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Ally and I worked alongside Jane until the morning crush was over. The regulars weren’t happy that Rosie wasn’t there, but we’d all been working alongside Rosie enough to be able to do a fair imitation. Still, it wasn’t the same.
Then Ally swung by Rosie’s house on the off chance he was there. This was off-limits for me because Lee might have found out Rosie’s address using one of his mysterious “ways” and might be there, and I didn’t want to bump into Lee just yet, especially not searching for Rosie or the diamonds. He didn’t know my plan and I wasn’t about to let on.
And anyway, business on a weekday didn’t really die down until after the lunch hour and I couldn’t leave Jane on her own.
While Ally was doing the stop off at Rosie’s place, my cell rang.
It was Dad.
“Hey, Daddy-o,” I said.
“What’s this about you hookin’ up with Lee?”
Shit.
Kitty Sue.
“We’re taking it slow.”
“Take itrealslow,” Dad said. “That boy’s a tomcat. Jesus, why couldn’t you choose Hank? Hank’s a good guy, a solid cop, has a job where both of his feet are planted on therightside of the law.”
Yikes.
Dad went on, “Don’t get me wrong. Lee’s his own man, doesn’t take shit from anyone, gotta respect that, but hell. My daughter?”
I was silent and Dad was on a roll. You couldn’t really get much in when Dad was on a roll.
“Kitty Sue is beside herself,” he told me. “Your mother and her had some sort of blood pact where they stuck their thumbs with pins and put them together, silly girl crap, and they promised their kids would get married, have babies, and that way they’d be related.”
Thatsounded familiar.
Dad’s voice changed from frustrated to coaxing. “Hank’ll have a good pension.”
“Dad, I’d make Hank’s head explode. We’d last, like, a day.”
“Shee-it.”
Dad knew this was true.
He didn’t say much more before he hung up.
Guess Lee didn’t have the Dad Vote.
I shook off the call and mentally assigned Lee the duty of letting his mother down easy. He’d gotten us into this, he’d have to get us out.
I decided to call a couple of Rosie’s friends that he’d put down in his file as emergency contacts to see if Rosie was with them or if they’d seen him. I got no response from one. The other was home, sleeping it off, unhappy to be disturbed, and had not heard from Rosie in a few days.
I called Duke again. Twice. No answer. No answering machine, either. Duke really needed to get into the twenty-first century, and I mentally added items onto my Christmas present buying list.
Then the door opened and Marianne Meyer walked in.
Marianne Meyer lived next door to the Nightingales in Washington Park all the while we were growing up. She was between Lee and Ally and me in age and she was a good friend. She had been fettered by a scoliosis brace in junior high and orthodontics in high school. She married a jerk, got a divorce and moved back in with her parents a year ago. Marianne was taking her divorce hard, and living with her parents at age thirty-one harder. She was five foot five and used to be cute as a button, but the divorce was taking its toll and she was drowning her sorrows in Oreos. She was a nurse at Pres-St. Luke’s. She took the evening shifts so she’d have her days free and had made house hunting a full-time hobby.
She rushed up to me at the espresso counter, her cheeks flushed.
“I heard you finally hooked up with Lee Nightingale,” she said.
Shit, shit,shit.
