Authors: Crystal Hubbard
“Tits McFloozie?” Chiara cut in.
“Tiff McCousy,” John clarified. “Troy’s woman.”
“You even cried when John gave you those fat diamond earrings, and normally you would have played it off or punched him in the head,” Cady finished. “You never used to be such a wet end, so I started thinking there must be a hormonal reason behind the excessive waterworks. The shirt you were wearing when you first came home gave you away, too.”
“In what way?”
“You looked like Tits McFloozie in it. Your boobs aren’t usually so…noticeable. And now, your face confirms my suspicion.”
“My face looks like road kill.”
“Exactly. I’d think that most people who are attacked try to protect their faces.” Cady demonstrated, slightly curling forward with her hands and forearms shielding her head and face. “Your face is a mess. You were curled up,” Cady moved her arms to her midsection, “but you were protecting something else.
Someone
else. Since you’re not showing yet, I figure you at about three months.”
“Three and a half,” Chiara said. “Damn it. You better not tell Mama, or Clara, or Ciel, and especially not Kyla.”
“I won’t tell.” Cady plucked at a worn patch on the knee of her jeans.
“I mean it, Cady.”
Her eyebrows shot up. “I won’t.”
“You let things slip in a way that seems like you’re not spilling a secret, when that’s all you’re doing. You can’t tell anyone. Not yet. Especially not now.”
“I can keep a secret,” Cady said.
“You’re a reporter,” Chiara scoffed. “You’re genetically predisposed to reveal secrets.”
“I’m a freelancer, so I get to pick and choose the secrets I reveal, and I’m a woman of my word. I won’t tell anyone.”
“Promise,” Chiara challenged.
“Look, I didn’t tell anyone that you and John got married, did I?” Cady threw out in her defense.
Chiara looked at John and saw her own shock mirrored.
“Of course, it’s not legal, since I was the one who performed the ceremony when you were ten,” Cady laughed.
“Nine,” John and Chiara corrected, both of them smiling in relief.
Cady couldn’t stop laughing. “Man, you should have seen your faces when I said that. Are you guys really that scared to get married?”
* * *
After final examinations from an obstetrician, a plastic surgeon and a physician’s assistant, Chiara was released with a prescription for acetaminophen and an outpatient treatment plan that called for ice packs, rest, and as little stress as possible.
Standing outside her apartment with Cady while John took a quick walk-through, Chiara doubted that she could manage the stress-free part of her doctor’s orders.
“It’s fine,” John said, coming out and taking Chiara’s hand. “Well…you know.”
Chiara had looked forward to showering in her own bathroom and getting out of the green scrubs she’d been given to wear home. But seeing all of her belongings destroyed or strewn around the apartment made her want to run back to the hospital. The wreckage in the light of day was bad enough, but watching Cady’s reaction made her feel even worse.
Chiara started at her big sister’s expression of horror. “I know it looks bad, Cady, but—”
“Burglars?” she shrieked at John. “You told me that Chiara walked in on a burglary. This is more than just a burglary!” She encompassed the clutter and debris in the living and dining rooms with a wide sweep of her arms. “Have the police scoured the place?”
“Yes,” Chiara said.
Cady went back to the front door and opened it. She squinted at the two lock plates on the outer side. “There are tool marks on your locks. They were picked. Did the police talk to your neighbors, ask if anyone heard anything?”
“They said they would,” John responded as Cady reentered the apartment and locked the door.
“Do they know when the break-in occurred?” Cady moved farther into the apartment. She stepped over a shredded sofa cushion to get into the kitchen.
“They aren’t sure,” Chiara said. She felt a little weak and leaned on John for support.
“This happened on Christmas Day, Chiara,” Cady said, disgust in her voice. “The day right after you left for St. Louis.”
“How can you tell?” Chiara was almost as impressed as she was afraid of her sister’s high-powered observation skills.
A small white object came flying out of the kitchen. John caught it, and he and Chiara looked at it. It was the analog timer from Chiara’s stove. Chiara almost smiled. Zhou had given her the complicated little kitchen gadget as a housewarming present. It showed the date and time, recommended cooking times for boiled eggs, frozen vegetables and such, and it had a space in back to store matches for igniting pilot lights.
Cady leaned against the doorframe of the kitchen. “Was that thing working when you left for St. Louis?”
“Yes,” Chiara said.
“Then the break-in occurred at one a.m. or one p.m. on December 25, according to when that timer got broken,” John observed.
“I can’t imagine anyone breaking in at one in the afternoon,” Chiara said.
John pulled his cell phone from the inner breast pocket of his jacket. “I’m calling Detective Vincent. He would have had this bagged as evidence if he’d seen it. He said that narrowing the time down would help a lot.”
“When you get the detective on the line, tell him to interview the lady in apartment 816,” Cady said. “I’ll bet she heard something.”
“Mrs. Mayo?” Chiara said. “She’s a hundred and ten years old. She’s deaf as a doorknob. All she does is watch television twenty-four hours a day. She’s also the meanest woman in the building.”
“Whatever,” Cady said with a lift of a finely arched eyebrow. “All I know is that when we passed her unit, I smelled White Diamonds.”
“Mrs. Mayo bathes in the stuff,” Chiara said.
“I smelled it at your door, too, before we came in. She came nosying around here recently. And if she’s so deaf, how did she know we were coming down the corridor? It’s not like we were beating drums or making a lot of noise. I saw the shadow of her feet at her door as we passed. She probably just pretends to be hard of hearing so people don’t pester her with idle chatter. She was probably watching us through her peephole. And if she watches TV twenty-four hours a day, she was probably awake when your place got hit. She saw or heard something,” Cady said confidently. “Every building has a Mrs. Mayo.”
“I’ll mention her to Detective Vincent,” John said. Stepping carefully, he made his way into Chiara’s bedroom so he could have some privacy for his call.
“What kind of trouble are you in?” Cady asked.
Chiara wanted to sit, but all of her furniture was in pieces. “It’s nothing John and I can’t handle.”
Cady kicked aside everything in her path to get to the remnants of the sofa cushions. She stacked them in a chair-shaped pile and helped Chiara sit on them. She then sat cross-legged on the floor in front of her. “Is this part of your handling it? Who did this?”
“I don’t know.”
Chiara bowed her face to stop Cady’s eyes from boring into hers. It was far easier to confound a polygraph machine than it was to get one over on Cady.
“This doesn’t look random,” Cady persisted.
“I’m sure it wasn’t.” Chiara laughed nervously. “I’m a woman living alone who travels a lot. Whoever was watching me probably thought it would be easy to come in and rob me.”
Cady anxiously rubbed her hands along her thighs. “You were being watched?”
“I didn’t mean…Cady…I just want to start packing the place up,” Chiara finished when all other possible explanations failed her.
“Packing? Don’t you mean cleaning? There’s nothing her to salvage. Even the lining of your drapes has been ripped out. Who does that?”
Chiara squirmed in her makeshift chair as she watched Cady’s face tense in thought. Once Cady put her mind to work on a problem, it was only a matter of time before she found the answers she sought. The most worrisome thing about her was that she never needed much to work with. When they were kids, Abby used to give them 50,000-piece puzzles to keep them busy on rainy Saturdays. Cady had a canny knack for puzzling together pieces of sky, empty ocean or barren desert. The ripped draperies were just another piece to go along with what Cady already had at her disposal: Zhou’s death, the trashed apartment and the physical assault. If Cady found out about her sudden resignation from USITI, Chiara was sure that her sister would piece it all together.
And then there would be yet another person placed in the line of Emmitt Grayson’s fire.
“The only piece that doesn’t fit is the baby,” Cady muttered.
“Cady, please. Stay out of it,” Chiara said.
Cady narrowed her amber eyes. “Stay out of what?”
“Stay out of my business!” Chiara snapped. “I don’t need you snooping around, sticking your fingers in pies that have nothing to do with you. Respect my privacy, if you don’t mind too damn much.”
“All right, this is enough, Chiara,” Cady said. “You and John have always been this satellite partnership orbiting the rest of us. Until I met Keren, I envied you. I didn’t have anyone who understood me without me having to explain everything. I didn’t have anyone with whom I could share all of myself, and not just the good parts.”
Chiara let Cady take her hands.
“You two take it to an extreme,” Cady went on. “All you seem to need is each other, and that’s not always a good thing. Now seems to be one of those times. Whatever’s wrong, you have to know that you’ve got family that can help. Don’t forget that.”
Chiara uneasily pulled her hands free of Cady’s. “I won’t forget.”
“I want to help,” Cady said.
“Good.” Chiara deliberately misinterpreted her meaning. “We can start packing today.”
“What was stolen?”
Chiara held her tongue.
“What were they looking for?”
“We’re taking care of it,” Chiara said with deadly calm.
“Who’s we?”
“Me, John and George.”
Cady’s spine stiffened. “George who?” Her lips parted with a tiny pip of understanding. “Not George…” She turned a wary eye on Chiara. “Good Lord, Chiara, how much trouble are you in?”
“I called the right sister,” John said. He and Chiara stood in Chiara’s living room, which was now empty except for an air mattress pushed to one corner. “Detective Vincent just finished talking to Mrs. Mayo. She recalled seeing three strangers in the corridor around one
a.m.
on Christmas morning. She said that she’d ‘bet dollars to donuts that they weren’t Santa’s elves making a delivery.’ Once he had Mrs. Mayo’s statement, Detective Vincent re-interviewed the doorman, and forced him to revise his first statement. He admitted that he let in three men claiming to be here for a party on another floor. He lied originally because he didn’t want to get fired.”
“Cady doesn’t mess around,” Chiara remarked.
“The disposal crew is giving her a hard time,” John said, lightly stroking Chiara’s upper arms. “I’m going down to the lobby for a minute to remind them of the price they quoted before they started the job.”
“You’d better hurry,” Chiara smile weakly. “Before Cady pulls out her lawyer card.”
“You mean Ciel?”
Chiara nodded.
“Will you be okay for a few minutes?”
“I’ll lock the doors and keep my cell phone in my hand the whole time,” Chiara promised.
He kissed the end of her nose, exited the apartment and waited in the corridor until she’d locked and latched her door behind him.
She shook her head in amazement as she strolled the perimeter of her living room. Shortly after her arrival from the hospital, Mr. Petrie had rung her bell, offering the use of an air bed if she chose to stay in her apartment rather than check into a hotel. Sick of hotels and hospitals, Chiara had readily accepted Mr. Petrie’s offer. Cady had made the bed with the sheets Mr. Petrie had included—Chiara’s bed linen hadn’t been damaged, but she couldn’t bring herself to sleep on anything her intruders had touched—and Chiara had fallen upon the bouncy bed and slept for hours.
When she awakened, she saw how productive Cady and John had been. John had changed into a pair of jeans and a sweater after the airline had shipped his overnighter back to him. Cady had called in a waste removal crew that had bagged, boxed and carried out everything that had been ruined while John helped Cady salvage whatever could be saved, primarily Chiara’s bed and bath linen, clothes and books.
No evidence remained of the broken picture frames, torn photo albums, smashed television and sound system and ripped drapes. Aside from black plastic bags filled with the items she was keeping, the apartment almost looked as it had when she’d first viewed it, when she’d first fallen in love with the building and had decided to move in.
Of course, back then there hadn’t been holes in the walls or sections of molding ripped out where the vandals had likely been looking for a concealed safe, according to Detective Vincent. And the built-in shelving in the living and dining rooms hadn’t been smashed.
The vaulted, multi-colored marble ceilings, original to the building and prime examples of the coolly sophisticated ornamentation popular in Chicago architecture during the late 1800s, were still intact.
Now that the rooms were empty, Chiara saw that her hardwood floors still gleamed like warm toffee despite their fresh nicks and gouges. She’d kept them protected by gorgeous rugs she’d sent home from the Far East, but those rugs were now rolled up and slumped in a closet.
The bathroom had been left relatively unscathed, suffering only the removal of the medicine cabinet from the wall and the overturning of the small shelving unit Chiara had used to store towels. The elegance of the bathroom made up for its smallish size. Although it held a basin, toilet, shower and tub, the high ceilings made the room seem less confining. Tiny wall tile imported from Morocco formed lovely mosaics while the floor was a single slab of Carrera marble from Italy. The fixtures were original to the building, and Chiara had always liked the whimsy of faucets curved like an elephant’s trunk and hot and cold water knobs shaped like stylized pineapples.
Her bedroom faced north, which was perfect because the sunrise left her alone. Her queen-sized bed, which had filled the floor space, had been crudely battered apart and the mattress slashed. The matching bureau had been scrapped, along with the bed, since so many of its drawers had been destroyed.
Cady had repeatedly assured her that her renter’s insurance would cover her belongings and even much of the damage to the apartment. But no amount of money could ease the pain of leaving, of knowing that she’d been driven out of the home she’d loved so well for so long. She’d been scared out, and now she was planning to go back home to start all over again.
She’d made a conscious effort to curb her newborn crybaby side, and she hadn’t shed a tear as the disposal team carried out the last of the furniture she’d chosen so carefully. But as she stood at her bare living room windows, staring east toward the darkness of Lake Michigan far in the distance, she couldn’t fight the combined power of hormones and grief. She mourned her old life even as she embraced the potentials of her new one. It was the transition that was so hard because of how it had been brought about.
“Someone attacked me in my own home because of that stupid…” She pressed her fingers to her mouth. Because of Zhou, who put the master chip in her possession? Because of Grayson, who’d created it? Because of George, who’d uncovered its use?
Or because of herself, for being so damned naïve.
Her whole body hurt, and now her soul ached too at the thought of the number of people she’d unknowingly helped deceive in her service to USITI. She wrapped her arms around herself and slid down the wall, her tears bursting forth. She had no idea how long she’d been weeping when John found her and enveloped her in his warmth.
“Shh, shh,” he soothed, pressing her head to his chest. “It’s okay.”
“I don’t want to leave this way,” she sobbed. “I loved it here, John. We made a good life here. I didn’t want my last memories of this place to be awful.”
“They won’t be,” he said earnestly. “I won’t let them.”
* * *
Cady and Chiara spent the night on the air bed while John slept on a pallet made of bath towels and blankets. Cady began her second morning in Chicago by venturing out for breakfast for the three of them, while Chiara went about completing her exit plans for USITI.
“I called Chele Brewster,” Chiara told John after he’d taken a quick shower. “She always works on Sundays, and she’s agreed to seal the boxes I left in my office Friday morning. She’s having a courier deliver them to me tomorrow.”
John peered at Chiara, his eyes moving over her face. She’d pulled her hair into a ponytail, and in her simple black tunic, form-fitting black pants and soft-soled boots, she looked like a college student rather than a technical sales rep. The swelling on the right side of her face had lessened to the point where she could fully open her right eye, but the coloration was vividly grotesque. The ER doctor had told them that the bruising would look worse before it got better, and at the moment, Chiara’s face looked as if it had been painted in psychedelic shades of yellow, purple and black.
John’s intense stare made her bring her right hand to the injury site. “I know how it looks. That’s why I didn’t want to go into the office myself.”
Holding a towel about his lean hips, John went into the bedroom. “Did you tell Chele what happened?”
“No. She’s a good person, but we don’t call her the town crier of technical sales for no reason.”
John put on a fresh pair of black sports briefs, but he had to wear the same jeans he’d worn the day before. “Would you mind if I went and picked up your boxes myself when Cady gets back? There won’t be a full staff at the office since it’s Sunday.”
“No,” she said. “But why?”
John poked his head and arms through a long-sleeved T-shirt, one he’d left at Chiara’s before he’d moved back to St. Louis. “I need to send an e-mail.”
“To who?”
“To my team in St. Louis.”
“You can send it from here,” Chiara said. “My Internet cable is still operable, and you have your laptop.”
“I need to send this e-mail from USITI.” He tugged on some socks, laced on his sneakers.
Chiara worked one hand over the other as she followed him into the dining room, where his briefcase, laptop and wallet sat on the counter separating the dining room from the kitchen. “Please don’t do anything foolish, John. Don’t do anything that will rouse more suspicion than we’re already under.”
“I won’t.”
“I’ve been thinking,” she said.
“I know. I heard you tossing and turning on the mattress all night. I don’t know how Cady slept through it.”
“Maybe we should go to the state attorney,” she said quietly. “Maybe we should have done that in the first place. Just turn the chip and the information about it over to the authorities.”
John leaned back against the counter, crossing one ankle over the other. “I thought about that, too. And then I thought about Zhou. If he knew what the chip did, why didn’t
he
take it to the proper authorities? Why did he put it in our hands? Maybe he thought he was protecting himself against Grayson, by using the chip as leverage.”
He scrubbed both hands over his face in renewed frustration. “Zhou obviously underestimated Grayson. We can’t afford to do the same thing. We need security. Leverage. I don’t think we can get that by just turning over the chip to the state attorney’s office. Grayson would be arrested, probably indicted, and what then? He’s already proven that he’s willing to kill over this chip. All he has to do is make a phone call, and the same psychos who came here and trashed your apartment will find us and take us out. We either spend the rest of our lives running, with our baby, or we end up like Zhou.”
“Okay,” she responded. “I had the same feeling, for the most part. I’m just so scared. I just want this to be over.”
John crossed his arms and looked at her for a very long time. When he spoke, his words hurt Chiara almost as much as her attacker’s fist had. “I’m disappointed in you,” he said.
“Wh-What?” she gasped. All the air seemed to have been sucked from her lungs.
“You’ve never let me, your family, or anyone else dictate how much control you have over your life,” he said. “You’ve always been the fierce one. The fighter. You’re letting Emmitt Grayson get the better of you.”
“I didn’t
let
anyone destroy my apartment,” she argued, the heat of her rising anger evaporating the tears she might have shed. “I didn’t
let
a man blitz me and beat me unconscious. I’m lost here, John. I don’t know what to do from one moment to the next! I’ve never had to fight my way out of something like this before. Do you think I’m enjoying this? Do you think I like feeling helpless and used and…and…weak? I was helpless last night, and Grayson used me, but I’m not weak! Don’t you dare accuse me of not being able or willing to fight!”
The pretty brown eyes that had seemed too big for her face when she was a kid blazed with fury, and a tiny smile came to John’s face. “That’s all I wanted to see, baby. I needed to see that you still had your fire.”
We’re going to need it, before this is over.
* * *
“Who is it?” Cady asked sweetly, even though peering through the peephole she saw perfectly well who it was.
“It’s John,” John grunted. “Open the door, please.”
“John?” Cady repeated. “John who? I know no John.”
“Quit messing around, Cady.” Chiara tried to work her way around Cady, who used her body to block access to the doorknob and locks.
“I’m sorry, sir, but you can’t come in without properly identifying yourself,” Cady giggled.
“Still sixteen inside that thirty-seven-year-old body,” John complained.
“The body’s only thirty-six, boy,” Cady said. “Now do you want to come in and dump those boxes or not? They sure look heavy.”
“It’s Mahofro,” John grudgingly said. “Now open the damn door, please.”
“That’s not funny, Cady,” Chiara said, nudging her sister out of the way to open the door for John. “It wasn’t funny when we were kids and it’s less funny now.”
Cady shrugged. “It’s funny to me.”
“Thanks, baby.” John, carrying two sealed file boxes, gave Chiara a kiss on the cheek as he passed her to set the boxes in the living room.
“What’s this?” Cady asked.
Without meeting her sister’s eyes, Chiara said, “I resigned from USITI last week.”
Cady’s left eyebrow shot up. “Oh really? Just like that? You upped and left your job?”
“Actually, I’ve been thinking about moving back to St. Louis for a while now,” Chiara said, kneeling over her boxes to strip away the sealing tape while John set up his laptop on the kitchen counter. “It’s something that’s been on my mind since John’s transfer, but I hadn’t decided one way or the other for certain.”
“Seems to me as though you’d move for John, even if you wouldn’t do it just to be with your own family,” Cady remarked.
“As goes his nation, so goes mine, is that what you think?”
“Well…”
“Contrary to what you and everybody might believe, John and I are separate people with our own lives and responsibilities. It was his choice to move to St. Louis and I supported it, same as he supported my choice to stay up here in Chicago.”
“Never mind that you’re hardly ever in North America, let alone Chicago, and that John is up here with you every weekend when you are in town,” Cady said. “Hardly anything changed when he moved.”
“Our arrangement works well for us.” Chiara rooted through her boxes, making sure that everything she’d packed the day before was still there. “It always has.”
“Since you’re going to have all this free time now, maybe you should think about planning a wedding,” Cady suggested.
“Or about getting another job.” Chiara took inventory of the framed photos of her nieces and nephews.
“You’re pregnant, kiddo,” Cady reminded her. “It won’t be so easy getting another sales rep job. You’ll have to tell your employer that you’ll be having a baby in six months.”
Chiara was a little too forceful in replacing her framed photos in the box. “I don’t want to work in sales ever again, and especially not for another software company.”