While I worked my way along the wall to the front to collect Mary Louise and Emily, Lacey moved her entourage to the center of the room. The guy I’d just been speaking to managed to position himself behind the waiter bringing her a drink. I stopped to watch. Lacey greeted him with enthusiasm, so he must have been telling the truth about their childhood. But he seemed to be trying to talk to her seriously about something—a mistake in a gathering this public. Even under the soft rainbows of Sal’s Tiffany lamps I could see Lacey’s color rise. She turned away from him in hauteur and he made the mistake of grabbing her shoulders. The off–duty cop who’d gotten Emily her seat muscled his way through the crowd and hustled him out the door. When we followed a few minutes later, the man was standing across the street staring at the Golden Glow. As we came out he hunched his hands down in his pockets and walked away.

“Vic, you’ve made me blissfully happy,” Emily sighed as we walked past the line of Lacey’s fans. “There they are, waiting for hours just to get sight of her, and she actually kissed me and signed my book, maybe I’ll even be on TV. If someone told me two years ago that every girl in Chicago would be jealous of me, I’d never have believed them in a million years. But it’s come true.”

Chapter 2: The Woman in the Road

2 The Woman in the Road

Emily chattered with excitement all the way to the car, then fell deeply asleep in the backseat. Mary Louise leaned back on the passenger side and slipped out of her high heels.

“I stayed up all night to watch poor Diana marry Prince Creep when I was that age,” she commented. “At least Emily got to touch Lacey.”

I had wanted to go to O’Hare to join the vigil for Ringo and John, but my mother was desperately ill by then; I wasn’t going to worry her by riding around on buses and L’s after curfew. “Some guy was trying to get next to Lacey as we left. He said they grew up together in Humboldt Park. Is that true?”