Yesterday's Stardust (33 page)

“Trish isn’t home,” Rena gasped.

“So what.” Yamile opened the back door and all five ran in. Rena caught the screen before it slammed. They passed through a porch strewn with beer cans. Towers of empty blue beer boxes tottered along the screened-in windows. Rena pulled her into a fluorescent-lit kitchen that smelled of rancid oil and burned food. A woman in her forties or early fifties sat at the table, cigarette in one hand, old-fashioned glass in the other. “What you girls up to?”

“Just havin’ fun.” Yamile answered.

“Any of you know where Trish went?” Her words ran together. “She left a note. Said she was going out with Rab, but she took clothes.” Red-rimmed eyes looked from Yamile to Rena. “She movin’ in with that boy?”

Rena’s mouth opened, but it was Yamile who answered. “Probably. She’ll get sick of him before long and be back.”

The woman shrugged. “Cheaper when she’s gone.”

Yamile laughed. “Can we hang out in her room?”

“Go ahead. Just don’t wake Buddy and whoever that is sleeping on the floor.”

Lungs burning and legs trembling, Rena sat on the floor, hugging her knees the way Trish had last night. Dani sat next to her. The other three poked around the room, looking in empty drawers. Rena stared at a stack of empty frames on the desk and a vacant spot on the bookshelf that had once held the scrapbook she and Trish started in fifth grade and traded back and forth on their birthdays. They were going to travel together someday.
“See the world and fill the book,”
they’d said.

She thought of the moment the innocence had faded and her life took a wrong turn. A cold, moonless night in February. Walking home from a journalism club meeting at school. Alone.

Alone because Trish hadn’t shown up for the meeting and hadn’t called.

She stared at a single green bead on the floor under the dresser as a piece from the puzzle of that night chinked into place.

Trish had been in on it. Her best friend had set her up.

Rena shivered. Dani put her hand on her arm. “You okay?”

“Yeah. You were awesome,” she whispered.

“Can’t believe I pulled it off. I’ve only kicked dummies and punching bags.”

Yamile flopped down on Trish’s bed. Leah and Venus crawled around her and sat against the wall. “Rena tell you how we roll?”

“She told me you’re all about protecting each other, being a family. I like that.”

“Yeah.” Yamile looked down at her feet. “We do what we gotta do to take care of our own. If it’s fighting, we fight. If it’s gettin’ money to take care of somebody who gets pregnant or don’t have a place to stay, we do it.” She turned to Rena. “You hear what went down last night?”

“Heard some chatter before it.” She leaned against the wall and concentrated on even breathing. Jarod hadn’t returned her call.

“Rab almost got busted. Wasn’t your man in on it?”

“Not in the middle of it.” She talked about “it” like she knew.

Dani picked up the green bead and tossed it from one hand to the other. “What happened?”

“Rab got in on a payback with some Chi-town guys. Had it all set up with some chick going to let him in to grab some weed and coke from the Roses, but it went bad. Neighbors ratted to the cops and started screamin’, so he ran.”

Another chill shimmied up Rena’s spine. Jarod was in on this. Trish was an accomplice. What would the charges be if they got caught? Dani leaned toward her. “Is Rab the guy with the eagle tattoo?” she asked.

Rena nodded, forcing herself to look calm. She looked at Yamile. “What was the plan if they’d gotten it?”

“Doesn’t your man tell you nothin’?”

Pressing her knuckles into the carpet, Rena shrugged with one shoulder. “I knew enough. I was there when Jarod gave Rab the gun.”

Yamile smacked her lips, a weird sign that she approved. Only weeks ago Rena had craved that approval.

At the moment, it meant nothing. She waited for an answer.

“They were going to kill the girl and take the stuff.”

Dani fought nausea as she stared at the girl who’d just mentioned murder in the same tone anyone else would use to say she was going to brush her teeth.

Yamile lay on a pile of pillows, leaning on her elbow. She could have been any teen at a sleepover, except for the two-inch scar tugging at the tender skin beneath the outside corner of one eye. Yamile stretched and yawned. “I’m starving.”

Had this cold, hardened kid ever been a little girl who played with dolls and sang her ABCs? “How’d you get to be the leader, Yamile?”

“Blood.”

Dani winced.

Yamile laughed. “Not like that. My brother was one of the original Sevens, so I didn’t have to prove nothin’ to hang out with them. But they exclude females on lotsa stuff, so when I was like twelve, I decided the women oughta have their own thing, ya know?”

“So you started the Sisters.”

“Yeah. We got some wannabes hanging around, but there’s maybe fifteen solid. My girls take care of each other.” She sat up. “And now we got you.” She slid off the bed. “I gotta find some food.” She opened the door. “Hey,” she whispered. “You guys see who’s sleepin’ on the couch? It’s Chi.”

Bile rose in Dani’s throat. Her fingers curled around the green bead. “Chi…
na?”

“Yeah.” Yamile closed the door. “She’s who we needed the money for. Her aunt kicked her out ’cause she found out she’s pregnant.”

The clamminess returned. Dani swallowed twice and sucked air through parted lips. She rose slowly on wobbling legs. “I have to get up early. I’m going to run.”

Yamile nodded. “We’re meeting at your place from now on.”

Dani wiped dampness from her upper lip and reached across Yamile to grab the door handle.

“Hey.” Venus pointed a black-nailed finger at her. “This is perfect. Chi can live with you.”

August 31, 1927

Francie straightened the papers and rose from her desk.
Her
desk in
her
office.
Mama, if you could see me now. This part of my life is good.

For now.

The swell of pride deflated as she walked into the hall and past the locked closet. The door concealed a row of loaded guns. She quickened her steps. Exactly a week had passed since another failed attempt to murder Al Capone. Three men, all friends of Tag, men she knew, were dead. Tony Russo, Vinnie Spicuzza, Ben Giamonco. All shot.

Tag’s time was coming. She could feel it in her gut. Soon.

Outside her boss’s door, she took a deep breath then knocked and opened the door.

“In triplicate, Mr. Walbrecht.” She raised her voice to be heard over the jackhammers on the third floor. She smiled at the man behind the sprawling mahogany desk and set the file on the corner. As she did, she glanced down at the paper unrolled in front of him. It appeared to be a diagram of a maze, but Francie knew what she was looking at, knew exactly what to look for. Every day for weeks now she’d gotten an inside glimpse of a different phase of the construction just beginning above them.

“Thank you.” Her boss leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. “I’m thinking we should have lunch at Municip—
Navy
Pier today. Can’t get used to the name change. What are you in the mood for, my dear?”

Tag’s coaching resounded in her head, but she ignored it. She was playing this one her way. No pouts, no dew-eyed looks. She knew how to get to a man like this. “You’ll laugh.”

“Try me.”

“Lunch would be wonderful”—she looked for, and found, a square red box on the diagram—“but I’d love some hot roasted peanuts.”

A deep, rich laugh echoed off the dark paneling. “That, we can do.” He stood and offered his arm. She took it, but discreetly pulled away when they reached the elevator. Mr. Walbrecht never used the back entrance, which meant that every day at half past twelve she tried to ignore the stares from Doris and the woman who sat at the desk she once occupied, as she walked beside one of the richest men in Chicago past glass cases teaming with sparkling diamonds and gleaming with pearls.

She hated that part of her day. Hated the stares and the way she had to act better than Doris when she was anything but.

They walked out into oppressive heat and into a waiting car, the door held open by a man in a black uniform with gold buttons.

Leather seats the color of butter welcomed them. A small fan mounted on the dashboard stirred the air. Francie adjusted her hat and folded her hands on her lap. As they pulled away from the curb, she ducked, looking up at the boarded windows on the third floor. “When will it be open?” she asked, with the air of a child anticipating Christmas.

“Can you keep a secret, my dear?”

Heart beating in time with the puttering motor, she slid her hands behind her back, crossing her fingers like the child she no longer was. “Of course.”

“The new vault is being made in Germany as we speak. It should arrive in June and coincide perfectly with the end of the reconstruction. The security company assures me the wiring and alarms will be installed and everything ready by June. So…” He hung on the word as if giving a drum roll. “We’ll switch over to the new system on my birthday, at the very moment I was born.”

Francie smiled. She didn’t ask the obvious questions. There were other ways to find that out. Mr. Walbrect’s mother belonged to Mrs. Hollanddale’s book club.

And Francie made all of her gowns.

D
ani stared at the time in the corner of her computer screen, begging it to change. The time, and her brain, were in worse-than-usual Monday morning slo-mo. She’d taken a half hour shower when she got home around one a.m.—shampooing three times, scrubbing off the tattoo and makeup. And guilt.

She’d spent the night connecting dots. Jarod had given a gun to Trish’s boyfriend Rabia—the guy whose picture she’d identified for Todd. Rab’s intention was to kill the woman who lived in the house—the mother of the baby who slept in the filthy crib? After two hours of wrestling, she’d gotten out of bed, driven to a gas station, and called the police, telling them all she knew. Anonymously.

That left her mind freed up to panic over China. There were moments during the sleepless night when the irony sank in and she’d laughed, in a twisted sort of way. China didn’t have a place to live because Dani had told her to leave her boyfriend, and when she did, he killed himself, leaving the apartment empty for the person China blamed for killing him to move in…and invite China to live with her.

Even now, hysteria stalked the edges of her remaining sanity.

She couldn’t think about it now. She had to focus. After work she’d go home and pray her way through it and decide what to do with what she knew. But right now she had to multitask her way into a mental fog that allowed no room for fear.

Between rewriting the end of her story on a girl who’d earned her college tuition sewing vampire costumes, she made notes on things she wanted to ask the director of the Boys and Girls Club, and instant messaged a seventeen-year-old boy who fashioned yard art out of old wheel covers.

Her e-mail icon popped up.

You
kissed
him?

Anna. Responding to the plea for advice she’d sent what now seemed like years ago.