Hers was the last car in the lot. Alice fumbled with the key fob and then the door, threw herself inside. Doors locked, she grasped her phone with both hands, putting all her thoughts on the other side. Please.
“Hello?” Juby answered with real curiosity but also a stiffness Alice recognized from their last conversation.
“I have another favor to ask,” Alice said. “I’m sorry, but—I—could I—”
“Are you OK? I can’t hear you.”
“Someone broke into the trailer. My work.” She had managed to get out of the shed and the site, leaving the broken padlock hanging. Jimmy had broken the padlock, like a common burglar. She was shaking. “I managed to hide, but—”
“You were there? OK, wow. Do you need to call the cops?”
The cop she needed to call was her dad. But—Jimmy. She didn’t know what to do. The truth made no sense. But to tell her dad anything other than the truth—it was better not to call until she knew more. She didn’t want him running home, not on her account.
She couldn’t face her dark apartment, though, security cameras or no. “Can I come over? I—I need to go where someone else is.”
Juby didn’t say anything at first. “Don’t get mad.”
She’d had the sense that Juby was mad at her, and it was a relief to be offered a scrap. “Why would I get mad?”
“Hold on.”
When Juby came back on the line, she had an address.
“Is this . . . where is this?” The address was near the posh building in the south Loop that King and Fine had constructed. “That’s tourist country.”
“It’s a hotel,” Juby said meekly. “I’m meeting Merrily there in an hour.”
Alice looked out at the parking lot dreamily. That was her hand gripping the steering wheel. Her other hand, holding her phone in her lap, Juby’s name and number displayed. That was Juby’s voice calling to her from the end of her arm. “Hello? Hello? Alice?”
They were doing it. They were going on with the search for her Doe without her.
She put the phone back to her ear. “Why is Merrily here?”
“Well, she lives on the South Side. It’s not like she’s driving in from Mars. Something about her mom—”
“Her mom lives in Indiana.”
“An hour away, Alice. I guess they got broken into, too—”
“When?” Could Jimmy be making trouble out there? Why? She’d told him, she realized. She’d told him that she knew Merrily, that they were getting to know one another. Given him a name he could chase down.
She shivered. Jimmy King? Her childhood playmate, her first crush? Why was he doing this to them? To what end?
“What does it matter, when?” Juby said. “Tonight, I guess. You can ask her. They’re checking into a cheaper place down the street and then she’s coming out for a drink.”
“And the plan is to what? Talk about her poor, poor sainted not-even-stepdad, who happens—”
“I get it,” Juby said. “No one owns all the shit here, though. Plenty to go around. Come have a drink with us, talk about stuff, don’t talk about stuff. If you still need a place to crash, you can come to my house afterward.”
Alice thought about hanging up. She never had to speak to Juby again. They might show up on the same thread on the Doe Pages’ chat, but they didn’t have to interact. It would be so easy, no goodbyes, just the simple snip of Juby’s number from her phone. Beep boop.
“Just a heads-up,” Juby said. “My house is actually my parents’ house. No jokes. Also, fair warning that my mom will definitely force-feed you before you can go to bed. Remember how her oldest kid went missing? She’ll—she might adopt you.”
Alice made an appreciative noise in her throat. She could sever ties with Juby—but she didn’t want to. This is what friendship is. It was a lot of hard work, is what it was.
FOR A MONDAY night this late, traffic into the city was heavy, and then the dark sky above opened up. Alice hit the windshield wipers and inched along, hunched over the steering wheel. An accident, maybe. She tuned the radio to soothing music but it didn’t help.
Jimmy the thief.
Was he teaching her some kind of lesson?
Gathering intel to hold the company hostage? To mess with them, feed their competitors?
Was he so mad the company wouldn’t someday be his that he was willing to rob it blind? But what that slick-haired man-child had stolen were mostly files that were backed up elsewhere. But her computer, her wallet. He hadn’t laid waste to King and Fine, but he was giving her a bad day.
If she hadn’t had her phone in her pocket and her keys tossed on her desk, she’d be marooned back at the site, filing a police report.
Her fingers tapped on the steering wheel. She should be at the site, filing a police report. Or—
Alice pressed a few buttons on the steering wheel and asked the onboard system to call her dad’s cell number. It rang out for a while. She was composing a calm voice mail she’d leave when her dad picked up the phone. “Hey, Al, what’s up?”
It was such a relief to hear his voice she almost sobbed. “Nothing,” she said, gaining control. “Missing you. Are you ever coming home?”
“I’ll assume this is from love and not because of some new mess the Jims have gotten us into.”
She listened to his laugh. “Not a new mess, no.”
“Oh, boy, what’s going on?”
“Hold on.” Her car was creeping past the accident. The highway was six lanes wide a mile or so outside of downtown, a parking lot of red taillights up to the site of the wreck, a crumple of machinery at the median. She wouldn’t look. She wouldn’t.
Quickly, the traffic broke up, gained speed.
“Are you in the car?” her dad said. “You know how I feel about you on the phone while driving . . .”
“It was all backed up—”
“But now it’s not.” Harris Fine, always a cop. “I have to run, anyway. You get home safe, that’s all I care about.”
She had to say something about the break-in. And Jimmy. “Dad—”
“Whatever it is, we can fix it up tomorrow, OK? I’ll be in early.”
She let out the breath she was holding. “Love you.”
“Love you more.”
When he hung up, the radio came back on, news, something about a protest staged in D.C. that day. She noted the time. She shouldn’t have even called him, it was so late, and who knew how late it was in—
She couldn’t remember where he’d traveled this week, and she hadn’t asked.
She hadn’t asked him anything. The ownership thing. The discrepancy in how far Matt had fallen. The break-in. She should have led with the break-in. She was complicit, for some reason letting Jimmy get away with whatever he was up to. She traced her feelings to their source, and discovered she was amused. Jimmy King thought he was smarter than the rest of them. More than wanting to stop him, Alice wanted to see him lose. She wanted to watch what would happen.
Curiosity fed on itself, never sated.
Alice let the highway split toward Wisconsin, toward Indiana, holding steady east toward the skyline and onto city streets still busy with cabs and ride shares, with late-nighters and the late-shifters. She drove straight toward the hotel address Juby had provided, but at the last minute, instead of turning toward the hotel, she hung a right on Michigan Avenue.
Down the block, the high-rise at 1799 South Michigan, King and Fine’s grand masterpiece, rose high above its neighbors. A beacon, calling her home.
She took too much pride in it. Her satisfaction had nothing to do with who owned the company, who put in the last rivet, who smoothed the concrete, who would cut the big ribbon with ceremonial scissors on Friday. She wasn’t responsible for any of it.
Her sense of ownership had been earned, though. She’d driven this route every day for almost two years, worked the phones, headed off the problems, stayed late. They’d built this cathedral, and her role—
She didn’t just sweep the trailer floor. What she truly did was absorb all the trouble that occurred among the crew and between JimBig, Jimmy, and her dad, all the discontent above and below, witnessing and listening, accepting all the worry and letting it live inside her. She had always served that role, at home as well as at the site and inside the shed. She absorbed free-floating conflict. She kept the dust down.
So if she took a little pride in their south Loop jewel, she thought she was allowed.
In the last block, she slowed to let the building slide up to her. She pulled over to the opposite curb. The city had installed raised medians to keep pedestrians from crossing except at crosswalks, planters with thin trees and hardy ornamental grasses. Overhead, the building glowed like something out of an old-time movie, like something King Kong had climbed. The shops on the first floor were dark at this hour, but above, some of the offices burned the midnight oil. The next twenty-five floors were condos, lit up like a game board, a light here, there, a guessing game of who had insomnia, who had too much work from the office, who was up binge-watching TV.
And then the cherry on top, the top floor, lit like a parade float. The rest of the block was quiet, dark, caught in a lull between L trains passing through. A few blocks away, Roosevelt Avenue still roared with traffic. Another night, this might be a busy thoroughfare after the final inning of a White Sox game, but tonight the sidewalks were rolled up.
The radio murmured: stock prices and the NASDAQ, a little tune to transition from national news to local. Alice put the car into park, rolled down the window, and leaned her head against the frame. She might like finished projects more than the grime of construction and progress. In this, she was not her father’s daughter. He loved to build, but the second the project was over, he itched for the next. Alice liked the build, too, but she loved the details of living, of home. Home was everything. Maybe that’s why the Doe Pages had drawn her in. Matching an Empty had everything to do with the details of a life that, once noticed, could only lead home. That crooked tooth, the birthmark on the back of the neck, that scar from a childhood fall. Set dressing that turned out to be structural.
“. . . body found this morning in the Indiana Dunes National Park, within three miles of Lake Michigan,” the murmuring radio said.
Alice reached for the volume.
Only because she’d been thinking of the Doe Pages, only because she was on her way to see Merrily, did it occur to her. The body could be Richard Banks. It wouldn’t be, would it? But in all his lives, he’d never wandered too far from the area, even with his life in danger—Why was that? A detail of living—not far from where he’d kidnapped her and disappeared, not far from where he’d been some kind of father figure for Merrily, not far from the casino and Rebekah and her daughter.
It wouldn’t be him. The sad fact was that the area saw more than its share of bodies.
“. . . a Caucasian male of approximately forty-five to sixty-five years old. The man has scarring on an upper arm, from an injury or tattoo removal. Tonight, police are seeking anyone who may . . .”
The scarring. She recognized the detail from his Doe profile.
He was dead, then.
She was strangely frustrated, even a little sad. There was nothing left to do, no way to understand. It would be an untidy ending. Lillian had warned her.
Alice had a fleeting thought for Merrily. Well, she’d have to live with it, the way you had to. She was only lucky Rick wasn’t her dad, hadn’t taken out his proclivities on her. Merrily was a lucky one, too.
Alice heard the announcer give the time, checked the dash. She put the car into gear and pulled into the center lane to find a break in the median and make a U-turn. No traffic was coming either way, so the U was an easy maneuver, until a large, dark SUV rushed out of the parking garage in the sub-level of 1799 South Michigan like a tank.
She pulled hard into the median, barely missing the corner of a concrete planter. She laid on the horn. An oversized hulk of a machine, the SUV still moved so quickly that it was halfway down the block before Alice could think anything other than prayers and foul phrases. Before she could consider how much the SUV had looked like one of the two King and Fine company vehicles, and wonder if Jimmy hadn’t stolen one of them, too.