Playing Dead

CHAPTER 17

I threw a beat-up old Samsonite of Daddy’s onto one of the double beds and applauded myself for arriving intact in Chicago, for not strangling a hapless man in the airport security line who looked surprised-surprised!-at the order to take off his shoes and remove his laptop from its case, for not succumbing to a panic attack when the plane suddenly swayed fifteen thousand feet above the earth.

The suitcase-hard maroon plastic with a lifetime of scratches-looked anachronistic against an austere modern room, not my taste but high above the noise of Michigan Avenue. The focal point was a sleek floor lamp with a blue neon light shooting up the side that could serve double duty as a nightlight.

Almost everything in the room was coolly neutral-either white, off-white, gray, or black. In $300-an-hour-decorator-speak, the colors were likely something more poetic, like Lovers’ Moon, November Rain, and Midnight. Yep, the smart-ass part of my brain continued to click along. Maybe inspired by staring at the pink-purple OPI polish on my toenails named My Auntie Drinks Chianti. Pedicure by Maddie. You had to drink to make this stuff up.

Three hours to go.

My body had been buzzing like a dying fluorescent light since I woke up. Maybe a quarter of a pill of Xanax would have fixed that if I hadn’t been so rash.

Plopping onto the other bed, I decided I’d rather be sitting on Black Diablo than alone in a hotel room in a strange city, wondering if I might be shot at in the next few hours or poisoned with a cup of high tea. I’d had plenty of time to interpret Charla’s warning about a dead end.

I eased the green dress out of the hanging bag in the suitcase for something to do, wondering how many minutes I should allow to strap it on. It was the only dress I tried, but Beatrice insisted it was the one. Would the girl I had been a week ago have so docilely obeyed Rosalina’s peculiar request?

I opened the mini-bar. No Dr Pepper. I grabbed a Milky Way, a Sprite, and a small can of cashews. When I finished downing that, I took a long shower, carefully applied makeup, pulled my hair off my face with two of Granny’s antique silver hair combs, all while trying not to think about how Rosalina Marchetti could destroy my world with just a few words.

At one-thirty, when my nerves were about to explode, the doorman helped me climb into a cab. I barely noticed the buildings whizzing by, except when my Armenian driver screeched to a halt to deliver a stream of American curse words at pedestrian tourists. He specifically targeted anyone carrying a red American Girl bag. I counted thirty-two of them in one block and then stopped counting. I knew some mothers of Maddie’s friends who thought nothing of dropping two thousand for a mom-and-daughter weekend trip to the flagship store on Michigan Avenue.

We cruised down Lake Shore Drive, the hot wind blowing through the windows, tearing apart my hair. In Texas cabs, air-conditioning was as certain as four tires. In the Windy City, apparently not. Half-moons of armpit sweat now stained the green silk. I stared into the beautiful blue of Lake Michigan on my right, punctuated with parasails and boats, its beaches packed with every skin and bikini color.

Snapshots flew by-a pretty girl in a bright pink sports bra bounced by an emaciated homeless man wearing three baseball caps and hoisting a bulging plastic bag. A cyclist knelt with a bloody knee to examine a flat tire on the concrete bike trail. A mother shouted into the wind as her toddler unexpectedly ran toward the waves. Lives that would never touch mine again.

Lake Shore Drive turned into Sheridan Road, connecting the city’s busy ant farm with a life of stratospheric privilege. We passed lush, rolling lawns, every blade of grass the same color and height, as if a band of Oompa Loompas used a paintbrush and manicure scissors each morning to maintain perfection. And the houses-if they could be called that-stood against the clouds as stunning specimens of architecture: Spanish-style villas, colonials, and modern geometric shapes that took cues from Frank Lloyd Wright, a hometown boy.

The cabbie turned off Sheridan Road and wound his way around, toward the lake, eventually pulling up to a massive black iron gate. He pressed the speaker button.

“What’s your name?” he asked over his shoulder.

“Tommie. Just say Tommie.”

“You don’t look like a Tommy,” he said, turning around. “You sure?”

“Just say it, please.”

He pressed the button again impatiently. “I got Tommy here. You going to let me in?”

“We’d prefer that you drop off Miss McCloud at the gate. She can walk up.”

The voice was male and stern, like a former military man. Or a Texas football coach. The cabbie shrugged and asked me for eighty dollars. Not knowing whether I was being ripped off, I gave him five crisp twenties and told him to keep the change. Then I hesitated, holding out a bill. “There’s another hundred if you wait. And another hundred when you deliver me to the hotel. It will be at least an hour.”

He weighed the possibility, running a mental cash register.

“OK.” He shrugged. “I’ll circle. But I leave after an hour and fifteen minutes.”

He left me standing alone in front of the monstrous twelve-foot-tall concrete wall that curved like a snake around a large property, its look somewhat softened by branches with tiny pink flowers that dripped over the side.

A security camera on top of the wall adjusted robot arms to direct its lens on me. I considered my tangled hair, perspiring face, green dress clinging in places it shouldn’t be clinging for tea of any kind with an elderly socialite. Nervously, I rubbed the key around my neck, which the hospital wouldn’t let Mama wear when I tried to give it back. I glanced right and then left. No sign anywhere of thugs in cowboy hats.

A small metal door to the left of the main gate, practically hidden by foliage, swung open because someone, somewhere, punched a button. I walked cautiously through, into the land of Rosalina’s paranoia, my body on high alert. I found myself in a narrow, arched tunnel of vines. The end was not in sight. I jumped as the gate snapped shut behind me.

I walked steadily for about three minutes as the path inclined toward what I assumed was Rosalina’s house. Five times I considered turning around. Twice, the heel of my brand-new metallic copper sandals got caught in the dirt until I finally yanked them off and trod onward barefoot.

Occasionally, the vines parted a little above me to let in more light. I could see they covered a continuous metal arbor that acted as a cage; plant life covered it so densely I could not see out on either side, and I assumed no one but the cameras I occasionally spotted could see in. By the time I arrived at a stone staircase embedded into the earth, I was trembling.

I counted twenty steps before reaching the landing. It took me a second to get my bearings once I reached open sunlight. I stood on the second-level terrace of an impressive replica of an Italian villa. On one side I faced floor-to-ceiling windows that framed a ballroom hung with three massive crystal chandeliers. The room was designed so that on special nights guests would spill out onto this balcony.

When I turned around, Lake Michigan slapped me in the face with an unexpectedly cool breeze. In Texas, you only caught one of those in summer by standing near an air-conditioning vent. I couldn’t see water, but I knew it was close.

I knocked the bottoms of the two-inch heels on the tiled ground to get off the dirt and strapped them back on before peering over the balcony into the most elaborate garden I’d ever seen, a maze of arbors and stone pathways and fountains. Someone could get lost in there. Which was probably the point.

“It’s beautiful, isn’t it?” asked a slightly accented voice behind me, and just like that, I was face-to-face with Rosalina Marchetti. The first thing I noticed was that she’d had her cheekbones “done,” pulled higher and sharper, making her look more Italian than Mexican.

Few vestiges of the Rosie from that faded newspaper picture remained. Her silvery white hair was orchestrated into an elegant bun almost as twisted as her garden. Her pale green pantsuit flowed from her slender body like a loose skin, a subtle background to the diamonds glinting on her fingers, in her ears, at her neck.

Rosalina was more beautiful than ever. And I looked nothing like her.

“Oh, my God,” she said, a mist over her blue eyes, which I knew were really plain, ordinary brown. And then she swept me into what seemed to be a very genuine hug.

I felt absolutely nothing. Shouldn’t I feel something?

“Shhh,” she warned, as I opened my mouth to speak. “Not here.”

She tucked her arm through the crook of mine, and led me down two more flights of rocky stairs that spiraled their way into the garden. The paving stones looked ancient enough for Michelangelo himself to have picked over them.

In the center of the garden’s opening courtyard, a life-sized copper statue of a small child with angel wings tilted her head to the sky, her arms open with glee as water spilled over her. “That’s Adriana,” she said. It took me several seconds to figure out who Rosalina was talking about. “I put the fountain in on the three-year anniversary of her kidnapping.”

Please, God, don’t let that girl be me.

Four other garden paths led off the courtyard into a dense, tamed jungle, and Rosalina tugged me along on one rampant with honeysuckle, oblivious to the effect of her words on me. From above, the garden gave the appearance of well-groomed symmetry, but once inside I gave up trying to keep track of all of the turns. I was hot, tired, and pretty certain Rosalina wasn’t much of a physical threat. Besides, I had always cheated with a pencil and eraser at childhood maze games.

“I feel safest in here,” Rosalina said, pulling a branch aside for me to step through. “This garden was designed for me many years ago by a University of Chicago math professor. He’s dead now. I’m the only other one besides my security guards and a gardener who knows every way in and out, and it’s locked without a key inside my head.” As she tapped her forehead, I prayed that the math professor died of natural causes.

She glanced at my dress, and my fingers awkwardly adjusted the neckline. “Thank you for wearing green,” she said. “It’s better camouflage.”

This was beyond bizarre. Had Rosalina lived her entire life in fear, grieving for a stolen daughter, a recluse trying to disappear into her landscape?

“Don’t feel pity for me,” she said, as if reading my mind. “I made my deal with the devil. Your father, that is. I was still young, but I knew what lay ahead for me if I didn’t marry him. Venereal disease, abusive men, an overdose. In some ways, your father saved me, although, of course, it was for his own selfish reasons.” Her voice trailed into bitterness. “I’m assuming you know the story, at least that part of it.”

Your father. Did she mean Anthony Marchetti? She dropped the words so casually.

“Why would you assume that?” I stuttered. “I don’t know anything.”

“This is my favorite space,” Rosalina said abruptly, as we stepped into the colorful chaos of a small Mexican garden. Bright blue tile covered the ground, overflowing Mexican pots held lemon trees and wildly colorful flowers. A parakeet cackled and swooped by several inches from my face. Two green-striped padded lounge chairs were neatly divided by a small green table that held a green pot of tea and a basket of scones. I guessed we stood on the south side of the maze, but who knew?

“Sit down, dear,” she said abruptly. “I’m not your mother, of course. Surely you never really thought that. You’re the spitting image of Genoveve. I always found that pretentious of her. Her name was probably something perfectly ordinary. Jenny with a J.”

I clung to the important part.

Rosalina Marchetti was not my mother.

My mother was the one who tucked me in at night like a burrito. Who had closed her eyes and held her breath every time I threw my body on top of a bull.

My mother was lying in a hospital bed in Texas, her mind wandering through a demented dream of her own.

“You don’t need to look at me like that,” Rosalina said haughtily. “It was just a little white lie. I wanted to present my case in person. You wouldn’t have flown all this way to see me otherwise; you would have simply tracked down Anthony. I figured you’d be curious. You’re a psychologist. You help small children. And this is all about a small child. My daughter. I need to know what happened to her. And I know Anthony knows. I want you to get him to tell.” She swatted at a wasp with a wrinkled, French-manicured hand. “Surely he can’t pass up a plea from his long-lost daughter.”

I was thinking, yes, Anthony Marchetti definitely could. I was thinking I wasn’t about to accept a word Rosalina was saying as the truth.

“You owe me.” Her face revealed a disconcerting glimpse of the stripper, the Mafia hooker, the survivor. “You and your mother owe me. My daughter is gone because of you.”

“Tell me. Please.” I barely got it out, but it was all the encouragement she needed.

“I was Rose Red,” she said proudly. “No other stripper pulled them in like I did. Anthony and his boys showed up almost every night. I dated one of his bulldogs. Arturo.”

She took a dainty sip of tea and crossed her legs primly.

“If alcohol and drugs in exchange for blow jobs counts for love,” she continued drily, “then Arturo and I were in love. Anthony was the stud, of course, but he was out of my league. We spent a lot of time over at a Rush Street piano bar, where your mother played and sang after ten. Anthony would listen to her and drink martinis until the garbage trucks rolled.”

She gazed at me with a mixture of jealousy and fascination.

“It’s eerie how much you look alike. That hair, the way you move. Anthony and your mother fascinated each other. She couldn’t resist him. All that darkness and charm.” Her voice grew heavy with sarcasm. “Thus began their great romance. The story goes to hell from there. I got pregnant. Your mother got pregnant. Difference was, one of Arturo’s buddies raped me in the alley behind the bar. Every which way, if you know what I mean. Arturo wouldn’t even look at me after that.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. “What happened to my mother?”

“Anthony went down for a hit on an FBI agent. It was ugly. He shot the man’s whole family. Somehow, your mother was mixed up in it. Anthony pled out to get her protected. Kind of a grand gesture for someone with Anthony’s résumé. To plead, I mean. I figured he’d just threaten a jury and get off.”

How, how, how could Mama be mixed up in this?

She paused, looking satisfied. “But there Anthony sits, more than thirty years later.”

“I don’t understand,” I stuttered. “You said you and Anthony weren’t… a thing.”

“He brought me an offer right after the murders. If I married him, my baby and I would be taken care of for life. But he made no bones about it: I’d be the new target for his enemies while your mother and his unborn baby got out of town. She already had an older boy. She never said who his father was. Not as pure as she put on.”

She was playing the role of martyr and enjoying every minute of it. I held back angry words because I didn’t want her to stop.

“Anthony always called me Red after that. But as in red herring, not Rose Red. I can’t say that he wasn’t straight about the risk in marrying him. I just never expected anything to happen to Adriana. You know that whoever took her had to think she was you. Anthony’s baby. I’ve been watching my back ever since.”

Something about this part of the story rang false, but I couldn’t put my finger on it. I was schooled in the facial tics of a liar, but she displayed none of them, her eyes focused on me, never darting away.

She gestured to the house. “That’s my prison. My fortress. I can flip a switch in any room and see every corner of the house and grounds. I think my security boys like to watch me in the shower sometimes, but”-she grinned-“that’s the price I pay. Every now and then I’ll do a little striptease around the four-poster. That’s just a bonus. They’re well paid.”

I brushed aside this image. “I still don’t understand. Why now? How did you find me?”

“Do you believe in Fate, Tommie?”

I thought about Granny and her cards, about how I sat smack in the middle of a tangled garden that was a metaphor for my life.

“Well, I believe that Fate brought you to me,” Rosalina said.

“Someone told you where I was,” I said flatly.

She turned coy. “I really can’t say.”

It suddenly occurred to me that I’d brought a tape recorder and never once thought about turning it on. I reached into my bag, ostensibly for a tissue, and flipped a switch and the direction of the conversation.

“So you don’t know what my mother knew about those murders?”

“Not a clue.”

“What makes you so sure Anthony Marchetti is my father?”

“I’m sure. Track him down. And while you’re at it, ask him about my Adriana. Beg him to give me some peace.”

I looked at my watch. I’d been there an hour. Screw subtlety. I just wanted answers. “Do you know why Anthony Marchetti has been moved to a Texas prison nearer my family?”

“I didn’t know that.” Rosalina seemed authentically surprised.

“I feel like my family is being threatened, but I don’t know where it’s coming from.”

“Maybe you should ask the Feds who are trying to peer over my wall right now.” Rosalina let out a snort of laughter. “Actually, honey, you can’t believe a word the FBI says. Of course, you can’t believe Anthony, either. He’s the master of illusion. The FBI guys, though-they lie, lie, lie to get what they want. Try to make us nervous. They’ve been bugging my phones for a decade. Don’t they think I know? They want to track all that money still drifting here and there.”

She brought the teacup and a flash of diamonds to her pale glossy lips, and I thought how her striptease was probably still worth watching.

I didn’t care what else she had to tell me. I desperately needed to get out of there. As I pushed myself out of the chair, she tugged me back down.

“Not yet,” she said, glancing around. “I want you to have something.” She reached into her pants pocket and placed a small red jewelry box in my hand, the elegant kind with the spring catch on the back.

The kind that promised something good.

It seemed odd that Rosalina would want to give me a gift-maybe something Anthony Marchetti had bought her once upon a time? Whatever it was, I didn’t want it.

Rosalina quickly shattered that sentimental thought.

“My daughter’s finger is in there.”

There weren’t words in the English language to respond to that, or at least I couldn’t find them.

“Be careful, don’t drop it!” Rosalina grabbed the box to keep it from falling. My hand didn’t seem to be working.

“Are you going to faint? Ay, Dios mio, don’t faint!” Actually, I didn’t think I was going to faint. I took a bottle of cold water from the ice bucket near my feet and placed it on my cheek.

“I’m sorry, Tommie,” she said. “I shouldn’t have surprised you like that.”

And then, “It’s mummified.” As if that made everything better.

Desperate not to lose me, she rattled on. “The cops gave it back to me years ago, six months after the kidnappers sent it. They told me that this could be my piece of her to bury. That she was dead, and I needed to accept that.”

“Have they tested it for DNA?” I heard my voice, calm and logical. An invisible part of me wandered up there in the lush foliage of the Mexican sage trees, an impartial observer to this mad tea party. I wondered vaguely how a gardener coaxed them to grow so well in Chicago. I could almost feel the leaves brush my cheek.

“No,” Rosalina replied. “They didn’t do DNA testing much back then. They seemed so certain it was her. And, frankly, I’ve never wanted to know for sure. Until now. I’m getting old. I don’t have that many years left.”

The box sat between us on the table, reminding me of the red coat in Schindler’s List, the single piece of color in a world gone insane. The red of Anthony Marchetti’s signature scarf. I picked up a cube of ice and rolled it around my neck. I tried not to let my imagination wonder what a thirty-one-year-old severed baby finger looked like.

“What do you possibly think I can do with this? I assume you’ve had investigators working on Adriana’s case for years.”

“Whatever you think you should,” Rosalina told me. “You are the daughter I never had.”

Her last scripted line.

The afternoon light had faded, and she sat in the shadow of a tree, Rose Red exposed. Somewhere along the way, she’d lost her Italian accent. She sounded like what she once was, a Mexican-American girl from the South Side, a scrapper who bent her morals until they strangled her. Despair leaked out of every pore. I could now make out the edges of her blue contacts. They couldn’t hide the misery that lurked behind them. I’d seen those eyes before-on my mother’s face, at Tuck’s funeral.

I willed myself to pick up the box. I could do this. Perhaps I had lived every moment of my life to get here, to this spot inside Rosalina’s vine- and pain-infested jungle. Maybe every research paper I’d ever written, every case I’d studied about childhood trauma, was preparation for this moment. Perhaps I was meant to find Adriana. Maybe she was still alive and held the answers.

I thought these things even while recognizing Rosalina Marchetti for what she was: a brilliant manipulator, a pathological liar.

I asked one more question, to test her.

“When you hugged me up on the terrace, you were looking for a wire, right?”

“Of course,” Rosalina said. “You can’t be too careful.”