The third book in the V.I. Warshawski series, 1985

MY STOMACH MUSCLES contracted as I locked the car door. I hadn’t been to Melrose Park for ten years, but, as I walked up the narrow pavement to the house’s side entrance, I felt a decade of maturity slipping from me, felt the familiar sickening, my heart thudding.

The January wind scattered dead leaves around my feet. Little snow had fallen this winter, but the air blew cold. After ringing the bell I jammed my hands deep into the pockets of my navy car coat to keep them warm. I tried to argue my nervousness away. After all, they had called me… begged me for help… The words meant nothing. I had lost an important battle by responding to the plea.

I stamped my feet to loosen the toes frozen inside thin-soled loafers and heard, at last, a rattling behind the painted blue door. It swung inward into a dimly lit vestibule. Through the screen I could just make out my cousin Albert, much heavier than he’d been ten years ago. The screen and the dark behind him softened his pout.

“Come in, Victoria. Mother is waiting for you.”

I bit back an excuse for being a quarter hour late and turned it into a neutral comment on the weather. Albert was almost bald, I noted with pleasure. He took my coat ungraciously and draped it over the banister at the foot of the narrow, uncarpeted stairs.

A deep, harsh voice called to us. “Albert! Is that Victoria?”

“Yes, Mama,” Albert muttered.

The only light in the entryway came from a tiny round window facing the stairs. The dimness obscured the pattern in the wallpaper, but as I followed Albert down the close corridor I could see it hadn’t changed: gray paper with white loops, ugly, cold. As a child, I thought the paper oozed hate. Behind Albert’s wobbling thighs the old chill stuck out tendrils at me and I shivered.