“Vic!” She flung herself against my chest. “This is—this is too horrible. What is happening? Why did they attack Angela?”
“Because I was there.” Angela’s eyes fluttered open. “I was taking a nap and then I heard them break open the kitchen door. There were two. I tried running out the front door but one of them caught me. He knocked me out, not long—I’ve been hit like that once before in a hard game. When I woke I heard them still in the apartment, so I lay still until they left. I tried to get to my phone to call 911 but they had stolen it.”
It was Arlette who brought her to the hospital. She’d seen too much brain damage in her years as a hockey spouse to take a head blow lightly.
“They have done the scan,” Arlette said. “There is not internal ’emorrhage, but she must stay the night here. Her mama will be here, but until then, we take care of her.”
“My uncle is driving her,” Angela murmured thickly. “Morning, early morning, maybe. Shreveport a long way ’way.”
Angela’s monitors had been beeping at the nursing station and one of the nurses came in to clear us out of the room.
“Arlette, I’ll drive Bernie to the apartment to pack some things for you both. You go ahead and book your flight. As soon as we come back you can go to O’Hare; I’ll wait with Angela until her mother gets here.”
An old Victorian house a block from the university had been turned into apartments; Angela and Bernie were renting the second floor with the two young women who’d moved back into their sorority. When we got there, I went up the back stairs to look at the door the intruders had broken down. They’d skipped the first and third floors: this had been a targeted attack.
“Vic—” Bernie’s voice trembled. “They were coming for me, weren’t they?”
“Baby, they think you know something or saw something or have something that is connected to Leo. You said he wanted to write some FOIA’s after the meeting. Did he say anything else? Show you anything?”
She shook her head.
“What about the FOIAs—what did he say about them?”
“I wasn’t really listening,” she said. “I told you this, that we were arguing against each other over how he should fight this Coop. The foyer thing, he wanted to know about the map he saw, that’s all I know.”
“Did he say what was on the map?”
“No. He said Simon took the paper from him so quickly he could see only a small piece of it.”
“It wasn’t the map of the proposed beach, then,” I thought aloud. “That wouldn’t have startled him, because he knew about that. The drawing was big, eighteen by twenty-four or even twenty-four by thirty-six. That’s not something that would be tucked into the corner of a backpack.”
“What are you saying? That Leo stole something?” A ghost of Bernie’s spirit flared up.
“No, baby, just trying to figure out what the goons are looking for. Get me your mother’s suitcase; I’ll pack her things. You take care of yourself.”
Arlette had been sleeping on a daybed in the living room. Her toiletries—including an array of skin care products with names like “Luminescence Recovery”—were neatly organized in a travel bag. She’d hung her clothes in the hall closet. I folded everything I could find into her case, with the toiletries on top so she could get at them in the airport.
When I finished, Bernie was still standing in the room she shared with Angela, unable to focus. A canvas holdall and her backpack were open on the floor, and she’d put some T-shirts and her hockey stick into the holdall, but she couldn’t seem to figure out what to do next.
The backpack was sky-blue, with the Canadiens logo in the bottom right corner. I frowned at it—I’d seen its twin—where?
“Bernie—did you give Leo a Canadiens backpack?”
“What? No, we exchanged no presents. Why?”
“I thought I saw one in his apartment.”
“It was the same color, but not our logo. I—I offered to get him the appliqué, but he said he couldn’t wear a badge for a team he had no interest in.” Her smile wobbled. “Now it is impossible to imagine why I thought he was special.”
She started stuffing underwear and jeans into the holdall.
“Did you have the backpack with you today?”
“But of course, Vic, it is how I carry what I need, my records on the students, the laptop, the water bottle. Tous!”
She stared, openmouthed, as I picked it up from the floor and emptied it onto the bed. Her laptop, a notebook, hairbrush, sunscreen, a paperback (Ayesha at Last), a bicycle lock, a hockey puck with Canada’s National Women’s Team logo. Wedged into a crease on the bottom, in between some tampons, an energy bar, and a scrunchy, was a flash drive.
“Is this yours?”
She hunched a shoulder, still openmouthed. “I don’t remember it, but it must be, no?”
“Let’s look at it, shall we?”
I felt as though I were walking on eggshells, but Bernie opened her laptop and inserted the stick.
Leo had taken five photos of the document, very fast, with his phone. It must have been while he and Simon were arguing over the page. The resolution was poor. The best I could tell was that the document showed the Chicago lakefront around Forty-seventh Street, with the proposed new beach laid out in a dotted line. More dotted lines indicated where new landfill would create a promontory that jutted a good quarter mile into the lake.
Laying the photos side by side on the screen, I saw that each had a few different details—17th hole, the money shot was marked on the promontory. So the Park District wanted to put a golf course along the lake. That would take some ingenuity—there wasn’t a lot of land there. Except that as I looked at the pictures, I realized that Lake Shore Drive was missing. They wanted to take up Lake Shore Drive and put in a golf course? That made no sense at all.
Bernie shook my shoulder. “I have to go, Vic. Mama is texting me, worried that we’ve been attacked. We must get back to the hospital.”
“Sorry, babe. These pictures—they are dynamite of a kind. I’m going to make sure the Park District knows I have them and then you should be safe. But you go back to Quebec. I’ll talk to your program head tomorrow and get your job sorted out.”
36
Long Night’s Journey into Day
I spent a long night in the hospital, dozing next to Angela’s bed. On my way back there with Bernie, I’d detoured to my building so that Mr. Contreras could say goodbye to her in person.
“Don’t you stay away permanent, young Bernie,” he said. “Vic and me, we’ll get this sorted out, okay?”
Bernie gave him a convulsive hug, spent a few minutes with Mitch and Peppy, but was anxious to return to her mother. The next commercial flight to Quebec wasn’t until six-thirty the next morning, but Pierre Fouchard had persuaded the Canadiens owner to send the team jet down to collect his wife and daughter. It was already in Chicago airspace when I bundled the two women into a taxi.
Arlette texted me at midnight to let me know they had landed in Quebec City. Pierre was driving them to their summer home in the Laurentians, where he had good security, including neighbors he trusted. Even though it was a major relief to know Bernie was safe, I had so many other dragons to fend off that I couldn’t relax. Hospitals, with their PA systems, their frequent interruptions to check on vital signs, aren’t conducive to rest, anyway.