She looked at me intently. “Right. Aside from that.”

“What do you mean?”

“Something Lippman said in there about ‘we’re doing everything we normally do at the beginning of an investigation.’ What they normally do is tail a person when they believe a suspect might contact them.”

I told her about the garage and my paranoia last night.

“Yep.” Maggie nodded. “That’s probably the feds.”

“Are you serious? I’m being followed?” Oddly, I felt momentary relief. My mind wasn’t slipping into some suspiciously obsessive realm.

“Sure,” Maggie said. “Best way to find a fugitive is to watch the wife or girlfriend.”

I flinched at the thought of Sam as a “fugitive.” “Don’t they have to tell me?”

“God, no. They can tail you to their heart’s content. The only thing they have to let you know is if they tap your phone. And, even then, they don’t have to tell you until they’re done. Later, you might be entitled to see the logs under the Freedom of Information Act. But now? During a new investigation? Nah. They get to look wherever they want for Sam.”

“So what should I do?”

“Don’t dance in front of your window in your underwear.”

“There’s nothing I can do?”

“Not really.”

I stared out the window as the cab entered the Loop and drove down Franklin Avenue. I dropped Maggie off and kept going toward my office. This is baloney, I said to myself. Bullshit, actually. I wasn’t just going to “move on” the way Andi Lippman had said; I had to do something, but what?

I didn’t know the answer to that, but I knew someone who might be able to help me.

When the cabdriver pulled over to the curb in front of my building, I leaned forward. “Keep driving, please.”

21

Whenever I need a sharp slap in the face or swift boot in the teeth, I go in search of Bunny Loveland.

Bunny was the housekeeper my mother hired when we first moved to Chicago following my dad’s death. When we’d lived in Michigan, no one we knew employed a cleaning lady or any household staff. You scrubbed your own toilets. And if you needed someone to watch your kids while you ran an errand, you called the neighbors, who said, Sure, we’ll stop over and check on them every so often. But in Chicago, it was different. My mother was a single mom, a working single mom. She needed someone to keep the apartment reasonably germ-free and to be at the house if she worked late.

When she heard the name Bunny Loveland my mom must have thought she’d hit it big. Surely this woman was an affectionate grandmother type. She certainly looked the part-gray polyester pants with the built-in seam and once-a-week beauty-shop hair that lay in rounded, steel-gray rows. Alas, Bunny wasn’t what my mother was hoping for. I’m not sure my mother even truly interviewed Bunny, because a quick conversation with the woman would have made it obvious that she was a cranky, mean-spirited person who cracked a smile only when she saw a Polish sausage from Vienna Beef.

Bunny came to our house twice a week from the time I was eight until I was a sophomore in high school. She brought groceries, mopped our floors and eyed my brother and me with a wariness that said, I know you little motherfuckers are up to something. Knock it off.

For the most part, Charlie and I stayed out of her way. Yet, as the years went on, Bunny started to toss out her opinions. They never came when you wanted to hear them, and they were always harsh, but you were glad for them when you recovered from the punchlike trauma.

I remember being eleven years old and tortured with the early advent of puberty. Something bizarre was going on with my body. It wasn’t the boobs-I wouldn’t get those until late, a surprise arrival senior year-it was simply that something seemed to be cooking inside me, boiling over, making me hot, making my red hair curl in sweaty ringlets around my face.

Bunny glanced over at me one spring afternoon and seemed to really see me for the first time in months. She frowned deeply, the motion making the thin skin around her mouth hang in folds. She crossed the room in a flash and grabbed my shoulder with a tight grip.

“Bunny! What…” I said, trying to squirm away from her.

“Come here.” She tightened her grip until it cut into my skin, pulling me closer. She leaned down and sniffed. “You smell ripe, girl.”

I froze, hoping this was all a mortifying, horrifying, terrifying dream.

“Has your mother bought you anything for that?”

“For what?”

She sighed-the same sigh that Moses must have made when he pondered the pickle of the Red Sea. “Watch your brother.”

She grabbed her keys and left the apartment. She returned twenty minutes later with a brown paper bag. She took out a blue tube that read Secret on the side. “Put this under your arms before you get dressed,” she said, plunking it down on the counter. “Every morning. Got it?”

We stared at each other. I knew she wasn’t steering me wrong. “Sure, got it.”

I quickly learned that when Bunny said something, she was rarely incorrect. And at the very least she was always atrociously honest, which was exactly what I needed now with Sam gone and no clue what, in my life, was worthy of belief.

Bunny was in her late seventies now and had only stopped cleaning houses a few years prior when a number of deaths in her distant family resulted in one cousin’s money being left solely to her. She still lived on Schubert Avenue in the place she’d bought in the sixties with her first (and only) husband, and which she had kept in the divorce a few years later.

I stood in front of the house now. It was a squat, old, brown cottage, overgrown with trees and surrounded by soaring brick brownstones, all built within the last ten years. Bunny had been offered loads of money to sell her place to developers who would raze her outdated shack. She could move to a bigger and better house with that kind of money, they told her. And she told them to shove it. I was sure her neighbors gritted their teeth every time they looked at the straggly bushes at the perimeter of the property and the little windmill outside Bunny’s front door.

I knocked. I hadn’t called, but I knew she’d be home. Bunny rarely left the place these days.

She opened the door, the smell of vinegar (her favorite cleaning solvent) wafting from behind her. She looked much the same as she had years ago-same hair, although it was white now; same grim set to her mouth.

“What are you doing here?” she asked by way of a greeting.

“Great to see you, too.” I kissed her on the cheek, and she quickly wiped at it with the back of her hand.

The front room of Bunny’s house was a sitting room decorated with sixties furniture-curved leather couches and mod coffee tables, stuff she and the husband had purchased way back when. For years, it was painfully dated, but now that retro was hot again, the room made Bunny seem like an elderly woman with extremely hip tastes. The Chicago Trib lay in sections on the table next to a cup of coffee.

Bunny nodded at the table. “Want some coffee or tea?”

“Sure.”

“It’s in the kitchen.” She sat down on the couch.

When I was back with a cup of tea, Bunny put down the paper and stared at me with a frown, waiting.

“It’s Sam,” I said.

The corners of her mouth lifted for the briefest second before dropping again. “I like that boy.”

This was true-I’d brought Sam around a few times and Bunny had taken to him like she didn’t to most people. He didn’t try to butter her up, and he shared her love of hot dogs and Polish sausage, and the two of them could go head-to-head for hours, debating Sugerdawg vs. Vienna Beef vs. Nathan’s vs. Portillo’s vs. Red Hot.

“Sam seems to have taken off,” I told Bunny. I told her what I knew.

Bunny’s gaze moved away from mine toward the light coming through her front window. She stared out, looking almost wistful in a way I’d never seen before. “I miss having a man around.”