2. The house in South Chicago, where Petra had stood watching when the thugs threw their smoke bomb through the window.

3. The Nellie Fox baseball.

4. Her obsession with whether my dad had left a diary.

5. Her arrival at the Freedom Center the night I went to collect evidence.

6. Her nervous whisper that she couldn’t look for the contractors who’d been hustled into Sister Frankie’s apartment.

It was four in the morning. I’d slept for seven hours, until Rose Hebert’s phone call woke me. But fatigue, born of stress, my still-healing body, and my recent sleepless nights, was overwhelming me. I went into the little back area and reassembled my cot and air mattress. Oblivious to the threat of another break-in, I sank back into sleep.

39 - A DIFFERENT CAR, A NEW CRIB

39

A DIFFERENT CAR, A NEW CRIB

IN MY DREAM, MISS CLAUDIA WAS STANDING OVER ME. “Lamont will come back,” she said in clear, plain speech. “My Bible tells me so.” She was waving her red leather Bible under my nose. She shook loose the dozens of cardboard page markers. When I put my hands out to catch them, they turned into photographs and floated to the floor before I could reach them.

If I could only study them, they would tell me exactly where Petra was and why she’d run away. But when I gathered up the pictures, they burst into flames in my hands. And suddenly I was holding Sister Frankie, her skin yellow-white beneath the burning candle of her hair. Behind her, Larry Alito and George Dornick were laughing with Harvey Krumas and my uncle. And Strangwell was there, pointing to my uncle and saying, “You know why she had to die.”

I woke sweating and weeping. For a moment, I was disoriented in the black space. I thought I was back in Beth Israel, with bandages over my eyes, and I flailed around my cot trying to find the call button for the nurse. Awareness gradually returned. I swung my legs over the edge of the cot and fumbled my way to a light switch, moving slowly to keep from tripping over the drawers that had been dumped on the floor.

It was eight in the morning, long past time for me to get going. My lease-mate has a shower at the back of her studio because she welds big pieces of steel and polishes them with caustic substances and needs to be able to wash off in a hurry. I stood under a cold spray of water, trying to wake myself up, and returned, shivering, to my own office to put my clothes back on.