254. 🕰️ THE WATCH IN THE RABBIT

Chapter 04 - The Man Who Was Buried

The car across from Bernice's house was a dark green Lincoln with a dent above the rear wheel. It had the peculiar, tired dignity of a good car kept too long. Whoever sat in the back had lowered the window an inch.

Bernice wanted me to stay inside. She said it twice, and then asked whether I'd remembered to eat lunch, which was how she behaved when she was afraid.

I went outside anyway.

The driver was a young man with a shaved head, waiting behind the wheel. In the back sat Vittorio Romano, seventy-eight years old and very much alive. His hair was thin and white, and the right side of his face had a burn scar that pulled the corner of his mouth downward. But his eyes were the same. I hated that I knew them instantly.

“Hello, June,” he said.

For a few seconds I had the foolish thought that someone ought to call the cemetery and apologize. Then the anger arrived, so complete it steadied me.

“Eighteen years,” I said.

He put one hand on the window frame. Two fingers were missing. “I know.”

“No. I don't think you do.”

He glanced toward Bernice's front porch. “Get in. Please. We don't have much time.”

“You've had eighteen years. I have five minutes.”

He let the hand fall. I could see an oxygen tank beside his feet and a cardigan folded across his knees, though the afternoon was warm.

“I want to see my granddaughter,” he said.

“You lost the right to ask for things the day you let your children bury a stranger.”

His face changed. There it was. Not surprise, exactly, but the expression of a man recognizing that somebody else knew the shape of his shame.

“What did Hannah tell you?”

“Not enough. Who died in that car?”

“John Weaver. My driver.”

I waited. In the silence, a woman across the street shook a bath mat from her porch railing. The ordinary sound of her work irritated me beyond reason.

“He wasn't supposed to be in it,” Vittorio said. “I got out at a service station. Anthony arranged the rest. I was told John would drive the car to a secure garage. A truck hit him on the parkway.”

“And you let them put his body in your coffin.”

His mouth worked without sound. “Yes.”

“Did you tell his wife?”

“No.”

“Then don't you dare tell me you had no choice.”

He looked at his hands. I remembered those hands making a puppet out of a dishcloth to amuse a little boy at breakfast. I remembered them signing checks for strangers' surgeries. I remembered them closing around my waist while I was young and thought being wanted was enough.

A person can do all those things and still be a coward. It took me a long time to make room for that fact.

Vittorio explained that he had learned Anthony and several partners were using the Saint Agnes Trust to move properties into private companies. The trust had been established for the neighborhood's longtime residents after the garment factory closed. He wanted to confront them, but Anthony claimed men involved in the scheme intended to kill him.

“So you disappeared,” I said.

“I thought I'd be gone for months.”

“And when the months became years?”

“I was ashamed.”

There are apologies that ask nothing and apologies that quietly ask to be relieved. His was the second kind.

He told me he had lived under the name Victor Reed in Maine, repaired clocks at a charity shop, and sent Hannah birthday cards after she found him eleven years after the funeral. She had gone looking when a bank statement with his old handwriting appeared in her files. For two years she begged him to come back and tell the truth.

“She shouldn't have had to beg,” I said.

He didn't argue.

He handed me a small brown envelope. Inside was a photograph of Hannah in a blue coat, sitting on a pier beside a little girl in a stroller. Vittorio was in the picture too, keeping a respectful distance. They looked uncomfortable, as families often do when someone insists on a photograph before anyone feels ready.

“Why come back now?” I asked.

“Friday. The sale becomes final Friday. Once the deeds move again, the people on Saint Agnes will spend years fighting to get them back.”

“Tell Damian.”

“I tried. Anthony controls which calls reach him.”

“Damian is a grown man with a telephone, Vittorio.”

He winced. That was something, though not nearly enough.

“There's evidence,” he said. “The watch holds part of it. Hannah has the rest. She planned to meet the investigator at the station, but someone knew.”

“Where is she now?”

“I don't know. She missed our meeting.”

He looked through the windshield. A delivery truck slowed at the corner, and his driver straightened abruptly.

“Go home, June. Keep Mia away from Sarto.”

“You don't get to give me orders.”

“Then hear it as a plea.”

He reached toward me again. I stepped back before his hand could touch mine.

When I returned to the Romano house, Damian was waiting in the hall. The grandfather clock behind him was five minutes slow. He had fixed that clock himself at fourteen and never allowed anyone to touch its mechanism afterward.

“You went to Bernice Talbot's house,” he said.

“Yes.”

“Luca says you met somebody.”

“Your father.”

Damian stared at me. Then he laughed once, without humor. “Try again.”

“His hair is white. He's missing two fingers. He breathes with an oxygen tank. But he's alive.”

I put the photograph in Damian's hands. He studied the elderly man, then the child, then the woman in the blue coat. He sat on the lowest stair. His knees seemed to have failed him.

“My mother cried every Sunday for a year,” he said. “She sat in the chapel where they kept his picture. She died believing he was gone.”

“I know.”

He rubbed his thumb over the picture until I worried it would tear. “And he went on sending cards to somebody else.”

It wasn't an accusation against Hannah. It was the bewildered arithmetic of a neglected child, still adding up what his father had chosen to give and withhold.

From upstairs came the faint sound of Mia singing to her rabbit. I had forgotten, for an instant, that there was a child in the house who would need dinner and a bath and a story. I was grateful for the sound of her voice.

Damian stood slowly. “Where is he?”

“Gone. He wouldn't say where he was staying.”

“Did you believe him?”

“About the danger, yes. About his reasons, not entirely.”

Damian handed back the photograph. “Neither will I.”

At seven, Luca delivered another piece of news. The investigators at the station had never arranged a meeting with Hannah. The name she had been given belonged to a retired detective who'd died the previous winter.

I went upstairs to check on Mia. She was brushing the rabbit with a pink hairbrush and telling him about the strawberries Rosa would buy tomorrow.

At the foot of her bed lay the yellow scarf I'd seen Bernice wear a hundred times. Its hem was damp and marked with dark grease.

Mia looked up. “Grandma June? The lady who cries on Tuesdays said I mustn't tell you who drove Mama away.”