenue trying to figure out why the business wasn’t there anymore. He thought he was late for work and had gotten turned around.”
“And that was where this Oracle woman had told you he would be?”
Trix glanced at the door. That was answer enough for Jim.
“This is nuts,” he said.
She bit into her pizza, chewed, and swallowed that first bite. “If you have a better idea… if you have the first clue what the fuck we should do about this…” She laughed a little crazily and touched her hair. “Please share. Because I don’t think calling Missing Persons is going to bring Jenny and Holly back.”
As Trix ate, Jim stared at the pizza cooling on his plate. Perhaps two full minutes passed before he picked it up and started to eat, feeling with every bite like he was somehow betraying his wife and daughter by feeding himself. He should have been out on the street, visiting every place they had ever been, or back at home waiting for them to return. But inside, he knew that was foolish.
Trix caught him staring at her. “What?” she demanded.
“Just trying to adjust to your new look.”
Trix shook her hair back. “Me, too. You know, I’m not the only one who looks different.”
“What, me?”
She tapped her eyebrow. “Your scar, from the night you and Jenny went to the U2 concert? It’s gone.”
Jim reached up and ran his finger across the place where the scar ought to be, but he couldn’t muster shock or even surprise. He’d earned the scar in a quick exchange of fists with an asshole who’d groped Jenny’s ass at the concert. There had been blood in his eyes-the guy wore a ring with a Celtic design-and by the time he’d wiped it away they were all being thrown out. But that had never happened, so there was no scar.
