Page 118 of Rough Hard Fierce (Chicago Underground 1-3)
A blush heated my face. “Yes.” At least it was true. I left out the part about him not planning on coming home.
Her eyes narrowed. “Why don’t you go on upstairs? Take a little nap or read a book or something. I’ve got her covered.”
Grateful, I trudged up the stairs. I soaked in a hot bath, letting the sweat and steam bead on my face before I pulled myself back out. After throwing on some clothes, I looked inside his closet. Beside the space he’d emptied, there was a row of shirts. Collared things that I almost never saw him wear. And underneath, slacks and jeans. In the drawers I found undershirts and socks and underwear.
I knew all this was here, of course. He’d gratefully relinquished laundry duty to me since my first days here. I only ever looked at these sections, of course, not what was on the top shelf.
It took me a minute to find a stool downstairs and then lug it back up. Shoe boxes filled with receipts and bills. They looked like they had to do with the restaurant, which fit, since any Philip-related papers were probably in his tinderbox of a mansion.
I set that back on the high shelf and rummaged through some folded blankets and sheets. At the very end, in the corner and under some winter clothes, was a file folder marked “Marge” in Colin’s square lettering.
I slid it open and found a Registered Claim and Deed granted to Colin James Murphy. Was this where he was staying? It didn’t seem likely. Based on the zip code, I guessed it to be out by Wolf Lake, about an hour’s drive from here.
I was going to find out. Maybe because I deserved answers, and Colin was too damned reserved to ever give them to me. Or maybe because I cared about him enough to push, in the same way he’d pushed me at the beginning. And plus, I was incredibly curious about the man I loved.
Even more thankful that Linda had stayed on for Bailey’s dinner, I got in my car. I passed through the neighborhood streets of Oak Park, out across Chicago’s urban jungle to the remote plains near the lake.
A faded sign marked my arrival. HUNTER’S GLEN TRAILER PARK. Rows of metallic and off-white trailers suffocated among the debris around them. Plots that were little more than dirt and a few stray weeds were marked by white, jagged rocks. If this was a glen, then I was a debutante, but I could believe people hunted in the swamps around the lake.
I hadn’t known Chicago had anything like this, so country. But then, it was barely there at all. As my car jostled over the gravel path, I noticed several trailers had their windows smashed in to darkened rooms. Only a man slumped against the side of one told me that this place hadn’t been entirely abandoned. His eyes were yellow. And his teeth, when he bared them to me. In a smile or a threat, I wasn’t sure.
At the end of the path there was a smaller sign staked into the ground. EUROPEAN FORTUNE TELLING $10.
Though a few of them seemed like they might be lived in, I was hesitant to go knocking on doors. Neither did I want to check back with the man I’d seen on the way. The fortune-teller seemed like the safest bet.
I got out of the car and wove through the path of junk. The furniture and car parts made me think the plot was used as storage. The pink metal flamingos and numerous gnomes made the area seem more deliberate, more decorous, like a poor person’s sculpture garden.
I knocked and was rewarded with a raspy, “Come in.”
When I opened the door, I was met with a beaded curtain. Not wooden beads or jewel tones like I might have expected, but hot pink plastic beads, like the kind that go on Mardi Gras necklaces. I parted the strings to walk into the smokiest room I’d ever smelled. Piles of newspapers and dishes crowded in on me.
“You want your fortune told, missy?” came from the corner, in a voice that grated like the gravel I’d just come from.
I blinked through the mist of smoke and dust, trying to see. “No, I was looking for…well, I wasn’t exactly sure, but—”
“If you don’t know what you’re looking for, sounds like you do need your fortune told, eh?” She cackled. I was pretty sure it was a she.
“I found out this place was owned by someone. Someone I know—”
“You know Colin?” she interrupted.
“Yes, he’s—”
“What you want with the boy?”
He hadn’t been a boy in some time, but the fact that she seemed to know him and thought of him that way said a lot. “Well, he’s my boyfriend. Or he was. And I guess I—”
“Girl, you’s barking up the wrong tree with that one.”
I didn’t know who this lady was, but that really wasn’t the message I wanted to hear. Thank goodness I didn’t believe in psychics, especially not her.
“I wonder if you could just tell me how you know him,” I said quickly to ward off another interruption.
She huffed. “I know everything about him. I practically raised the boy.”
Holy shit. I thought back to the papers I’d found in Philip’s study. He’d been orphaned, they’d said, so she couldn’t be his mother. Maybe a foster parent? If they’d been placing kids in this dump, they must have been in a bad way.
She leaned forward from the shadows. Her face was a map of neglect with its many wrinkled tributaries and sunken eyes. “I’m his aunt.”
