Sara Paretsky - Burn Marks

I explained. “I tried to tell you Wednesday. I didn’t know what it was-I don’t think he’d worn it around me more than once or twice. He thought-you know, as long as Elena was alive she could link it to him. Well, not just that. She could tie him to the fire at the Indiana Arms. He was the person, too, who knocked us both out and tried to burn us at the other place.” I started shivering as the memories hit me. I tried to push them aside but I couldn’t.

Bobby grunted and stood up to reach for one of the cowboy coverlets. He tossed it to me and I wrapped myself in it. After a bit my shivering stopped, but both of us sat lost in our own reveries.

At least my last visitor yesterday was benign-Zerlina, again taking three buses, wanted to know how her daughter came to die. She shared a Coke and more of Lotty’s chicken soup and wept with me. She shook her head in amazement when she learned Elena had saved my life: “Thought she’d pickled her brain too good years ago to come up with something like that, but the Lord provides when you least expect it.”

As if following my thoughts, Bobby asked abruptly about my aunt.

“It’s like it all never happened. I stopped by the Windsor Arms-the hotel where she’s living now-last night. She was out front with a bottle and a crowd of greasy old men, showing her little finger in a splint and bragging over her heroics. Some people even a whirlwind won’t change, I guess.” I laughed mirthlessly.

Bobby nodded a couple of times to himself. “I want you to understand something, Vicki. Try to, anyway. Tony, your daddy, took me under his wing when I joined the force. He must have been a good thirteen, fourteen years older than me. A lot of guys were coming back from the war then, they didn’t make it easy on us rookies. Tony looked out for me from day one.

“I thought I could do the same for Mickey and it hurts me, hurts my pride Eileen tells me it is, that I could be so wrong. I keep thinking to myself, what would Tony think, he saw me making such a colossal mistake?”

He didn’t seem to want an answer but I gave him one anyway. “You know what he’d say, Bobby, that anyone can make a mess but only a fool wallows in it.”

Bobby smiled painfully. “Yeah, well, maybe. Yeah, probably. But here’s what you gotta understand, Vicki. I thought the best thing I could do to pay Tony back for all he did for me was look out for you. I never could understand the way Tony and Gabriella brought you up, not making you mind the way my own girls did. And you just didn’t seem like a real girl to me, the things you wanted and wanted to do. I’m not even sure I like you all that well. I just thought I owed it to Tony to look after you,”

I thought he’d finished, but he only stopped to crack his knuckles, get himself over the hump. “So you’re not like other girls, Eileen-Eileen never minded a minute, she always loved you like you were her own daughter. But I just couldn’t deal with it. And then when you exposed Mickey-he was like my son and you were like an alien monster. But if he’d had your guts and your honesty, he’d never of gone along with those buddies of his to begin with. Never dug himself that kind of hole.

“So I’ve had to think about it. Think about you, I mean. Start from the beginning. I love my girls. I don’t want them any different from how they are. But you’re the daughter of the two people I loved best, next to Eileen, and you can’t do things different than you do, shouldn’t do them different, not with Gabriella and Tony bringing you up. Do you understand?”

The door at the top of the stairs opened and Bobby’s daughter Marianna called down. “Daddy! People are waiting for you!”

“Be up in a jiffy, sugar!” he yelled back. “Don’t let them start without me.”

He got up. “Okay? Is that enough?”

I stood up too. “Yeah, I think that’s enough.” I fished in my pocket and handed him a small parcel. “I brought that along for you. Just in case, you know-just in case I felt like giving you a present.”

He undid the paper and opened the little box. When he looked inside and saw Tony’s shield lying in the cotton, he didn’t say anything, but for the second time that week I saw him cry.