The Twelfth Card

worked some, cleaning. He said I could stay in the basement—if I paid him. I have a cot down there, an old dresser, a microwave, a bookshelf. I put his apartment down as my address for mail.”
    Bell said, “You didn’t seem real at home in that place. Whose was it?”
    “This retired couple. They live here half the year and go to South Carolina for the fall and winter. Willy has an extra key.” She added, “I’ll pay them back for the electric bill and replace the beer and things that Willy took.”
    “You don’t have to worry about that.”
    “Yes, I do,” she said firmly.
    “Who’d I talk to before, if it wasn’t your mother?” Bell asked.
    “Sorry,” Geneva said, sighing. “That was Lakeesha. I asked her to front she was my moms. She’s kind of an actress.”
    “She had me fooled.” The detective grinned at being taken in so completely.
    “And your own language?” Rhyme asked. “You sure sound like a professor’s daughter.”
    She slipped into street talk. “Don’t be talkin’ like no homegirl, you sayin’?” A grim laugh. “I’ve worked on my Standard English ever since I was seven or eight.” Her face grew sad. “The only good thing about my father—he always had me into books. He used to read to me some too.”
    “We can find him and—”
    “No!” Geneva said in a harsh voice. “I don’t want anything to do with him. Anyway, he’s got his own kids now. He doesn’t want anything to do with me.”
    “And nobody found out you were homeless?” Sachs asked.
    “Why would they? I never applied for welfare or food stamps so no social workers came to see me. I never even signed up for free meals at school ’cause it’d blow my cover. I forged my parents’ names on the school papers when I needed their signatures. And I have a voice-mail box at a service. That was Keesh again. She recorded the outgoing message, pretending to be my mother.”
    “And the school never suspected?”
    “Sometimes they asked why I never had anybody at parent-teacher conferences, but nobody thought anything about it because I have straight A’s. No welfare, good grades, no problems with the police . . . Nobody notices you if there’s nothing wrong.” She laughed. “You know the Ralph Ellison book, Invisible Man ? No, not that science fiction movie. It’s about being black in America, being invisible. Well, I’m the invisible girl.”
    It made sense now: the shabby clothes and cheap watch, not at all what jet-setting parents would buy for their girl. The public school, not a private one. Her friend, the homegirl Keesh—not the sort who’d be close to the daughter of a college professor.
    Rhyme nodded. “We never saw you actually callyour parents in England. But you did call the super yesterday, after what happened at the museum, right? Had him pretend to be your uncle?”
    “He said he’d agree if I paid him extra, yeah. He wanted me to stay in his place—but that wouldn’t be a good idea. You know what I’m saying? So I told him to use Two-B, with the Reynolds being away. I had him take their name off the mailbox.”
    “Never thought that man seemed much like kin,” Bell said and Geneva responded with a scoffing laugh.
    “When your parents never showed up, what were you going to say?”
    “I didn’t know.” Her voice broke and for an instant she looked hopelessly young and lost. Then she recovered. “I’ve had to improvise the whole thing. When I went to get Charles’s letters yesterday?” She glanced at Bell, who nodded. “I snuck out the back door and went down to the basement. That’s where they were.”
    “You have any family here?” Sachs asked. “Other than your aunt?”
    “I don’t have no—” The flash of true horror in the girl’s eyes was the first that Rhyme had seen. And its source was not a hired killer but the near slip into hated nonstandard grammar. She shook her head. “I don’t have anybody.”
    “Why don’t you go to Social Services?” Sellitto asked. “That’s what they’re there for.”
    Bell added, “You more’n anybody’re entitled to it.”
    The girl frowned and her dark eyes turned darker. “I don’t take anything for free.” A shake of the head. “Besides, a social worker’d come to check things out and see my situation. I’d get sent down to my aunt’s in ’Bama. She lives in a town outside of Selma, three hundred people in it. You know what kind of educationI’d get there? Or, I stay here, and end up in