Sandra’s demand that I prove Bron had been on the job when he died was April’s only hope, either for her heart or her education, and I wasn’t optimistic. William had made it clear that the company would fight a comp claim to the bitterest possible limit. If I had Carnifice’s resources, maybe I could track down just where Bron had been at those odd times Grobian had quoted to me, ten-oh-something in Crown Point, Indiana, prove that he died on the job, but I didn’t even know where to look for his truck. For all I knew, it was in that pound over on 103rd Street, along with the Miata, or simply mingled with a lot of other By-Smart semis anywhere from South Chicago to South Carolina.
It made my head hurt, thinking about the number of things that needed to be done if I were going to figure anything out down here. And I still didn’t know where Billy and Josie could have gone. I’d wasted an hour in a landfill, and all I had to show for it was two religious books and a child’s drawing of a frog sitting on a-I slammed on the brakes and pulled over to the curb.
The child’s drawing, of a frog sitting on a piece of rubber. Like the frayed piece of wiring Bron had in his workshop behind the kitchen. A drawing of how to make a nitric acid circuit breaker. Put a rubber plug in a froggy soap dish. Put it on top of the intake cable at Fly the Flag. Pour in some nitric acid. Eventually, the acid would eat through the plug, eat through the rubber casing around the intake line, the exposed wires would short out, spark, ignite the fabric nearby.
I tried to imagine why Billy would have had this sketch when it was Bron who’d been experimenting with the wire. I couldn’t picture Billy committing sabotage at Fly the Flag-unless the pastor had told him to do it because it would somehow be good for the community. The pastor was the only person he could trust right now, Billy had said, but I still couldn’t see his stubborn, earnest young face hovering over a wire with a dish of acid.
Bron, yes, Bron could do it, but if he was constructing the thing would he have carried a diagram around with him when he left the house? How had he gotten hold of the wretched frog, anyway? Julia, Josie, April. Julia had bought the frog, she’d said, as a Christmas present for Sancia. I’d thought at the time she said it she was lying; now I was sure of it. Josie could have taken it from Julia and given it to April, although that didn’t quite make sense.
I drummed my fingers on the steering wheel. April, heartsore in every sense of the word, I didn’t want to push hard on her, but I did have the charger for Billy’s phone-I could question her while dropping it off, but I’d save that option for last. But Julia-Julia was another story. I turned the steering wheel hard to the left and made a U-turn back to South Chicago.
39 Painful Extraction
Rose Dorrado’s face was even duller than when I’d been here two nights ago. Like Sandra Czernin, she hadn’t washed, or even combed, her hair lately, and the red curls were matted and tangled, but she stepped aside to let me into the apartment. Betto and Samuel were on the couch, watching Spiderman. María Inés was propped up between them, cooing and clapping her hands aimlessly. She was wrapped in a little piece of red-and-white striped bunting. More of those flag remnants. I stared at it, wondering how many times I’d seen it without noticing it.
“Now what?” Rose was saying in a leaden voice. “You’ve found my Josie? She’s dead?”
I shook my head. “Didn’t Julia give you my message? The Bysens have a big team out looking for Billy; maybe they’ll turn him up. The good news is that Josie is almost certainly with him. Have you talked to your sister in Waco?”
“It’s good news that my girl is out sleeping with a boy? I don’t need another baby in this house.” Even the angry words came out in a listless tone. “Anyway, my sister, she never heard from them. Around the building, they say you found Bron Czernin and that English lady Monday night. They were using Billy’s fancy car, and you found them next to it, lying in the landfill. So what’s not to say that Billy and Josie are there, too, and you didn’t find them.”
The story had certainly gotten garbled as it raced around the neighborhood. “I can’t guarantee that, of course,” I said quietly. “But I know Billy gave his car to Bron because he didn’t want his family finding him through his license plate, so I don’t think he was with Bron. Anyway, when I found the car it was under the Skyway. No one knows how Bron and Marcena ended up by the landfill.”
“So where did they go, Billy and Josie? Not to the pastor, not to you, I even went to see Josie’s father-I thought, maybe you were right, maybe she did turn to him, but he could hardly remember which child she was.”
We talked it over in as many ways as we could think of-which were pretty meager. I had a feeling Billy was staying in South Chicago -whatever was bothering him about his family was right here in this neighborhood, and he wouldn’t be able to leave it alone.
“I’ll call everyone on the team,” I finally promised. “Monday night, I just scouted around their homes, looking for Billy’s car or any sign the two of them were there. But before I go, Rose, I need to know a couple of things, from you, and from Julia.”
I had come to ask Julia about the soap dish, but I wanted to know about that bunting. “Tell me about the sheets, the ones on Josie’s and Julia’s beds-and now this fabric you’ve wrapped María Inés in. Did Zamar make those at Fly the Flag?”
“Oh, those sheets.” She half lifted an apathetic shoulder. “As if any of that matters now. He thought-the pastor thought, why not sell towels, sheets, pot holders, things like that, through the churches? Something good for the community, making sheets in the community, buying, selling, it was a dream of the pastor, that we have a buying cooperative-he was thinking maybe in time we could buy and sell everything, clothes, food, even drugs, and save money and make money. He started with Mr. Zamar, and Mr. Zamar, he tried, he really did, even though the pastor, he accused him, that Mr. Zamar didn’t want the cooperative to work. But I was there, I was sewing, we made five hundred sheets, a thousand towels-and only seventeen people bought them, mostly the mothers of the girls who play basketball. Who can make a living when only seventeen people buy what you are selling?”
“So was that the second shop where you were working?” I asked, puzzled. “Making sheets for the cooperative?”
She gave a crack of hysterical laughter. “No and no and no. The second shop, it was right where the first shop is. Only we did it in the middle of the night, so the pastor wouldn’t see. As if he doesn’t hear everything going on in the neighborhood, he’s like God, the pastor, what he doesn’t see he knows anyway.”
I squatted next to the boys, who’d been watching us nervously. “Betto, Samuel, your mama and I have to talk. Can you go into the dining room?”
They apparently still remembered me as the woman who could get you charred, because they scuttled off the couch into the back of the apartment with just one frightened look at their mother. If only I had that effect on Pat Grobian or the pastor. We sat down, the baby sleeping between us.
“Why didn’t Zamar want Pastor Andrés to see the second shop?”
“Because we were using illegals!” she shouted. “People who are so desperate for money they work for nothing. Now do you understand?”
“No.” I was completely bewildered. “You need money; you can’t afford to work in a sweatshop. What were you doing there?”
“Oh, if you are this stupid how did you ever go to a big university?” She waved her hands wildly. “How can I believe you can find my daughter? I wasn’t working, I mean, I was working, but I was supervising, he was paying me to supervise, to make sure people stay at the machines, don’t steal nothing, don’t take long breaks, everything that-that I hate!”