Ghost Country by Sara Paretsky Read Free Book Online

their Special Events office. She could answer the phone, sound pleasant to prospective customers, book weddings and bar mitzvoth—surely that was within her capabilities? So Mara put on pantyhose and lipstick every day—Did you run a comb through that bush of yours, miss? Mrs. Ephers would call to her as she left the apartment in the morning—Try to remember it’s not just your name that’s injured if you make a bad impression. Your sister went out on a limb for you: don’t you go hurting her career by making a mess of this job.
    The Hotel Pleiades perched east of Michigan Avenue, one ofthe skyscrapers that had suddenly erupted from the empty lots around the train station. The hotel’s white masonry and slate-colored glass shot thirty stories over the river, shutting out light from the old buildings on the avenue, but giving guests a clear view of Lake Michigan.
    The hotel also sent down shoots to the Underworld, the shadow network of streets beneath the heart of downtown Chicago. The Pleiades parking garage opened onto Lower Wacker Drive, where delivery vans and garbage trucks bring supplies to downtown businesses, and ferry away their waste. Under rusting rebars in the roadbed to the bright city overhead, homeless people lived in makeshift boxes, protected from rain and snow, skin turning gray in the absence of light and air.
    It was near the Pleiades garage that the woman at the wall camped. The exact location under the leaking pipe seemed important to her: one night, when Mara was climbing down the stairs to the Underworld, she saw a panhandler working a line of homebound office workers while they waited for one of the buses that had a terminus on Underground Wacker. The commuters stood in an unspeaking, unmoving line, as if by holding themselves completely still, the germ of homelessness would not infect them. When the bus arrived and the passengers surged through the doors in panicky relief, the panhandler snarled and moved up the street to the woman at the wall’s usual spot.
    The woman wasn’t there. Watching the man unzip his pants to relieve himself against the bricks below the crack, Mara wondered if he’d forced the woman to leave, when she suddenly appeared at the corner of the building.
    She drove him away, yelling curses at him: “The Mother of God knows you’ve defiled Her temple! She will curse you, She will wither your balls, She will turn your urine black!” The panhandler, twice her size, stumbled off without taking time to cover himself. Mara laughed. Street theater, performance art, right on, sister.
    A couple who’d just left their car with the garage attendant backed away in horror, first from the panhandler, trying to ziphimself together as he shuffled along, and then from the woman’s curses which followed him down the street. As Mara walked past the garage she could hear the driver of the car complaining loudly to the garage manager: “Can’t you do anything to keep the street clean down here?”
    “It is clean, except for suburban scum who come and dirty it with their minds,” Mara yelled.
    She turned back to the homeless woman, who was rubbing a crumpled newspaper over the dark blotch left by the man’s urine. Mara found a five-dollar bill in her wallet and handed it to her.
    The woman interrupted her work to pocket the bill. “Thank you, ma’am, thank you. The Mother of God thanks you, too. Her face on the wall will smile at you. Her blood will cleanse you.”
    The woman finished her work and stuck her fingers against the crack in the bricks where water, stained red by the rusting pipes behind it, oozed out. She laid damp fingers on Mara’s lips, then on her own. Mara tried not to grimace or draw away, but she couldn’t help gagging at the woman’s touch, and the taste of the chalky-sweet rust on her mouth.
    As she walked back past the garage the manager was standing with the outraged couple, watching her. “Hey!” the manager yelled. “You! Do you know that