“How did you know to find me at the Bean?” I demanded.
“The bellman who directed you to a coffee shop this morning saw you Googling the library on your phone.”
Spies, spies, everywhere.
“From there,” he said, “I just followed the action.”
Was he really this good at his job? Or was he one more person lying to me?
An hour and two beers later, I almost didn’t care. I was dressed in a deliberately unsexy pair of cotton granny pajamas littered with tiny flowers, my hair dangling down my back like a wet rope. Hudson had rescheduled the flight I missed this afternoon for tomorrow night and booked himself in the seat next to me. He didn’t think I should fly until we were pretty sure a blood clot wasn’t forming in my head.
Now he lay beside me, propped up on the bed with the best view of the TV. No touching, I’d told him, before we settled in to watch the last half of the Cubs game.
Things were fine, until Hudson broke my rule in the bottom of the seventh. He turned on his side and ran his finger alongside a bruise.
“Tommie, I think you should disappear for a while until I figure this out. If I know the FBI, and I do, they aren’t going to share much. I’ve got a place in Cabo. Take Sadie and Maddie. You could be a thousand miles out of danger and on your way to a nice tan by tomorrow night.”
“I burn,” I said, unable to focus much on anything but his finger traveling up and down my arm like the tip of a hot poker. It reminded me of something else.
“Hudson, there’s a dead girl’s finger in my purse.” My laugh sounded slightly hysterical.
“What?” Hudson raised up, his foot knocking over the half-finished beer on the side table behind him. He hadn’t asked me a thing about my meeting with Rosalina Marchetti, whether I was or wasn’t her daughter.
“Yesterday, at Rosalina’s house. She said she’s not my mother. But she gave me her daughter’s finger. The kidnappers sent it to her in the mail thirty-one years ago. She wants me to find her. She’s convinced Marchetti knows where she is. That she might be alive. She says my mother and I… owe it to her.” I realized I was babbling. “I haven’t worked up… the nerve… to open the box.”
“Jesus,” Hudson said, resigned. “This is a very complicated soap opera you are living. You couldn’t have picked a more effective mood killer. Go get the finger. Otherwise, I’m not going to be able to sleep.”
I retrieved the box, wondering why I hadn’t chucked it and its contents into the Chicago River.
“Go ahead,” he urged, “open it.”
I snapped up the lid and pushed down the urge to throw up.
The finger, the size of a doll’s, rested on black velvet.
It was dusty gray, wrapped carefully in Saran Wrap like a tiny leftover.
I cleared my throat. “I’m going to get it tested for DNA. I have a friend from college who works in a medical lab. I have multiple DNA projects in mind for him. Including my own.”
“Are you sure you want to do that?”
“No,” I said.
I snapped the box shut.
I was about to say more, to tell him that Rosalina claimed I was the child of a liaison between Anthony Marchetti and my mother. But Hudson pulled off his sweats, revealing pale blue boxers against beautiful desert-browned skin and the most amazing calves I’ve ever seen outside of a professional baseball catcher. He yanked off his T-shirt. Everything was as I remembered, only better. Perhaps I hadn’t completely killed the mood, after all.
“The Cubs are up by six,” he said, sliding over to the other bed and popping the mint in his mouth before punching his pillow into a hard, tidy square. I watched those legs disappear under the sheets, thinking about being entwined between them, desperately wanting to taste that mint by putting my mouth on his.
“You need to work on your bedtime stories,” he said, turning over to face the wall. “Sleep tight.”
In two minutes, he was snoring, leaving me to stare at the ceiling and think.
I knew Hudson too well. Maybe the finger was a surprise, but he knew more than he was saying about Rosalina and Anthony Marchetti. Or he would have asked more questions.
Oh, the irony. In less than forty-eight hours, I was breaking a promise to myself, about to close my eyes and leave myself vulnerable to another man of unnerving contradictions.
CHAPTER 21
It surprises me that Adriana Marchetti looks so much like Maddie did at that age. That fact surprises me more than her wings made out of bright green leaves and her ability to fly. I look but can’t tell if she has all her fingers. She is waving, her hands a blur of motion. She dips into a puffy white cloud and disappears. When she appears again, her mouth is moving but no sound is coming out. She’s trying to tell me something.
I can’t hear. I can’t hear!
She swoops nearer and nearer like a creature in a 3-D movie until all that fills the screen is her perfect pink mouth and rows of tiny white teeth. She’s opening wide, her tonsils flapping. I’m about to be swallowed.
“Find me,” she taunts, as I slide down her throat and into the warm ocean. “Find me.”
I sat up, soaked with sweat, my heart pounding out of my chest. I stripped off my pajamas and lay back, shivering gratefully as the air-conditioning hit my wet skin.
Ever since I could remember, dreaming had been like stepping into a dark universe as vivid as real life. The coffin dream was the worst. Sometimes the two worlds collided and I woke up to ghostly faces at my bedside that vanished when I reached out to touch them. My eyes, wide open. My fingers stabbing the air to be sure I was alone. Granny called them night visitors. Scientists explain them away as a trick of the mind, a sleep disorder.
Just a dream, I assured myself. The child looked about three or four. Adriana wouldn’t be three. That was just her age as a statue in a garden. She was only one when she was kidnapped. There is no proof she is dead. And there is absolutely no reason to think that I have latent tendencies to communicate with spirits, especially since that gift ran on Daddy’s side of the family and I wasn’t at all sure who my Daddy was.
I glanced over at Hudson, breathing quietly and deeply in his soft gray cocoon, and thought how many times I had been uselessly naked in his presence today.
The clock flipped to 3:07 a.m., casting a blue glow. My heart slowed to a normal rhythm. My nerves, however, remained lit up like a string of chasing Christmas lights.
It seemed as good a time as any to check my email. I noticed that Hudson had brought my canvas bag, probably retrieved by the FBI in the library. My research had been picked up off the floor and was now tossed inside like a pile of trash. My laptop lay safely where I left it, inside its case on top of the desk. I threw on the T-shirt that Hudson had thrown off and sat down and powered it up. I went straight to email.
The third subject line screamed.
DO YOU REALLY WANT TO DIE THIS WAY?
Madddog12296 was definitely getting more direct.
This time I didn’t hesitate. I opened up the email. Blank space, except for an attachment labeled “The Bennett Show.”
My virus software went to work.
No virus detected, it told me cheerfully. I clicked “continue download.”
The first image filled my screen from edge to edge, familiar and confusing at the same time.
It wasn’t a virus, but it was very, very sick.
I couldn’t take my eyes from the slick horror show running on automatic in front of me. I had only several seconds to absorb an image before it faded out to bring another. And another.
Fred Bennett died violently in the kitchen while making popcorn. He’d put up an intense fight for his family. Every surface, every wall, every tile sprayed red like they’d battled with ketchup bottles.