Was this normal? Kids don’t know what is normal.
But I didn’t express that to Sadie as she refilled Mama’s water, opened a new box of Kleenex, and set it on the tray. Pulled the call button closer even though Mama was too out of it to know.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should have been there for you.”
“Don’t be sorry. I’m not really angry with you, Tommie. I’m not even angry with her. I’m just confused. And scared. I’m worried about Maddie’s safety. I want this to be over.”
Then I heard the tone, the pleading one she used all her life when she needed backup, when I was the big sister who secretly finished her report on the Roman Empire or helped her slip out our bedroom window on a school night for a quick make-out session in the dark.
The McCloud sisters were tight.
“You know you are my sister no matter what you find,” she had said. “Figure it out, Tommie. Make it go away.”
I pictured it like a Frito. Or maybe more like a Bugle.
But still I did not open the box.
It was 7:22 a.m. and I’d been awake in the hotel room for two hours, mesmerized by the stripe of the lamp’s blue neon light, thinking nightmarish thoughts about a decomposing baby finger while Rosalina’s bitter voice swam around in my head. Odd that I’d never seen another person besides Rosalina at her mansion. Not a maid. Not a security guard. Just that disembodied male voice over the speaker.
I didn’t wait on the hotel operator’s wake-up call for permission to get out of bed. I took a quick shower and threw on some jeans, another of Sadie’s slightly too tight T-shirts, this one etched with a cheerful blue Buddha, a little mascara, and clear lip gloss. I jabbed two yellow No. 2 pencils into a makeshift bun on my head, the hairstyle I wore for studying since high school. Because, today, I planned to study.
I stepped out of the hotel into the pedestrian traffic on Michigan Avenue, which was vibrating with aggression to a ranch girl like me. A bike messenger cursed and swerved when I stepped into his path; a grinning homeless person punched me, hard, on the arm; a swinging briefcase rapped one of my knuckles, all before I reached a café a couple of blocks from the hotel. The businessman with the briefcase kept on walking and barking into his headset. In Texas, I would have wound up with an apology and maybe even a date.
I appreciated a city with a pulse, but I needed to live where I could see the sky. At home, sky loomed everywhere, a blue marble cereal bowl a benign giant child turned over to keep us safe from his dog. Here, it was an afterthought, little slivers between the walls of the skyscrapers if you happened to look up.
On the plus side, safety in numbers.
Once I retrieved my coffee, I walked as far to the right of the sidewalk as I could, balancing the paper cup in one hand while watching the traveling red dot on my phone’s GPS. I was the dot, of course, on a twenty-minute stroll to the Harold Washington Chicago Public Library, a granite and red-brick behemoth squatting on the corner of State Street and Congress Parkway. I stood still for a moment and endured the battering of passersby just to appreciate it.
Tall arched windows filtered in light from all sides, while creepy winged gargoyles leered from the top, waiting for someone with a wand to bring them to life. Inside, thousands of visitors a day chose from among six million books, further proof that books would survive catastrophic events alongside the roaches.
I closed the door behind me, instantly insulated from the madness of people rushing, rushing, rushing. I drank in the silence like precious water.
Here, the world slowed to school-zone speed, controlled by librarians intelligent and methodical enough to be either great presidents or serial killers.
Visiting libraries in foreign cities was a hobby of mine. College libraries, city libraries, itty-bitty libraries. It didn’t matter. Today I had the bonus of a purpose, a suggestion from Lyle.
“Turn Off Your Cell Phone and Pagers, Please,” a sign asked politely. No exclamation point needed. With the help of an ancient docent at the front desk, it didn’t take long to pinpoint my destination: up three flights of sweeping marble stairs.
I moved past a reading area laid out with dozens of current newspapers from all over the world and entered a glass-fronted chamber crammed with rows and rows of scratched-up metal file cabinets.
The room held only one other occupant. A tiny punked-out girl in head-to-toe black with a single skull earring, grad student written all over her, who looked up from her thick book on Sartre and asked in an unexpectedly sweet voice, “Can I help you?”
She led me to the cabinet with the microfiche reels, helped me collect the right dates and publications, walked over to a nearby machine, and provided an efficient lesson in the ancient art of reading and copying microfilm. I wasn’t a novice, I assured her.
I’d done a sweltering summer of research into old microfiche records at mental institutions as an intern for two cantankerous UT professors who squabbled constantly about whose name would go first on a joint journal article that is still unpublished ten years later.
Punk Girl smiled, offering a glimpse of the innocent still in there, while the skull in her ear leered like the gargoyles. I wanted to ask whether she was buying Sartre’s take on existentialism, if she believed our lives were blank pieces of paper on which we wrote the story with no help at all from God. I wondered if she’d gotten to the concept of mauvaise foi, bad faith, the part where we deceive ourselves in order not to take blame.
I figured she would think I was nosy and crazy, which I pretty much was at this point, so I kept my mouth shut. As she walked away I snapped the first roll in place, switched on the light, and whirred past ads and headlines until I found the date I wanted: January 3, 1980.
I could have found this in the Chicago Tribune’s online archives, but Lyle said there was nothing like experiencing the stories in real time, as they appeared in print. I could appreciate this. Researching online was a sterile experience. I liked original packaging.
The headline was direct and screaming, in 72-point type: FAMILY BUTCHERED.
The accompanying photograph showed cops throwing up in snow-covered bushes in front of an unremarkable saltbox brick house marked off with crime scene tape, the best action shot a newspaper photographer could get on a late-night deadline.
I pressed the button to copy the page, scanning the brief story:
CHICAGO-A family of five and an unidentified female were found shot to death execution-style last night in a home in a quiet Polish neighborhood on the North Side.
Police identified the victims as Frederick and Andrea Bennett. The names of the three children and the second woman were not released.
Police broke into the house about 9:30 p.m. after neighbors complained of a barking dog.
Stefan Pietruczyk, a next-door neighbor, said the family moved in only two weeks earlier and kept to themselves.
“Me and the wife thought it was strange that the kids didn’t come out much,” said Pietruczyk, who has lived in the neighborhood for twenty-five years. “And the parents weren’t that chatty. But we were real happy someone had finally fixed up that house. Now we wish they’d taken their troubles somewhere else. Our property values are shot to hell.”
FBI agents swarmed the house shortly after Chicago patrol cops called in the murders. An FBI spokeswoman on the scene said further details would be revealed at a press conference today.
I scrolled ahead. The next day’s front page featured a slightly more sedate 60-point headline: FBI FAMILY SLAIN BY MOB. Below were the headshots of the victims, including school pictures of the children: Alyssa, six, and two brothers, Robert, ten, and Joe, four.