“How come you don’t say anything?”
Margaret was talking to me. Oh. I’d been hiding behind my old friend’s black-clad, heavily tattooed frame, my reddish-brown hair in curtains over my cheeks, worried my face would speak my name.
“Oh … I let Matt do the talking,” I said quietly, doing my best dumb-girlfriend routine. Her father, whom I’d called Uncle Augie for the first dozen years of my life, had died, reportedly by suicide, the previous May. Hanging, according to dispatch records. I didn’t sleep for a week, and for the first three feverish days, I did everything I could to locate the funeral. I was frantic to look him in the eye — to see the bogeyman who’d been fouling the family closet for all this time. To make sure he was dead. I called 12 funeral homes; I called the medical examiner’s office; I begged the current cold case unit to help me — and was rebuffed. Gazing into Margaret’s eyes, sharp and framed in glinting blue eyeshadow, wasn’t the same, but it was something.
Matt asked her what the neighborhood was like. “We’re friendly down here,” she said. “Not like other parts of the neighborhood. It’s not safe, and the cops are useless.”
“Tell me about it,” I said. I stared at her, both petrified that she’d recognize me and longing for it. What did I think was about to happen? What would I say to her — “I’m Kate Crane. I’ve wondered all these years if your father killed mine”? And then what? Nothing passed between us; not even a flicker of recognition crossed her face.
Matt and I left, through a glass door that opened into a narrow space that led to a cheaper storm door. At the time of my father’s disappearance, he weighed close to 300 pounds. It must have been hellish to haul his dead or dying person down those little wood-paneled stairs, through the gap in the service counter, and then through this two-door combo — a stretch for two slender members of the living. I banged my hip and felt a flash of smug. If you’re going to get away with murder, it should take some elbow grease. I hoped my father’s killers banged their hips at least as hard as I had. That killing him had marked them somehow.criminal masterminds.