Red, White and Dead Part 2

"Shane and I are going to St. Bart's," Q said. "You could come with us."

I leaned back against the booth. "I don't have the cash for a vacation."

Maggie sighed. "And what am I talking about? I don't have the time. I'm on trial later this week. But maybe if we just started planning something it would motivate us, give us something to look forward to. We've always talked about going to Prague."

"And Paris."

"And London."

"And back to Italy." Now I sat upright. Maggie and I had done a study-abroad program after our first year in law school.

Maggie saw my excited look and read my thoughts. "Is your aunt still living in Rome?"

I nodded fast. "As far as I know."

"Do you think we could stay with her?" Maggie asked. "That would help with the cost." The truth was Maggie made more than enough to head to Rome for a week or two or four, but I appreciated that she was trying to be sensitive to her newly cash-strapped friend.

"I haven't talked to her in a long time, but I could ask." I could definitely ask, and not only because we wouldn't have to pay for a hotel, but because other than my mother and brother, my aunt was the only person who had also known my father. Elena, my father's sister, had been living in Rome for decades. When Maggie and I went to school there eight years ago, Aunt Elena had taken us to our first meal in Rome-at a restaurant right next to the Pantheon called Fortunato. But unfortunately, she had been out of town the rest of that month, and we didn't get to spend any more time with her.

Yet she was exactly the person I wanted to spend time with now.

You're okay now, Boo.

I hadn't told Maggie or Q about last night. Under Mayburn's rules, I couldn't tell anyone about the fact that I was his part-time, off-the-books employee.

I'd started working with Mayburn last fall when Sam had disappeared after Forester's death, and in return for looking into the matter, I'd agreed to freelance for Mayburn. The whole reason I need you, he'd said, is because you're a typical, normal North Side Chicago woman. If there's any inkling that's not the case, if anyone knows you do P.I. stuff on the side, it won't work. I had argued that I should be able to tell my close friends, but Mayburn wouldn't budge. If one of those people lets it slip to someone else, he'd said, it wouldn't end there; word would get around.

I wasn't so sure I cared anymore about a freelance investigator gig, especially when it got me into the kind of scariness it had last night. I'm a girl who likes to be chased as much as the next, but only in a romantic sense, not in a Mob-is-about-to-kill-you kind of sense.

And yet I couldn't shake the sound of that man's voice, the way he'd called me by my childhood nickname, Boo. Or at least that's what I thought I'd heard. The further I got away from it, the more I doubted myself. But I still wanted to poke around a little, to see if I could find anything out about my father, if there was anything to find out. The man had been dead for almost twenty-two years after all. But no one aside from my mother, used that nickname.

A way to fish around about my dad was to reestablish contact with my aunt Elena.

"Mags," I said, "I think you've got something here." I lifted my napkin and tossed it onto my plate. "I'm calling her tonight."

3.

H e watched her leave the restaurant, her steps casual, unhurried. And yet her shoulders were tight, her head swiveling. She pivoted once or twice, as if she couldn't decide which way to go, but then he recognized what she was doing. She was getting a feeling, sensing surveillance. And she was right. He watched as she stopped at the window of an office-supply store. To pa.s.sersby she probably looked as if she was simply smoothing the front of her yellow summer dress, merely tugging a few stray red curls into place. But he knew what she was really doing.

She couldn't identify the source of her suspicion, he could tell, and so after another few fast glances in the gla.s.s at the people around her, at the cars on the street, she turned and kept moving. Her body appeared more relaxed now. Apparently, she had decided she wasn't being followed.

She was wrong.

He just hoped he was the only one.

4.

I walked home from my lunch date to savor the summer weather-crisp without being cool, sunny without being blazing, breezy without the lake winds blowing your skirt around your a.s.s. Usually, I would be on my scooter-a silver Vespa-but Q had driven me to lunch. With so much time on my hands and considering the fact that Chicago receives approximately four and a half-perfect weather days like this, I figured I had to make the best of it.

The streets were crowded with people. Everyone had a bustle to their steps, it seemed. Everyone had a purpose. You could tell the lawyer types who were dashing to court or a deposition. You could spot the salespeople pulling product in small wheeled suitcases. When I'd been one of those dashing lawyers, I was always jealous of someone like me, someone dressed casually the way I was in flip-flops and a yellow cotton dress, someone who clearly didn't have to rush anywhere. But being on the other side was starting to depress me-knowing that I wasn't just playing hooky for the afternoon or taking a much-needed sabbatical, knowing that I was out of work and out of prospects and almost out of my twenties.

Plus, all those people on the street, and the fact that a crowd made it easy to tail someone, began to make me nervous, made me think about Dez and Michael, and wonder if they knew who I was, if they were looking for me. And of course, thinking about Dez and Michael made me think of that stranger in the stairwell.

It was one night, when I was about five years old, that my father had given me my nickname. I'd woken up crying after a sinister dream. He tried to console me, but nothing worked. In the span of six hours, I'd grown fearful of the dark. My dad told me then that if you were afraid of something, you should look it straight in the eye. I didn't know what he meant, and he must have seen that.

"What are you afraid of in here?" He gestured around my bedroom, lit only by the tiny lamp in the shape of a sh.e.l.l that sat on my nightstand.

I looked around. Nothing appeared particularly scary. "I don't know."

"Ghosts? You're scared that they'll say, 'Boo'?"

"I guess."

"Well, there's nothing scary about that. Nothing scary about ghosts, either. They're just people who aren't here anymore, stopping back in to say hi. Except they say boo."

That sounded rather simple. And not at all terrifying.

"Okay?" Under his round copper gla.s.ses, my dad's eyes sparkled, as though a laugh was just about to hit him. I loved when he looked like that. It made everything seem fine.

"I guess..." I said again, the fear still lingering a bit the way bad dreams do.

"You guess? What kind of answer is that?" My father looked at the ceiling and acted as if he was thinking hard. "I'll tell you what. I'm going to call you Boo. Just for a little while, so that if you ever do see a ghost and they say that to you, you won't be scared. You'll have heard it before. Okay, Boo?"

I liked it. I'd never had a nickname before. "Okay."

It had been a thing between the two of us, just my dad and me. After he died when I was eight years old, my mother picked up the nickname, as if by using it she could keep him a little bit alive. But I had never seen a ghost, never heard one. Until last night in the stairwell.

When I got to the Chicago River, I began to feel I was being watched. I swung my head around, but it didn't appear as if anyone was following me. I kept walking, paying attention to everyone I pa.s.sed, and it seemed as if a lot of people were looking right at me, expressions of recognition on their faces. It was hard to tell if any of the people were tailing me or if their expressions were simply the type I'd witnessed frequently over the last couple of months-looks that said, I saw her on the news, I think. Yeah, she did something wrong.

The fact was, I hadn't done anything wrong, but after my friend died in the spring, the Chicago cops had suspected me of her murder. As a result, my image was flashed across the news stations for a week or so. Thankfully, mine was a flash-in-the-pan story, but I still got those looks with some regularity. I hoped Dez hadn't seen the story, or hadn't remembered it.

I dropped my gaze as I crossed the bridge in front of the Merchandise Mart, not wanting to meet anyone's eyes for too long. I reached into my bag for my cell phone.

"Hey, Iz." My brother answered on the first ring, which he almost always does. He's one of the few people I know who actually answers their phone on a consistent basis.

"What are you doing? Want to take a walk in the park or something?"

"Yeah, meet me at Mom's. I'm over here, using their printer."

"Are they home?" "They" was my mother, Victoria McNeil Calloway, and her husband, Spence. The two were mostly joined at the hip, and mostly at home now that Spence had retired from his business-a real estate development company that provided consulting around the country.

I loved being with my mom and Spence, but I wasn't ready to see them now. You couldn't just waltz up to someone on a beautiful Monday afternoon and say, "Hey, any chance your husband, who died two decades ago, is alive?" I could barely ask myself that question. It was really too ridiculous. But Charlie was hard to fl.u.s.ter.

My mother lived on State Street in an elegant gray-stone house, a few blocks north of Division Street. Charlie was waiting for me on the steps, his tall frame leaning back casually on his elbows. His loose, curly brown hair glinted in the sun with a hint of red I've always told him he got from me.

He came down the steps and we hugged, then wordlessly started walking down State Street to Lincoln Park. We wandered behind the Chicago History Museum, crossing the street and pa.s.sing by the entrance to the zoo.

When we reached Cafe Brauer, we went behind it to the small pond, where paddleboats were rented by tourists or families. Some of the boats were forest-green, others white and shaped like huge swans.

Charlie pointed. "Remember when Mom used to take us on those?"

I nodded. "Mom and I would paddle and let you think you were doing all the work."

Charlie shook his head. "Yeah, and being the sucker I am, I believed it. Thought I was the man of the house."

"You were the man of the house."

We both laughed. Charlie has always possessed a lazy streak. It's not that he's stupid. Quite the contrary. Charlie is a reader of history, a lover of art and music. And trumping those things, Charlie is a lover of red wine and naps.

In fact, most of his friends-and sometimes even my mom and I-had taken to calling him "Sheets" because he spent much of his time in bed, a trait that had intensified after college. Charlie had graduated with a degree in English and a desire to do absolutely nothing. A friend's father took pity on him and gave him a job driving a dump truck to and from work sites, which Charlie liked just fine because during down times, he was allowed to doze in the trailer. He might have gone on like that for decades, but one day the truck turned over on the Dan Ryan Expressway when a semi cut him off. He broke his femur, screwed up his back and ended up with a fairly hefty settlement from the semi's insurance company. In his usual cheerful way, "Sheets" took it as a windfall and had spent the last few years sitting around, reading, getting the occasional physical-therapy session and, yes, drinking red wine.

"Let's sit." Charlie pointed to a bench at the side of the lagoon that was shaded by a patch of vibrantly green trees.

He took a seat, his long arm on the top of the bench. I arranged myself cross-legged and looked at him, trying to figure out how to tell Charlie what I'd heard, or thought I'd heard, last night. I stared across the pond at a bridge that spanned one edge of it, at the Hanc.o.c.k building and the skyline beyond that.

Ever since Charlie and I were little, I was the more serious, the one who worried enough for everyone, the one who a.n.a.lyzed a situation ten ways before deciding what to do, while Charlie mostly rolled along. I needed him to a.n.a.lyze this one with me, though. I wouldn't tell him about working for Mayburn, but I had to tell Charlie that I thought I'd heard our father's voice.

"So I was on Mom's computer," Charlie said, before I could form my words.

"Working on something for YouTube?" Charlie produced funny little movies filmed on the streets of Chicago. He shot them in black and white and set them to old-fashioned French music. It was kind of hard to explain, but they were really quite charming, and he had developed a coterie of people, mostly female college students, who loved them and as a result, loved Charlie, as well.

"I was working on my resume."

"Really?" I tried not to sound surprised. Charlie had talked about looking for a job-after years of living off his settlement check, it was starting to dry up-but somehow it was impossible to imagine him getting up and doing something besides deciding between merlot versus cabernet.

"Yeah. Actually, I think I already have the job. They just need my resume for office purposes, to put it in my file."

"What's the job?"

"An internship at WGN. The radio station."

"The one with the gla.s.s studio on Michigan Avenue?"

He nodded.

"Wow." I couldn't hide my astonishment. "That sounds like a big gig."

"No, it's being an a.s.sistant-or intern or whatever-to the producer for the midday show."

"So you'll be going there every day?" Somehow this concept seemed impossible.

"Yeah. I'm going to be working, Iz." There was a note of pride in his voice I didn't recognize. He studied my face. "I mean, c'mon, I don't know what I want to do with my life. Actually, I wish everyone would stop asking me what I want to do with my life. What does that even mean?"

I shrugged. I couldn't be of any help there.

"But it's time to do something," he continued. "Maybe this radio thing could be for me." He shrugged, too. "You know Zim?"

I nodded. "Zim" was Robby Zimmerman, a friend of Charlie's from high school.

"Well, his dad is in radio sales, and he got me the job. There's no money in it, like no money, but-"

"You're going to work for free?" Financially, I was appalled, but this sounded more like the Charlie I knew.

"Yeah. At least at first. Because I have to try something, Iz. I'm twenty-seven." He said this like, I'm eighty-three.

Charlie's birthday was just a few days ago, and he was taking it even more seriously than I was my upcoming thirtieth.

"I can't sit around on my a.s.s forever." He frowned and looked out at a duck being chased by a toddler who was being chased by her mother.

"Why not? You do sitting on your b.u.t.t better than anyone I know." Somehow, this whole notion of Charlie as a member of the working cla.s.s freaked me out, made me feel as if my world was shifting even more. Things in my life kept skidding around, and I hated the fact that I had no idea where they would all land.

Charlie laughed. "You don't want me to get a job, because you don't have a job."

"Exactly. It's the beginning of summer and both the McNeil kids are lazy good-for-nothings. Let's make the most of it and spend the summer on the lake." Suddenly, I could envision it-Charlie and I walking from my mom's house to North Avenue Beach, maybe sitting on the roof deck of the restaurant that looked like a boat and eating fried shrimp for lunch, lying under an umbrella in the sand for the rest of the afternoon, barbecuing with my mom and Spence in the evenings. Ever since the breakup with Sam-and Theo and Grady-I craved my family like never before. Even more so now that it felt as if I was about to lose Charlie somehow. Or at least the Charlie I knew.

"You should do that," Charlie said. "Have yourself a lazy summer. Pretend you're me, and I'll go to work and pretend I'm you."

I frowned. I wasn't enjoying the prospect of suddenly being the sloth of the family. I didn't think I could pull off slothful with exuberance and elegance the way Charlie had. I was pretty sure I didn't want to.

Then I had an idea. "How about we go to Italy? Tell the radio station you can start in a month or even a few weeks." If we could stay with our aunt and I could use my airline miles, it might be doable. Charlie loved the concept of traveling, had been talking about Europe the last year, and if I planned the trip for him, the ease of it all might just push him over the hump and get him to agree.

"Can't. Their other intern quit. They need me on Wednesday."

"Like in two days, Wednesday?"

"Yeah."

"Wow." I hardly knew what to say. "Congratulations, Charlie." I squeezed his hand.

"Thanks." He smiled-that great Charlie McNeil smile that made the few freckles on his face dance and his hazel eyes gleam. If there was a famous McNeil smile, as Mayburn had suggested, it belonged to Charlie, not me.

I turned and looked at the pond, at a dad with twin girls on a paddleboat. The girls were laughing, pointing. The dad appeared stressed and was trying to stop them from falling over the side.

"Remember when we got to do things like that with Dad?" I gestured at the boat.

Charlie crossed his arms and studied the family. "Not really. I don't remember much about him at all."