Chapter 2 - THE WOMAN WITH BLUE SHOES
By midnight, the mansion was crawling with detectives, and my daughter was asleep with her head on my lap.
I had never heard so many radios in one house. Officers moved quietly through the west corridor, photographing door handles and collecting sign-in logs. An ambulance crew had cleaned and dressed my hand, then insisted I should have the cut examined for glass. I agreed only after Daniel promised Sophie could ride beside me to the hospital and that my mother would be told where we were.
Rain hammered the roof of the security car as we left the estate. Behind the gates, the mansion looked like a castle lit for a party nobody wanted to attend. Dante stood under the portico without an umbrella. Even at a distance, I could see him holding his neck as though he no longer trusted the skin beneath his fingers.
Sophie stirred against my shoulder. "Mommy, did I do something bad?"
"No, baby. You told the truth."
"The silver man was mad."
"He's responsible for his own feelings. You're not."
She considered that with the seriousness only a child can bring to ordinary words. "Will Mr. Dante still have headaches?"
"I don't know."
"I hope somebody helps him."
I kissed her hair. I hoped so too, though I was beginning to suspect help might be much harder to find than danger.
At the hospital, a nurse took us through a side entrance to avoid the cameras already gathering outside. Someone had told the local news that Dante Moretti's private residence was the scene of a police investigation. In Chicago, his name could turn almost anything into a headline.
A doctor examined my hand, removed a tiny glass splinter, and gave me a fresh dressing. My eye was painful but showed no immediate sign of a serious injury on examination; she told me to return if my vision changed or my headache worsened. A police officer took photographs of the bruising with my permission. When I described Victor shoving me, my voice sounded as though it belonged to somebody standing across the room.
"Do you want to make a formal report?" the officer asked.
I looked toward Sophie, who was coloring a paper cup with a borrowed marker.
"Yes," I said. "I do."
The word surprised me. For three months, I'd been swallowing one small humiliation after another because I needed the paycheck. But an adult had put his hands on me, and now someone had threatened my daughter. Silence was no longer keeping us safe.
Daniel arrived shortly before two in the morning. He carried a bag containing Sophie's pink sweater and my phone charger. His coat smelled faintly of wet pavement.
"Your mother is with a neighbor," he said. "I checked personally. A patrol car is making additional passes near her building, and a detective has her contact information."
"Thank you." I hesitated. "Where's Dante?"
"He's being examined at a separate facility. The doctor is independent of Hale."
"Did they find out what that thing was?"
"Not yet. It has no obvious manufacturer label. The police have it."
Daniel rubbed his forehead. "Anna, when Sophie described the woman in the white coat, did she mention anything besides the shoes and peppermint smell?"
"She said the woman touched the device."
"Did she see a face?"
"I don't know. She was behind the sofa, where I told her to sit while I cleaned the adjoining shelves. I didn't realize anyone had entered Dante's room."
Daniel lowered his voice. "There was a temporary badge registered yesterday to Dr. Celia Ward. Hale approved it."
The initials from the folder hit me like ice water.
"C. W.," I whispered.
He nodded. "Ward worked at a clinic called Harborview Neurological Services. It closed eighteen months ago. The address still appears on some treatment bills."
"How can a closed clinic be treating Dante?"
"That's what we want to know."
I watched Sophie reach for another marker. "Can I show her a picture?"
"Not a single photograph," Daniel said. "The detective will arrange a fair identification procedure if appropriate. We don't want to suggest a face to her."
I appreciated that. Sophie had done enough. Whatever happened next should not depend on asking a five-year-old to carry a grown man's burden.
Daniel's phone rang. He listened, then stepped a few paces away. I heard Dante's name and the phrase independent toxicology screening. When Daniel returned, there was a new tightness around his mouth.
"Dante remembered another detail," he said. "A woman was counting down from ten. She told someone the readings wouldn't make sense unless he had taken the evening dose."
I thought of the rows of medication records in Victor's folder. Dates, dosages, signatures. A schedule that seemed designed to produce a result and then explain that result away.
"Is someone drugging him?"
Daniel didn't answer immediately. "The specialists are looking for causes. The old injury could contribute to his symptoms. They don't want to assume the device is responsible for everything."
That measured answer made him more believable than anyone who had offered easy explanations in Victor's house.
He pulled up a chair. "You can stay here until your mother is ready for you, or we can take you somewhere else. Either way, you'll decide."
"I want to go home," I said. "Not another secret apartment. Not another mansion. Home."
"Then we'll help you get there."
At four in the morning, I carried Sophie up the cracked staircase of my mother's building on the southwest side. The hallway smelled of laundry detergent and somebody's late-night cooking. There was a chipped blue flowerpot beside our door. I'd never been happier to see it.
My mother, Ruth Miller, waited in an armchair with a blanket over her knees. Her recent surgery had left her walking carefully with a cane, but her face was fierce when she saw my bruises.
"Who did this?" she demanded.
I sank beside her. "A man at work. The police know."
She closed her eyes and drew a breath. "Anna, when your husband died, you promised me you'd let people help you. You can't protect Sophie by carrying every bad thing alone."
Noah had been gone two years, lost to an ordinary winter highway collision that made no news and left me with a stack of bills. I had spent every day since trying to be enough for two parents. Hearing his name without hearing it said was enough to undo me.
"I'm scared," I admitted.
Mom took my left hand. "Then we'll be scared together."
I got Sophie settled in her bed. Her stuffed rabbit lay against the pillow, and on the wall above it hung drawings of rainbows, dogs, and a family with three figures because Sophie still included her father when she drew our happiest days.
I finally slept for a little over an hour. At six thirty, my phone rang. It was Daniel.
"Dante asked to speak with you. There's something he'd rather say himself."
I should have refused. Instead, I stepped into the kitchen and accepted the call.
"Anna?" His voice sounded rough, stripped of its usual command. "You and Sophie okay?"
"We're home. My mother's with us."
"Good." He paused. "I owe you an apology. Last night I grabbed your daughter's wrist. I woke up frightened and I treated her like a danger. She deserved better."
My throat tightened. He had noticed her fear when the room had been full of his own.
"You can tell her when she's awake," I said.
"I will. The doctor found a small puncture mark near the scar. She says there may have been an attachment there, but we need imaging and records before anyone knows its purpose."
"What about your memory?"
A long silence.
"I remembered a room with blue curtains. A woman asking whether I'd seen the transfer papers. When I said no, someone told her to increase the dose. I don't know if the memory is reliable. I have to find out."
"You're getting real doctors now."
"For the first time in three years, I feel like I'm asking my own questions."
I heard a door open in the background. Daniel said something to him, too softly for me to catch.
Then Dante added, "Victor's lawyer has informed us that he left the estate before detectives could interview him. We don't know where he is."
Cold prickled across my shoulders.
"And Vanessa?"
"She's at her family's penthouse. Her phone records are being reviewed with the appropriate legal process."
Another pause.
"Anna, why did you take the job at my house?"
The question seemed strangely personal after everything else.
"My mother needed help after surgery. Sophie needs a stable home. Your salary was better than anything else I could find."
"You deserve a workplace where you aren't afraid. If you want to leave, my staff will make sure you're paid what you're owed. No conditions."
"I don't want charity," I said too quickly.
"Neither do I. I want to pay a debt my household owes you."
I didn't know what to say. The most powerful man I had ever met sounded exhausted, angry, and painfully uncertain. Maybe power didn't protect a person from being lied to. Maybe it only attracted people who could make the lies sound convincing.
After we ended the call, I found Sophie sitting on the kitchen floor in her pajamas, drawing on the back of an old grocery list.
"What are you making?" I asked.
"The lady's shoes."
I knelt beside her. She had colored them a bright blue, adding a tiny white bird to the side of each shoe.
"The doctor had birds on her shoes?"
Sophie nodded. "Like the bird on Grandma's coffee mug. She told the silver man her shoes were lucky because she always ran when things went wrong."
I studied the two little birds. A peculiar detail, but perhaps one someone could verify without asking Sophie another frightening question.
Then she drew a badge hanging from a string around the woman's neck. She wrote two uneven letters beneath a scribbled photograph: C W.
"Sweetheart," I whispered, "how did you know those letters?"
"She said her name when she answered the phone," Sophie replied. "I know C because Claire is in my class, and W because we practice it on Wednesdays."
Her pencil moved again. This time she added something beneath the badge: a square with four dark lines.
"What's that?"
"The little box the lady gave the silver man. He said it was the only one left."
My hands went numb. I'd seen a square box with four black lines in Victor's office, tucked beside the medication charts. I had mistaken it for a barcode label.
As I reached for my phone, a message arrived from an unfamiliar number.
It contained a photograph taken through our kitchen window less than a minute earlier. In the picture, Sophie was bent over her drawing, my mother's blue curtains behind her.
Under the photograph were six words.
YOU SHOULD HAVE STAYED AT THE MANSION.
May you like
I looked toward the window, but the street below was empty.
Whoever was watching had followed us home.
