The Isle of Youth: Stories by Laura van den Berg Read Free Book Online

time I did feel partly responsible for whatever it was that had happened to her husband, as though our mere presence had set something in motion that might have remained dormant otherwise.
    “We tried our best,” I said. “We did just what you asked. We were very professional.”
    “You should have seen the mess they left on the roof,” Detective Gregerson said. “Beer cans, food wrappers. Styrofoam cups, which are hell on the environment. And you shouldn’t take those caffeine pills.” He patted his chest. “Bad for the heart.”
    Mrs. Defonte folded her hands on the table and sniffed.
    When the police found out we’d posed as real detectives, we were charged with impersonating an officer, fined one thousand dollars, and stripped of our private investigator and gun licenses. Winslow & Co. was over. Because Julia had a prior, her probation was extended by five years. The police said that if it weren’t for overcrowding, she’d have gone right back to jail. That same week, a man was stabbed to death in the parking lot of our building in Opa-locka. Even after the body was taken away, streaks of dried blood stayed on the asphalt until it rained.
    *   *   *
    The rest of the Defonte saga unfolded on local TV. Boca Raton resident vanishes into thin air! The story got a lot of air time on Florida stations, but never went national. Still, I developed an addiction to the news. I would stay inside for days, reading and watching everything I could find. I would sleep for hours and wake up tired. Some nights I lay on the sofa and thought as hard as I could about what we’d seen, what it meant. Was his body in that building? Was Belinda Singer some kind of criminal mastermind? Had he faked his own disappearance and made off to South America? What had we missed? I didn’t come to a firm conclusion about anything.
    Julia had no patience for my brooding. The Defonte case reminded us all too much of our father—not just the vanishing, but the inscrutability of it. My sister threw away our Winslow & Co. business cards and letterhead and started working with a shady, unlicensed PI outfit, whose clients were usually as culpable as the people they wanted investigated—a husband with domestic violence priors looking for his wife, a crooked businessman searching for the equally crooked partner who fleeced him. I brought this up to Julia one night, the morality of it. Who isn’t guilty , she said, and maybe she had a point. On the nights she didn’t come home at all, I would wait up on the sofa, in the glow of the TV, and worry.
    New postcards arrived in the mail, another cloud and a rocky slope with scrubby bushes. I gathered all the cards and took them next door to Mirabella, who read tea leaves for a living. She was twenty-one, single, and rarely home. She took me into her bedroom. Her walls were covered with posters of tea leaves in various formations. She flopped down on her bed, spread the cards out in the shape of a rainbow, and examined them.
    “This is not in Florida.” Mirabella lay on her stomach. She had acne scars on her cheeks. She picked up the river and fanned herself with the card. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s hard to say more without all the pieces.”
    “Harder than reading tea leaves?”
    Mirabella said she wasn’t charging me and so I couldn’t expect her best work. Besides, she added, pointing at one of the posters with the card, the leaves always told the whole story.
    “Like I knew I was going to get robbed before it happened,” she said.
    “If you knew, why didn’t you do something?”
    “What could I do?” she said. “Not go home?”
    I looked at the poster. The tea was a soggy, dark swirl, like wet dirt in the bottom of a white cup. Maybe I just didn’t have a knack for seeing things.
    Back at the apartment, I called my husband. If he would tell me what he was sending pieces of and why, I was willing to give him the satisfaction of saying he knew working with my sister