The Isle of Youth: Stories

OPA-LOCKA

My sister was the photographer. From a rooftop deck, nestled between two enormous ferns in clay pots, she photographed our target, Mr. Defonte, entering the adjacent apartment building. He wore a white linen suit, boat shoes, and a straw sun hat with a chin strap that dangled beneath his jaw.

“Only in Florida,” Julia said, snapping a photo. “Does he think he’s on a safari?”

Mr. Defonte paused outside and stared at his feet. He was only a few steps away from the entrance of the glossy high-rise building. The doors were made of blue glass with silver handles in the shape of leaping fish. Julia took another picture. I was crouched beside my sister and peering through binoculars. I could see his face in profile, his long downward-sloping nose and soft chin. I knew his full legal name, his social, his date of birth, where he lived, where he worked, his favorite lunch spot, and his license plate number. His wife had hired me and Julia to investigate him. Together we made up Winslow & Co., the private detective firm we’d been running for the last year.

“I don’t think he’s going inside.” I lowered the binoculars. It was Boca Raton in June. My throat was slick with sweat, my underarms damp. “I just have a feeling.”

“If that motherfucker doesn’t walk through that door, I’m going to climb down from this roof and smack him in the face,” Julia said. The apples of her cheeks were flushed. Her chestnut hair glistened.

I opened the red cooler we brought on stakeouts and fished out an ice cube. I ran it along the back of Julia’s neck and over her cheeks. She sighed in a way that sounded grateful. I kept moving the ice over her skin until it turned into a tiny translucent shard and melted into my fingertips, until it was just my hand on the nape of her neck.

Mr. Defonte opened the door. He hesitated for a moment, then disappeared into the building. Julia snapped three pictures in a row. Now all he had to do was come out. And all we had to do was wait.

* * *

What do you want? That was how the conversation with Mrs. Defonte began, how they always began. You don’t hire a private investigator unless you want something. In our early twenties, Julia and I hired a detective to track down our father, who vanished in the middle of the night when we were teenagers. I was fifteen, Julia thirteen. We just woke up one Saturday morning and found him gone and our mother in the backyard, staring at the sky. Our detective was expensive and didn’t have any luck. We knew what it was like to want something so badly, it burned a hole inside you.

Mrs. Defonte had hired us for the same reason most women hired PIs: she suspected her husband was having an affair. In the last six months, she explained in her living room, his behavior had changed. He took phone calls in the middle of the night. He worked later. Something about his tone of voice was different, his smell, even. He seemed to have trouble looking her in the eye. She had followed him once, waited outside his office and trailed him to a café on Second Street, but then she lost her nerve.

Mrs. Defonte had beautiful black hair that nested on her shoulders and nails painted the color of pink geraniums. She wore a snug black sleeveless dress, a white sweater draped over her shoulders, and sat with her ankles crossed. She was in her fifties, around the same age as my mother, who was several weeks into a six-month cruise around the world; it had started in Fort Lauderdale and would end in Monte Carlo. Julia liked to joke that our mother had been away at sea her whole life. She’d done her best to raise us, but once we were out in the world, the distance that had always been there shifted and hardened, like a building shedding its scaffolding and assuming its final shape. We reminded her of painful times, we understood.

“I want to know what’s real,” Mrs. Defonte said.

“That’s exactly what we do.” We had been served iced teas and Julia’s long fingers were wrapped around her glass. “We gather facts, evidence. We separate what’s true from what isn’t.”

Mrs. Defonte nodded. “It’s all very peculiar,” she said, almost to herself.

“It’s actually pretty common,” I said. Julia stepped on the toe of my sneaker. I had a habit of saying the wrong thing to clients. All were supposed to think their predicament was special, in need of our expertise. The Defonte case was a big opportunity for us. We’d been getting most of our work from insurance companies, which often hired private investigators to look into claims, but it was the domestic investigations that really paid.

Mrs. Defonte looked at the ceiling for a moment and sighed. She told us that sometimes she wondered if she was making it up. Once she wrote out a list of all the warning signs, all the things he’d done, but on paper it didn’t look that damning. Still she couldn’t let go of the feeling that something was wrong. It plagued her day and night.

“Maybe I just have too much time on my hands,” she said.

“You leave it to us,” Julia said. “Give us a month and we’ll know what he’s been up to.”

On our way out, I noticed a photo in a silver frame. It was Mrs. Defonte standing on a stage, a red velvet curtain hanging behind her. She wore a long bronze gown. Her hands were clasped in front her stomach, her lips parted in song.

“I sing in our community opera,” Mrs. Defonte said when she saw me looking. “That was from The Mask of Orpheus. I went to Juilliard, you know.”

“Really?” I glanced up at her. She was nearly smiling.

“It was a long time ago.” She opened the front door and watched us walk to our car, a black Explorer with tinted windows and a portable GPS affixed to the dashboard. It was a rental.

That night, back at our apartment, a minimal amount of digging turned up the name of the community opera and its rehearsal schedule. They staged their rehearsals and performances at an opera house in downtown Boca Raton. My sister and I lived in Opa-locka, ten miles north of Miami. Opa-locka came from the Indian name Opatishawokalocka, which meant “the high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place.” It was a rough neighborhood. Every night, Julia locked all our equipment — GPS, walkie-talkies, tape recorders, cameras, binoculars, laptops — in a safe in her bedroom closet. She kept the Glock 22 I was licensed for on the bedside table. Just last week our neighbor Mirabella had been robbed at knifepoint. I had tried to talk my sister into moving, citing crime statistics and reasonable rents in other neighborhoods, but she loved the two-story blue stucco building with the concrete balcony and the drained swimming pool half-filled with bottles and empty cigarette packs. For Julia, risk was like air. The good news was that we saved a bundle in rent and could afford to run ads in everything from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel to the Boca Beacon, which was how Mrs. Defonte had found us.

One night, a week into the Defonte case, I told Julia I needed to go for a drive. It took less than an hour to reach the opera house. It was on a brick street lined with palm trees, a circular building with a glass facade, so even from the parking lot, I could see the warm light inside. A crescent-shaped pool curved in front of the entrance; a trio of fountainheads shot white water into the air. After finding the rehearsal stage, I took a seat in the very back. The space was empty save for a handful of people in the front rows. They were in rehearsal for Don Giovanni. Mrs. Defonte stood on the right-hand side of the stage. She wore street clothes, black slacks and a crisp pink button-down. A long white veil was clipped to her hair. A man with a black mask over his eyes stood in the center of the stage, singing. I watched Mrs. Defonte watch the man and wondered what she was feeling. Another person came into the theater and walked down the aisle, carrying an armful of fake roses to the stage. I sank lower into my seat.

The veil Mrs. Defonte wore in her hair was not unlike the one I’d worn when I got married. I had moved in with Julia six months ago, after my divorce was finalized, and soon I’d started getting strange postcards in the mail. They were part of a set. I’d seen a similar kind of thing in a party store once; if I had all the cards they would fit together like a puzzle. So far, I’d received two swatches of sky, a cloud, a dried-out river, and a brown ledge. There was nothing on the back except my name and Julia’s address. Everything was typed, the letters large and a little smudged, as though it had been done on an old typewriter. The postmarks were from Arizona, Utah, Nevada. I had never seen my husband use a typewriter, but he had always wanted to travel west. He thought Florida was a miserable swamp. And he knew Julia’s would be the first place I’d turn. Once, I spread the cards out on the floor and tried to put them in order. I didn’t have enough pieces to make sense of what they were supposed to be.

When Mrs. Defonte began singing, my hands dropped into my lap. My chin rose, as though pulled by a string. Each note was as perfect as the crystal goblets I’d noticed on her dining room table. The other actors on stage gazed at her with the same kind of wonder. When she finished, they all applauded. One person rose from her seat. Mrs. Defonte looked around, startled, like she’d just come out of a trance. A voice like that was a weapon.

* * *

By ten o’clock, we’d been on the roof for seven hours. The darkness had brought little relief from the heat. We’d used up all the ice cubes, eaten the bologna sandwiches I’d packed, drunk a beer apiece. Over the last two weeks, we had observed Mr. Defonte entering hotels, high-end places near his office, and exiting after an hour; it was always the same days of the week, the same times. Fifteen minutes after he left, the same blond woman always emerged. From the blonde’s photo and license plate number, we located her address and tracked Mr. Defonte to her high-rise on Royal Palm Avenue. The first time we followed him to her building, it was observational; this time, we were prepared to document. Catching him going in and out of her residence was significant to our case. The hotel meetings could, with some effort, be explained away. He was a lawyer, after all. He could say he was meeting clients, that the blonde’s presence was a coincidence. Spending seven-plus hours in her building, however, would be harder to dismiss.

When it was my turn to watch the door, Julia stretched out on one of the white plastic beach chairs behind me. The chairs had mildew on them, which we hoped meant the roof deck didn’t get much use. If anyone discovered us, Julia planned to tell them we were police. Before starting Winslow & Co., we enrolled in an online detective school. We learned how to take fingerprints and write reports, how to run credit and background checks, how to do surveillance and skip tracing. I liked the school; it made everything seem official. At the end, there was a certificate. Julia was less interested, so I did most of the work for our classes. One thing we were never supposed to do was impersonate a police officer.

Around midnight, the conversation turned to our father.

“Here’s a story,” I said to Julia.

Once, my father told me a story about a business trip to Chicago with his friend Bill Keller. At a bar, Bill picked up two prostitutes. They were young, with accents and fake fur coats. They all went back to a hotel, an old grand place called the Iron Horse. My father and Bill disappeared into separate rooms, but instead of doing what one would normally do with a prostitute, of doing what Bill Keller was doing in that very same moment, my father said they lay down on his bed and he read to her.

“Read what?” I’d asked.

“A novel,” my father had said.

I was eleven. The story made me feel strange. It seemed to come out of nowhere. We were eating lunch at Bojangles’. The Kingsmen were playing on the radio. I knew what a prostitute was, but I didn’t yet understand how unusual it was to not do what one normally does with a prostitute, to read her a novel instead. I didn’t understand that my father wanted me to see him as being above temptation and superior to Bill Keller, who I had never met. I didn’t know the right questions to ask. What kind of novel? What did she smell like? Did she fall asleep on your arm? What was her name? Now I thought I would like to find that prostitute and get her side of the story.

“So?” Julia said, her voice drowsy from the heat.

“I realized the other day that it couldn’t possibly be true. I don’t think I ever saw Dad read anything, let alone novels, for starters.”

“What was true?” Julia said.

Our father was a grifter. He spent our childhood selling fake insurance policies. When he vanished, he left behind a mountain of debt; the house we’d grown up in went to the bank. Our mother moved us to Athens, Georgia, where she was from. She threw away all the photos we had of our father and encouraged us to tell people he was dead. All we were left with was the stories. The prostitute in Chicago. The time he escaped the Vietcong by jumping off a cliff. The time he ran with the bulls in Barcelona and saved his best friend from being gored in the ass. Things only children would believe. All story and no truth.

I liked to tell myself that, unlike our father, we were on the right side of the law, me and Julia, with our firm and its solid-sounding name, but that hadn’t always been the case. Two years ago, Julia was arrested for breaking into houses. She’d been at it for a long time, picking places where the owners were away. When she finally got caught, in a mansion on Fisher Island, she did six months in Broward Correctional. The idea for the private detective business was hatched during visitation. We talked about how exciting it would be, how lucrative. My husband, a tax consultant for H&R Block, had always thought Julia was a professional housesitter; he was furious that I had lied to him, that I’d once gone down to Coral Gables to swim in the Olympic-size pool of an estate my sister was robbing, and even more furious that I insisted on visiting her twice a week in jail. Can’t you just write to her? he’d say. Do you have to actually go there? Our mother talked about Julia like she was away on a long trip. So it was just my sister and me, like always.

In Georgia, we had gotten bored with college and dropped out, drifting back to South Florida like homing pigeons. I met my husband while working at a watch store in Pinecrest. He brought a Swiss Army in for repair. He’d had it for a decade; he said he liked to hold on to things. We married a year later, in the Miami courthouse. I loved him, but I didn’t always understand how to be honest. Over time, we became less sure we were something the other wanted to hold on to. And then there was Julia’s arrest and visitation. I saw how small she looked in her gray jumpsuit, how she wanted to ask if our mother was coming but knew better. As I listened to her talk about the PI business — her voice quick and grasping — I realized my thirties were on the horizon and I’d never had a job I found interesting. And that I liked the idea of busting people for doing things they shouldn’t be. Since Julia had a record, I’d been the one to apply for our firearm and PI licenses. I told my husband Julia and I were starting a catering company. When he discovered a Winslow & Co. business card in my purse, he bypassed fury and went straight to sadness.

“Do you think Bill Keller was a real person?” my sister asked.

“I don’t know.” I pulled at the collar of my T-shirt; the fabric was stuck to my skin. “The hotel is a real place, though. The Iron Horse. I looked it up once.”

“Any sign of Defonte?” I could tell she was ready to change the subject.

I raised the binoculars and scanned the entrance. The perimeter of the building was brightly lit and still. “Nothing,” I said. We were prepared to keep waiting. There were two more beers, a thermos of water, and a bag of Cheetos in the cooler, plus a packet of NoDoz in the back pocket of my shorts.

“Maybe Mrs. Defonte is out of town,” Julia said.

“Maybe.” I happened to know that was unlikely, since she’d had rehearsal the night before and had it again tomorrow.

We waited through the night, and when the sun rose behind us, it brought a heat that was painful. We put on big sunglasses and baseball caps and draped towels over our shoulders. I’d taken too many NoDoz and my hands were shaky, my mouth dry. All the water was gone. We had not taken our eyes off the building since he went inside, not for one single moment.

Julia searched around with the binoculars. I rested my elbows on the edge of the roof. It was unusual for a target to change the pattern so rapidly, to go from one-hour stretches to all-nighters. Maybe Mrs. Defonte really was out of town. Or maybe he had decided to up and leave her.

“Keep looking,” she said, passing me the binoculars. “I’ll go get us coffee.”

“Water,” I said. “I feel like I’m being roasted.”

A lot of PI-ing was about waiting. Knowing how to wait, being prepared to wait, not giving up on waiting even when it felt like God was one of those assholey kids who hold a magnifying glass over ants until they explode, only He’s using the sun. What we didn’t know was that sometimes all the waiting in the world won’t give you what you need.

* * *

After twenty-four hours, we decided something had to be done. It felt like we had been on the roof for years. We’d been trading off for bathroom breaks. Julia had made two runs to the convenience store down the street for water, Nutri-Grain bars, and coffee (while she was at it, she had checked to make sure Mr. Defonte’s car was still parked in the same spot; it was). Still, we couldn’t stay up there forever. My stomach gurgled. The back of my neck and my legs were sunburned. My eyes itched. Birds had shit on our camera bag and on Julia’s wrist. Mr. Defonte had to come out of there eventually, we figured. It was a Wednesday. He had a wife, a job. But the blazing afternoon stretched on and on until finally it was night again.

“We should call Mrs. Defonte,” Julia said. “See if she’s heard from him.” She tossed me the cell phone and said she was going out for more coffee. She liked to do the talking until we had to tell clients something they might not want to hear.

I kneeled on the roof, facing the building Mr. Defonte had vanished into. I’d never had a conversation with Mrs. Defonte alone.

“Do you have any news?” she asked when I called. I closed my eyes for a moment and imagined what her words would sound like if she were singing them.

“Sort of,” I said. “Have you heard from your husband lately?”

She said that she hadn’t. He was on a business trip in Memphis.

“That can’t be true. We photographed him going into an apartment building on Royal Palm yesterday afternoon.”

“And?”

“We haven’t seen him since,” I said. “We’ve been watching the building. He hasn’t come out yet.”

She was silent. I guessed she was considering what her husband had been doing in that building for so long and who he’d been doing it with. I pictured her sitting stiffly on the elegant sofa with the cream-colored cushions and the curved wood legs, a hand resting on her knee.

Mrs. Defonte said she would call me back and did so a few minutes after we hung up. She reported that she had tried her husband’s cell, twice, but there was no answer. When my husband left, I had wanted to call him very badly, but had gotten drunk instead; at the time I told myself I was washing the urge out of me. I wondered if another postcard had turned up at Julia’s apartment in Opa-locka.

“I guess we’re not sure what to do,” I said, worried Mrs. Defonte might start losing faith in us. “We’ve been up here a long time.”

“You’re the detectives,” she said.

* * *

When morning came, Julia sucked down a coffee and two jelly doughnuts. She picked up the black nylon messenger bag that contained the Defonte case file, stalked over to the fire escape, and started climbing down.

“Where are you going?” I said. “You just made a breakfast run.”

“Fuck this motherfucker,” Julia said, her hands gripping the ladder.

I followed her down the fire escape. She didn’t check for cars before crossing the street. When I caught up with her, she was looking for the blond woman’s name on the row of silver mailboxes in the lobby.

“There she is.” Julia pointed at box 703. Belinda Singer. Flecks of icing were stuck to her finger.

“This isn’t what we do,” I said. Private investigators were watchers, waiters. We waited for people to do whatever it was they were going to do, recorded it, and then handed over the evidence. We didn’t jump into the middle of situations. We didn’t intervene.

“We went to detective school, am I right?”

“I went to detective school,” I said. “I did all the work. Everything is in my name.”

“Well, we call ourselves detectives, don’t we?”

I gave her a little shrug. The lack of sleep had made everything bleary.

“I’m ready to do some detecting.” Julia held me in a hard stare. She had bright hazel eyes, more green than brown, and could be very convincing.

We rode the elevator to the seventh floor and knocked on the blond woman’s door. She looked older up close, her tanned skin creased lightly around the eyes and forehead, her lips thin and dry. She wore a white sleeveless tennis dress and white sneakers with ankle socks. Her hair was pulled into a high ponytail.

“Are you Belinda Singer?” Julia flipped open her wallet and flashed the heavy brass badge issued to licensed PIs; if you didn’t look closely, it could pass for the real thing. “Let us in. We’re detectives. Police.”

The woman didn’t move from the doorway. I peered over her shoulder, but didn’t see anyone inside.

“Ms. Singer? Did you hear me?” My sister’s voice was forceful. I would have believed anything she said. The blond woman opened the door a little wider. Julia edged into the apartment.

“You’re a detective too?” she asked as I entered.

I glared at her in a way I hoped was intimidating.

My sister moved into the blond woman’s living room. She stood on a leopard-print rug, next to a glass coffee table piled high with issues of South Florida Living. I hung out closer to the front door. The floor was cream tile; large cockleshells, each the color of a sunset, had been arranged on the pale pink walls.

“Where is Peter Defonte?” Julia asked.

The woman cocked her head. “Who is Peter Defonte?”

Julia told the woman that she knew exactly who Peter Defonte was, that he had been in this apartment for the last two nights and was probably still here.

“I wish,” the blond woman said.

“Do you think this is a joke, Ms. Singer?” Julia replied.

“No one’s been here. Look around.”

We checked the two bedrooms, the closets, the bathrooms. We looked under the beds and behind the shower curtains. When we were finished, Julia pulled a head shot of Mr. Defonte from her messenger bag and handed it to the blond woman.

“This man, we know that you know him.” Julia’s voice was softer. She touched the woman’s forearm. “Go on, take a look.”

The woman pinched the sides of the photo and frowned. “I don’t know him at all.” She handed the photo back to Julia and surveyed us for a moment, her nose wrinkling like she’d just smelled something unpleasant, which was entirely possible, seeing as we’d been baking on the roof, unshowered, for two days.

“I think your detecting skills need some work,” she told us.

“This is the law you’re talking to,” Julia said. And then we got out of the apartment as quickly as we could. We went back down to the ground floor and showed the photo to the building manager, the superintendent, and a few maintenance men. If anyone asked, Julia did the badge flash and said we were police. No one recognized Mr. Defonte. The maintenance men showed us the side entrance, which had been visible from the roof. Besides the front door, that was the only way out; there was nothing that went through the back.

“Not unless you’re Spider-Man,” one of the men said, moving a mop across the floor.

In our time with Mr. Defonte, he had never seemed wily or agile, like some kind of escape artist. To me he had always looked weak, with his sluggish gait and doughy face and ridiculous hat. Outside I sat on the sidewalk and slumped against the building. The heat was as strong as ever. I felt like my skin was melting.

“What the fucking fuck?” Julia paced in front of me.

I pressed my face against my knees and groaned.

Later we had to call Mrs. Defonte and tell her we’d lost her husband. She’d phoned his office in Boca Raton and the firm he was supposed to be meeting in Memphis; no one had seen or heard from him. He had simply vanished. Since it had been forty-eight hours, Mrs. Defonte called 911 and then the real police got involved.

* * *

We had seen him go into that building. We had seen him open the door and walk inside. Our stakeout had just started; we were sharp and rested and hydrated. We had taken photos. Could he have slipped out when we were on the seventh floor, even though no one saw anything? Can buildings eat people? At a certain point that seemed as likely as anything.

We were required to turn our camera and film over to the police. They had examined every inch of the building, impounded his car and searched it for clues, and were as flummoxed as we were. Me and Julia and Mrs. Defonte met with an officer at the Boca Raton police station, a Detective Gregerson. He was an older man dressed in black slacks, sweat-stained shirtsleeves, and orthopedic shoes. He didn’t look capable of much, but then neither had Mr. Defonte. He slid the photos we had taken across the metal table and asked Mrs. Defonte if she could identify her husband. She gazed at the photos of him standing on the sidewalk, staring at his feet; reaching for the door; pulling it open and stepping inside. She wore a quarter-sleeve dress patterned with red and pink flowers and leather sandals. Her black hair was pulled into a tight bun. She looked tired and confused, as though she’d just woken up in a place she didn’t recognize.

“It’s him,” she said.

“Are you certain?” Detective Gregerson said.

She nodded and pushed the pictures away.

“What about the blond woman?” I asked.

“Belinda Singer.” Julia cracked her knuckles, her go-to move when she was nervous.

“We questioned her,” Detective Gregerson said. “She doesn’t know anything.”

“What about all those pictures of her and Mr. Defonte?”

“Did you ever see them talk to each other? Hold hands?”

“No,” Julia and I said.

“Did you ever see them interact in any way? Any contact at all?”

We glanced at each other.

“No,” Julia answered for us.

“There you go.” He swept his hand to the side, like he’d solved something.

“There you go what?” I said. “It’s an excessive amount of coincidences.”

He sighed. “Fucking PIs.”

“What did we do?” Julia slapped her hand against the table.

Detective Gregerson said that, in his experience, if you wanted to go looking for trouble, all you had to do was spend ten minutes with a few PIs.

“It’s your aura,” he said.

“We never stopped watching that building,” I said. We hadn’t. Not for a minute, save for when we searched for him inside. That was the one thing I was sure of.

Mrs. Defonte looked at us and then at Detective Gregerson. “I never should have hired them,” she said. “I just wanted some answers.”

“Don’t we all,” said the detective.

I didn’t think it was fair for Mrs. Defonte to blame us, but at the same time I did feel partly responsible for whatever it was that had happened to her husband, as though our mere presence had set something in motion that might have remained dormant otherwise.

“We tried our best,” I said. “We did just what you asked. We were very professional.”

“You should have seen the mess they left on the roof,” Detective Gregerson said. “Beer cans, food wrappers. Styrofoam cups, which are hell on the environment. And you shouldn’t take those caffeine pills.” He patted his chest. “Bad for the heart.”

Mrs. Defonte folded her hands on the table and sniffed.

When the police found out we’d posed as real detectives, we were charged with impersonating an officer, fined one thousand dollars, and stripped of our private investigator and gun licenses. Winslow & Co. was over. Because Julia had a prior, her probation was extended by five years. The police said that if it weren’t for overcrowding, she’d have gone right back to jail. That same week, a man was stabbed to death in the parking lot of our building in Opa-locka. Even after the body was taken away, streaks of dried blood stayed on the asphalt until it rained.

* * *

The rest of the Defonte saga unfolded on local TV. Boca Raton resident vanishes into thin air! The story got a lot of air time on Florida stations, but never went national. Still, I developed an addiction to the news. I would stay inside for days, reading and watching everything I could find. I would sleep for hours and wake up tired. Some nights I lay on the sofa and thought as hard as I could about what we’d seen, what it meant. Was his body in that building? Was Belinda Singer some kind of criminal mastermind? Had he faked his own disappearance and made off to South America? What had we missed? I didn’t come to a firm conclusion about anything.

Julia had no patience for my brooding. The Defonte case reminded us all too much of our father — not just the vanishing, but the inscrutability of it. My sister threw away our Winslow & Co. business cards and letterhead and started working with a shady, unlicensed PI outfit, whose clients were usually as culpable as the people they wanted investigated — a husband with domestic violence priors looking for his wife, a crooked businessman searching for the equally crooked partner who fleeced him. I brought this up to Julia one night, the morality of it. Who isn’t guilty, she said, and maybe she had a point. On the nights she didn’t come home at all, I would wait up on the sofa, in the glow of the TV, and worry.

New postcards arrived in the mail, another cloud and a rocky slope with scrubby bushes. I gathered all the cards and took them next door to Mirabella, who read tea leaves for a living. She was twenty-one, single, and rarely home. She took me into her bedroom. Her walls were covered with posters of tea leaves in various formations. She flopped down on her bed, spread the cards out in the shape of a rainbow, and examined them.

“This is not in Florida.” Mirabella lay on her stomach. She had acne scars on her cheeks. She picked up the river and fanned herself with the card. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s hard to say more without all the pieces.”

“Harder than reading tea leaves?”

Mirabella said she wasn’t charging me and so I couldn’t expect her best work. Besides, she added, pointing at one of the posters with the card, the leaves always told the whole story.

“Like I knew I was going to get robbed before it happened,” she said.

“If you knew, why didn’t you do something?”

“What could I do?” she said. “Not go home?”

I looked at the poster. The tea was a soggy, dark swirl, like wet dirt in the bottom of a white cup. Maybe I just didn’t have a knack for seeing things.

Back at the apartment, I called my husband. If he would tell me what he was sending pieces of and why, I was willing to give him the satisfaction of saying he knew working with my sister would only bring trouble. I tried calling three times, but I couldn’t get through; his cell phone had been disconnected. For a while I pretended the beep-beep-beep was my husband trying to reach me. I told myself he was using Morse code, which I had learned about in detective school. Hello, I said. I’m listening.

One afternoon, when Julia was out on a job, two things happened: Another postcard arrived. It looked like part of a gorge, the same shade of brown rock, WISH YOU typed across the back. The second thing would have been easy to miss. I was unwrapping a Hot Pocket in the kitchenette when I heard something on the news about a man in Nevada who had been arrested for defrauding senior citizens. I left the frozen Hot Pocket on the counter and went to the TV. According to the reporter, this man’s racket had been going on for two years. He had raked in hundreds of thousands. A Nevada DA said he would be punished to the fullest extent of the law. They showed the man being led up the steps of the courthouse. His hands were cuffed behind his back. A police officer gripped his elbow. He wore a gray trench coat. The wind blew his white hair across his face, revealing a toupee. He was much older, of course, but there he was.

* * *

“No fucking way,” Julia said when I told her what I had discovered. The eleven o’clock news replayed the story and she gasped when she saw him walking up the courthouse steps. I felt relieved that she’d recognized him as immediately as I had. We called the number our mother had left; her boat was docked in the Maldives and she was on an excursion to a fishing village. We told the cruise director to tell our mother it was an emergency.

For a weekend, Julia partook in my addiction to the news. We kept the TV on day and night. The Senate was considering a bill designed to safeguard the personal information of senior citizens, so our father’s story was getting national play. We read everything there was to read on the Web. Julia let her cell phone ring. When we came across more photos online of our father entering the courthouse, she held on to my arm. In one, he was looking right at the camera, his gray eyebrows raised, his lips parted. Age spots dotted his face; his skin sagged. We made fun of his toupee to keep from crying.

The facts went like this: our father, posing as a financial consultant, had convinced seventeen elderly Nevadans to give him power of attorney over their finances and then fraudulently cashed checks on the accounts. The victims had lost everything. It was Mrs. Calhoun, a ninety-six-year-old widow, who got him caught. Her daughter got suspicious of our father and called the authorities. An investigation was launched. When our father was arrested, he was getting ready to skip town. I wondered what, if anything, he would have been leaving behind.

On the first night, we printed news articles and cut out the photos of our father. We sat next to each other on the sofa, the TV blaring, and studied them under a magnifying glass. He and Julia shared the same high forehead and sharp cheekbones. I wondered if there was anything of him she saw in me.

“He looks so old,” Julia said, rubbing her thumb over the paper.

When we called our mother a second time, the cruise director was able to get her on the phone. We put Julia’s cell on speaker and told our mother everything. That we’d found our father in Nevada. That what had happened to him, where he’d been, was no longer a mystery. We were breathless, talking over each other. Once we finished, we leaned toward the phone and waited.

“We’re going to Sri Lanka next,” our mother said. “We’re going to ride elephants.”

“Mom?” we said. “Did you hear what we just told you?”

“This wasn’t an emergency,” she whispered before hanging up.

On the second night, we watched a TV special called “Preying on the Elderly” that featured our father and a con man right here in Florida, who had defrauded a whole retirement home full of seniors last winter. They showed one of our father’s victims, a hunched old man named Reginald. He was leaning into a walker, a tiny white dog at his feet. The program offered a list of tips for elders: Don’t give out personal information over the phone. Be suspicious if someone says you’ve won a fabulous prize. Get-rich-quick schemes never make you rich. Do background checks on everyone you meet. Julia pointed out that it sounded like the elderly were in need of private detectives. I nodded. I hoped Reginald was watching the same thing we were.

Later, while Julia was in the shower, I realized that after our father was arrested, the postcards had stopped coming. I decided they hadn’t been from my husband at all, and was surprised by my disappointment. I didn’t say anything to my sister at first. I stood by the closed bathroom door and listened to the water. I took a beer from the fridge and drank it standing up. When Julia emerged from the shower, I suggested we watch a movie. I picked up the remote and started clicking through the channels. Beverly Hills Cop was on. All night, I kept my secret.

On the third night, I couldn’t stop myself from telling Julia about my theory. My husband hadn’t sent the cards. It had been our father all along.

“It makes sense,” I said. “A bunch were postmarked in Nevada.”

“I should have known.” Julia was on the couch in a long T-shirt and socks. “A typewriter didn’t seem like your husband’s style. Too romantic.”

I sat next to her. The news was on. Julia turned down the volume. The cards were stacked on the coffee table. He knew where we lived. He had kept track of us. Was it out of love, or a calculation, keeping tabs on his family in case he ran out of strangers to con? More questions we couldn’t answer. I wondered if he knew about my divorce and Julia’s stint in jail, if he had seen Mr. Defonte on the news and knew it had to do with us.

“I think this one goes here.” Julia picked up the image of the gorge and placed it in the middle of the table. We put the sky and the clouds above it. The river to the left, the ledge to the right. We played with the positioning of the cards, tried to complete the sentence that began with WISH YOU.

“Wish you well?” I said.

“Wish you luck?”

“Wish you were here?”

Julia looked at me. “If that’s what it says, I’m glad we’re not.”

In the end, the puzzle didn’t tell us much. We still didn’t have enough pieces to know what it was for sure. We could tell it was a big dusty valley of some kind. Someplace out west, we figured. That part of the country was foreign to us.

“The Grand Canyon?” I suggested.

“Is it rocky enough?” Julia leaned over the coffee table, her head tilted. “What about Death Valley? That’s in Nevada, right?”

I remembered hearing about the salt flats in Death Valley on TV. Badwater, they were called. The only animal that could survive there was some kind of snail. “Or the Mojave, in California? Do deserts have riverbeds?”

Julia scooped up the cards and stacked them on the table.

Years ago, when we were kids, we often played in the woods behind our childhood home. Somehow these nights had the same feeling as our games. At a certain point, Julia would always drop whatever we were doing and bolt into the woods. I would chase her, call after her, but she would just run and run. Finally I would climb the oak in our backyard and search for the peak of her head moving through the trees. I hardly ever found her. Usually I had to wait until she was ready to come out. Sometimes that took minutes; other times, hours.

My sister stared at the TV. I heard sirens. At first it sounded like they were right outside, but after a while, they began to fade.

“Here’s a story,” she said. “About two little girls who tried to make something out of nothing.”

* * *

By Monday, Julia had reached her limit. That night she muted the TV and lay on the couch, her head in my lap. I nestled my fingers in her hair. It was thick and tangled and smelled like her coconut shampoo.

“I can’t stay in this place anymore,” she said.

At first I thought she was talking about Opa-locka and felt a wash of relief. “It’s about time. Where do you want to go?”

Julia didn’t seem to hear me. “Mom was right. From now on, we should just pretend he’s dead.”

I pulled my fingers out of her hair. “How can we pretend that? He’s right there on the news.”

“It’s like being in a maze,” she said. “We’re never going to get anywhere.”

She was right. Between Mr. Defonte and our father, I could feel myself being consumed by mystery. But that was beside the point. It didn’t even feel like a choice, to wade into all of this. I didn’t understand how she could decide to stop.

“I have to let it go.” She sat up and rubbed her forehead. “I just have to.”

A still of our father was on TV. It was from when he had just arrived in Nevada. He wore a yellow polo shirt and was smiling broadly, a neat crest of gray hair arcing over his forehead. It might have been under the worst circumstances possible, but he was back in our lives.

“Look at him, Julia.” I leaned toward her and pressed my palm against her cheek. “He’s right there.”

“I know he is,” she said. “And I wish he wasn’t.”

After that night, she went back to working with the shady private investigators. She started coming home smelling like whiskey and smoke, a gun tucked into the waistband of her jeans, even though we’d lost the firearm license. Just in case, she told me. She got a pager and it buzzed constantly. She lost weight. Her hair thinned. The spaces beneath her eyes hollowed out. She looked the same as she did in jail, weary and sad. Once I heard her screaming at someone in our parking lot. By the time I looked out the window, my sister was alone and sitting on the ground, her face in her hands. I went downstairs and crouched in front of her, stepping in a small pool of gasoline. I placed my hands on her knees. Julia, I said. Look at me. She sighed and tipped her head back, and for a moment I thought she was going to break out of whatever it was she’d fallen into. But then she jumped to her feet, went upstairs, and locked herself in her room. A few mornings later, I found her asleep on the couch, fully clothed, the gun on the coffee table. Her brown hair fell over her shoulders; her hands were folded under her chin. Her lips were parted in the exact same way our father’s had been in the photo we found online; they even had the same long, slender shape. On the couch, Julia was free of the sadness. She looked innocent and sweet and most people would have no idea what she was capable of. But I knew, because she was my sister. I knew she was keeping things from me.

* * *

Here was what I kept from Julia: Twice a month, I would go to Boca Raton for Mrs. Defonte’s rehearsals. By late July, they were in final preparations for Don Giovanni. They had done the last two rehearsals in full costume; the stage held a pair of elaborate gold balconies connected by a wide staircase. The steps were covered by a plush red rug. A chandelier hung from the ceiling. It was like seeing the opera on opening night, minus the audience. I almost felt bad that I hadn’t paid anything.

Mrs. Defonte was playing Donna Anna and the masked man was Don Giovanni. She wore a floor-length gown with lace sleeves and green brocade, the veil still clipped in her black hair. Her voice was as beautiful as ever. I wondered how much she thought about her husband, what she thought about him. I imagined she had theories of her own.

Don Giovanni wore black pants, a white peasant shirt, and a wig. The basic problem in the story was that everyone wanted Don Giovanni to change, but he wouldn’t. It also showed how a person’s actions come back on him, how the seed of what happens next exists in what’s happening now. I had started going to the rehearsals because of Mrs. Defonte, but in the end, Don Giovanni was the one who held my interest.

My favorite scene was set in a graveyard. Don Giovanni and the servant, Leporello, were surrounded by gravestones. Giovanni’s laugh summoned the ghost of the Commendatore, who he’d killed in act one. Leporello was frightened; Giovanni invited the Commendatore to dinner. He couldn’t know, couldn’t see, what would happen next.

It was a terrible flaw, our inability to see where our lives were leading us. For instance, in the back row of the theater, I could never have imagined that in late August, while Julia was stopped at a red light in Opa-locka, three blocks from our apartment, a man would walk up to her and shoot her in the head. She died at the scene. Our mother had to fly back from Muscat, her neck heavy with blue topaz, which, she had been told, would shield her from grief. I couldn’t have imagined how long I would stay in Julia’s apartment, out of a strange sense of loyalty, before I broke down and moved to Coconut Grove and took a job as an administrative assistant in a law firm, perhaps not so unlike the one Mr. Defonte had worked in. I couldn’t have imagined that, after my father pled out and was sentenced to fifteen years, I would have flown all the way to Nevada to see him in jail, to tell him that his daughter was dead and our mother might as well be, to tell him that I missed him, that I would never forgive him, that he could fuck his fucking postcards, and not be able to get past the entrance. In fact, I couldn’t even get out of the rental car. I sat in the parking lot for hours, blasting the Kingsmen CD I’d brought along, the postcards tucked into the glove compartment, before driving away. For the first ten miles I convinced myself that I was doing preliminary surveillance, that I would be back. I wondered if my husband would be consoled by the fact that the lies I told him were nothing compared with the ones I sometimes told myself. No, none of that seemed possible, as I watched Mrs. Defonte and Don Giovanni sing in a way that made my insides tremble.

The Commendatore came back to Don Giovanni in the form of a statue. The singer was painted silver and wore a helmet and a cape made of chain mail; he reminded me of the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz. Even after I’d seen the whole opera, I kept willing Don Giovanni to not laugh in the graveyard, to not invite the Commendatore to dinner. Run away, I would whisper in the back row. Just run away. He never did, of course, and it wouldn’t have changed anything if he had.