“There’s coffee,” Jess offered.
Don looked toward the dining room table. “Looks like you’ve already eaten.”
“Jess forgot to tell me you were dropping by,” Adam explained, his lips a smile. “I’d be happy to whip up another omelet.”
“Thank you, but maybe some other time.”
“Let me hang up your coat.” Jess held out her arms.
Don dropped the bags of bagels into them. “No. I think I’ll get going. I just wanted to get these to you.” He headed for the door. “You probably should put them in the freezer.”
The phone rang.
“Busy place,” Adam said.
“Don, wait a minute. Please,” Jess urged. Don waited by the door while Jess went to the kitchen to answer the phone. When she came back a minute later, she was pale and shaking, her cheeks streaked with tears. Both men moved instantly toward her. “That was the medical examiner’s office,” she said quietly. “They found Connie DeVuono.”
“What? Where? When?” Don asked, the words emerging like pellets from a gun.
“In Skokie Lagoons. An ice fisherman stumbled across her body late yesterday afternoon and called the police. They brought it to Harrison Street by ambulance.”
“They’re sure it’s her?”
“Dental records don’t lie.” A cry caught in Jess’s throat. “She’d been strangled with a piece of wire rope, so tight she was almost decapitated. Apparently, the body was quite well-preserved because of the cold.”
“I’m so sorry, Jess,” Don told her, drawing her into his arms.
Jess cried softly against his shoulder. “I have to go see Connie’s mother. I have to tell her.”
“The police can do that.”
“No,” Jess said quickly, seeing Adam tiptoe toward the door, his jacket over his arm. “I have to do it. Jesus, Don, what can I say to her? What can I say to her little boy?”
“You’ll think of just the right words, Jess.”
Jess said nothing as Adam opened the door and threw her a delicate kiss good-bye. The door closed softly after him.
“Where does Connie’s mother live?” Don asked. If he was aware of Adam’s departure, he said nothing.
“Miller Street. I’ve the exact address written down somewhere.” Jess wiped the tears away from her eyes.
“Go take a shower and get dressed. I’ll drive you over.”
“No, Don, you don’t have to do that.”
“Jess, you don’t have a car, and there’s no way I’m letting you go through this alone. Now, please, don’t argue with me on this one.”
Jess reached over and stroked her ex-husband’s cheek. “Thank you,” she said.
A
re you all right?” he was asking.
“No.”
Jess was still crying. She couldn’t stop. Even in the shower, her tears hadn’t abated. She’d cried as she slipped into her jeans and red sweater, cried as she slid into the front seat of Don’s Mercedes, cried as they pulled up in front of Mrs. Gambala’s modest duplex in Little Italy.
“You have to stop crying,” Don had urged gently. “Otherwise she’ll know before you even open your mouth.”
“She’ll know anyway,” Jess had told him. And she’d been right.
The front door had opened before Jess reached the top step of the elaborate little redbrick porch. Mrs. Gambala stood in the doorway, a small woman dressed from head to toe in black, her grandson peeking out warily from behind her ample hips. “They found her,” Mrs. Gambala
said, accepting the truth even as she shook her head from side to side in denial.
“Yes,” Jess had admitted, her voice catching, unable to continue.
Steffan had taken one look at Jess, one look at his grandmother, then raced up the narrow staircase to his room, slamming his door in painful protest.
They’d gone inside where Jess had explained the details to Mrs. Gambala, promising to tell her everything as soon as the coroner’s report came in, assuring her that the man responsible would be quickly apprehended and brought to trial. She’d stared at Don, as if daring him to contradict her.
“Are you going to issue a warrant for Rick Ferguson’s arrest?” Don had asked as they were returning to his car.
There was nothing Jess wanted to do more, but she knew that until she learned the details of the way Connie DeVuono died, she was smarter to hold off. She had to know exactly what, if any, physical evidence there was to link Rick Ferguson to Connie’s death. “Not yet. Are you going to call him?”
“What reason would I have for calling him if you’re not going to arrest him?” he’d asked in exaggerated innocence. “Besides, it’s Sunday. I don’t work on Sundays.”
“Thank you,” Jess told him, then started crying again.
“Are you all right?” he was asking now.
“No,” she said, folding her top lip under the bottom in an effort to stop them from quivering.
Don reached across the front seat and took her hands, in his. “What are you thinking about?”
“I’m thinking about how Mrs. Gambala keeps all her furniture covered in plastic wrap,” Jess told him, releasing a deep breath of air.
Don laughed, clearly surprised. “You don’t see much of that any more,” he agreed.
“Connie told me about it once. She said that Steffan didn’t like waiting for her at his grandmother’s house because she kept all the furniture in plastic and there wasn’t anywhere comfortable to sit down.” A sob caught in Jess’s throat. “And now, that’s where he’ll grow up. In a house full of plastic covers.”
“In a house full of love, Jess,” Don reminded her. “His grandmother loves him. She’ll take good care of him.”
“Connie said her mother was too old to look after him, that her English was poor.”
“So, he’ll teach her English, and she’ll teach him Italian. Jess,” Don said, giving her hands an extra squeeze, “you can’t worry about everything. You can’t absorb everyone else’s pain. You have to pick and choose, or you’ll make yourself nuts.”
“I always thought it would be better to know,” Jess confided, after a long pause. “I always thought it would be better, no matter how awful, to know the truth, for there to be a resolution. Now, I’m not so sure. At least before today, there was hope. Even if it was false hope, maybe that’s better than no hope at all.”
“You’re talking about your mother,” Don said quietly.
“All these years I thought that if only I’d known one way or the other what happened to her, then I could get on with my life. …”
“You
have
gotten on with your life.”
“No, I haven’t. Not really.” She looked out the car window, noticed for the first time that they were traveling east on I-94.
“Jess, what are you talking about? Look at all you’ve accomplished.”
“I know what I’ve accomplished. That’s not what I mean,” she told him.
“Tell me what you mean,” he directed gently.
“I mean that eight years ago, I got stuck. And no matter what I’ve done, no matter what I’ve accomplished, emotionally, I’m still stuck back on the day my mother disappeared.”
“And you think that if you’d known what happened to her, that if someone much like yourself had approached you then and given you the same sort of news you delivered to Connie’s son today, you would have been better off?”
“I don’t know. But at least I would have been able to deal with it once and for all. I would have been able to grieve. I would have been able to go on.”
“Then you’ve answered your own question,” he told her.
“I guess I have.” Jess wiped the tears away from her eyes, rubbed at her nose with the backs of her fingers, stared out the side window of the car. “Where are we going?”
“Union Pier.”
“Union Pier?” Jess immediately conjured up the image of the small lakeshore community approximately seventy miles outside of Chicago where Don maintained a weekend retreat. “Don, I can’t. I have to get ready for court tomorrow.”
“You haven’t seen the place in a long time,” he reminded her. “I’ve made some changes, incorporated some of the ideas you once suggested. Come on, I promise to have you back by five o’clock. You know you aren’t going to be able to think clearly before then anyway.”
“I don’t know.”
“Give yourself a break, Jess. We both know you’re as prepared for tomorrow as anyone could possibly be.”
They continued in silence, Jess following the scenery, watching as the few drops of rain that had started falling turned gradually to snow. Buildings gave way to open fields. They took the Union Pier exit, continued east toward Lake Michigan.
ELSINOR DUDE RANCH
, a large wooden sign announced over an arched wrought-iron gate.
HORSE TRAILS AND LESSONS. INQUIRE INSIDE. DRIVING RANGE
, another sign proclaimed half a mile down the road, oblivious to the fact it was the wrong season for golf. Jess remembered her father teasing her mother about teaching her to play golf after he retired.
UNION PIER GUN CLUB
, another large wood sign stated, as they continued east, the snow becoming heavier, more insistent. Jess sat up straight in her seat, all her senses on instant alert.
“What’s the matter?” Don asked.
“Since when did they have a gun club out here?” Jess asked.
“Since forever,” Don reminded her. “Why? You feel like working off some frustration? Although I’m pretty sure you have to be a member,” he continued when she failed to respond.
“Do they have an archery range?”
“What?”
“An archery range,” Jess repeated, not exactly sure where her thoughts were headed.
“I wouldn’t think so. Why the sudden interest in archery?” He stopped abruptly. “The Crossbow Killer?” he asked.
“Terry Wales swore on the stand that he hadn’t shot a
bow and arrow since he was a kid in camp. What if I can prove he did?”
“Then I’d say you have a clear shot at murder one.”
“Can I use your phone?”
“The whole point of this trip was for you to relax.”
“This
is
how I relax. Please.”
Don lifted the car phone off its receiver, handed it to Jess. She quickly dialed Neil Strayhorn at home.
“Neil, I want you to find out about all the archery clubs within a two-hour drive of Chicago,” she said without unnecessary preliminaries.
“Jess?” Neil’s voice filled the car over the speakerphone.
“I want to know if Terry Wales is a member of any of them, if he’s even been near an archery range in the last thirty years. Detective Mansfield can probably be of help. There can’t be that many archery clubs around. Tell him we need the information by tomorrow morning. I’ll call you later.” She hung up before he could object or ask questions.
“You’re a hard taskmaster,” Don told her, turning left onto Smith Road.
“I had a good teacher,” Jess reminded him, bracing herself as the car bounced along the unpaved, bumpy one-lane road.
Summer cottages lined the secluded route. Despite the fact that the houses along the bluff had roughly quadrupled their value in the last decade, the residents obviously considered repairing the potholes in the road a low priority. Jess held tightly to the door handle as the car bounced toward Don’s pine-wood cottage, finding it increasingly difficult to see out the front window.
“It looks so forbidding,” Jess said, as snow swirled everywhere around them.
“I’ll light a fire, open a bottle of wine, it won’t look so bad.”
“It’s really starting to snow.”
“I’ll race you to the front door,” Don said, and Jess was off and running.
“I’d forgotten how beautiful it is here.” Jess stood by the large glass window that made up the back wall of the cottage and stared through the snow at the small garden she had planted herself many years ago. The bluff stood just beyond, a series of steps carved right into its steep side, leading down to the lake. Large spruce trees lined the borders of Don’s property, separating him from his neighbors on either side, guarding his privacy. Behind her, a fire roared in the large brick fireplace. Don sat on the white shag rug between the fireplace and one of two old-style colonial chesterfields, the remains of the picnic lunch he’d prepared spread out before him.
“We miss you,” Don said quietly. “The garden and I. Do you remember when you planted those shrubs?”
“Of course I do. It was just after we got married. We argued about what kind of bushes would grow the fastest, be the prettiest.”
“We didn’t argue.”
“All right, we
discussed.”
“And then we compromised.”
“We did it your way,” Jess said, and laughed. “This was a nice idea, coming here. Thank you for thinking of it.” She returned to the white shag rug, lowered herself to the floor, leaned back against the brown-and-ocher striped sofa.
“We had a lot of nice times here,” he said, his voice steeped in nostalgia.
“Yes, we did,” she said. “I think I liked May the best, when everything was just starting to bud, and I knew I had the whole summer to look forward to. By the time June came around, I was already starting to worry that summer would be over soon and winter would be coming.”
“And I always liked winter best because I knew that no matter how cold it got outside, I could come up here and build a fire and make a picnic lunch and be warm and happy. What more could anyone ask for than to be warm and happy?”
“Sounds so simple.”
“It doesn’t have to be difficult.”
“Do you bring Trish here often?” she asked.
“Not often.”
“Why not?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Are you in love with her?” Jess asked.
“I’m not sure,” Don said again. “What about you?”
“I’m definitely not in love with her.”
Don smiled. “You know what I mean. You gave me quite a surprise this morning.”
“It wasn’t the way it looked,” Jess said quickly.
“How did it look?”
“I guess like we’d spent the night together.”
“You didn’t?”
“Well, in a manner of speaking, I guess we did. Adam had a little too much to drink and passed out on my couch.”
“Charming.”
“He’s really a very nice man.”
“I’m sure he is, or you wouldn’t be interested in him.”
“I’m not sure I am. Interested in him.” Jess wondered if she was protesting too much.
“How long have you known him?”
“Not long. Maybe a month,” she said. Maybe less, she thought.