The Thousand - Kevin Guilfoile [129]
That story seemed like it had been lived long ago and by somebody else. She thought about a recent scandal she’d heard of, a woman who’d written a memoir and manufactured details of a sordid childhood. When your own life seems like fiction, how easy it must be to think the details can be altered after the fact. How easy it is to believe lies are memories and memories are not truths.
Nada stepped from behind the kitchen counter and inspected the living room floor. The varnish was like new. Not a single mark.
No exclamation points like the one she remembered in her father’s study. The scuff mark once made by her mother’s shoe in anger.
She returned to the tiles and studied them again. Clearly a wolf now, menacing, fearsome. Nada’s heart pounded against her ribs. She wondered what to make of the letters: a s s/a s s. Was it a joke? A simple vulgarity? Blackburn was not above that. Nada tried to make connections in her head between wolves and donkeys. She drifted back to the computer and searched for the phrase, the word ass twice in a row, but she didn’t dare click through to any of the sites she discovered. The puzzle pieces turned in her head once again and she searched for the same letters, this time as one word—assass. Still nothing but vulgarity.
Assass. Lupa.
She clicked on Google’s Italian language site and searched again.
The second result gave her a new word: assassino.
It wasn’t two words. It was a fragment of one. Somewhere in Patrick’s head, on a tile perhaps not yet painted, were three more letters, no doubt making the word a feminine match to lupa.
Assassina. Killer.
She placed her coffee on the table, holding it there while the thought congealed. So many leftover pieces of her life slowly turning and snapping together. She walked down the hall to her mother’s bedroom, painted dark, with lots of long horizontals—the bed frame and the windows and two tones of blue paint on the wall. Inside the master closet, almost as big as the bedroom, she pulled out several tall wooden racks of shoes and scanned the pumps and clogs and flats and sandals for three minutes or more before she found the match to the black high-heeled pair in her head—the shoes her mother had always worn to the symphony. Nada remembered a picture of Elizabeth, head to toe, standing next to her father before the concert that preceded Erica’s murder. It had been in Chicago magazine just prior to the trial.
Fathers are never who they seem to be. A mother with a secret is the scariest thing of all.
Nada found a box and emptied it of red sneakers. Then she grabbed some tape from her mother’s gift-wrapping station and carried the box back to the kitchen, where she printed a note in small, neat letters on her mother’s monogrammed stationery.
Dear Mr. Vallentine,
As I remember, Erica Liu had an oval-shaped bruise on her neck where her attacker had crushed her windpipe. She’d also been gouged in the eye. Police never found the weapon. You made a big deal about that at trial.
Compare the bruise in the evidence photos to the bottom of this shoe. It never occurred to them the weapon might be a woman’s foot because it never occurred to them that the killer might be a woman.
Sincerely,
CCG
She taped the note inside the box and found the address of Reggie Vallentine’s law firm on an envelope in her mother’s file of bills. Then she walked downstairs to have the doorman call for a messenger, passing her mother with a bag of bagels coming from the other direction in the hall.
47
KLOSKA STUDIED the indentation she had left in his soft mattress. It was deep where her hips had been, where the weight of the two of them together had been centered, where the force of their coupling had made its most direct impression.
He couldn’t stare at her yet—they hadn’t been together long enough, hadn’t made any commitment that made staring not weird. But he could stare at her absence, stare at the place where she had just been.
She returned