The Greeks of Beaubien Street Read Online Free Page A

she may never again see her daughter alive, and she must be ready the moment the authorities called for them.
    Gretchen was never, ever late. Even though she was twenty-six, she still had a curfew. As long as she lived at home, Jacob wanted her back by eleven each night. He couldn’t sleep knowing she was out. It wasn’t fair to him. If she needed to stay out later, she could move. When midnight passed into Saturday morning, Jacob called a friend of his on the force. They waived the forty-eight hour waiting period and put out the missing person report. Marianne put on a white blouse and a pair of dress slacks with a matching jacket and waited. She prepared a pot of coffee and poured two travel cups full. She and Jacob got into their car and began driving up and down every street on the west side of town. They would tackle the east side in the daylight tomorrow if she still wasn’t home.
    Gretchen drove a bright red Chevy Malibu. You could see it a block away. At six o’clock Saturday morning they found it at Blazos, a popular hangout for young adults. Jacob was furious; how many times had he told Gretchen to stay the hell out of the drive-in restaurants in town? A bunch of low-life scum hung out there. Marianne reminded him that she’d had a date with Mike. Jacob hated Mike, so Gretchen stopped having him pick her up at the house. Instead, they met downtown and she would leave her car at Blazos and go off in his Explorer.
    “Where does Mike live?” Jacob asked, looking at his wife.
    “I think in East Dearborn,” Marianne said, immediately sorry because Jacob’s face contorted as he yelled at her.
    “God damnit, I know he lives in East Dearborn! Where , for Christ’s sake?” He didn’t allow Gretchen to date boys from Fordson High School on the dreaded East side when she was a teen, because that was where the Arabs went to school. But now, as an adult, she would date whomever she pleased. And who pleased her at the moment was Mike Ahmed. Jacob left the parking lot at Blazos and drove like a maniac down Michigan Avenue. He was yelling at Marianne, “call four-one-one and get a phone number!” But even simple Marianne knew that was ridiculous; Ahmed was as common a last name as Smith. She hoped they would find his contact information somewhere in Gretchen’s room instead.
    Jacob sped back to their house. They barely waited for the car to stop moving before both jumped out and ran inside. When they got to her door, they stopped, fearful to move into the space, not sure what they might find. Jacob, in a rare moment of thoughtfulness, deferred to his wife and hung back. She went to her daughter’s desk and pulled out the chair to sit. Like the rest of the room, everything on the desk was neatly organized. She began pulling drawers open; worried she would expose something that would send her volatile husband into a rage. Under a neat stack of bills waiting to be paid lay Gretchen’s address book. It was an old fashioned, vinyl bound book. With trembling hands, Marianne opened it to the first pages, to the A’s. Ahmed . Michael Ahmed, 144 Indiana Street. There was no phone number. She probably had it programmed into her cell. Marianne picked up the telephone and dialed information. When the automated recording answered, she recited the street address into the receiver. The robot voice responded that there was no listing found for that address.
    “Let’s just go. He might try to hide from us if she is still there and he knows we are coming.” For once, Jacob thought his wife was making sense. They hurried down the stairs and out to the car again. Jacob pulled out onto Outer Drive, pointing the car toward Ford Road. He couldn’t remember where Indiana Street was, but had a GPS. He hollered at Marianne to program the address in and hollered some more when it took her shaking fingers so long to type it. Indiana was as far as you could go and still be in Dearborn. There was a huge fenced-in area with a Water Company