Public Secrets

make an undercover cop. “To keep people from hassling them, maybe hurting them. And the little girl,” Lou added. “Someone might try to kidnap her.”

“Jeez. You mean they’ve got to have guards all the time?”
“Yes.”
“Bummer,” Michael murmured sincerely, no longer sure he wanted to pursue the idea of becoming a rock star. “I’d hate to have people watching me all the time. I mean, how could you have any secrets?”
“It’s tough.”
As his father pulled away from the curb, Michael cast one last look over his shoulder. “Can we go to McDonald’s?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“I guess she doesn’t get to do that much.”
“What?”
“The little kid. Emma. I guess she doesn’t get to go to McDonald’s.”
“No.” Lou ruffled his boy’s hair. “I guess not.”
It took only a few minutes to get Michael settled in with a cheeseburger, fries, and a shake. Lou left his son in the booth to call in. From the phone outside the window he could see Michael dousing more ketchup on the burger. “Kesselring,” he said. “I’ll be in the station in an hour.”
“I got some bad news for you, Lou.”
“What else is new?”
“It’s Fletcher, your pizza man.”
“Didn’t he make it into L.A.?”
“Yeah, he made it in. Sent a couple of uniforms to pick him up this morning for questioning. Seems they were about six hours too late. He’d been dead that long.”
“Shit.”
“Looks like a standard OD. He had the works and some top-grade heroin. We’re waiting on the coroner’s report.”
“That’s great. That’s fucking great.” He slammed a hand against the wall of the booth, hard enough to make a mother hurry her three children by. “Have the lab boys been over his hotel room?”
“Top to bottom.”
“Give me the address.” He fumbled for his notebook. “I have to drop my kid at home, after that I’ll have a look.”
Lou noted it down, swore again, and banged the receiver. He opened the door, then to give himself a moment, leaned against it. Through the window he could see his son cheerfully plowing through the cheeseburger.

Chapter Thirteen

Saint Catherine’s Academy, 1977
T WO MORE WEEKS , Emma thought. Two more long, boring, rotten weeks, and she’d be out for the summer. She’d be able to see her father, and Johnno and the rest. She’d be able to breathe without being told she was breathing for God. She’d be able to think without being warned about impure thoughts.
As far as she could see, the nuns must be full of impure thoughts or else they wouldn’t be so sure everyone else had them.
She would be going back to the real world for a few precious weeks. New York. Emma closed her eyes a moment, trying to bring its noise, its smells, its life into her quiet room. With a sigh, she propped her elbows on her desk, slouching in a way that would have made Sister Mary Alice crack her ruler. She didn’t bend over the French verbs she was supposed to conjugate, but looked out over the green lawns to the high stone walls that closed the school off from the sinful world.
Not all the sinful world, she thought. She was full of sin, and was grateful her roommate, Marianne Carter, was equally blighted. Her days at Saint Catherine’s would have been torture without Marianne.
She grinned as she thought of her funny, freckled, redheaded roomie and best friend. Marianne was sinful, all right, and was even now doing penance for her latest transgression. The caricature Marianne had sketched of Mother Superior was worth a couple of hours scrubbing bathrooms.
If it hadn’t been for Marianne, she might have run away. Though where she would have run, she hadn’t a clue.

There was really only one place she wanted to go, and that was to her father. And he would have shipped her right back.
It wasn’t fair. She was nearly thirteen, nearly a real teenager, and she was stuck in this antiquated school conjugating verbs, reciting catechism, and dissecting frogs. Gross.
It wasn’t that she hated the nuns. Well, she admitted, perhaps she did hate Sister Immaculata. The Warden. But who wouldn’t hate someone with a pruny mouth, a wart on her nose, and a fondness for giving young girls extra chores for the teeniest infractions?
But Da had only been amused when she’d told him about Sister Immaculata.
She missed him; she missed all of them.
She wanted to go home. But she wasn’t sure where home would be. Often she thought about the house in London, the castle where she had been so happy for such a