A Man Who Ought to Be Dead
Chapter 06 - A Man Who Ought to Be Dead
Rosa stared at the photograph until the image became a collection of ordinary details: the shape of Michael's ear, the little fold at his cheek, his habit of holding his shoulders as if he were bracing against cold. The man in the photograph was older than the one she'd buried, his hair touched with gray. He stood outside a hardware store beside a blue pickup truck. She knew him.
"It could have been taken years ago," Dante said carefully.
She pointed at an election poster taped to the store window. The candidate had entered the race that spring. The photograph was recent.
Rosa did not cry. She put both hands around a paper cup of water and asked, very evenly, "Where?"
Mercer traced the photograph to a store in a small town near Scranton, Pennsylvania. An employee remembered a man who'd bought rope, door hinges, and a cheap padlock. He had paid in cash and asked for directions to a rural highway. The blue truck had belonged to a man who was now dead.
"He used Michael's face," Mercer said, "but the identity connected to the vehicle is complicated. We won't know who it is until we find him."
Rosa wanted to leave immediately. Dante offered his car, his driver, and every private investigator he employed. Mercer refused the private investigators. Rosa refused the car.
"He was my husband," she said. "If he's alive, I will speak to him when the police say it's safe. But I won't have another man deciding where I go."
Dante accepted the correction. He was learning to recognize a boundary before he ran into it.
For two days the investigation produced nothing. Rosa washed dishes in her small apartment and wondered how to tell Sophia that the word dead might have been wrong. She had built her daughter's life around the absence of a father: the school forms, the photographs on the mantel, the candles lit on his birthday. What did a person do with grief if the person mourned had been living all along?
On the third night, Michael called.
Rosa recognized the pause before his hello. It was a silence she had once loved, the moment before he found a joke worth telling.
"Don't hang up," he said.
She sat down on the kitchen floor. "Where have you been?"
"I'm sorry, Rosie. I can't explain on this line."
"You can explain enough. Sophia is three. She asks about you when it rains. She thinks you live in the stars because I couldn't think of anything else to say."
He made a sound that might have been a sob. Then he said, "I was going to come home. Every time I tried, they found me."
"Who?"
"The men who burned the warehouse. Not all of them work for Falcone. Some never did."
Rosa looked toward the hallway, where Sophia slept with her rabbit. "Why did you let me bury somebody else?"
"I thought they would kill you if you knew."
"They might have killed me anyway. You didn't give me a choice."
He said nothing. She could hear a radio and a vehicle passing close by. "I have something," he said finally. "The accountant kept the original ledger. It shows who moved the money. Nick was never in charge."
"Who was?"
The call broke off. Mercer, who was monitoring the call with Rosa's consent, sent officers to the location indicated by the trace. A night clerk at a motel reported that a man matching Michael's description had paid for a room and left half an hour earlier.
The next morning, Rosa met Elena at the hospital. They had never spoken before, though Michael had told Rosa about the wealthy woman who visited workers' homes after accidents and wrote down every name. Elena looked older than thirty-five now and kept a soft blanket over her knees.
"He told me you were stubborn," Elena said.
"He should've married someone easier, then."
Elena smiled. Then she brought out a photocopy of a letter Michael had slipped beneath her clinic door months after her disappearance. He'd apparently known she was being held, but not where. The letter was brief and written in his careful block printing. It said that the fire had been ordered to destroy evidence of a laundering scheme and that two people in the family had approved it. One was Vittorio Falcone. The second name had been blacked out with marker.
"Did he black it out?" Rosa asked.
"I don't know. I never saw the original. The nurse made this copy."
They held the paper to a bright window. Under the ink, an impression remained, just deep enough to catch the light. Elena took a pencil and a thin sheet of tracing paper from the bedside table. She'd spent years restoring old documents for a museum before she married Dante. Her hands trembled, but she knew the work.
"There," she whispered after several attempts. "A capital B. Then an E."
Rosa felt her stomach drop. "Beatrice."
Elena shook her head. "Perhaps. But look at the final letters. That's not Beatrice."
She set the paper down. Beneath the black line the name emerged, faint but legible, one letter at a time.
May you like
BENNETT.
And Rosa realized that whatever Michael had been running from, it might have begun with the surname he had given her.
