“You mean about the wind farm?” I ask him.
“Yes. It’s the one thing that we need to sign off on this week. BT Power wants to put up a hundred more turbines in Stephenville. If we don’t, they’re choosing another site. They’ve also got their eye on our Big Dipper property near Boerne.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly.
“Tommie, you need to leave some of these early decisions to me. We’ve got a good lease going with them.”
“Is there any controversy over the farm so far? The seventy-five turbines already in place?” I’d stood on our land just once since the turbines had been erected. I’d had mixed feelings. Nestled near an old farmhouse, they had a strange beauty about them, rising higher than the Statue of Liberty, gently whirring and spinning with the wind, turning the plains into an eerie, alien landscape when night fell, their red eyes blinking.
“What do you mean?”
“Exactly what I asked. A year ago Daddy put in seventy-five turbines on this land with an option for more. Do you think it has gone smoothly?”
Wade looked surprised that I had this much information. Or maybe surprised that I cared at all.
I’d never liked Wade much. He was brusque, always around, quick to shoo us away from Daddy when we were little. But Wade and Daddy once walked into bad situations with nothing but each other and a gun. Shared violence is like human superglue.
He decided to answer my question. “The rancher to the north makes a lot of noise to the media about the way it looks,” he drawled. “Says the turbines destroy his view. The town’s happy about the taxes improving their school system. They got a turf field out of the deal.”
“I told Daddy a few months ago that the turbines are bothering the kids,” I said. “And the horses.”
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“They put up a wind farm near the rehabilitative ranch where I work. We can’t see the turbines, but they’re close enough for the kids to hear. They call them the whispering monsters. The horses don’t sleep as well. Some of the kids deal with constant nausea since they went full power. Wind turbine syndrome, they call it.”
Wade frowned. “I can’t deal with this damn hippie crap right now, Tommie. This is what your father wanted. You keep dawdling and we’ll lose two million dollars like this.” He snapped his fingers, leaning over the desk, a little too near my face. “You can’t decide based on a few courses in psychology and a bunch of cancer kids and gimps and four-legged animals. That ain’t how you make business decisions.”
He used ain’t to underscore his irritation, since we both knew Wade was a literate cowboy with a master’s in agribusiness from Texas A&M. But in his mind, the only kind of satisfactory therapy involved a bottle of Old Rip Van Winkle whiskey and an hour to kill with a gun and a bull’s-eye.
“The Big Dipper is a beautiful piece of land,” I told him. I bit back that I was finally only a couple of months from my Ph.D. “Untouched. There aren’t that many properties with natural running water from streams and the river.”
“It’s recreational property,” Wade countered. “People aren’t paying for it anymore, not a prime piece like this.”
We’d never sell that piece. I stared at him steadily. He was deliberately missing my point. I was deliberately missing his.
Grief for Daddy poured out of both of us, seeping into the cracks in the floorboards where blood used to run.
I knew that Wade fished with his twenty-five-year-old autistic son every Saturday, a promise he never broke. Wade’s cowboy boots were custom-made at Leddy’s down the street because of a limp that he’d never talk about. With that limp, he insisted on carrying my mother out of the house the day she left it for good, a rag doll in his arms.
He was mostly a good man, a smart man. I knew it. I just didn’t like him.
“Get out,” I said, because I didn’t want him to see me cry.
“Yes, ma’am. Call when you need me. It’s going to be sooner than you think.” He gestured to the wooden file cabinets that lined the walls, to the mail stacking up on the desk, to the Apple computer that had yet to reveal its secrets, and my heart sank because I knew he was right: I would need him.
Wade turned with his hand on the doorknob.
“Tommie, you’re going about this dead wrong. But I will say, it’s nice to see a little fire in you. I thought that side of beef stomped it out of you for good.” His face softened. “I hear you’re still wicked on top of a horse. Maybe we should take a ride and works things out.”
He shut the door quietly.
My eyes roved over the walls, tears gradually softening the edges of the cattle drivers and whores and gamblers, historic photographs of Hell’s Half Acre that Daddy picked up one at a time out of dusty boxes in antique shops.
I stopped at the picture of Etta Place, the beautiful, unfathomable girlfriend of the Sundance Kid. Nailed in a place of honor over the doorframe, one of Daddy’s favorite pictures, a Christmas gift from Mama pulled out of a shiny silver box.
Long, dark hair piled up, gray eyes, a slim, lithe body. Etta didn’t look wild or cruel but they swore she was.
Why did no one know her real name? Was she really a prostitute when she met the Sundance Kid? And where did she vanish to? How do you live a life without a beginning and an end?
As a child, I would sit cross-legged on the hard floor directly in front of her, craning my neck up, willing Etta to speak, to spill her secrets just to me, until Daddy finally glanced over from his desk and said:
“She’s a mystery, honey. A goddamn mystery.”
CHAPTER 3
Five minutes after Wade left, I decided to turn the page and allow the plucky, foolish heroine to plunge ahead.
I wondered what it meant that I was now thinking idiotically of myself in the third person and using words like plucky. My colleagues would offer up the fancy term disassociating. Sadie would say not wanting to deal.
Rosalina Marchetti could be a con woman, I told myself. Or a stalker. Emotionally unbalanced. Dangerous.
I had to know.
My fingers leapt over the keys of Daddy’s computer, suddenly alive after a week of crippled hesitation. It took just thirteen minutes before I found the right Rosalina Marchetti in the Chicago Tribune archive. And, when I say right, I mean wrong, so wrong.
Rosalina Marchetti née Rosie Lopez, more poetically known in her stripper days as Rose Red, married Chicago mobster Anthony Marchetti on January 27, 1980. A month after that, Marchetti stood before a judge and received a life sentence, convicted on six counts of first-degree murder and unrelated charges of embezzlement and bribery. The sentence seemed light. Anthony Marchetti belonged in hell. He’d viciously murdered an FBI agent, his wife, three children, and an agent guarding them at a safe house. But the court left a chance for parole.
Marchetti stared coolly out of his wedding announcement, a dark and charismatic stereotype. He looked as if he would be equally comfortable attending the opera or chopping off body parts in a back room. The glowing woman is usually the star of these kinds of photos, but his new bride, Rose, hung back shyly, her face in shadow. It was ridiculous to think that either of these people had anything to do with me.
Their melodrama didn’t end there. A little more searching confirmed that Rosalina’s story held up. She’d given birth to an unlucky little girl six months later. I say unlucky because the child was kidnapped three days after her first birthday. My stomach hurt as I kept reading, one of the “hot reads” on a true crime site with 136,000 hits. Days after the abduction, the kidnapper had sent Rosalina her daughter’s finger. I looked down to confirm that my fingers were still attached. Why didn’t Rosalina ask about the finger in her letter?