Page 27

TWENTY-FIVE

I stood there, the sounds of fiddles, pipes, tin whistles, banjos, and bodhran drums in my ears, mixed with the cacophony of handclapping, foot stomping, well-lubricated revelers, and I was sure I’d heard Johnny wrong.

“ Prison ?” I said.

“I know,” he said. “She’s pretty slick, but I was eyeing her at dinner. She hunches over when she eats, and she uses her elbows and arms to block her plate.” He mimicked the action.

“So?”

“So, Felipe is lucky she didn’t stab him with a fork. Protecting your food is a big thing when you’re locked up. So is eating fast. Some chow lines give you six minutes to hoover it all down before they rotate. You do that three meals a day for a couple of years, and it’s a hard habit to shake.”

“You think she was in for years ?”

“I can’t put a clock on it, but you don’t just pick up table manners like those after a bad day in traffic court.”

“I told Lizzie she had bad table manners! I spotted it when we went to brunch with her and my dad. I thought she was just kind of—I don’t know—low rent. But prison? Holy shit, Johnny, we have to tell my father.”

“First of all, sweetheart, there is no we . Second of all, what are you going to say? The guy who sells me weed is up on his prison lore, and he thinks this chick you’ve been banging is an ex-con?”

“You’re right. My father is already pissed at me because I haven’t been jumping up and down about how fantastic she is, so I’d better be a thousand percent positive. Do you think she has anything in her purse, like parole papers? That would prove it.”

“Her purse? No way. Her house, maybe, but not her purse.”

“Then you’ve got to help me break in and get it,” I said.

His head snapped back. “You want me to break into her house? Jesus, Maggie—are you out of your mind? You know the cops have a hard-on for me. You trying to get me arrested?”

“Oh God, Johnny, I’m sorry. I don’t want you to get in any trouble. I just thought...”

He broke into a big wide smile. “Hahhhh! I’m just busting your chops. Breaking and entering is the highlight of my résumé. When do you want to do it?”

“She’s already got my mother’s car and her jewelry, so the sooner the better.”

We didn’t have to wait long. On Saturday morning the happy couple took the train into New York City to do some Christmas shopping. An hour later Johnny and I parked three blocks away from Connie’s house on Oriole Lane.

“How do we get in?” I asked.

“The front door,” Johnny said. “I checked it out yesterday. It’s a slam lock. I could teach a three-year-old to open one.”

“Teach me.”

“First you need the right equipment.” He pulled a piece of plastic from his jacket pocket. It was about the size and shape of a candy cane.

“Where’d you get that?”

“Sears. They have a burglary tools department.”

“Johnny, this isn’t funny.”

“Relax. I cut it out of a milk jug.” He put his thumb against his index finger. “You just slide it between the jamb and the door,” he said, slipping the plastic between his two fingers. “Then you drag it down, yank it out, and the hook on the cane trips the lock.”

He went through the motions. It wasn’t the most convincing demonstration, because I couldn’t tell if the plastic had actually parted his fingers, or if he just popped them open on his own. But I had to trust him. He was as close to a criminal genius as I was going to get.

It worked. We walked up to the front door of Connie’s house, and he opened it as quickly as if he’d used a key.

“You’re welcome,” he said once we were inside.

The house was woody—cedar on the outside, pine on the inside. The main living space was about twenty-four by twenty-four with a towering ceiling and lots of glass, so light filled the room. There was a stone fireplace at one end and a full kitchen on the other. Several doors led to what was probably the bathroom and bedrooms, and a wide, thick mahogany staircase with open risers led up to a loft.

“Nice digs,” Johnny said.

I walked upstairs to her studio space in the loft. There was a work in progress on the easel and a few canvasses propped up against a wooden trunk. I figured those were the rejects she decided weren’t worthy of hanging on the walls of her new boyfriend’s pub.

“I’m going to cruise around and see if I can find anything interesting,” Johnny said.

“And I’ll see if I can find anything incriminating.” I went downstairs and found her bedroom. The bed was made, the tops of her dresser and night table were neat and orderly, and there wasn’t a stitch of clothing or a pair of shoes lying around.

I opened her closet. Everything was meticulously organized. Sweaters, blouses, skirts, pants, and in one small section, several hangers with men’s clothes—my father’s. Disgusted, I shut the door.

There was a second, smaller bedroom, and that’s where I found the desk. It was white metal and probably cost less than a hundred bucks at Staples, or ten at a garage sale. The base was a pair of double file-drawer pedestals, and there was a pencil drawer in the center. I tugged at each drawer. Locked.

“Johnny,” I yelled. “I got something.”

“I’m in the bathroom,” he yelled back. “I’m taking a leak.”

Two minutes later he showed up with a pair of silver candlesticks in his hand. “It looks like you’re taking more than a leak,” I said.

“They were buried in the back of a closet,” he said. “She’ll never even know they’re gone, and I can get fifty bucks easy for them.”

“Put them back,” I said, “and help me open these drawers.”

He set the candlesticks down and studied the locks.

“Can you get them open without scratching the paint?” I said.

“Probably.” He dropped to the floor, slid under the desk, and came up ten seconds later with a key in his hand. “Make that definitely. It was taped to the underside of the middle drawer. She’s not exactly a master criminal.”

I unlocked the two file drawers on the left. Empty. Then I tried the pencil drawer. Pencils. Finally, I unlocked the right side and slid open the top drawer. There was a stack of papers in there.

“Take them out one at a time and keep them in order, so you can put them back the way you found them,” Johnny said.

I went through them slowly—receipts, bills, a copy of the support group pamphlet my father had been reading, a catalog from Blick art supplies, and underneath it all, a manila folder about an inch thick.

I opened it, and my stomach wrenched.

“Oh my God,” I said.

“What is it?” Johnny asked.

It was a page out of a newspaper, folded several times, so that what jumped out at me was a black-and-white photograph of a beautiful young woman in her midtwenties.

The camera had caught her just as she threw her head back, spread her arms, and looked up at the sky. Her long, thick hair was captured in midtoss, her smile unfettered by fear or doubt, her eyes radiating with joy and the love of life.

“You know her?” Johnny asked.

“It’s my mother,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper. “This is her obituary in the Heartstone Gazette .”

I unfolded it. Several sections were highlighted. I began reading.

“Kate McCormick, co-owner with her husband, Finn, of the popular bar and restaurant McCormick’s... two daughters, Margaret, seventeen, and Elizabeth, sixteen... The McCormicks have a long history of generosity to the community...”

“There’s more newspaper clippings under here,” Johnny said.

There were four more, all obituaries, all for women in their forties and early fifties who died over the summer, all highlighted.

“How many men is she stalking?” I said.

“Look closer,” Johnny said. “These four have a little X at the bottom. Your mom’s obituary has an asterisk. Your father’s the target.”

“This whole thing has been a scam,” I said. “As soon as my mother died women have been coming on strong—practically throwing themselves at my father. He’s managed to keep them at bay. But Connie walked into the bar one night and ordered two drinks—one for her, and one in memory of her dead husband. My father wasn’t ready to date. If a woman said, ‘Let’s go to a movie and dinner, and see where it goes from there,’ he’d have run the other way. But Connie sucked him in with her sad-and-lonely-widow bullshit, and then she brought him to her bereavement group, and held his hand... and...”

“And one thing led to another,” Johnny said. “Your Dad’s a man, Maggie. Cut him some slack. You can’t hold this against him.”

“I won’t,” I said. “He was vulnerable. She preyed on him.”

“I take back what I said about her not being a master criminal,” Johnny said. “This bitch knows what she’s doing.”

“But now I know what she’s doing,” I said. “And I’m going to stop her.”

“How?”

I shook my head. I had no idea. I gazed back down at the picture of the beautiful young woman so full of life and promise, and silently asked her to show me the way.