Unforgotten (40 page)
“In fact—” she looked down at Baxter—“being with Lance’s family was the most intensive interaction I’ve ever had.”
Baxter wagged his tail.
“I miss them.” She missed him. She crouched down and hugged Baxter’s neck, soaking up the scents of honeysuckle, roses, bougainvillea, and dog. What she really wanted was the scent of fresh-hewn wood, but Michelle and a few others would be there soon to set up. It would be rude to hole up in her workshop with a saw.
Before Lance, she wouldn’t have cared. Would not even have known. But now that he’d exposed her flaws, it didn’t feel right to settle back in. She looked over at the carriage house Lance had restored, shoring up the original stone walls and adding the skylighted roof and glassed front, the interior divisions of bedroom and bath. She smiled, recalling their argument over fixtures, her resistance to cost overruns, and his flabbergasted replies. She’d been impossible. But there was something in Lance that brought out the worst in her— and the best.
He just made her … more.
She walked over, peered through the glass beside the door, and glimpsed the guitar leaning in the corner. How long before its strains rose up and his aftershave tinged the air? How long before they were back in business and her kitchen became his? She ached. How could hope hurt as much as grief?
Baxter pressed into her and whined. “I know.” She crouched again and buried her face.
Michelle found her like that and laughed. “That dog gets more hugs than any human alive.”
Rese looked up. Michelle’s face was a broad plate with a wad of a nose, blunt eyebrows over eyes sunk too deep and narrowly, a generous mouth made incidental by a prominent cleft chin, and the whole, irresistibly warm and inviting. The face of a friend to walk beside.
“Mind if we set the food up in the kitchen; then folks can funnel out to the garden?”
“That’s fine. However you want to do it.” She had no doubt Michelle would handle things. That was another thing her face told you—competence, as well as compassion and companionship.
People arrived in twos and threes, and, like a frog in warming water, she handled the growing crowd with less discomfort than she’d expected. They brought the homey foods she remembered from Evvy’s funeral. Nothing like Lance’s cooking. But she hadn’t had a good meal since they got back, so she helped herself without reservation.
So many people introduced themselves, she would have been lost if she hadn’t just practiced on Lance’s family. The children playing in the yard reminded her of Lucy’s and Monica’s gaggle, the cousins, nieces, and nephews. The quiet the last couple days had been incredible, but so were the little voices laughing and calling to one another—and her. She got tugged into a game of tag that actually seemed to be everyone just running around tagging one another.
After enough of that, she collapsed on a bench Lance had rescued from the surrounding vines and saw with surprise that Star had come down, looking like a wraith beside Michelle, who loaded up a plate for her. How long would it be before Michelle mentioned God, and Star took off? But another woman joined them, and as they all talked, Star finished her plate with no problem.
Rese didn’t exactly mingle, but she talked to anyone who talked first. Nothing glib, but she managed.
“This is such a wonderful place,” Michelle said after most of the people had gone. “A real welcoming feel to it.”
Rese glanced around, trying to see the villa from an outsider’s perspective instead of her intimate knowledge of so many details. Welcoming and wonderful. Why not?
“I just can’t get over your doing it all yourself.”
“Lance did the carriage house.”
“And where is he?” She looked around as though he might be hidden somewhere.
Rese sighed. “Still working things out with Antonia.” She’d explained the purpose of their trip before they left, but it didn’t begin to address all the stuff that had happened since.
“Well.” Michelle clapped her hands to her thighs. “It looks like we’re just about wrapped up here.”
Shouldn’t she be relieved? As Michelle hauled a stack of serving dishes into the kitchen and filled the sink with suds, and several others scooped the remaining food into baggies and containers, she felt reluctant for them to leave.
“You two will use this, won’t you?” Jackie asked, sticking the food into the refrigerator.
“Sure, thanks.” Rese nodded. It appeared Star enjoyed their fare a lot more than hers. All that she could make with relative success were Lance’s recipes, the five breakfasts she had mastered when she’d planned to do without him. “Would you all like a latt
?” And now she was fairly certain something had taken over her body as she indicated Lance’s fancy machine. “It’s the only piece of equipment I really know how to use.”
Jackie said she had to go. But the willowy, red-haired Karen, who had eaten with Star and Michelle, said, “Love one. Decaf, if you don’t mind.”
“Me too.” Deb sat down with Karen.
Michelle got watery in the eyes. “Nice of you to ask.”
Rese shrugged. It wasn’t a big thing, but then again it was. It was probably the first overture she’d made to other women, the first gesture of friendship she’d made in a long time, maybe ever. Lance’s sisters must have worn off.
There’d been too many surprises that evening for her to wonder that Star came in and sat with them, seemingly calm and attentive. From what she’d gleaned from the Internet on heroin withdrawal, Star’s symptoms shouldn’t be over yet, but after sleeping all day, she now led the conversation around Shakespeare and Monet, sonnets and impressionism, and her own style of painting that, amazingly, she’d shown Michelle in the carriage house.
Either it wasn’t smack, as everything had seemed to indicate, or Star was having a miraculous recovery. Rese made a second round of frothy drinks, letting the others carry the discussion. It was eleventhirty before they left and Star went upstairs, and midnight before she realized Lance hadn’t called.
————
His thoughts spun like a gyroscope on a string, balanced by the centrifugal force of his rage. It was like the hours and days waiting for Tony to come out of the rubble. Somehow it would be wrong, there’d be a different outcome. In spite of impossible odds, they would find the people alive, all the people who’d vanished. But hour by hour hope had died, birthing rage instead. Rage that demanded an outlet.
He could smell the sick sweet breath of the war protestors as he’d pressed among them with their signs. He’d carried Tony’s picture into their midst and ended up in a squad car. The emotion had been valid, but he had been fighting the wrong enemy.
He’d focused his anger on the tools, not the evil that drove them. Why had Tony been there, taking another man’s place, covering a shift? It had seemed the supreme accident, but it wasn’t. It was intentional, God allowing it. For His purpose.
“Don’t try to play the hero. You’re not Tony.”
Not Tony. Not. Tony.
Pop was right. He wasn’t the broad-shouldered, attentiongrabbing, respect-commanding hero the world recognized. He was only a vessel. But God had removed Saul and chosen David, with only his sling—and his faith—to combat evil. Lance had no sling, but whatever he had …
He swallowed. He had snatched the letter back from Pop, gone upstairs, and climbed out to the fire escape. The stars had come and gone, and with the growing dawn his mind unraveled the facts and laid them out thread by thread.
Nonno had been murdered for doing his duty. Before and because of him, Vittorio, and, in effect, Quillan. Tony became a cop because of Nonno’s example. And duty took him as well. Lance felt like Job with his family crushed around him. For what? Daring to stand against evil. To make a difference.
He clenched his jaw. Twenty-two years they’d thought it an accident. He’d been six years old when Nonno’s car crashed, but he’d spent much of those six years at his grandfather’s knee, youngest and oldest.
Then there were the stories. Nonno’s generosity and the clever ways he’d helped people so it didn’t look like charity. His big heart. His big laugh. A singing voice that could make a stone cry, but no tolerance for cruelty in any form.
He detested bullies and opposed anyone who preyed on the weak. He had loved the law, served it sacrificially. But he was also a product of the tyranny his family escaped in Naples. He knew there were times the authorities wouldn’t or couldn’t help, when a man stood up and said, enough. Those times were called vendetta.
Nonno—cop, federal agent, undercover operative—had acted in the only way he could.
Nothing stops evil except personal sacrifice
. But someone had planned the accident so convincingly his own family had never suspected. There’d been no investigation at all. Now, twenty-two years later … what chance was there?
The sun gilded the windows. Stiff from the bricks against his back, the iron rail pressed into his shoulder, Lance raised his face. He had dared to grip God’s ankle, sworn to hold on, and demanded the yoke be placed on him. The throbbing grew in his head until it seemed he could feel his skull bulging.
The common definition of vendetta was a blood feud. But it had another meaning—a curse returned.
L
ance shifted when Rico opened the window beside him.
“Whatchu doing, ’mano?”
Lance looked over his shoulder. “You’re up early.”
Rico leaned on the sill. “Chaz was making deliveries. He called to say you were on the fire escape and I should find out why.” He yawned.
Lance pulled away from the wall and stretched his spine. Could be difficult to explain why he did anything from here out. He rose stiffly and climbed back through the window.
Rico looked him over. “D’you sleep out there?”
“Didn’t sleep.”
Rico frowned at the rumpled letter. “From Rese?”
Lance looked down at the pages. “It’s not to me.” Though in a sense it was. Marco might have written it to Nonna, but the burden did not rest on her.
A vendetta, a curse on his family. Carlo Borsellino had started it. Too weak or spineless to threaten the Mafioso who murdered Agosto, he’d turned his wrath to the man who’d sent his father up. Carlo died but the curse was set in motion. Through Nonna’s marriage, Vittorio and Quillan were family. Only one had felt the bullets, but the curse had taken Quillan, as well, evil that would not be denied.
Maybe Nonno had been wrong to make peace with Paolo. Lives had been lost. Could he simply look away? Lance frowned. The Borsellinos had unleashed a destruction his family had watched in ignorance, taking the blows and not knowing why. Vittorio, Quillan, Marco, Tony. What would happen if he did nothing? Would it keep eating away at the Michellis?
Who was next—Jake, already tainted by Tony’s death? Or himself. Or Rese. What if he brought it onto her, as Marco had carried it to Antonia? An ache seized him. How could he go back to Sonoma, knowing what he knew?
With Rico’s stare ferreting into his thoughts, Lance drew himself up. “I’m late for church.”
Rico didn’t press it, but that wasn’t the end, he knew. Lance just didn’t know who to trust with his burden before he saw where it might go. He had told Pop, but Pop was choosing a path of nonresistance, a weary, trudged path he knew too well. Lance felt in his gut that wasn’t the way, but …
Vendetta. What did he know about feuds and curses? He’d had his share of fights, but they were face to face on the street. A simple problem; a simple solution. This was not simple, and he wasn’t sure there was a solution. But as Rese had said, nothing happened by chance.
He dropped to the kneeler and spoke the responses, but his mind still spun. Every step he’d taken had brought him to this. He had felt it from the moment Nonna’s finger on the envelope pointed him to Liguria, when Conchessa sent him to Sonoma, when he saw Rese’s sign in the window and found Nonna’s box in the attic. He’d attributed everything to the Lord.
Tony had died at the hands of terrorists driven by evil, but evil would have no power if it were not given by God. Tony: confident, capable, assured. Tony: black-and-white, bound by rules—only rules might no longer apply, and Tony wouldn’t stand for that. It fell instead to the prodigal.
He stared at the crucifix. How could he refuse to see it through? He had demanded Nonna’s burden before he knew what it was. But it wasn’t only hers. It was all of theirs. They all bore Nonno’s death upon them, those he died to keep safe and those who would come from them—as long as the curse was unreturned.
Maybe he was confusing the spiritual battle he’d witnessed the other night with a purely human grudge. But then why had the Lord shown him? It had to be in preparation for the next level. He’s reached the end of the board and become a knight, his responsibilites changed and magnified.
He left the church and started home, but stopped on the sidewalk. Stella sat in her plastic chair in a sky-blue floral shift, elastic stockings, and rubber-soled shoes. A ball of yarn rested against her ankle, the needles click-clicking dangerously in her knobby hands.
“Buon giorno,”
she said with a gappy smile on her liver-splotched face.