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 Jennifer’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.
He moved first.
Once again, I found myself in the arms of a strange man in a strange place. Except he wasn’t a stranger.
He was Tuck.
“You look just like her,” my brother said into my ear, my wet face pressed against the scruffy fabric of his coat. He smelled clean and safe, like he’d showered with Ivory soap and then eaten an orange for breakfast. These are the silly things we remember. He used to smell like boy sweat and too much Drakkar cologne.
“I’m so sorry,” he said.
The people in the café stopped gawking and went back to their coffee, figuring us for overwrought lovers. Tuck and I sat down in awkward silence. His hands fingered the yellowed newspaper articles, picking them up one at a time, hesitating the longest over the one about Jennifer’s murder.
“Is this how you found me?” he wanted to know.
“Not exactly. Some legal documents helped. But once I found you, I finally got a hint of what they meant.”
“I mailed them to Mama. Every time they relocated me, I sent her a newspaper article so she’d know where I was. Nothing else. Just a clipping.”
He reached a hand across the table, hesitant.
“Let’s just sit here for a while.” I dropped my hands to my lap. “You don’t have to explain. I’ve figured out most of it.”
It didn’t matter that a homeless man was probably buried in Tuck’s grave. Or that Tuck was once an OU student named Barry.
What did anything matter when my dead brother sat across from me, pulsing with life, wanting to fill the space between us?
“I was a left-handed pitcher,” he said. “A bookie for Cantini tracked every high school team with a left-handed pitcher my age. The Feds found out they were stalking two players in other states. William thought it was just a matter of time.”
William. Daddy.
Tuck picked up the clip with Jennifer’s photo, her smile forever frozen in newsprint, and in a sad little house in Oklahoma.
“I’ll never forgive myself,” he said. “I loved her. That summer, they tracked me down at OU through a leak in the field office. Found Jennifer first. Tortured her to get my address. I’m pretty sure she died without saying.”
His voice faltered. “The marshals kept moving me. Eventually here.”
Tuck leaned back and pushed his glasses up with the long, graceful fingers of a pianist. “I met Nora as a student at Eastman and she saved my life. We’ve been married twelve years. She teaches flute. We have two kids.”
“I know.” I wondered whether I should confess to last night’s spying, to months of spying. I wasn’t sure he knew about the inheritance. The financial documents Marcia found said his kids wouldn’t be notified until they turned twenty-five.