Barbara started stuffing everything back in the box, including the cheap trophy engraved with the inscription “Chicago’s Rookie Reporter of the Year,” which she angled so I would be sure to see it.
“Sorry to rush you, but I’ve got to go sell a campaign for an erectile dysfunction drug.” She winked. “That changes lives, too.”
This sophisticated, toned woman wasn’t at all the slightly plump, gray-haired Barbara with a vague memory of distant events that I’d imagined on the way over here. Apparently, I wasn’t what she imagined, either.
“I like you, Tommie,” she said. “You’re not what I expected. I’ve spent plenty of time on the couch. You’re not the usual brand of psychologist. You get what you need by really listening. Not casting silent judgment. It’s a better approach. Believe me, I know.”
She was gooping it on pretty thick. Maybe I hadn’t pressured her enough. And she seemed oddly relieved. How far to go was always the psychologist’s dilemma. It occurred to me that she hadn’t asked any questions at all.
Barbara opened up a black patent-leather shoulder bag that cost more than most people’s monthly mortgage and reached into a back pocket of a wallet, behind a lineup of shiny credit cards. She pulled out a tattered 3 × 5 photograph with a white creased line down the middle from being folded in half for a very long time, and handed it over.
It was a picture of a sweet-faced little girl perched behind a cupcake with a single lit candle. On the back, in faded blue ink, I could make out the name “Adriana Marchetti.” I’m pretty sure my face remained blank, something I’d become better at in the last week.
Barbara Monroe continued to contradict herself. A powerhouse PR woman and a matter-of-fact caregiver to down-and-out strays. A $1,600 purse, and a photograph memento of someone else’s probably dead little girl.
Barbara hesitated for a second and then reached inside her purse again, this time for a large manila envelope.
“I’ve decided to give you this, too. My husband-my third husband,” she corrected with a wry smile, “thinks I’m a little nuts to do this. But about two years ago, I did a press packet for a start-up company that specializes in age progression. You know, for missing kids and stuff. I asked him to age Adriana forward as one of the press kit samples. She was so young when this picture was taken that it’s a bit of a crapshoot. But if she’s alive today, she might look something like this.”
Before I could lift the flap on the envelope, Cricket howled from his gut-the slow, pitiful howl of a dog that knows he’ll soon be without human company-and Barbara hustled us out the front door. “Every time we leave, he’s still sure we’re never coming back. My daughter will be home from school to walk him in a minute. Or rather, Cricket will walk her.”
Barbara flicked her remote at the blue Audi sitting in the driveway, eyes now hidden behind dark, sexy sunglasses that gave her an instant pass into her forties.
She vanished behind the tinted glass, with words that I’d wonder about later.
“Don’t disappoint me,” she said.
CHAPTER 22
I kept the manila envelope sealed until Hudson and I were crammed onto the Chicago El in two plastic blue seats that were sticky with a substance I thought best not to identify. We sat directly across from a public service ad recommending the use of pink condoms for Breast Cancer Awareness. I guess that isn’t much odder than NFL players wearing fuchsia shoes on a field where they are trying to kill each other.
Hudson had chosen our mode of transportation for the morning. He’d been quiet, almost sullen, ever since I ran the slide show for him back at the hotel. He didn’t like being a sitting duck in a cab he wasn’t driving, but a crowded train that allowed us to dodge and duck and leap from car to car was apparently acceptable. Just one of his many control issues.
Then again, I felt lucky that he agreed to this side trip to see Barbara Monroe at all and that at this moment his thigh was pressed against mine like a hot waffle press. It was a bonus that either one of his fists could concuss someone with a glancing blow.
While Hudson casually scoped the occupants of our car, I did the same. In one corner, a man and woman in jeans and matching turquoise Cancer Fun Run T-shirts were quietly arguing. In the other, a businessman in an ugly tie read a weathered John Grisham paperback. Everybody else appeared equally harmless, but then, I’d lost my instinct for this sort of thing.
I turned my attention to the envelope.
Actually ripping it open turned out to be a letdown, not the dramatic eureka moment in the movies. I realized that a tiny part of me wondered whether the face inside would look like Sadie, a sure sign my senses had left me, since I held her the day she was born. Rosalina’s missing daughter would be older anyway. My age.
“Barbara Monroe was ripped off,” Hudson said, leaning over to look. “The nose is crooked. Sort of Michael Jackson-y.”
“She didn’t pay for this,” I said, but Hudson had already started a conversation with the middle-aged Hispanic man nursing a Starbucks next to him. They slipped into a highly animated stream of Spanish about last night’s Cubs game.
I stared at the computer-generated color composite in my hand. An unhappy woman in her late twenties with short black hair and funky red highlights stared back. She had Rosalina’s eyes and a small, pursed mouth that looked like it wanted to spit out, “Who the fuck are you?” The nose tilted up and left, as if the artist couldn’t quite decide what to do with it. There was no resemblance to the gleeful copper angel in Rosalina’s fountain.
The image radiated an unreal quality, like someone improperly embalmed.
Waxy, shiny skin. Parts that didn’t fit together. The hair, stiff, like it had been sprayed to death. How in the hell did the artist commit to red highlights?
I flipped over the picture and found a note that Barbara had scribbled to me, saying that she’d provided the artist with a picture of Rosalina and a blurry police mug shot of the guy she says raped her. What a crapshoot. She signed off with, “Hope this helps!” and a giant B scrawled underneath like two perky cartoon boobs.
Age progression had advanced significantly beyond the scope of the amateurish portrait in my hand. How did Barbara Monroe think this could possibly help me?
The sweaty, extra-large man on my other side stunk like a combination of Old Spice, onions, and garlic. His thigh crept onto my side of the blue plastic seat by about two inches. I smiled politely and pulled out the first of Barbara’s notebooks.
They were a newspaper lawyer’s worst nightmare. Barbara used a bastardized shorthand that was, at best, cryptic: sweeping, curlicued handwriting with bursts of short phrases or words and the occasional full quote, often marked with three or four exclamation points. Like her stories, the notebooks read a little fast and loose, mostly posing questions and notes to herself.
Lttle grl’s white shoe.
Rosalina drunk???
Blck sedan.
I knew psychologists who worked like this-scribbled diligently, using their notebooks more as a prop than anything else. But they also backed themselves up with a tape recorder. Then again, maybe I was being too hard on her. I’d met and envied a few people with photographic memories, including an autistic nine-year-old able to describe the peacock tattoo of the man who mugged his grandmother in such exquisite detail that the jury returned a verdict in ten minutes.