had to try to tell her how very worried I was to see her in such a corrupt place.”
“And was it Alexandra’s face she was painting?”
Cristina’s nose twitched as if she were smelling something bad. “It was enough to see Nadia together with a naked woman. If she was involving her sainted sister, then I am thankful to God that I was spared that sight.”
“How did Alexandra die?”
Cristina backed away from me. “In a painful, hard way that I prefer not to discuss.”
“Did she have a boyfriend, a girlfriend, anyone I could talk to?”
“What are you trying to ask?” Cristina hissed.
So she knew her daughter had women as lovers. Alexandra wouldn’t come out of the closet for fear her mother would learn, and her mother had known all along. Had Alexandra committed suicide because of the pressure? Had Nadia known and moved out after fighting with her mother over Allie’s sexuality?
I couldn’t think of any good way to ask these questions, so I asked in a bad way. “Who told you that Alexandra was sleeping with women?”
Cristina gasped. “If you came here to slander my saint, my angel, I will call the police. Leave!”
“I’m not trying to upset you, Ms. Guaman, just to figure out who killed your beloved daughter Nadia.”
“They arrested a man. It’s enough, enough that we’re dragged through the dirt by Nadia, without you coming to me and pouring it over me.”
“I went to Nadia’s apartment this morning,” I said. “Someone had broken in, had stolen her computer and all her discs. All her artwork is missing.”
At that, she became very quiet. She shook her head slowly as if unhappy at whatever she was thinking, but even though I tried several different gambits, she wouldn’t share her private thoughts with me. I told her about Nadia’s conviction that someone was spying on her.
“Who would that have been, do you think?” I asked. “The person who murdered her?”
Cristina shook her head again. “Nadia had many unhappy ideas, and not very many of them are—were—true. Was it she who told you those filthy lies about Alexandra? Nadia believed them and wouldn’t accept my word that her sister was pure, a good Christian, not capable of such acts. But enough anger. Nadia is with her sister now, in the arms of the Blessed Mother. I thank God that she has no more pain on this earth.”
That was all I was going to learn from her: Nada about Nadia. I walked unhappily from the store, wondering just what it was Cristina Guaman didn’t want me to know about her daughter. Daughters.
I stopped in a taquería across the street for a bowl of rice and beans. Ernie couldn’t tell me anything. Even if I could get past security at O’Hare to reach Lazar Guaman, it was hard to convince myself that such a gray and beaten man would talk to me. That left the surviving daughter, poor young Clara. It was two-thirty—with luck, I’d make it to her school before she left.
17
Vow of Silence
I rode the Green Line to Halsted and walked the few blocks to St. Teresa of Avila Prep. School got out at three, and the city buses were already lined up. Unless the Guamans’ self-appointed protector could leave his La Salle Street practice to collect Clara, the easiest route home for her was on the Number 60 bus down Blue Island Avenue.
I reached the school about ten minutes ahead of the exodus. I shivered in the bus stop catty-corner to the school until the tall doors opened and the students poured out.
They seemed to arrive in one giant wave of screaming, jostling teens, but as they passed me they broke into little clots—groups of high-spirited boys, or girls laughing and kidding together, or couples in that adolescent embrace that doesn’t allow a single molecule of air between their bodies. A number were walking alone, shoulders hunched to avoid the glances of a pitying world. Most were bent under their giant backpacks, looking much as their peasant forebears must have, lugging cotton or corn or wood. And all, it seemed, were madly reconnecting to their cell phones and music players after a day of forced withdrawal.
My dressy boots were elegant, but they weren’t very warm. I was beginning to think I’d have to amputate my toes if I stood outside much longer, when Clara Guaman appeared in the middle of a knot of other girls. Unlike yesterday, when she’d gone bare-armed to her sister’s funeral, she was dressed sensibly in