Playing Dead

by Julia Heaberlin

  Marcy tried to be considerate of my injuries during the pat down, but I winced through it nonetheless. She allowed me to keep one personal item: an old Walmart receipt with five questions scribbled on the back, winnowed down from a long list in my head.

  Two minutes for each answer. For closure.

  Impossible.

  She guided me to a small, white, windowless room, stark and stripped of any charm. Two steel chairs faced each other, bolted to the concrete floor. I began to shiver as soon as my thighs hit the chilled metal seat. It was like sitting on a glacier.

  A guard in a tan uniform stood upright in the corner, ignoring me, as if I didn’t exist.

  I stared straight ahead at the chair in front of me, at the rings in the concrete that would chain him in place, the most scared I have ever been.

  Waiting.

  Full of what? Hope? Anger? Fear?

  All of the above?

  I focused my eyes on the door, trying to stir up the girl inside, the bull rider who was so much gutsier than the woman in this room. Would he look me in the eyes? Speak first? Beg forgiveness? Threaten me? Say he loved me?

  The mob was supposed to be dead. Fiction. Cliché fodder for television and movies. And yet here I sat, tapping my boot nervously, about to confront a man who knew guys on the outside named Nerves and Baby Shanks, Vinnie Carwash and Jack the Whack.

  I grew up with names like Sug and Dub, Butelle and Waydeen, Coody and Willie Pearl. Even without the three fingers he lost in a farm equipment accident, I’d bet Butelle could take down Nerves and Baby Shanks at the same time.

  The door clicked. I yanked my attention back. He was coming.

  As he shuffled through the door, blinding in a highlighter orange jumpsuit, shackled, cuffed, and led by two men in full riot gear, I reacted like I would to any powerful, leashed animal. I stayed perfectly still, struck again by his potent dark looks.

  Neither of us spoke, wasting precious seconds, while one of the men unshackled his feet, reattaching the cuff on his right foot to the hook in the floor. Throughout this process, Marchetti’s eyes traveled over my face, furious, reminding me what a horror show it was.

  “I am innocent,” he said.

  Out of more than a million words to pick from in the English language, he chose those three to say first, to the daughter he might never see again, who had presented herself to him like a hurt rabbit.

  It was and forever would be about him. Ten minutes would be plenty.

  To hell with my list. I really only had one question. One thing to say.

  “Why are you here? In Texas?” I drew in a shaky breath. “I want you to go back.”

  He gazed at me steadily, not reacting.

  “I wanted to breathe the same air as your mother. I wanted to know she was close.”

  “Jack?”

  “He was interfering. Raising the dead. It wasn’t that hard to get here. I still have a few connections.”

  My eyes dropped to the floor, locking onto the black patch of hair I could see between the cheap prison-issued blue deck shoe and the hem of his jumpsuit.

  “You are safe now,” Marchetti said. “I’ve made sure.”

  I met his pupils, receding into vertical slits, reminding me of a copperhead that once wrapped itself around my boot. Daddy had taught me, only inches from a rattlesnake curled on a rock, that elliptical pupils in a snake meant venomous. Back away.

  “Who murdered Tuck?” My voice trembled, amplified by the close space, the thick walls.

  It took just a second for me to travel the few feet between us, to grab his chin and turn his face up so he was forced to look at me, unflinching. My fingers were hot against his skin, a current pulsing between us. The guard leapt up, maybe surprised that a 107-pound woman with a braid down her back was going to be today’s problem.

  I didn’t flinch as the correctional officer grabbed my arm. “Ma’am, no contact. Sit down.” He was giving me a chance to behave.

  “You owe me,” I said fiercely to Marchetti, not letting go. Wasn’t that what Rosalina had said to me not that long ago?

  It occurred to me that he probably hadn’t been touched like this in more than thirty years. That he might like it.

  Everything around us was happening in slow motion. The guard yanking me back, barking into his walkie-talkie, the human black bugs running in.

  “I don’t know,” Marchetti said quietly.

  One of the bugs pulled me by my sling and the pain dropped me to my knees.

  My father didn’t move. His face twisted into something inhuman.

  And I knew.

  Unchained, he would have killed the man who hurt me.

  We were halfway home before Hudson spoke.

  “You remember that phone call I got at the prison?”

  I roused myself from half slumber.

  “Your library kidnapper got a toothbrush shiv to the throat last night in jail.”

  I sat up straight, ignoring the pain. “Is he dead?”

  “Very dead. Coincidentally, his father, Azzo Cantini, died in his sleep last night.”

  You’re safe, my father had told me.

  “Marchetti told me he is innocent of the Bennett murders,” I said dully, face pressed against the window, brown scenery whirring by.

  “Marchetti was knee deep in their blood.” Hudson said it sharply. “Those murders benefited every single mobster dealing drugs in Chicago. Who knows how much the Feds had on him?”

  He hesitated.

  “I’ve been able to trace Jack Smith, aka little Joe Bennett. He did survive a crappy childhood in the foster care system. He did go to Princeton on a full-ride scholarship. Until six months ago, he was a computer software engineer at one of the large insurance companies in Hartford. That’s when he took an extended leave of absence, claiming a family tragedy. His boss was talkative on the phone. Smith is very gifted with computers, apparently. Nobody knows where he is right now.”

  I nodded, absorbing this. A brilliant guy. A computer expert. Jack Smith was probably his own best source.

  Hudson rested a hand on my knee, concerned, and asked the question of the day.

  “Are you all right?”

  “Almost,” I said.

  I still had a little dead girl to find.

  CHAPTER 34

  Maddie and I stood, hand in hand, in front of Rosalina Marchetti’s gate. Up the hill, I could glimpse one of the mansion’s shiny copper turrets, barely visible above the forest of trees and thick green vegetation. A September chill blew through our paper-thin Texas skin, and we huddled a little closer.

  I wondered how we looked in the fish-eye lens of the security camera. Harmless, I hoped.

  I pressed the buzzer again. We weren’t expected. So when the electronic gate swung open, I was surprised, but only a little.

  Rosalina had unfinished business with me, too.

  I’d been sling-free for a week. The bruises painted on the right side of my face were now a poisonous yellow and green.

  My niece had returned to her joyful little self and this weekend in the city was our personal celebration of survival. We cursed out the Cubs like natives, made faces in the Bean, and checked out the American Girl store although Maddie insisted she was too old and just wanted to take a brief look inside. We left with a red bag. Of course, I had ulterior motives for picking Chicago.

  Maddie and I climbed the driveway that wound like a wide ribbon to the top of the hill, arriving a little breathless at the mansion.

  “This place is awesome.” Maddie’s face was enthralled. “A fairy tale. I feel like we’re coming to visit the queen.” She pointed up. “There she is!”

  On a small, curlicued balcony, Rosalina struck a pose like a 1930s movie star, her silky red robe glimmering in the sun. She pretended not to see us, her profile turned, staring off at something only she could see. I prepared for her to swoon and wondered how we’d catch her. Something white flashed briefly in the upstairs window beside her. A nurse?

  A
black-uniformed maid met us outside, leading the way up a curving staircase to the balcony in the back where Rosalina and I first met. Like magic, our hostess was already in place, sitting near the ledge at a table set with two martinis and a crystal dish of mixed nuts.

  “Hello again, my dear,” she said, not getting up.

  As we reached the table, her gaze drilled into Maddie, clearly an unexpected nuisance. “Run on down to the garden and play in the maze. Little girl, when you get lost, just yell. There are cameras. Someone will lead you out.”

  “Don’t go far,” I added, not sensing any real danger. I now believed the cameras were there more to keep Rosalina in than to keep anyone out.

  Maddie bounced off with the maid, who was already offering up chocolate chip cookies and milk, and I confronted this woman whose vanished child had made a permanent home in my dreams.

  “Where is Adriana?” I asked.

  She sighed, and pointed to her heart. “She’s here, and …” pointing melodramatically down to the fountain, “… she’s there.”

  It took me a second to get it.

  Adriana wasn’t missing.

  She was buried below us.

  The fountain was her tomb.

  Maddie was roaming the gardens. Alone. What the hell else was buried there?

  I tried to keep my voice steady. “She wasn’t kidnapped. How did she die?”

  “It was an accident. I was high on something. Some of Cantini’s special juice. I was about to put her in her crib and I dropped her. She hit her head. Wouldn’t stop crying. Then she went to sleep. The next morning, she wouldn’t wake up.”

  Her lack of emotion chilled me.

  “Anthony knew, of course. He was in constant contact from jail. His lawyers are always busy maneuvering his money and I’m always signing things. I think that’s why he married me. Not to protect your mother—to hide all his dirty business.”

  That had occurred to me, too.

  “One of his men came up with the finger thing. Did the chopping. Mailed the package.”

  I winced at the word chopping, but Rosalina appeared unbothered.

  “And then there was that pesky little reporter. Barbara Thurman. She couldn’t stop bugging me about the kidnapping. I let something slip once, and she wouldn’t let go. She never liked me.”

  Rosalina twirled the olive to marinate it and gracefully popped it in her mouth, the perfect socialite, the studied actress. She and Jack, co-stars.

  “So what made her stop pursuing the story?”

  “Money, what else? Lots and lots of money.”

  “So you were responsible for the break-in at her house?”

  “One of my boys followed you. I wanted to know if Thurman broke her word. She was paid too much for that. I planned to tell you in my own good time. Or not.”

  “You shouldn’t have worried.” I thought of Barbara’s misdirection, the drawing of a woman with funky red highlights who had never existed.

  Poor Adriana. I felt the finality of her small death, the immense sadness that came with it, and a weight lifting off of me, rising like a balloon.

  You didn’t die in place of me.

  “Why the hell did you give me that fake finger?” I asked Rosalina. “Why did you beg me to come up here?”

  “Honey, I didn’t really think you’d take it. What kind of person would? It was for effect. I made it in my ceramics studio one day when I was missing Adriana. The real one is buried with her. When the police gave it back to me, they said it had been chopped off after death. Of course, I already knew that.”

  I shivered at the image of Rosalina casting the finger of her baby, maybe singing a lullaby as she worked at it.

  “You know, your mother had everything.” Her voice grew ugly with bitterness. “A daughter who lived. Men who adored her. A nice reporter doing a piece on Anthony told me all about it. He suggested that you and I should meet. The letter was his idea.”

  Jack. Of course. Jack’s fingers were everywhere. Pulling me down with him.

  Rosalina’s face took on a dreamy quality. “I thought maybe you’d believe me. That you could become the daughter I never had. That reporter told me your mother had lost her mind. So the timing was perfect. You were the same age as my Adriana. You’d have been like sisters if all of this had never happened.”

  She reached across the table to cover my hand with hers, a creepy albino spider.

  “It was absolution,” she said. “A full circle.”

  I felt a deep, urgent need to find Maddie.

  “Don’t you judge me,” Rosalina said petulantly, sensing my abrupt mood change. “Everybody’s always judging me.”

  I stood up to go, knocking my half-finished martini across the table, bitter liquid spilling onto Rosalina’s red silk, the stain spreading, reminding me of blood.

  So much blood.

  “I’ve spent years atoning with my charity work. I’m a good person!” Rosalina’s voice was rising now, out of control.

  Peering down on the shiny copper Adriana, I frantically called Maddie’s name.

  Seconds later, she appeared out of a path on the opposite side of the courtyard from which she’d disappeared, looking pleased with herself.

  “She’s the first one to find her way out,” Rosalina said, surprised.

  I hoped those words were prophetic.

  CHAPTER 35

  I couldn’t let go of Jennifer Coogan.

  The last piece.

  I knew that her story was linked to mine.

  I like to think that she led me here, to this spot, on this snowy January night in Rochester, New York. I stared across the street through the icy film on my rental car window at a boy shooting hoops in the driveway of a blue Victorian house painted with cheerful yellow trim. I closed my eyes and listened to the ringing echo as the ball hit the concrete, a steady pound, pound, pound. Then I drove away.

  Thirteen hours later, I waited at a table in a coffee shop on a quaint little street called Park, twisting Hudson’s ring on my finger, nervously smoothing the newspaper articles Mama had so carefully safeguarded. I sipped a fully leaded mocha cappuccino. The caffeine was a tough call.

  I’d been trying to clean up my act.

  Less tequila, more whole grains. Less oil, more wind.

  Anthony Marchetti had lost his parole hearing in Illinois and asked to be moved back to his cell at Stateville. He hadn’t killed himself. I didn’t think he was the type. I decided against requesting a DNA test.

  Charla Polaski still calls me once in a while, asks my advice and never takes it.

  It took sixty-three hours and twenty-nine minutes for the Hobbit and the Giant to pop out of face recognition software at Hudson’s security firm. Ernest Lowalsky and Reuben Fierstein, two minor contract guys who died in a shootout three years earlier when they wouldn’t surrender to the police. Wherever Jack was, I hoped he knew.

  As for Hudson and me, we are nudging our way toward permanent, working steadily on my dream to build a horse therapy ranch on our property in the Hill Country. He helps me assess every horse I buy as if they were for his own children. Maybe they will be.

  Mama’s autopsy revealed she died of natural causes. A stroke. Slowly, I have begun to grieve her and Daddy the way I was supposed to, saving the best parts of them.

  Still, I wish they had trusted me. Told me. Instead, they let Tuck lie like a cement block in my gut. I think of all the master secret keepers who come to me, old souls in little bodies, kids who never had a tight hug, a single peaceful night of sleep, or a place in the hay to disappear and have a good cry. For these children, the hard part isn’t getting them to keep a secret, it is getting them to tell.

  In my free time, I made a trip back to Idabel and dug up the names of every person alive who might know something about Jennifer Coogan’s life and death. I hit upon Holly Bender, an acquaintance who’d gone to the University of Oklahoma at the same time and now managed the local Walmart.

  Holly told me what she could about Jenni
fer’s mysterious boyfriend, including the name of an OU professor who’d taken a special interest in him. It was easy to find the professor’s phone number and picture on the university website. He genially offered up little but a description—good-looking, dirty-blond hair, blue eyes, thin frame—the first thing that tickled the back of my mind.

  W.A. knew a lot more than he let on about the anonymous heirs in my mother’s will, but I guess he couldn’t stop protecting her after all these years. His dear secretary, Marcia, took pity on me and surreptitiously combed his files for the name of the New York lawyer who set up their trust. Instead, she found the actual names of the teenage heirs: Troy and Amy Merchant, who coincidentally lived in the same city as one of Mama’s newspaper articles.

  It was Maddie who dug up their profiles on Facebook. I keep no secrets from her, for better or worse. She tried to unsuccessfully “friend” them when I wasn’t looking. No response. They had parents with strict rules.

  Sometimes at night, I dreamed about Jennifer Coogan and the man she thought she loved.

  So when he walked into the coffee shop, announced by the jangling Indian bells on the door, I knew him at once, because I’d obsessively examined his picture on the Eastman School of Music website.

  A tenured professor of classical music studies. A composer. The father of two young heirs to a considerable fortune.

  He looked the part—an erudite, tall, good-looking, middle-aged man with wire-frame glasses, wearing a brown tweedy coat and jeans. He ordered a plain cup of black coffee as he did every morning at 7:25 a.m. on his way to work.

  His eager young teaching assistant had been very helpful on the phone with details about her boss’s routine. She thought I was an old friend who wanted to surprise him. At the Eastman School of Music, they aren’t expecting killers.

  He dropped a few coins in the tip jar, picked up his coffee, and turned. I was hard to miss. I’d left my hair down on purpose.

  I was a ghost. One of his ghosts.