Too Quiet in Brooklyn by Susan Russo Anderson

been?” I asked.
    “Some of us have serious studying to do.”
    “So?”
    “My Eagle guy just phoned. He heard that the Feds found the remains of a cargo van. Torched real good. Found it on a spit of land off the Belt near Bensonhurst. A 2000 or so Econoline. Original color white, but they found flakes of reddish paint. No plates.”
    “VIN?” I asked.
    “They don’t know.”
    I took three bites of ice cream, slurped my coffee to get rid of the brain freeze, and told Denny.
    He made a call and scribbled some notes on his napkin.
    “These guys aren’t going to torch a van before destroying the VIN. They’ve been removed or filed down. Some of Jane’s folks are looking through the rubble now for pieces of the frame. Insurance companies know all the places to look, and I’m sure someone on her team has called them. Maybe they’ll get lucky, let’s hope so.”
    “Any human remains?”
    “He didn’t say.”
    “Good.”
    “Fina, that means nothing. First of all, we don’t know whose van this was, not yet at any rate. And second, that fire could have been fed by any number of agents that can make it hot enough to disintegrate the devil’s tail. Not even bones would survive the blaze.”
    I bit down.
    He looked at me with those eyes I can’t resist. Damn, but he’s too good for me.
    I thought I saw a smile cross his face. “But he did say they found a kid’s picture book wedged between the rocks about five-hundred feet from the site. Something about a tree.” He kissed my neck. “Do you think tomorrow’s going to work for dinner?”
    “Better tell your mother no. This is my chance, this case. Besides, I feel like something’s going to break and it’s going to be me that makes it break.”
    He nodded thoughtfully. “We don’t talk much about what’s between us. We never get round to the real words, do we?”
    “Denny, now’s not the right time.”
    “I know, I know.”
    He tried to hide his disappointment by turning on the TV.
    I sat next to him on the couch. Nice and close. But in a few minutes my phone vibrated. I looked at the text and smiled. “What do you know, it’s Jane feeding me info.”
    “Torched van?”
    “Yup. No VIN, telling me about The Giving Tree .”
    I texted back to her, “Charlie’s favorite book,” and asked her what happened at the morgue.
    For a reply I got, “She’s your client.”
    I smiled. I was going to get just so much from Jane and nothing more.
    “What did you say you majored in?” I asked him, even though I knew full well it was something to do with numbers.
    “Tell you what, you help me with the dishes and we’ll look at those Excel files together,” he said.
    “Better yet, you look at the Excel files while I do the dishes.”

    * * *

    I looked over my notes, planning my next moves and decided I needed to talk to Barbara. When I’d moved her car earlier, I wrote down her tags and peeked in the glove compartment where I’d gotten her address, insurance particulars from her registration, and other papers she’d stuffed in there. She lived in the two-hundred block on Clinton, nice neighborhood. I knew Cobble Hill well and I could have knocked on her door, but looked at my watch and decided I’d better phone first.
    “The police just called,” Barbara told me when I called her mobile. “They found The Giving Tree . I’m sure that means Charlie’s alive.”
    I didn’t think finding Charlie’s picture book in the tall grass near a torched-out van was a good sign, but I wasn’t about to share my opinion with Barbara. I’d be disabusing her of hope. I couldn’t help it, Emily Dickinson’s poem started rolling through my head, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.” I used to recite the whole deal to myself, over and over after Mom died, listening hard for the tune coming out of the feathery thing’s beak, but in the beginning, I never heard it. Even now I have days when I think it’s all bullshit, but tonight it was