Laura Caldwell - Red Blooded Murder

“No. A place called Uncommon Ground. It’s up near Wrigley. I’m there all the time, and yes, I’m sure someone there will tell you they saw me that afternoon.”

There was a banging on the front door.

It opened with a slow creak.

And there was Vaughn.

He looked from Mick to me and back again, and I could see his eyes jumping, his mind leaping to connections even more absurd than the ones he already had.

“I came over when I saw his press conference,” I said before he could even open his mouth. “This is the guy who Jane was with on Friday night.”

Two uniformed cops stepped inside, behind Vaughn. Mick looked amused by the police inhabiting his place. He stood up and offered his hand to Vaughn. “Mick Grenier. Nice to meet you.”

“We need to take you in for questioning.”

A wave of relief fell over me. This would all get straightened out now.

“Sure,” Mick said. “Just let me get a jacket.”

He left the room.

Vaughn gestured at one of the uniformed cops. “Go with him.” He turned back to me.

“So you’ll ask him where he was on Friday night?” I demanded. “And you’re going to confirm that he was with Jane?”

“I’ll ask him, Izzy.”

I hated the sound of my name coming from his lips. “You should confirm that he was stalking her, too.”

“Don’t worry, Izzy.” He said it in such a tone that it sounded like Don’t worry your pretty little head.

“And when you finally realize I wasn’t with Jane that night, then this…this calling me a person of interest, it’s over, right?”

“For you?” He actually laughed. “For you, this whole thing is a long way from over.”

T he minute I woke up in my mother’s guest room the next morning, fear was waiting-sitting calmly in a corner of my mind, legs crossed, filing her nails. She was waiting, like someone who officially lived in my brain now, who didn’t intend to leave anytime soon. I realized then that I’d seen her before. Fear had been with me for a while, long before Jane died.

I tried to remember when fear hadn’t been a resident. I dialed my mind back and back, reviewing clip reels of my life, searching and searching, and I finally landed on last autumn, a time when Sam and I were still Sam and Izzy, when our wedding was only a few months away. I thought I was busy then. I thought life was crazy. I thought that I had been pushed to my limits with work and wedding plans. And yet, every morning when I woke up back then, I was, I realized now, content.

I found the phone in the room and took it back to bed with me, curling myself tight under the covers. In the dim morning light seeping through the ivory curtains, I called Sam. He would just be waking up in Cincinnati, I figured. “It’s me. I’m calling from my mom’s.”

“Hey, Red Hot,” he said.

“Didn’t sleep last night, huh?” I could tell. Sam had problems sleeping when he was upset, and his voice was always different in the morning after he tossed and turned.

“No.”

I waited for him to say he was sorry about last night, about blowing up at me about Grady, but neither of us said anything.

Finally, I broke the silence. “Remember the song you were going to sing for me on our wedding night?”

Silence for a minute, then, “Of course.”

“I was just thinking that I never heard it. What did it say?”

“I can’t sing it now.”

“No, don’t sing, but tell me a couple of lines. Maybe the refrain?”

He exhaled, as though it hurt to remember the song. “It was called ‘We’ve Come to It.’ The song was about how everything was culminating on that night, how everything that we’d done led us there, but the song was also about how we would keep coming to it every day, even after that night.”

I pulled the covers tighter around me, missing him, missing Us. “What did you think of when you wrote ‘come to it.’ I mean, what was It?”

“It. You know. It was us. Settled. Happy.”

“No secrets.” I couldn’t help it.

“I don’t have any secrets, Izzy! Jesus, we’re back to this again.”

I threw off the covers and sat up. “You’re right. I do keep bringing it up, and I’m sorry, but I guess the thing is…” What was the thing? “This thing is…” I felt on the edge of some revelation, some small, quiet, truthful revelation. “The thing is, I don’t know. I don’t know why it’s not right. I just feel it in my bones. Something keeps telling me it’s not right between us.”

“I don’t know what else I can do.” He said this simply. Not annoyed. Just resigned.

“I don’t, either. I think it needs time.”

“We’ve given it a lot of time.”

“Maybe we need more.”

“I don’t know if I have more.”

The fear sitting in the corner of my mind leapt to her feet, danced around. “What do you mean?”

“I don’t know. But I know this isn’t the time to make any decisions.” A pause. “What’s going on with Jane’s case?”

I sat up and looked around the room at the tasteful furniture, the impressionistic painting, trying to ground myself, but everything seemed to swing around crazily. “What does that mean? For you and me?”

“It doesn’t mean anything. Not right now. I shouldn’t have said that about not having time. I do. I’ll always have time for you. C’mon. Let’s not go over this again. Tell me what’s happening with Jane’s case.”

I felt short of breath.

Sam seemed to know. “Izzy. We’ll be okay. One way or another. I promise you that. Let’s get you through this right now, this thing with Jane.”

I sucked in air. I liked the take-control tone of his voice. “Okay, here’s what happened last night.” I gave him all the details. I told him that I was going to try and check out Mick’s alibi.

“You’re going to be fine, Izzy. Really. This will all work out the way it’s supposed to. And you can rely on me, okay? You can. Whatever you need. Just let me know.”

I said, okay. I said, I love you. And we got off the phone.

I sat there in the silence of the guest room, thinking that what I really needed was to somehow return myself to the place I’d been last fall. If I could go back, I would appreciate it more. I would be more cautious with life.

But then fear started filing her nails again in the corner of my mind, reminding me there was no going back.

And so I made myself get out of bed; I opened the window and looked down onto a sun-dappled State Street, and made myself register the warmth, the fact that it would probably be a sunny spring day in the sixties; I made myself leave the room, made myself read the note my mother left outside the door, saying she’d chosen a few dresses for me in her closet, that she would be back in a few hours; I made myself get dressed in a linen spring dress that wasn’t as tight as I thought and cinched it with the wide black belt my mother had laid out; I made myself walk down the street to find Grady’s car, and I pointed it in the direction of Wrigleyville.

I called information and got the address for Uncommon Ground, the place where Mick said he’d been writing when Jane was killed.

I drove north on Lincoln Avenue, the traffic was surprisingly slow for midmorning on a Saturday. And the sidewalks were crowded with people, mostly my age and younger, all of them strolling, all looking really, really happy. I saw a bunch of Cubs hats and realized there was a game today. In Chicago, when there’s a Cubs game at 1:20 in the afternoon, you don’t get there at 1:00 p.m., you get there as early as your liver will allow you to start drinking. I couldn’t have been more jealous of those fans at that minute.