I know all you vegans out there think I’m the wickedest person on the planet, but I love being the meat queen, showing up at a Sunday barbecue loaded down with ribs and sausages. Mostly, it’s for my teammates on the campaign. Whoever thought work would be this much fun?? I’m, like, doing blog searches to see who has bad stuff to put out against My Candidate, like anyone could, and the whole world wouldn’t know it was the biggest crock ever. But everyone who meets My Candidate thinks Mr. President four years down the road, so we have tons of media and money and everything. And I’m, like, Saint Joan on a charger, going out and looking for dragons who want to attack us.
It wouldn’t take a sophisticated code breaker to realize who Petra was, or who her candidate was, based on her posts. In fact, as I skimmed the comments, it was clear that many of her MySpace friends knew that the candidate was Brian. There was competitive ribbing from Hank Albrecht, the guy working for the incumbent. There were passionate pro-Brian posts. And then there were quite a few people who wrote about altogether unconnected stuff: dogs, clothes, favorite restaurants.
Petra wrote about Mr. Contreras and me. I was code-named DC, for “Detecting Cousin.”
Every now and then I go over to see Uncle Sal, not that we’re really related, and DC, who really is my cousin. She’s, like, almost my mom’s age, isn’t that weird? Uncle Sal, who my detecting cousin only calls “Mr. C.,” he can’t get enough of my dad’s company’s ribs or of me. My cousin is jealous of me, isn’t that fun? Uncle Sal likes to flirt with me, and it used to be her, you know. Sometimes they seem like an old married couple having the same kind of squabbles everyone’s parents do. Oh my God, we all may end up like our parents, isn’t that freaky?
I went over yesterday, and Uncle Sal was scolding DC for wanting to go talk to this old gang leader who’s doing a hundred years for murder or whatever. And she’s, like, it bugs me that people are too pissed off at me to answer the simplest questions, and I’m, like, so put on your big-girl underpants and move on. And Uncle Sal thought that was hysterical and laughed his head off. So DC got really huffy but was trying not to show it. I mean, I thought being a detective was more dramatic, like solving murders, collecting clues, not going out to prison to talk to some kind of ignorant black gangbanger.
I remembered that episode, and it made me angry that Petra had put it out for the whole world to read about. I made a face at the computer screen. “Put on your big-girl underpants now, V.I.,” I muttered, and read on.
I focused on her posts about the work she’d done for Brian, wondering if any of dragons she’d been sent to slay would turn out to be biting back, but they seemed innocuous enough. She had tracked down a rumor that Brian had been seen in a Rush Street leather bar. She’d handled a post that he’d taken money from someone who’d been arrested for selling kiddie porn.
She’d written about DC breaking into her apartment the night she dropped her keys by the front door. And then we came to the Navy Pier fundraiser.
We had this huge fundraiser, and I am, like, a superstar because My Candidate chose one of my guests for his big photo op. My guest was a World War II hero, and he wore all his battle medals and everything, and was on the front page of a bunch of papers, including the Washington Post, which my dad always says is a liberal rag, but it’s so important. Anyway, I’m, like, a star at the campaign, even though it was a total fluke, but the head of the campaign, who we all call the Chicago Strangler, was superimpressed and pulled me out of the NetSquad to do special assignments directly for him. Some of my coworkers are a little huffy, ’cause some of them have been with My Candidate from Day 1, and I’m a Joanie-come-lately. But, well, that’s life.
Up through that post, Petra’s tone had been like her speaking voice, breezy, confident. A few days later, she wrote more soberly.
I thought they promoted me because I did such a great job. Turns out it was because I can’t keep my big mouth shut. I said some stuff about something that the Strangler wants to know more about, something that happened a million years ago that could come back to bite my candidate. It’s so confusing. It’s something I said, but I have no idea what, but now the Strangler says I have to dig it up, even though I don’t know anything about what happened or even what I’m really looking for.
It’s like Spy vs. Spy, and I have to spy on my DC, which in some ways is fun, seeing if I can outsmart a person who’s been a detective for twenty years. But mostly I hate it, because the Strangler says I can’t trust anyone. He says if I tell a single soul what I’m looking for, it could get people killed, especially if I tell my detecting cousin. The Strangler says she’ll go out of her way to hurt people I care about, and I know that when she’s angry she goes off the deep end. She saved this homeless guy’s life, but she almost killed me because I didn’t respect her mother’s dress. So watch Campaign Girl morph into Undercover Girl.
A week went by, and Petra made her final post.
If you say something that puts everyone you care about in danger only you don’t know that it’s a big secret, are you really to blame? And then how do you know who is your friend and who is your enemy? I can’t tell anymore. I wish I’d never come to Chicago, but it’s too late. I can’t go home.
I sat back in my chair and rubbed my eyes. Petra, with her perpetual cheerful broadcasting of everything she knew, had said something that put the powerful people around her on alert. DEFCON 3 and dropping. I could hear the alarms ringing in Les Strangwell’s office.
I didn’t know the things that Petra might have talked over in the office-these clearly ranged from my breaking into her apartment for her, since one of her Web posts dealt with that, to my visiting Johnny Merton-because she’d even blurted that out at the Navy Pier fundraiser. Certainly, anyone reading the posts on her MySpace profile would know what she was doing. I imagined the Strangler coldly reading over her shoulder. He could be any one of those five hundred “friends,” invisible, like a shark floating under her toes.
I had an uncomfortable memory of the morning in my apartment when I’d blown up over her pawing through my trunk. My anger had frightened her, and it had created a gulf between us. I thought again of all the times my dad had told me my temper would get me into serious trouble. My God, he’d been right, but I’d never taken his words seriously to heart.
I had to find Petra. I didn’t even know where to begin my search. I felt like something large and clumsy, a rhinoceros, easy to spot as it crashed through the underbrush and about as effectual an ally in times of trouble.
I made a list of things I’d said or done and things Petra seemed interested in:
1. Johnny Merton and the Anacondas.
2. The house in South Chicago, where Petra had stood watching when the thugs threw their smoke bomb through the window.
3. The Nellie Fox baseball.
4. Her obsession with whether my dad had left a diary.
5. Her arrival at the Freedom Center the night I went to collect evidence.
6. Her nervous whisper that she couldn’t look for the contractors who’d been hustled into Sister Frankie’s apartment.
It was four in the morning. I’d slept for seven hours, until Rose Hebert’s phone call woke me. But fatigue, born of stress, my still-healing body, and my recent sleepless nights, was overwhelming me. I went into the little back area and reassembled my cot and air mattress. Oblivious to the threat of another break-in, I sank back into sleep.
39
IN MY DREAM, MISS CLAUDIA WAS STANDING OVER ME. “Lamont will come back,” she said in clear, plain speech. “My Bible tells me so.” She was waving her red leather Bible under my nose. She shook loose the dozens of cardboard page markers. When I put my hands out to catch them, they turned into photographs and floated to the floor before I could reach them.