Brooklyn Bones Read online

  Maybe he willed himself to let go now instead of later. I firmly believed his will was more than strong enough to succeed at that.

  There was a bit mentioning that his nearest relative, his nephew Steven, was in seclusion. “Seclusion?” I thought. That certainly was a euphemistic word for it. I thought “held by police” might be more accurate.

  With James gone, Steven would be left to clean up the mess. He deserved it. The fact that only a few days ago I had some feelings for him seemed less real to me than any dream I had ever dreamed. Less real than a dim memory of something that might have happened when I was a child. Or in another life. It happened a very long time ago, to someone else.

  I hoped he would end up in jail. For the next few days, I kept a radio turned to the all-news and read all the papers, from the newspaper of record to the sleaziest tabloid, to see if there was anything more about how James died, or what was happening to Steven. In all the verbiage about James’ life and times, I could not find one word.

  I had another meeting with Russo, to fill in some details for him, and give him notes and answer more questions, so I tried to ask my own too. When I asked about Steven, he shook his head and said only two words, “Ongoing investigation.” I hadn’t expected anything better, but it was worth a shot. When I asked if I would have to testify at a trial, or if Chris would, he only shrugged and said, “Wait and see.”

  When I pressed him about Mary, he said, “Safe in a psychiatric facility, getting help.” I must have looked horrified, because he laughed and added, “Calm down. It’s no snake pit, believe me. She’s getting good care. We need her to get better so we can ask her some more questions. Not that we haven’t tried, but the answers don’t always relate to what we’re asking. Or even this planet, sometimes.”

  “I don’t know what would have happened without her…I owe her…I can’t even say how much. Please. Please take care of her.”

  He nodded. “We owe her too, loony as she is. Someone, somewhere, knows who she is. We’re gonna find them.”

  Amazingly enough, they did, though I didn’t learn about it for some time. Deep in her filthy shopping bag of meager possessions, there were two pictures of a young girl, sealed into a zip top plastic bag. Much later, he showed me copies. One was a yearbook photo, and if you got past the too-wide smile and the Brady Bunch curls she did look a little like Chris. The other was from a dime store photo booth. She was gaunt now, her hair string-straight, her eyes surrounded with black eye liner. She wore ankh shaped earrings.

  Russo told me that the plastic bag also held a Minnesota birth certificate. They used it to make some connections, tracked down people still in the town who told about the teenage cousin who ran away decades ago, about the parents who followed a trail to New York and then hit a dead end, the heartbroken father who came home and the disturbed mother who refused, who insisted she’d stay until she found her, no matter how long it took.

  So Chris had finally found her, behind a plywood wall in our house. I was sure of that now, and a few weeks later I found out that Mary knew it too. She came by my house with a middle-aged woman in a pink suit. Not a New Yorker. Mary looked shaky, but clean and less gaunt, and for the first time ever, her eyes were truly focused when she talked to me. Something had worked for her in the hospital.

  “That Lt. Russo told me all about it. I thought I’d ask you if I could see where…where…you know. But maybe not. Maybe not.” She went silent, lost in her thoughts.

  “I’m Mary Margaret’s cousin,” the other woman said. “From Minnesota. I’m taking her back home. We’re sure glad that policeman found us.”

  “Going back for a visit. Not so sure I’m staying.”

  “Mary,” I said, “I have to say thank you, forever and ever. I’ve wanted to, but they wouldn’t tell me how to find you. Do you want to come in? You are certainly welcome. We didn’t…the fireplace is still there…it didn’t seem right…is there anything I can do for you? Anything at all?”

  I was babbling. I couldn’t find the right words to tell her what I wanted to say, so I was using a lot of wrong ones.

  She shook her head. “You don’t need to say thank you. You found my girl and I found yours.”

  Close enough. I nodded, unable to speak.

  “Cover up the damn fireplace and hang a pretty picture on it. She liked rainbows.” She stopped, took a deep breath, started again. “We’re taking her back home, my sweetheart, and saying a proper good-bye to her with a minister, choir, resting her next to her grandparents and her poor father. I’m thinking about writing ‘Good Morning, Starshine’ on the stone. She loved that song.” She stared at my house. “Her name was Kristin, you know. Nice Norwegian name. Popular in Minnesota.”

  I hugged her hard and she hugged me.

  “Remember me to your lovely daughter,” she said as her cousin led her to the car.

  As if, I thought. As if Chris would ever forget.

  ***

  My father came home. He took his house back from his tenant and we talk now. We don’t talk a lot, not yet, but we talk. We began to plan a service for Rick, accepting that we might not ever know what really happened to him, but that we needed to remember and honor the man we did know.

  Joe showed up at my house with a full crew a few days after our talk on the steps, and seemed like his old self. I was relieved. I could not deal with a lost friendship right now. I had too much else on my plate. I had to return to my internship and make myself useful—working overtime!—or I would not get the credits I needed. My father was back in my life. Chris would be coming home from camp, where she had returned to finish her summer.

  Joe came to the party I had to celebrate my brand new kitchen. He looked over the tiles for signs of sloppy grouting until I told him to get a beer and leave my kitchen alone. He went into the living room, where I saw him straightening the picture on the wall. He was the same, but not quite.

  Darcy came, still apologizing for introducing me to Steven. I told her to shut up and serve the potato salad. The Pastores came, with a restaurant-size pan of lasagna and some more old photo albums. They admired everything about the kitchen. Then Mr. Pastore got into a discussion with Joe about tiles and Mrs. Pastore immediately began cutting up the lasagna. The perfect guests.

  Leary was there, unwisely eating everything in sight. We had fit some missing pieces together while he was in the hospital—he instantly recognized the two thugs in custody as the men who had invaded his apartment—and now he was eager to see where it had all started. To my surprise, he and my father hit it off instantly, trading stories about Brooklyn in the old days.

  Chris had come back from camp a few days before, again starving and begging for a hot bath, with the results of her classes carefully packed into a portfolio. There were sketches and watercolor studies and a series of pictures she had taken in photography class, forest scenes after a rain. In one, the sun hitting the drops created a dazzling, multi-colored prism, a rainbow. I had the perfect place for it.

  From deep in the duffle bag a turquoise bracelet emerged for me, agate earrings for all of her old friends, and a list of new friends who had to be invited to the party. At the party they immediately disappeared downstairs into the garden, and one of them was a cute boy who never left Chris’ side. Was this a new parenting abyss opening up? Tonight I was too busy as hostess to think about it much, but I’d have to ask some questions tomorrow.

  In the fall, Chris and I went back to school at the same time. By putting in killer hours I was able to finish my project at the museum, write my report and get my credit. They offered me a part-time job for the fall semester. A real paycheck would be involved. Of course I said yes.

  Chris talked to the boy from camp every night. He lived in Riverdale, the other end of the city. He was a two-hour subway ride away, which was fine with me.

  As the fall moved along, it became
clear that there would be no trial of anyone involved in Chris’ abduction, or the attack on Leary, or the various ways I had been harassed. The two men who had done it told everything they knew, to cut a deal for reduced jail time, just as Russo predicted. And when some small pieces of evidence they had overlooked put them in Rick’s house, they owned up to that too, desperately insisting his death had been an accident. They were only there to make threats, they said, but Rick had objected to their presence and threatened them. They had the nerve to claim it was self-defense. They would spend some serious time in jail, even with their deal.

  And no, they did not know why they were threatening him, it was Mr. McLeod’s orders. They’d moved the body, tried to hide it, but in case it was ever investigated, they’d planted the bag of money to create confusion. Again, McLeod’s orders, they claimed, though I thought it sounded stupid enough to be their own idea.

  In the meantime, McLeod calmly asserted there was no proof whatever that he even knew them, let alone was involved with any of their activities. He kept asserting it, and though Russo cursed when he told me, it looked like he was correct, and he was going to walk.

  Steven, however, would not. With the best legal counsel money could buy, he was only able to bargain down to a minimum sentence. He insisted he had nothing to do with Chris’ kidnapping, he learned about it after the fact and was only there to see she was not harmed. Russo did not believe a word of that. I almost did—almost—sometimes—but I truly did not care.

  All those years ago, when my husband was killed, I thought the worst thing possible had already happened to me, and there was nothing left to fear. Of course any parent knows that wasn’t true, and having Chris in danger brought that home again with a smack on the head. I would never forgive Steven.

  We finally had that memorial for Rick and as he directed, it was a party. The soundtrack was Sinatra and Ellington and Rosemary Clooney, and old cops took turns with the mike, telling stories both funny and touching. We all lifted a glass of Jameson’s to the man we remembered.

  The last piece of the story fell into place that day. Wanda showed up, escorted by her huge, silent brother. Her hair was a different color but her clothes were as eye catching as ever and she caught quite a few eyes. She mingled with old friends, joined in the toasting, and wept a little, but the story she most wanted to tell was not for the mike. It was for my father and me, no one else, and she told it in an empty adjoining room.

  It was about a young, ambitious cop who took a bribe for the only time in his career. It wasn’t money but a promise of introductions going way up the ladder, in return for abandoning an investigation on a drug-ridden block of Park Slope. It was a long shot anyway—the parents from out of town, the runaway daughter, and the few clues they had that led to that neighborhood. He knew the places to look but someone made it worthwhile for him to say he didn’t, to not ask questions about the young people who had suddenly disappeared from an especially shady house, to make sure the parents went home to Minnesota without learning anything.

  That was all it was. He had buried it in his memory until that missing girl turned up in a way that threatened someone he loved.

  “He told me he told them he would never let you get hurt and they told him he still owed them and to keep his mouth shut after all these years. He didn’t respond well to threats, so.” Wanda shrugged, but there were tears in her eyes. “So they shut his mouth for him.” Her brother came into the room, tapping his watch. “I gotta go now. Plane to catch. Anyways thought you’d like to know.”

  Dad and I went back into the reception, where someone was proposing another round to Rick.

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