• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

And clearly I wasn’t alone in this. I could read it on their paralyzed faces—Beth’s, Cliff’s, Taylor’s. Jesus Christ, they were all thinking. Somebody just walked into our building and murdered two people. We’re not safe here. Talk about dumb, stoned-out hippies.

I had an even worse thought then, something I bet hadn’t even occurred to the others—yet. If somebody was out to get us, maybe Mia and Wilt hadn’t really been the first victims. Maybe Dan Zuni had already been got. Could be he’d never made it into the woods or wherever he was headed. I didn’t even dare voice that fear. We were already freaked enough.

It had been barely sixty seconds since I’d righted the telephone. Now it was ringing. Cliff picked up the kitchen extension, listened for a few seconds, then hung up.

“Who was that?” Annabeth asked.

“Some guy from the Sun-Times.”

“Take it off the hook again,” she said.

Oh, sure. A reporter after the inside story of the scandalous hippie murders. Look what’ll happen if you let your children become free-love dope freaks.

“Hey, Sandy,” Cliff said, holding on to me. “You okay? You look weird.”

“I’m just so cold.”

“Yeah, man, it’s freezing in here,” Barry said. “And I’m so hungry I could eat lint. Damn, I wish—” At least he had the decency not to finish that sentence. I wish Mia was here. That’s what he was about to say. How about some scrambled eggs, Mia? Wait a minute . . . oh, yeah, right. She’s dead. “What? Don’t look at me like that. What are we supposed to do?” he said. “Starve?” He popped up from the chair and rubbed his hands. “Let’s go get some grub. We’ll go to Chester’s. I’m buying, as usual.”

“I guess he’s right,” Annabeth said. “It feels like I haven’t had anything to eat in two weeks.”

We milled around stupidly, suddenly loath to lose sight of one another. It seemed to take forever to find our coats and scarves. Then, when I opened the front door, the real chill set in. I saw four angry eyes rolling around in their sockets. A black fist poised to knock on the door. It was all I could do not to scream. Facing me were my aunt and uncle.

2

My aunt Ivy is what some people would call prim. She is a small woman with a lovely, willowy figure. It was willowy, anyway, before she was hospitalized earlier in the year, and nearly died. Now she is just plain skinny. But the superpale complexion and the sunken cheeks and perfect red lips suit her, too. Closing in on sixty and in poor health, she is still a beautiful woman. Nor did the illness take anything away from her impeccable manners and her modulated way of speaking.

“Damn you, Cassandra, I don’t know whether to kiss you or beat the living shit out of you.”

That was not the way Ivy usually talked.

“Do you know what you put us through, child? Waking up this morning and hearing about this disaster on the radio. I said, ‘Woody, have mercy, Jesus, isn’t that the address where Cass is?’ And then when we called and called and couldn’t get an answer on the telephone—Lord, Cass. The police are circling like flies downstairs. I thought you were—Do you know what we’ve been through? Answer me!”

But I couldn’t, because Woody started in with his own version of Do You Know What We’ve Been Through. It was full of threats and ultimatums, and it rang through the corridor like the voice of God in a bad mood.

I had always suspected that my self-made, self-educated uncle Woody was attached to the numbers racket in his youth. My grandma only dropped hints about the shrouded past of her sister’s dapper husband Woody Lisle: Maybe he was a rumrunner and maybe he was a gambler; maybe he was once the “business partner” of the notorious South Side criminal Henry Waddell. But with him standing in the doorway like that, booming at me in that commanding, whiskey-lined voice, I felt like a nickel-and-dime gambler who had welched on a debt and was ignorant enough to think he could get away with it.

“You march back into this goddamn apartment and pack your goddamn bags, young miss,