this.”
“Thanks, Darraugh: chicken soup for the PI’s soul,” I said, but he’d already hung up. Just as well. He has plenty of options among the big security companies that handle most of his heavy-muscle jobs. He stays with me not because he likes to support small businesses, but because he knows there will be no leaks out of my tiny operation-I get the jobs that he wants total confidentiality for, but, if he got fed up enough, he’d take the work elsewhere.
When Mr. Contreras finally left with the dogs, I lay down on the couch. I didn’t go back to sleep-I actually felt better after being on my feet for a bit. I put on an old LP of Leontyne Price singing Mozart and watched the shadows change on the ceiling.
I had one little bit of information that no one else did: the teenage girl. It wasn’t only a wish to keep a hole card, although of course I wanted one, but that her spunk and ardor reminded me of my own youth; I felt protective of her the way you do of your childhood. I wanted to find her on my own before deciding whether the cops or reporters ought to have a crack at her.
I assumed she lived in one of the Coverdale Lane estates. I tried to imagine a strategy for going door-to-door looking for her. I was her scoutmaster coming to collect her Girl Scout cookie sales money. I was looking for my lost Borzoi. I’d found emerald earrings when I was jogging and wanted to restore them to the owner.
Perhaps I could check the area high school, although who knows where people in mansions like those in New Solway send their children. Not only that, I’d only seen the girl briefly, by moonlight. I wasn’t sure I’d recognize her again, let alone be able to describe her.
I shut my eyes and tried to conjure her face, but all I remembered was her long braid and the soft cheeks of youth, the planes or lines that might show character not yet formed. Had she said anything that might lead me to her? I was a pig, she’d bet with some of the other kids, she knew someone was in the attic. What had I said that got her so mad she’d run away? Something about not taking responsibility for And then I remembered the little thing that had come loose in my hand when she jerked free. I had stuffed it into my jeans pocket. And my jeans were in the garbage bag the sheriff’s deputy had given me.
I’d dumped the bag in the front hall when I came in this morning. With a ginger hand, I fished out the damp, mud-caked pants. Rotted leaves and threads of plant roots fell away when I shook them out. I had a feeling I was lucky be too congested to smell them. I had to pry the pocket flap open and pull the whole pocket inside out to get the thing I’d torn from my teenager’s backpack. It was black with mud.
When I ran it under the kitchen tap for a few minutes, the mud washed off to show an ancient teddy bear. The last few years it’s become kind of a fetish with kids, putting the toys of early childhood on their backpacks or binders. A high school senior had told me that the coolest kids use ratty crib toys; wannabes buy them new. So my girl was cool, or aspired to be: this little guy was missing both his eyes, and even without a night in my muddy pocket his fur had been pretty forlorn, worn down to the nub in places.
The distinguishing feature of the bear was a tiny green sweatshirt with gold letters on it. At first I thought it was a Green Bay Packers shirt, which would only narrow my search to the million Packer fans in the ChicagoMilwaukee corridor, but then I saw the tiny V and F monogrammed around a minuscule stick. The Vina Fields Academy.
Vina Fields Academy used to be a girls’ school when Geraldine Graham had gone there, where they’d learned French, dancing and flirting. Since turning coed in the seventies, it’s not only become the most expensive
private school in the city but an important academic one. The stick on the teddy bear’s little shirt was supposed to be the candle or lighthouse or whatever the school uses to illustrate that it’s a beacon of light.
I only know all this because I see a life-sized version of the sweatshirt every time I go into La Llorona on Milwaukee Avenue. The owner, Mrs. Aguilar, wasn’t noticeably proud of her daughter, Celine, getting a scholarship to attend Vina Fields: she only had one entire wall papered with her yearbook photos from sixth grade on, along with pictures of Celine with the school field hockey team, Celine accepting the top prize in mathematics for her class three years running, and the sweatshirt.
I hadn’t eaten for almost twenty-four hours. I might as well drive down there for some of Mrs. Aguilar’s chicken soup with tortillas.
CHAPTER 6
Back when I signed a seven-year lease for my part of a warehouse at the south end of Bucktown, the surrounding neighborhood was chiefly Hispanic, with a handful of starving artists who needed cheap rent. Two taquerias within half a block of my front door served fresh tortillas past midnight and I had my choice of palm readers.
This evening as I drove south and west toward my office, all I could see was old six-flats like mine coming down and new town houses going up. Strip malls with identical arrays of Starbucks, wireless companies and home renovation chains were replacing factories and storefronts, as if the affluent were afraid to take chances on neighborhood places. The taquerias are a memory. Now I have to walk almost a mile farther south for the nearest good tostada. Of course, tenants like me are one reason the neighborhood is changing, but that doesn’t make me any happier about it. Especially when I figure what my next round of lease negotiations will look like.
I drove past my office without stopping, although I could see lights in the tall windows on the north side; my lease partner, Tessa Reynolds, was working late on a sculpture.
A few blocks south of our building, Milwaukee Avenue narrows to Model T width, making for congestion at all hours of the day. I parked at the first meter I came to and walked the last two blocks to La Llorona,
threading my way through the kinds of crowds that I knew from my South Side childhood. Worn-out women with litters of children straggling around them were stopping in the markets for dinner, or fingering clothes on the racks set out on the sidewalk. Boys darted in and out of the noisy narrow bars and I saw a girl of about eight slip a hair clip off a table and into her pocket.
When I got to La Llorona, some six or seven women were talking to Mrs. Aguilar while she packed up their families’ dinner. Celine was at the cash register, her red-brown hair swept up in a ponytail. She was working math problems in between ringing up purchases.
“Buenos dias, Senora Aguilar,” I croaked when Mrs. Aguilar glanced over at me.
“Buenos dias, Senora Victoria,” she called back. “You’re sick, no? What you need? A bowl of soup? Celine, chica, bring soup, okay?”
Celine sighed in the manner of all beleaguered teenagers, but she ducked smartly under the counter to fill a big bowl for me. While I waited, I glanced at her book: Differential Equations for Math SAT Students. A snappy title.
I sat at one of three high-topped tables that were stuck in the far corner of the storefront, drinking the soup slowly. When the shop was empty of other customers, I listened to Mrs. Aguilar’s endless fret about her bad back and her rotten landlord, who was raising her rent but refused to fix the leaking pipe that had shut her store down for two days last week.
“He want to make it so I go away, then he take down the building and make condos or something.”
She was probably right, so I didn’t do anything but commiserate. I finally managed to steer the conversation to Mrs. Aguilar’s third-favorite topic, Celine’s education. I asked if she had a current yearbook for Vina Fields. Mrs. Aguilar came around in front of the counter and pulled it out from the drawer underneath the cash register.
“Field hockey, I don’t understand this game, but at this school it is important, and Celine is the best.” Celine squirmed and moved with her equations to one of the high tables. When another handful of customers came in I took the yearbook with me to my table, asking for a refill on the soup.
“Don’t get no food on that, Victoria,” Mrs. Aguilar admonished me, as she ducked underneath the countertop and returned to her skillets.
I started going through the class pictures, seniors first. So many freshfaced, self-confident girls, so many with long dark hair and arrogant poise. I stopped at each such face, trying to match it to last night’s phantom. I didn’t think it had been Alex Dewhurst, favorite sport, showing horses, favorite singers, ‘NSYNC, or Rebecca Caudwell,
