“I let her in, yeah, but that was two days ago when she stopped in for your phone charger. She didn’t stay long enough to do this kind of damage. And, anyway, you got her all wrong. I don’t know what’s wrong with you, cookie, but it’s like you’re jealous of her for being young and pretty and lively. I thought you was better than that. Really, doll, I thought you was.”
“How can you talk like that when my apartment has been trashed! Look at this!” I held up my mother’s gown. “She knows how much this matters to me and she just wads it up and dumps it like it’s an old dish towel.”
“I’m just saying, Petra couldn’t a done this no matter what you think. And I didn’t let anyone else in, so this was a professional, someone who could bypass all your locks and gates and stuff and get in anyway. They had to’ve done this late at night, when me and the dogs was sound asleep. Your cousin wasn’t here in the middle of the night.”
I called Petra’s cellphone, but there wasn’t any answer. I left a message telling her to call me the instant she picked up her voice mail. With the dogs and Mr. Contreras accompanying me, I walked through my apartment, looking at wreckage. The old man was right: Petra wouldn’t have been so wanton. But neither would a professional. Unless it was a professional deliberately trying to terrify me. In which case, they had done a great job.
“But what could they be looking for?” I asked Mr. Contreras. “Except for that Nellie Fox ball, there’s nothing here that anyone would want. Besides, as I keep saying, there’s no sign of forced entry.”
“Maybe Petra forgot to lock up behind her,” my neighbor suggested.
“Then why was it locked when we came up the stairs just now?” I was teetering on the brink of meltdown and kept hysteria out of my voice by effort of will alone.
Mr. Contreras wanted me to call the police, but I’d had my fill of the law. Although the more chaos I saw, the less I thought my cousin had caused it, I didn’t want a crime unit to find some trace of Petra there. If she’d done this, I’d tackle her myself.
I spent the rest of the night cleaning. Mr. Contreras stayed to help, picking up books, helping fold clothes, cleaning the kitchen with me. In my dining room, dishes had been pulled from the shelves with the same recklessness apparent everywhere else. The old man knelt, grunting, to pick up cups and plates and wipe them before putting them back on the shelves.
My mother’s red Venetian wineglasses, which she had wrapped in her underwear and carried in her one small suitcase when she fled Italy, were piled on the floor. I picked them up, my hands shaking so badly I was afraid I would break them, and held each up to the light. I had lost two over the years and cracked a third. Now a fourth had a chip in the base.
I held on to the fourth glass, unable to keep from crying. When Bobby and Eileen Mallory had their first baby, Gabriella had brought these glasses out to drink a toast after the christening. That was the first time I remembered seeing them, and my mother had told me their history. The wineglasses had been a present to her grandmother in 1894 on her wedding day. They had been carried by Gabriella into hiding as a memento, even though they were an unwieldy and fragile burden. She had managed to carry them from Pitigliano to Siena, where she hid in her music teacher’s attic, and then, hours before the Fascists arrived, smuggled them to the hills, where she hid with her father until bribes and luck got her passage on a ship to Cuba. Not one glass had broken. But me? I’d now damaged half of them. Victoria Iphigenia, the ox.
I don’t know how long I sat there, while Mr. Contreras tiptoed around sympathetically putting away books and papers. Peppy came to lay her head in my lap. I put the glass down to stroke her, then finally got to my knees on my way to return the glasses to my breakfront.
I was getting to my feet when I saw that my photo album had been flung under the table. I got down on my knees again and crawled between the legs after it.
My eyes were aching from overuse and my hands were throbbing, but I turned the pages, trying to figure out if any of the pictures were missing. A number had come loose from their little corner mounts. I doggedly went through the album, slipping in the loose ones, including one of my parents toasting each other with the Venetian wineglasses. I winced and turned the page. The picture of my father with his slow-pitch team was missing.
I looked under the table, then sifted through the album a second time, but the picture had disappeared.
32
WE FINISHED A LITTLE AFTER ONE. MR. CONTRERAS LEFT the dogs with me for protection, and I made sure all my door and window bolts were shot home on the inside, but, even so, I slept badly. Every time Mitch scratched or a car honked too loudly, I jumped awake, heart pounding, sure the next minute would bring a home invasion or a Molotov cocktail through a window. Finally, around five, the lightening sky made me feel safe enough that I dropped off.
The dogs woke me at nine, whining to get down to the back garden. I slumped out after them, sitting on the back porch with my head on my knees, until the hot sun burning my neck reminded me that I couldn’t be outside without protection.
Back inside, I tried my cousin again. She answered just as I thought the call was going to roll over again to her voice mail.
“Uh, Vic, uh, I can’t do that thing for you that you asked me.”
“Petra! I can barely hear you. What’s going on?”
“I can’t talk to you now.”
She was still speaking in almost a whisper. I answered sharply that I needed some answers from her at once about what she’d been doing in my apartment.
“I wasn’t there,” she said. “Except when I went to make your bed and stuff.”
“You didn’t look around for that baseball you wanted?”
“I did look in the trunk, but I put everything back again. So don’t get too mad at me, please, Vic. I can’t talk right now, I’ve got to go. And I can’t find those guys for you.”
She whispered so fast before hanging up that I couldn’t squeeze in another word. I walked to the front window and frowned down at the street. I’d told my cousin the other night that I was an expert at detecting line spinners, but I’m not sure how true that boast was. Someone very skillful was spinning me around, but whether they were using Petra or she was a willing participant or even just a bystander I couldn’t make up my mind.
I flicked the cord on the blinds and realized I was standing in such a way that anyone on the street could see me if they wanted to aim a gun or a bottle at me. Whatever Petra might or mightn’t have done, it was impossible to picture her throwing a Molotov cocktail at anyone. Or even the smoke bomb that had driven the family out of my childhood home last weekend. Mr. Contreras was right. She was exuberant and careless, not mean-spirited or cruel. That was how I would write her up at her performance review.
I heard the dogs whining and scratching at the back door and went to let them in. I knelt to talk to them. “I’ll take you guys for a good walk tonight after the sun goes down, but this is it for now.”
I dressed carefully, in a high-necked T-shirt and loose-fitting linen trousers and jacket that covered my arms and chest. I put on the white cotton gloves I needed to protect my hands and found a wide-brimmed straw hat that I sometimes wore at the beach. When I was finished, I looked like Scarlett O’Hara protecting her fragile skin, but it couldn’t be helped.
To complete my protective gear, I went to the safe in the back of my bedroom closet. My intruders had shaken out my wardrobe, but they’d missed the safe, which is built in behind my shoe bag. Occasionally, I have a document so sensitive, I don’t want to leave it in my office overnight. Otherwise, all that I keep in it is my mother’s diamond drop earrings and pendant and my Smith & Wesson.