Chapter 2 - The Scent of Lavender and Burnt Ash
Marco Moretti did not take off his shoulder holster when he was inside the house.
It was a custom-molded Galco leather rig, oiled until it smelled like an old saddle, carrying a Kimber Custom II with the hammer back and the thumb safety engaged. It sat beneath his left armpit like a second set of ribs, familiar and heavy enough to keep his left shoulder slightly higher than his right.
He stood in the industrial kitchen on the garden level, watching the digital readout on the commercial espresso machine climb from 190 degrees to 202.
Elena Reyes was scraping carrots at the stainless steel prep island twenty feet away. She was scraping them too fast. The orange shavings were flying over the rim of the compost tub, scattering across the gray linoleum like wood chips.
“Elena.”
The peeler stopped mid-stroke. The blade gave a tiny *tink* against the steel table.
“Yes, Mr. Moretti?”
“Your girl was on the third floor.”
Elena turned so quickly she nearly dropped the carrot. Her face, usually the warm, weathered color of toasted pine nuts, had drained to the gray-white of river silt. She wiped her hands frantically on her apron, her eyes darting toward the security monitors mounted above the dry-goods pantry where sixteen camera feeds flickered in silent, black-and-white grids.
“I am sorry, sir. She slipped through the service pantry. I was—the linens from the laundry service had mildew, I had to inspect every corner—she will not go up there again. I swear to you on the grave of my mother, she will stay in the staff quarters.”
Marco did not turn around until the espresso shot had finished its thirty-second pull. The crema was dark, the color of hazelnut skin, with three blond flecks in the center. He picked up the tiny porcelain cup by its loop, turned his back to the counter, and leaned against the stainless steel edge.
He was forty-four years old. In the last five months, the hair at his temples had turned the color of pencil lead, and the skin beneath his eyes had taken on the bruised, sunken look of a man who had forgotten the difference between sleeping and merely lying down with his eyes closed.
“What did she say to Alina?” Marco asked.
Elena’s throat moved as she swallowed. “Nothing, sir. She is three. She speaks nonsense. Animals. Bread. Colors. She does not understand—”
“She said something about a dog.”
Elena froze. Her fingers curled into the bib of her apron, bunching the white cotton until the seams creaked. “A... a dog?”
“Alina told Mrs. Danvers to check the security perimeter,” Marco said, his voice level, flat, drained of any cadence that might indicate whether he was angry or simply tired. “She thought someone had let a hound loose inside the interior fence. The boys walked the wire twenty minutes ago. Nothing. The sensors on the south ditch didn’t trip.”
He took a sip of the espresso. The bitterness was clean, hot, and did nothing to clear the gray fog behind his eyes.
“Did you bring an animal onto this property, Elena?”
“No, Mr. Moretti. Never. We have no pets. We have only what you permit us to bring.”
“Then why was my daughter asking if we had an Irish wolfhound on the grounds?”
Elena’s mouth opened slightly. Her eyes moved from Marco’s face down to his polished oxfords, then to the floorboards between them. A strange, ancient shadow seemed to pass over her features—something older than her fear of Marco’s Kimbers, older than the New Jersey syndicates, older than the Moretti family’s fifty-year tenancy on this hill.
“She saw the gray one?” Elena whispered.
Marco set the cup down. The saucer rattled once. “What gray one?”
“In Michoacán,” Elena said, her voice dropping so low that the hum of the sub-zero refrigerators nearly drowned it, “in the mountains behind my grandmother’s village, they call them *los custodios*. The ones who wait in the brush when someone has been left for dead.”
Marco stared at her. A cold, dangerous irritation stirred behind his ribs. “We are not in Michoacán, Elena. We are four miles from the George Washington Bridge.”
“The dead do not care about the bridge, sir,” she said, her voice trembling but strangely firm. She looked directly at him for the first time since Matteo’s funeral. “My girl... she was born during the fever year. The doctors in Oaxaca said her brain would not work. They said she would never speak, never hold a spoon. Then she woke up when she was two, and the first thing she said was the name of my brother who drowned in the canal ten years before she was born.”
“I don’t pay you for folklore,” Marco said.
“No, sir. You pay me to clean the blood off your coats when you come in through the basement,” Elena said without flinching.
The kitchen went dead.
Even the refrigerators seemed to quiet their compressors.
Marco did not move. He was a man whose reputation rested on the fact that he did not have to shout to be obeyed; when he lowered his chin by half an inch, men who owned five-hundred-foot cargo vessels sat down and shut their mouths.
Elena stood her ground. Her hands were still bunched in her apron, but her chin was up.
“She did not hurt your girl,” Elena said softly. “Your girl has been sitting in that window like a stone for five months. Since your son went into the ground, Miss Alina has not spoken three words to me. Today she told my Sophia that you don’t put butter on a nosebleed. That is twelve words, Mr. Moretti. That is more than she said to the doctor from Manhattan who charged you five thousand dollars to hit her knees with a hammer.”
Marco looked at the small woman.
He saw the frayed edge of her collar, the neat, invisible stitches where she had mended the hem of her uniform herself, the fierce, animal terror in her pupils that was entirely eclipsed by her need to protect her daughter.
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his silver money clip, and slid two hundred-dollar bills across the prep island. They stopped against a pile of carrot peelings.
“Buy the girl some boots that match,” Marco said.
Elena did not touch the money. “Mr. Moretti—”
“Take the money, Elena.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And leave the door between the nursery and the east wing unlatched during the day.”
Elena looked up, her breath hitching. “Sir?”
“If she screams,” Marco said, turning toward the service stairs that led back up to the cold marble, “if Alina screams at her, you take the child out. But if she doesn’t scream... you let her stay.”
He did not wait for her answer. He climbed the stairs, his hand sliding along the cold walnut rail.
Every riser reminded him of Matteo. Matteo had built the steps with the carpenter during the renovation two summers ago, complaining that the pitch was too steep for a house meant for old men. *“You’re gonna fall down these when you’re seventy, Pop,”* the boy had laughed, holding a level against the treads. *“You’ll break your hip and I’ll have to run the docks myself.”*
Matteo had not reached twenty-one.
The funeral had been dry and windy. The flowers had smelled of car exhaust and damp earth. Marco had stood there with two federal marshals taking photographs from an unmarked sedan forty yards back, while six of his captains carried the mahogany box that felt light—too light—because there hadn’t been enough left of the boy after the truck hit them on the turnoff to fill out an adult suit.
Alina had been in the intensive care unit then, her spine crushed against the transmission tunnel of the Audi, breathing through a machine that clicked every four seconds like an expensive clock.
When Marco reached the top of the stairs, he paused in the shadows by the grandfather clock.
Down the long gallery, the light had turned the color of wet slate. Alina was still there. She had not moved an inch.
Beside her chair, sitting directly on the bare marble with her legs splayed out in a wide *V*, was Sophia.
The toddler was holding a crayon—a stubby, tooth-marked piece of green wax—and was methodically drawing a circle around the left caster of Alina’s wheelchair.
Alina was watching her.
She wasn’t telling her to stop. She wasn’t turning the wheel to crush the child’s fingers.
May you like
She was just watching, her pale hand resting on the armrest, her small, ruined body curved slightly forward, suspended between the grave of her brother and the child on the floor who didn’t know enough about death to be afraid of it.
***
