“Vacation,” she repeated, as if she was learning a word from a foreign language.
“She doesn’t have any charges here for a train or cab,” I said as gently as I could. “But there’s a pretty big charge Wednesday morning to… Well, it’s a website people use for arranging, you know, rental cars, hotels, flights…”
“Trips,” Sicily whispered.
“Getaways,” I said at the same time.
23
I could have used a different word, but I hadn’t. Maybe it was time the kid knew who her mother really was.
The idea that Marisa might have meant to disappear and leave her behind was too much for Sicily, though. She hurried off to cry somewhere more private.
While I had Marisa’s financial life at my fingertips, I clicked around a bit more, feeling a little guilty but also like an archaeologist sifting through the fragments of a strange culture. Who lived like this? The amount in their checking and savings accounts made my eyes water.HolyEmmylou Harris! People just had thousands and thousands of dollars sitting around in their bank accounts? I went back to the credit card statement. They had an autopayment set up on the credit card that cleared the balance to zero every month. Without worrying it wouldn’t clear? What black magic was this?
I clicked back to the checking account, and found a cash withdrawal from the morning Marisa came to see me. Not absconding-to-Costa Rica big, but a few hundred bucks, anyway, probably as much as she’d be allowed to take in a single transaction.
Her bank was a national chain, though. She could have found a branch office and pulled out tons more, if she’d been leaving for good.
“Interesting,” I mumbled into the screen.
There was a noise, but when I looked up, no one was there.
“Sicily?”
The house was quiet around me. This house, thishome. My mother’s home, where I was not welcome. Where my name had never been spoken.
What was Idoinghere?
I stood up. But I couldn’t just ditch the kid without saying something. Not again.
“Who the hell are you?” a voice said.
A small-framed woman stood at the open doorway to the kitchen, chin turned askance at me. She wore an unbuttoned cardigan, and her thin chest was rising and falling with quick breaths, like a cornered bunny. I might have answered her, except I couldn’t speak.
She held a small gun in her hands, pointed directly at me. “Put your hands where I can see them,” she said.
I raised my hands. I was the bunny.
“Isaid, who are you? What are you doing here?”
“I can… If you just…” I couldn’t see anything but the gun.
Alex had been held up plenty of times over the years, but he hadn’t prepared me for it. I couldn’t think a single coherent thought, only—
Joey’s marbled gray skin, dead.
“Why are you here?” the woman demanded. “What have you done with her? Where’s Marisa?”
I licked my lips. Where did I start?
“Where’s my daughter?” she said.
“Your daughter,” I managed. “Is your daughter… Sicily?”
The woman blinked uncertainly at me behind her glasses. “You know Sis?”
“Sicily,” I called loudly.“Sis?”
