Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“No fainting from you, my girl. Need one working brain around here besides mine. Sit up and pull yourself together.”

I sat up. The priest hoisted me to my feet with only a mild grunt. Hundred-and-forty-pound women are nothing to an old boxer. He held a cup to my mouth and I swallowed hot tea, choked, then drank down the rest. I put my head between my knees and willed the gray cloudy pieces of my mind into some kind of order.

“Where would the girl go?” He spoke to me roughly to make me concentrate.

“It depends partly on why she ran away.” My voice wobbled. I steadied it and continued. “She turned hysterical this morning when I asked her to talk to Benji. I also suggested she confide in her grandmother. I just hope she didn’t follow that piece of advice.”

I pulled out my cell phone and called the Bayard apartment. Elsbetta answered.

“Why are you making trouble here?” she demanded. “Mr. Edwards, he wants to fire me because you came this morning. Now Miss Catherine has run away, all because of you.”

“Is Renee or Edwards there?” I ignored her outburst. “I want to talk to them about Catherine.”

“You cannot be bothering them. They have ordered no phone calls.” “Tell them I’m reporting Catherine’s disappearance to the Chicago police,” I said coldly. “If they want to speak to me, they can call me on my cell phone: I’ll give you the number.”

At that, she put me on hold. Within a minute, both Renee and Edwards were on the phone, each trying to order the other to leave the conversation to them.

“Do you have Catherine?” Renee demanded. “Isn’t she with you?” I said.

“She’s run away,” Edwards said. “Without leaving a note.”

“You acted like a Victorian father, Eds, ordering her to pack for Washington and no argument allowed. Elsbetta phoned me at my office, but-” Edwards shouted over her voice. “If you’d thought she deserved half as much attention as Calvin and your goddamned publishing empire-“

“If you listened to anyone but your-“

“Knock it off, both of you,” I said savagely. “When did she leave and what was she driving?”

“You cannot call the police,” they said in chorus.

“I can damn well do what I want. Someone reported seeing her in a white SUV Do you seriously imagine she’s safe driving a three-ton vehicle with one arm?”

That briefly united them: they wanted to know who had seen her. I grew angrier, pushing on them until they admitted Catherine had taken Renee’s white Range Rover, that they knew she hadn’t shown up at the New Solway house, that she’d left around three-thirty, after her fight with her father.

“Have you called Julius Arnoff to see if she’s gone back to Larchmont?” I asked. It didn’t seem likely to me, because she and Benji had been flushed from the mansion once already, but neither teenager was probably thinking much right now.

“My first thought,” Edwards said. “While Renee was still cursing you for taking Trina to her Arab boyfriend, I had a guard stake out the house. She isn’t there.”

“When you came uninvited to the apartment this morning, did you or did you not arrange an assignation for Trina?” Renee demanded.

“Grow up,” I snapped. “I don’t know where Benji is, nor Catherine. Stop casting around for who to blame for her disappearance and tell me what you’re doing to find her.”

“Edwards is using his private security connections,” his mother said bitingly. “They’re likely to shoot her if they see her. If you were looking for her, where would you start?”

“Nowhere I’d tell either of you,” I said nastily, and closed my phone. “They have a private security force out looking for her,” I turned to Father Lou. “That really scares me.”

“Girl adored her grandfather, isn’t that what you told me the other day? Maybe they had some special place. Everyone goes to ground where they feel secure; place connected to her grandfather would feel secure to her.”

“He’s got advanced Alzheimer’s. He won’t be able to tell me-never mind. I know who can. I’ll call you from the car.”

I ran from the school.

North of Madison, Wisconsin, a freezing rain began to fall. The interstate turned glassy on the overpasses; I had to keep my speed down to stay in control. Except for the occasional giant rig charging through the slush at eighty, we had the road pretty much to ourselves.

Geraldine Graham was snoring lightly in the seat next to me. She had insisted on coming: she still had keys to the cottage-she had found them easily, in a drawer in her bedroom, and put them into a black Hermes bag that rested now at her feet. I tried to force her to stay home, but she said she knew the route, which I didn’t, and more important, at least to her, she needed to make sure Benji and Catherine were all right. “If I’d told you these things last week, they might not be in danger now.”

When I’d reached Anodyne Park, Lisa had answered the bell-bustling, officious: you can’t come in, Madam is resting. I pushed her aside and strode down the hall, opening doors. I found Geraldine dozing on her bed with a reading light on and a book open beneath her fingers.

Lisa darted in under my arm. “Oh, madam, this detective is here, breaking in. Shall I call Mr. Darraugh or Mr. Julius?”

Geraldine sat up with a start. “Lisa! Stop dithering. The detective? Mr. Darraugh’s detective is here? Oh, there you are, young woman. Wait while I collect myself.”

I knelt next to her. “Something urgent has come up. I need your help; I don’t need you to put your clothes on.”

“Grant me the foibles of my upbringing, young woman. I think better while dressed than naked. I will be with you directly.”

I walked impatiently up and down the hall outside her room, but she was, in fact, remarkably quick, despite her age and Lisa’s interference, and in a few minutes was talking to me in her alcove in the sitting room. I told her I was going to tell her things that were utterly confidential and that Lisa could not be a party to them. After a look at my face, Geraldine summarily dismissed her maid. Lisa gave me the kind of expression that makes you glad a handgun isn’t backing it up, but she retreated.

When I heard the door close-and made sure Lisa was on the far side of it-I told Geraldine about Catherine and Benji.

“I know you and Calvin were lovers all those years ago. It was you he meant when he called for Deenie last week, wasn’t it?”

Her fingers clenched on the arms of her chair, but she nodded. “How did you know? Was it the key to Larchmont that he had kept?”

“That, and some other things. Armand Pelletier left an unfinished manuscript among his papers that pretty well spelled it out.”

“Ah, Armand. I wondered if he would come back to haunt me. He was so passionate about workers’ rights, and for a time I reflected that passionbecause I was passionate and needed some object for my ardor. He was bitter when I left him for Calvin; he accused me of being too fastidious, of needing the fleshpots of Egypt. I told him clean sheets would suffice. But it had more to do with-Calvin was a generous lover, and Armand… took more than he gave. His passions ultimately were for himself alone. With Calvin, too, it was only a way of getting what he himself desired, but I didn’t see that until much later.”

“There was never a question that you would leave your husband?” Involuntarily, I let myself be sidetracked.

“I thought-I had the notion that if I divorced MacKenzie, Calvin and I might marry. But however much Mother hated MacKenzie, she couldn’t stand the scandal a divorce would cause, and before I’d nerved myself to stand up to her-Calvin had married Renee.” She twisted the great diamond on her right hand. “I had gone to Washington when he was called