The Treasure Box (17 page)

The woman held up a small leather change purse. “You dropped your pocketbook when you ran off.”

Rachel jammed her hands into her pockets and came up empty. She stared at the wrinkled face. “Why didn't you just keep it?”

“Don't take what's not mine.” She extended the purse in Rachel's direction. “What people throw out or give freely, I take.

Like the birds of the air and the lilies of the field. I get by just fine without stealing.”

Reluctantly, Rachel accepted the change purse and slid it into her pocket. “Do you have a name?

“Everyone has a name,” the old woman replied. “Even those whose names are only known to God. Mine's Grace.”

“I'm Rachel. Rachel Woodlea.”

The rheumy old eyes filled with an inscrutable expression, almost like recognition. “Pleased to make your acquaintance, Rachel Woodlea. How's that ankle feeling?”

“It hurts,” Rachel admitted, “but I don't think it's broken.”

“That's a blessing, now isn't it?” Grace got to her feet and held out a hand. “We'd better get a move on.”

“Where are we going?”

The old woman eyed the clouds. “It'll be dark soon, with more snow coming. You're in no shape to walk anywhere, and it's not likely there'll be any cabs or streetcars running until they get the streets cleared. Better come home with me for the night.”

Rachel gazed at Grace's outstretched hand and saw that her fingers, protruding from the cutoff mittens, were gnarled and bony, the fingernails dirty and chipped. She wondered idly what “home” might be like for a woman like this—a splintered packing crate in a dark alley, a sheltered doorway, the damp and musty corner of an abandoned warehouse? But it didn't matter. She no longer saw a crone, a hag, a derelict. This beggar was not a threat.

She was just a sweet old woman named Grace.

17
WHERE THE WORLD ENDS

H
er mind consumed by the increasing pain in her right ankle, Rachel paid little attention to where Grace was taking her. She had enough to concentrate on just keeping her feet under her. It was a slow and treacherous journey, one wobbling step at a time, but after several turns along the shadowed streets and alleyways, they stopped in front of a mountainous pile of old wooden packing crates.

“Welcome to my humble abode,” Grace said with a cackling little chuckle.

Rachel stared at her. “What—I mean, how—?”

“Watch.” She put a hand to one of the crates and shifted it to one side, revealing a doorknob and part of an old metal door.

Night was approaching, and dusk had drained the world of color, leaving the alley filled with eerie shapes in shades of black and white and gray. A scrabbling sound caught Rachel's attention. She looked down just in time to see the shadow of a large creature with a pointed snout and naked tail scuttle past her leg and vanish into the pile of crates. She jumped, landing on her injured ankle, and almost fell. “Rats!”

“Don't mind them, deary.” Grace laughed. “They're my watchdogs—and right good at their job, too.” She pointed toward the end of the alley, where a beast the size of a small cat was nosing through a pile of garbage. “That's Bruiser. The one who just went under the crates I call Rex. Anybody snooping around takes one look at them and runs the other way.”

Rachel suppressed a shudder. “I can't imagine why.”

Grace opened the door and motioned Rachel through the small crevice. When both of them were inside, she pulled the crate back into its place and shut the door behind them. “Clever, isn't it? If you didn't know a door was there—”

“You'd never find it.” Rachel smiled in the direction of Grace's voice. She had no idea where they were, only that they were totally encompassed in darkness. Claustrophobia began to creep over her, but before full-blown panic could set in, Grace began to lead her forward.

They rounded a corner, and somewhere in the distance—it seemed miles away—Rachel could just make out a faint glimmer. Biting her lip, she leaned against Grace and limped resolutely toward the light. The throbbing in her ankle was steadily worsening, and she was afraid she might pass out. But just when she thought she could walk no farther, she found herself in a large room with a single candle burning on a low table.

“Sit, and prop that leg up,” Grace said, motioning to a worn but still serviceable easy chair with a matching ottoman. “I'll get a fire going.”

Rachel eased down into the chair and gingerly lifted her foot onto the ottoman. In the dim light, she could see Grace's silhouette moving back and forth, and a few minutes later, a fire blazed to life in a large brick hearth. The heat seeped into her bones and she began to relax.

Grace removed her overcoat, hung it on a peg in the corner, and went about the task of lighting additional candles. Rachel's eyes followed the old woman around the room, her wild white hair stuck up in all directions like an insubordinate halo. An angel? Rachel wasn't certain. Mam would have thought so, that much was sure. But if not an angel, certainly not the crazed lunatic Rachel had first assumed her to be.

At last, when the room was bathed in a warm golden glow, Grace came to stand over Rachel. “So, what do you think of my home?”

Rachel looked around. On the far side of the room lay a sleeping pallet, two or three crates, and a large and lumpy pile of something with a dark blanket thrown on top. In a semicircle around the fireplace sat the chair she currently occupied, a stained sofa riddled with holes, and a second easy chair. Just to the right of the doorway was a scarred wooden table surrounded by four chairs.

“Where are we?”

“In the back room of Benedetti's, what used to be Angelo's private office.” She grinned, showing every one of her large crooked teeth. “Angelo used to let me eat scraps out of the cans in the alley. Guess he never figured I'd inherit the place.”

“You
knew
Angelo Benedetti?”

Grace shrugged. “As much as a beggar on the street can ever know a wealthy gangster.”

Rachel felt her insides clench. “He
was
part of the mob, then.”

“The restaurant was a front; everybody knew it. Fine food, if the leftovers I scrounged from the heap were any indication. But this place wasn't Angelo's primary moneymaking venture.” She pulled off her mittens and tossed them onto the table. “He ran a bootlegging operation.”

“What happened?”

“I wasn't around here that night, but I reckoned Angelo had been conniving to take over somebody else's territory.” She shook her head. “Not an honorable thing to do, even by Mafia standards. One of the other families sent him a message.”

“You mean they killed him?”

“Him and his cronies, plus a whole bunch of other people.

Shot up everything on two floors. Wrecked the place, too.” She went over to the fireplace and picked up a small log from a pile stacked neatly against the wall. When she brought it back, Rachel could see that it was not a log at all, but the splintered leg from a wooden chair. “Left me lots of good firewood, though.”

“So you simply moved in?”

“That's about the size of it. When the dust settled and the cops were gone, they boarded the place up. I found my way in, scavenged up what I needed, and have been here ever since.” Grace chuckled. “Now, let's take a look at that ankle.”

She removed Rachel's boot and inspected the ankle in the firelight. “It's a bad sprain, but the cold—and your boot—kept it from swelling too much. I'll wrap it up for you.”

Rachel closed her eyes and leaned her head back against the chair as Grace went to collect whatever supplies she needed to treat the sprain. When she opened her eyes, the old woman was standing in front of her holding out a glass bottle full of clear liquid. “Drink some,” she said. “It'll make you feel better.”

Rachel balked. “Is it—?”

“It's
water
.” Grace rolled her eyes. “I have a little tea, but I was saving it to go with dinner.”

Rachel hadn't realized how thirsty she was until the bottle was half gone. Apologetically, she turned to Grace, who was sitting on the floor at her feet sorting through a little box, pulling out pins and needles, some long pieces of fabric torn into bandages, and a half-empty bottle of Doctor Tarwell's Miracle Liniment.

“I found enough bandage to tie it up good and tight,” Grace was saying. “When you live on the street, you got to be prepared for the worst.”

Rachel heard her speaking, but the words didn't register. All her attention was focused on the box.

A small tin box, painted a soft blue.

With brass corners and handles.

And a map of the world on all four sides.

Rachel sat in her chair, still as death, while Grace continued to sort through her supplies as if nothing had changed, as if the earth hadn't suddenly stopped rotating on its axis.

“Let's put on a bit of this liniment first—that should help ease the—” She turned toward Rachel. “Lord save us, deary! What's the matter? You look like you've seen a ghost.”

Rachel recoiled. A ghost. Yes. Sophie's ghost. Cathleen's ghost.

“The . . . the box,” she stammered.

“Pretty little thing, isn't it?”

Grace shut the lid and approached Rachel with the bottle of liniment and wrapping cloths in her hands. But Rachel lunged forward, trying to reach the box, and her injured foot slipped off the ottoman and fell onto the floor with an agonizing thud. She clenched her jaw and cried out in pain.

“Easy, there,” Grace warned.

“The box! Please, let me see the box!”

“All right, all right.” Grace handed the box to her and began anointing her foot with the liniment and wrapping it with the lengths of bandage.

Rachel sat in silence and allowed Grace to doctor her ankle, all the time cradling the Treasure Box in both arms. There could be no mistake, even though it looked a bit the worse for wear, with a scrape or two here and there and some scratches in the paint. It was Sophie's box. There were the little sea lions lounging on the beach, and the smiling dragon in the waters at the edge of the world.

The presence of the Treasure Box here, in this place, could mean only one thing—Cathleen and Derrick had found their way to Angelo Benedetti's
ristorante
. Rachel desperately wanted to believe they hadn't been here when the unthinkable happened. But the evidence she held in her hands contradicted any shred of hope her heart could muster. The box was here. Cathleen wasn't.

Her eyes stung, and her sister's face surfaced in her mind, as if Rachel were looking at a body submerged in shallow water.

Before she had left on the steamship to America, and throughout these long months of searching, she had been driven by the need to find Cathleen and make her pay for her betrayal and deception.

Now guilt settled over the other emotions that layered like silt in Rachel's soul—not adult responsibility, but a guilt founded in childish fears:
I wished something bad to happen, and it did. It's all my fault.
The weight of it pressed all the air from her lungs, and she gasped for breath.

Adult reason, of course, told her that she couldn't bear the burden of her sister's death; she hadn't been here, and even if she had, what could she have done to stop it? But she could not forget all those years of enmity between herself and Cathleen—the hostility and envy, the rivalry, the animosity. The reality was, she had never really had a sister—she'd had an adversary, a nemesis. Even now, as an adult, Rachel had followed Cathleen to America not because of any sense of love or family loyalty, but for retribution.

Suddenly it all seemed so foolish, so senseless. What had Rachel hoped to gain in coming here, in tracking down the two of them? A relationship with her sister had been the furthest thing from Rachel's mind. She had no prayer of getting her money back, and she certainly didn't want Derrick.

That left only one reason: to regain possession of Sophie's Treasure Box. The one evidence Rachel had that life held out some promise, however slim, of hope. The memory of a friendship that had endured even beyond this life, bringing a measure of peace to her soul.

She opened the lid and read once more the familiar words:
Love Is the Key That Unlocks Every Portal.
She traced her finger around the edges of the little smiling dragon. What was it the old charts said, at the end of the known world where the seas dropped off into the void?
There Be Dragons Here.

Well, the mapmakers were right. Childhood fantasies and innocent faith could only carry you so far. Rachel had sailed to the end of the world and discovered it to be a perilous place, fraught not with smiling dragons but real ones who breathed fire; not with placid blue seas but dangerous maelstroms that sucked you down to oblivion. A place where sisters died and dreams shattered and you were left with nothing but memories and remorse and the specter of what might have been.

Grace finished tying off the bandages, gave Rachel's foot a motherly pat, and leaned back. “There. All done. You'll want to take it easy for a while, though. Stay off it as much as possible.”

“Where did you get the box?” Rachel whispered.

“Oh, it ain't mine. It's hers.” She pointed toward the back of the room. “She just lets me use it.”

Rachel's eyes went to the far wall. No one was there—only Grace's sleeping pallet and a jumbled collection of odd possessions.

Grace got to her feet and went to stoke up the fire. “I'll get some dinner on; you must be hungry.” She went to the peg where her overcoat hung, reached into the pocket, and pulled out something wrapped in wrinkled butcher paper. “Got a real good ham hock,” she said, holding up the joint for inspection. “And a few carrots and potatoes from what the green grocer over on the next block threw out. Make a tasty soup, I'd think.”