Playing Dead by Julia Heaberlin

Author:Julia Heaberlin
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: David_James Mobilism.org
ISBN: 9780345527028
Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
Published: 2012-05-28T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 18

I let the water from the hotel’s luxury shower massager run like hot spikes down my spine. Rosalina and I parted on pretty good terms, considering—not enemies, not friends.

She seemed satisfied that I would at least make an attempt with Anthony Marchetti. I made no promises about the finger but placed it carefully in my purse, unable to bear the thought of opening the box, not yet, and certainly not in front of her.

Rosalina allowed me to walk out of the mansion grounds on the winding driveway much less dramatically than I arrived. I was two minutes late, but my cabbie had waited.

Even with all the lies, details in Jack’s and Rosalina’s stories matched so closely they were impossible to ignore. I turned and stuck my face in a blast of hot water, my mind drifting to Sadie and our conversation yesterday at the hospital.

I’d gone to check on Mama, but the truth is, I needed a Sadie fix more, my little sister’s assurance that it was all going to be OK before I took off for Chicago. We sat in a booth in the hospital cafeteria drinking cups of black coffee from the bottom of the pot and sharing a piece of dry lemon pound cake whose only saving grace was a drizzle of white glaze.

I had laid it all out: my jail visit with Anthony Marchetti; the details of Jennifer Coogan’s unsolved murder; the little girl with my Social Security number buried in a Chicago cemetery; the emailed photo of Alyssa Bennett, slaughtered with her family in a Mafia frenzy more than thirty years ago; the almost comical warnings from a rodent-voiced husband killer on death row. My concerns that Jack Smith wasn’t really who he pretended to be.

“Three little girls,” Sadie mused, smashing the last crumbs into her fork. “If you include Rosalina’s missing daughter.” I hadn’t thought of parsing it that way. Sadie always had a way of tilting the world a little to change my view.

Her long legs were stretched out across her side of the booth. She wore a fitted white T-shirt, low-slung jeans held up by a tooled leather western belt, brown Reef flip-flops, and pink toenails with daisy decals, courtesy of Maddie. Silver hoops in her ears, not a whisper of makeup except a little black eyeliner, short wild hair she kept pulling her fingers through, big blue weary eyes, and still, the kid sweeping the floor two tables away couldn’t take his eyes off of her.

She cast a spell. Maybe this was a curse for the McCloud women or at least for whoever ran into them.

Later, Mama lay motionless between us, heavily medicated, her hospital bed at a forty-degree angle, the IV pumping in nutrients, the lines of the heart monitor spiking in a choreographed pattern. She was too young for this kind of ending. Some people were destined to live the most significant part of their lives all at once, in a brief, intense span of time. Maybe Mama was one of them.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.