by Sara Blaedel
“Lydia said she was accused of killing eight people, but if I’m counting right, from what you’ve said, only seven died in the house that day,” Ilka said.
Fernanda shook her head. “No, it was eight. They also accused her of killing Ethan, because they never found him. And right before we drove off, a neighbor came over. He was shot before he even got to the house, but we’ve heard that Javi Rodriguez was sentenced for that killing.”
“When did he get out?”
“In August. I learned all this from Lydia when she came down here with your father. And now the only ones left are Miguel and Juan.”
Ilka stood up. “Maybe we should go inside?”
It was chilly, and she could see her father was tired. He leaned on her arm as they walked over the gravel. Fernanda had already turned on the lights in the house. The single painting in the small kitchen depicted the view of Lake Michigan from Artie’s porch; other than that, only wood carvings like those she’d seen in Artie’s house hung from the walls.
They put water on to boil, and Fernanda rinsed and warmed a teapot. Ilka’s father eased down on the sofa. He slumped over, his head almost falling onto his shoulder, but before Ilka could react Fernanda was at his side. She leaned over and put his arms on her shoulders, then spoke softly: “Okay, Paul, time for bed.” She helped him into his bedroom beside the kitchen.
Ilka glanced around the living room. Another door to the right of the dining room table was closed, and it was quiet inside. Ethan must be sleeping in there, she thought as she sat on the sofa and grabbed her phone.
“You have reached a number that has been disconnected or is no longer in service,” the mechanical voice said. She tried Lydia’s phone one more time, but got the same message. Ilka set her phone aside. She hadn’t even thought about where she would sleep, but she tucked her legs underneath her on the short sofa. Looks like it’ll be here, she thought.
A few minutes later, Fernanda brought the teapot in. “You have to find Lydia,” she said. “She’s out there all alone, with no money and no place to go.”
Ilka nodded and said she’d tried to call Lydia. “She’s been disconnected.”
“Your father says you two should leave early in the morning.”
“No way! He’s not going, it’s way too dangerous and difficult. I’m going back alone.”
Ilka thought about the travel bag Lydia had left at her feet when she climbed in the hearse and slipped into the coffin. Then she pictured the two Rodriguez brothers they’d left behind. Lydia shouldn’t be alone when she picked up her bag; Ilka needed to get back before she did.
“I’m coming with you, and that’s it.”
Ilka turned her head. Her father stood in the doorway wearing his dark-blue pajamas.
“No, you are not!” she nearly shouted. “You’re forgetting; everyone thinks you’re dead. You can’t just show up all of a sudden. And I’m going to have to drive back in one stretch, to get there before Lydia.”
His forehead wrinkled into an angry frown. “If you don’t take me with you, I’ll rent a car and drive myself.”
“Paul!” Fernanda said.
“I’m leaving early tomorrow morning. I can’t just sit down here and hide while all these people I care about are in trouble. It doesn’t make any sense that Lydia had me declared dead. I need to get home and sort all this out.”
He turned and closed the door behind him.
Ilka shook her head as Fernanda stepped toward her.
“He needs a nap in the afternoon. He hides it pretty well, but he isn’t so strong now, after being injured. And his one leg isn’t good, he can’t drive a car. You’ll have to drive the whole way.”
Ilka was already resigned to him coming. She nodded and promised to make sure he rested during the trip, despite how annoyed she was at his insistence. It meant they would be spending twenty-four hours together in a car, and honestly, she wasn’t sure if she was ready for that.
Fernanda handed her a cup of tea. Ilka asked what happened after the policeman advised Lydia to get out of town.
“Lydia called a woman—Alice Payne—and told her everything that happened. They’ve known each other for years, and Lydia trusted her. Alice said to come over, they could trade cars. The police had to be looking for ours. And she told Lydia to get rid of her cell phone so it couldn’t be tracked. That’s when I realized it wasn’t the police Alice was most worried about, it was the Rodriguez brothers. When we got there, she had her car all ready for us. Clothes, food, blankets, some money too, so we could buy anything Ethan needed. She told Lydia to not use her credit card since it could be traced. She said she’d hide Lydia’s car and promised to look after her house until everything died down—until the police arrested the right men. She suggested we drive up to Oklahoma and stick to places where it was easy to hide. At the time we had no idea how much trouble we were in.”
Fernanda hadn’t touched her tea. She still wore the shawl over her shoulders, though the cool draft from the open window didn’t seem to bother her. She was somewhere else, Ilka thought. Twelve years back in time, and far from the Key West gallery.
“We heard about the case on the radio while we drove. First it was just a short announcement about a shooting in San Antonio, but around noon they reported that Enrique Rodriguez had been killed, and then everything seemed to explode. Just like the policeman said it would. At first, they called it a gangster war, and they started sending live updates from in front of Ben and Jenny’s house. Suddenly they knew everything, who the kids played with, where their best friends lived. I couldn’t understand how it could happen so fast.”
Fernanda’s cheeks grew taut as she pressed her lips together.
“The girls were three and five years old, they said, but nobody mentioned Ethan. Already that afternoon they were connecting Lydia with the shootings. The police had searched her house and dug up the graves of two babies in the backyard. A boy and a girl, both under a year old.”
“The two they were going to use to smuggle drugs, right?” Ilka said.
“Those two, yes. We’d already stopped for gas once, but we had to fill up again that evening, plus Ethan needed some things. I had no baby clothes, baby food, diapers. Lydia walked up to pay and saw herself on the TV by the counter. MANHUNT, they’d written above her head. I was in the bathroom, and by the time I came out Lydia had already switched our license plate with an Oklahoma car in the parking lot. So we wouldn’t be driving with Texas plates.”
The expression on Fernanda’s face changed while she spoke. Ilka pictured the two of them driving away, terrified, with no idea they would be running and hiding the rest of their lives.
“The next few days the story was all over the world. Javi Rodriguez was in jail. He said he’d worked for Lydia and her brother, which was a laugh. Everybody knew the Rodriguez brothers would never work for anybody else. He gave the police all the details about how Lydia supplied the bodies of infants, and he had names and dates for every one of them. He also told them Ben was the only connection to the people smuggling the drug babies across the border, and that he planned the routes and took care of the money. Javi gave them all these details to make it look like Lydia really was involved. The media called her the brains behind the drug ring. They wrote all these terrible things about how she slaughtered babies, or robbed them from graves and cut them open. And later on, when I found Ben’s papers in the crib, we saw that a lot of the details checked out. Except they were the ones behind it all, not her.”
Ilka nodded. Now she understood what Lydia had lost when she discovered the bag was gone. “We’ll leave as soon as my father is ready in the morning.”
Fernanda nodded and asked if she could help bring Ilka’s things back from the car.
Ilka shook her head. “No thanks, I’ll take care of it myself. I need some air anyway.”
And a cigarette. Though she didn’t say that.
8
After sleeping for three hours with his head back against the he
adrest, her father opened his eyes and started talking about his will.
Ilka could feel his eyes on her; she gripped the leather-covered steering wheel harder.
“I wanted you to know I never stopped thinking about you,” he said. “Even after I married Mary Ann. It was important to give it to you, because you always meant so very much to me. You were my story, the part of my life where I wasn’t controlled by other people or my own mistakes.”
They were following a mobile home on the inside lane of the interstate. Ilka looked over at him. Since leaving Key West the day before, she’d been trying to call Lydia, but there was still no connection. She was worried, tense, tight as a fist inside, but her father’s disastrous attempt to take care of her was so absurd that she started laughing.
“Thanks a lot! Next time you want to show somebody how much they mean to you, take my advice: Don’t give them a funeral home about to go bankrupt.”
She turned back to the road and shook her head. A few moments later she dropped all pretense of humor. “I’ve never heard of anything so stupid. Or so thoughtless, so uncaring.”
The deep well of anger she’d been holding down since leaving Artie’s house began rising.
They’d spent the night at the same Atlanta motel she’d stayed in on the way to Florida, and the same night manager had checked them in. It had been awkward when the man asked if they wanted one or two rooms, but because she didn’t really know her father that well anyway, she asked for two. Once again, she told him they would be leaving early the next morning, and once again he answered that he couldn’t care less as long as she paid in advance.
While driving the first day, she’d told her father what had happened a few days earlier: how Leslie, her half sister, had killed her own grandfather Raymond Fletcher, and Mary Ann had taken the blame for it. She also filled him in on everything leading up to the shooting, and for a moment she thought her father was trying to hide a tear when he turned away. But when he looked back at her, it wasn’t sorrow she saw in his eyes.
He wanted to know how Mary Ann was doing. He looked worried, but she couldn’t say much, other than that his wife had been taken away by the police.
“I can’t even begin to tell you how much I wish you’d never, ever come up with that idiotic idea of yours, that will,” she muttered. But then it occurred to her that she didn’t really mean it. Because it felt so right that she’d met Artie. And Sister Eileen. And for that matter, her father. The reason she’d come to Racine in the first place was to find out why he’d abandoned her, and she’d succeeded.
“I couldn’t know how it would turn out,” he said.
“No,” she hissed. “But you knew I was the one who would have to take care of the mess you left behind!”
“But it wasn’t supposed to be so soon that you would get involved.”
“Well, guess what, we don’t usually get to decide when our time is up. So even if you and Lydia hadn’t created this situation, theoretically you still could have died, and all these problems would have been mine anyway.”
Slowly she simmered down. She even felt sorry for him. He’d written letters to her—she’d found that bundle of them in his desk drawer. Thoughts he had wanted to share with her, even though he never could send them. And ultimately, that had been enough—more than enough—to make her feel she’d never been forgotten.
“Why did you let Raymond Fletcher come between us?” She had also told him briefly about meeting his father-in-law, and explained that she knew why he had abandoned her and her mother. But he didn’t answer her.
For a long time, they drove in silence. Finally, as they were approaching Chicago, he said, “I was afraid of Fletcher back then, that’s why I went along with him. Afraid something would happen to you and your mother if I stood up to him. It was like he took over my life. And I let him do it. My weakness and bad judgment put me in that horrible situation. I was afraid of myself, too. I was causing problems for everyone, and I thought the best thing to do was just let him take over. Or maybe it was more that I thought I could get away from the part of me I couldn’t control.”
After a moment he cleared his throat. “You could say he bought me. And I let him do it.”
He was choking up, and Ilka felt sorry for him, but she kept her eyes glued on the road as he spoke.
“I wrote you into my will because I hoped you’d find out how my life had gone, and that you were never forgotten. And I won’t deny it, I’ve been waiting a long time for my father-in-law to die. The second he was gone, I would have contacted you. Way back then I promised him I would be a loyal husband and father, and said that wouldn’t change even if I kept in touch with you, but he wouldn’t budge. And I wasn’t strong enough to stand up to him.”
Ilka was seething again, yet she could hear how badly he had missed her, and that kept her from boiling over. They didn’t really know each other, though he’d been in her thoughts as far back as she could remember. Sitting so close to each other in the hearse felt almost claustrophobic.
They pulled into a gas station to fill up. Every time they’d stopped for gas, Ilka had tried again to call Lydia, but the same mechanical voice kept answering.
After paying for the gas, she bought two sandwiches and two cups of coffee and carried them out to the car. She settled into her seat and asked her father to try Lydia’s number one more time.
“Have you tried the funeral home?” he asked. “If she did make it back, she might still be there.”
Ilka had left without locking anything up, and of course she couldn’t know if the Rodriguez brothers had still been there when the police arrived. In any case, anyone could have gone in and taken whatever they wanted. Including the travel bag with the leather handle, she thought. Ilka listened anxiously as he called the funeral home, but no one answered there either.
North of Chicago, signs for Racine began popping up. Ilka stayed in the right lane. She was tired of driving, and she asked her father if it would bother him if she rolled down her window. He shook his head.
A short while later, after she signaled to turn off at an exit, he said, “I loved your mother. She was the love of my life.”
Ilka glanced over at him in surprise.
“The first time I saw her, she was surrounded by kids at the zoo. The kids in the class she was teaching. I’d just eaten lunch in the cafeteria. This was not long after I took over the funeral home on Brønshøj Square.”
Ilka kept an eye on the GPS and slowed down to make sure she didn’t miss the Milwaukee exit.
“So, I was walking out of the cafeteria, and your mother was telling the kids about flamingos. Maybe it was the way they listened, but anyway it caught my attention. You don’t often see a big group of kids stand still and listen to someone. Her hair was long back then, it curled down on her shoulders, and she’d tied it back with a red scarf. She was one hundred percent focused on her class, as if they were the only people in the zoo. I walked over and stood close enough to eavesdrop, and then when she noticed I’d joined her class, she asked me if I wanted to go along to see the birds. So I followed them around, and before we split up, I invited her out for coffee the next day.”
What stuck out most to Ilka was the warmth in his voice. Her mother had never talked about how they had met, and she’d never mentioned the zoo. Ilka could easily imagine her mother with the class—she’d been a popular grade school teacher—though the notion of her inviting a strange man to walk around with the kids sounded odd to her.
“Did you ever talk to her after you left us?” Ilka was thinking now that her mother might simply not have told her. But her father shook his head.
“Our lawyers handled the divorce. I signed a statement saying I’d been unfaithful to her, and I let her have everything.”
“Were you? I mean, unfaithful?”
He shook his head again. “I was only thinking of her. And you. But when the opportunity to get away came, I knew I had to grab it. More and more I was turning into my own father, a
nd I hated that. I didn’t like the person I was becoming. Everything was slipping away from me. I’d borrowed quite a bit of money with the business as collateral, without telling your mother about it. I didn’t want her to find out I was getting in over my head.”
Ilka turned off to Racine. He looked down at his hands.
“I was so ashamed of myself, and at the same time I was afraid of what I might do. I felt like two people, me and some stranger. I lied and cheated to get my hands on more money, and then I gambled it all away at the track. I tried to get help. I’ve never understood why it’s so hard for me to control. It’s like some force that grabs hold of me when I get out too far.”
Ilka asked him to call the funeral home one more time, but again no one answered.
“I never did love Mary Ann,” he said.
She felt claustrophobic again; this was way too intimate. But she reminded herself that these were answers to questions she’d carried around since the day he’d left.
“I’ve always cared about her, though, very much so. I hate thinking she might go to prison.”
Ilka wondered why he didn’t even mention the murder, which was the reason Mary Ann had been arrested, but she let that go. And when he said he wanted to visit his wife, she shook her head and reminded him he couldn’t just show up.
“Everyone thinks you’re dead. You can’t even register for permission to visit her; you have to have an ID for that. Which you don’t have because you don’t exist. You’re going to have to wait until you can convince the powers-that-be you’re not dead, explain there’s been a mistake.”
