Free Waking Hours by Lis Wiehl Page A

his cell phone at the scene. He has no idea how it got there.”
    “Is he the only suspect?”
    “I don’t know,” Tommy said. “He gave the police the names of the other kids at the party. I believe they’re thinking one of them did it, but maybe someone unrelated to the party found her on her way home. Have you ever heard the name Abbie Gardener?”
    “I know Abbie,” Carl said. “As much as anyone can, given her condition. I’ve seen her at High Ridge when I visited some other residents there. What’s Abbie have to do with this?”
    “Probably nothing,” Tommy said, “except that last night she got out of the nursing home and ended up in my backyard. My alarm went off at three in the morning. The police think she might have seen something.”
    “It won’t be easy to talk to her,” Carl said. “I understand she’s in the final stages of Alzheimer’s.”
    “Can I show you something?” Tommy asked, digging his phone from the pocket of his jacket. He flipped screens until he’d queued up the video he’d taken the night before. “She was saying something when I found her, but it wasn’t anything I could understand. I thought maybe if I played it for you—you speak like a hundred languages, right?”
    “Not quite a hundred,” Carl said. “Before you do—are you working on this as a case?”
    Carl was one of the few people Tommy had told of his new career path.
    “Sort of. I’m just an interested party. Did I ever tell you about Dani Harris?”
    “Is that the party you’re interested in?”
    “She’s a forensic psychiatrist with the DA’s office.”
    “Did you tell her you’re studying for your PI’s license?”
    “Not yet,” Tommy said. “I didn’t want to seem pushy. Anyway, she’s working on the case and she asked me to help her. Okay, she didn’t exactly ask me.” He handed Carl his phone. “Can you translate this?”
    “I can try.” He pressed the screen’s Play arrow and listened.
    Tommy watched the expression on his friend’s face change from curiosity to concern. “It’s crazy stuff, isn’t it? What’s ‘luck’s fairy’?”
    “The first part’s in Italian,” Carl said. “Do you mind if I take this inside? I just want to check something on my computer. I’ll be right back.”
    While he waited, Tommy watched a flight of geese fly overhead in chevron formation, headed in a northerly direction. He’d always had a remarkably good sense of direction, even on a cloudy day or night when the sun or the stars were hidden. It was the wrong time of year for geese to fly north, but he assumed they knew what they were doing. Circling back, perhaps, to pick up stragglers.
    Carl returned to the porch carrying a book. When Tommy opened it, he saw it was written in Italian. He turned back to the cover and read the title, La Divina Commedia, di Dante Alighieri .
    “It’s a nineteenth-century translation of the Ferrari original,” Carl said. “I thought I remembered the passage from the Purgatorio , but I was wrong. It’s from the Inferno . Haven’t read this since I was in seminary.”
    He reached over and opened the book to the page he’d bookmarked and pointed with his finger to the exact line.
    “ Le ali congoleare di mondo . My Italian’s not as good as it should be,” Carl said, “but I would translate it as ‘His wings freeze the world.’ In context, ‘God’s most splendid being, who beats his wings and freezes everything that surrounds him.’ ”
    He handed Tommy a printout he’d made of his translation.
    “What about ‘luck’s fairy’?” Tommy asked.
    “Well, it’s not l-u-c-k-apostrophe-s. It’s l-u-x. Lux , that means ‘light.’ In Latin, not Italian. And ferre , spelled f-e-r-r-e, means ‘to bring.’ ‘Bringer of light’ would be the translation. ‘Whose wings freeze the world.’ Lux ferre is from the Bible. It refers to a person.”
    “And who would that be?” Tommy asked.
    “Lux ferre,” Carl said. “Combined to make