Bad Luck Girl (35 page)

But no matter what else she did, Callie LeRoux still kept a close eye on the Midnight Club, and people still said all kinds of strange things about it. They said there was a back room where you could catch sight of a whole lot of funny-looking people coming and going. But that was Chicago for you. Nobody asked too many questions. But they said other things too. They said in the basement of the Midnight Club there was a different back room, and in that back room was an old iron safe. They said if you went and put your ear up to it, you could hear something rustling, like cloth, and somebody whispering, and somebody knocking.

Despite all the things people said, Callie and her parents and her best fella, Jack, just kept getting on with the business of living happily ever after.

Until …

I knew from the beginning Callie was going to wind up in Chicago. There were a lot of reasons why. First among them was that Chicago is right in the middle of the country and the middle of the two courts, as I always saw the Seelie court as being based more on the West Coast and the Unseelie more on the East Coast. Since Callie was always walking the line between worlds, loyalties, and identities, it made sense to have her ending come in the middle of all of these.

There’s also a personal connection. My mother grew up in Chicago. My grandfather worked for the Rock Island Line (and, incidentally, tried his hand at writing). It’s also where my parents met. Chicago shaped my ideas of what a major city is and could be. I don’t get back as much as I’d like to, but when I do, I still have the sensation of coming home.

Another reason for finishing the story in Chicago is that Chicago was a significant end point for Americans who made the Great Migration. The city offered relative freedom for African Americans in the years between the World Wars. Chicago is one of the furnaces that forged American culture
from the beauty, struggle, creativity, sweat, and blood of the people who make their journeys here, whether voluntarily or involuntarily.

Then, of course, there’s the blues. There are a lot of arguments about the exact birthplace of the blues, but there’s no question that they flourished in Chicago. As American music has been such an integral part of these books, I couldn’t end the story without acknowledging blues. I’ve included one more playlist here. Some of these songs didn’t emerge onto the scene until after the year when the story takes place, but because they are icons of early blues, I’m exercising a bit of artistic license in including them.

I want to thank everyone who has shared this journey with Callie and Jack. It’s been a tremendous adventure, and I can’t wait to see what’s next.