The Body at Saint Agnes
Chapter 03 - The Body at Saint Agnes
Leo Caruso was fifty-seven, two years older than Vincent, and had the smooth manners of a man who considered impatience a fault in other people. His expensive gray suit was immaculate. So were his shoes. As boys, Vincent and Leo had shared a bedroom whenever Leo’s father disappeared for months at a time; as men, they had shared businesses that never appeared on the same set of books.
Leo placed the fire photograph on the desk. “Before this gets out of hand, you should know there’s a woman in Connecticut claiming to be Isabel. We heard about it yesterday.”
“Who’s we?” Vincent asked.
“The security people.”
“I pay the security people.”
Leo’s smile held. “And I keep them from bothering you.”
Claire stood near the door. She felt she had wandered into a family argument that began before she was born. In the photograph, brick walls had collapsed inward around a charred sign. SAINT AGNES could still be read above the soot.
“Did someone die there?” she asked.
“Two people,” Leo said. “One was my cousin Isabel. Some things should remain buried.”
“My mother isn’t buried.” Claire heard the steadiness in her own voice and was surprised by it. “She was on the phone with me last night.”
Leo finally looked directly at her. It was not a pleasant look. “Then perhaps your mother owes several people an explanation.”
Vincent rose. “That’s enough.”
He had dismissed powerful men from rooms using those three words, but this time Leo did not move. He held Vincent’s gaze for a long second and then withdrew the photograph as though tidying up after himself.
“I’ll be downstairs,” he said. “You know what this could do to the family.”
When the door closed, Claire released the breath she had been holding. “Is the family in business with this restaurant, or the restaurant in business with the family?”
Vincent almost smiled. “That’s a fair question.”
“I want an actual answer.”
He looked at her for the first time without comparing her face to another face. She was exhausted and frightened, yes, but she had come to work on time, asked for her wages, and refused to let anyone speak for her. He thought of Isabel at the same age.
“My family made money in shipping and property,” he said. “Some of it legally. Some of it not. I inherited the second kind before I knew enough to refuse it. That isn’t an excuse.”
“Did it kill somebody?”
He looked away. “I don’t know.”
Claire disliked that answer because she believed he meant it.
At noon she stood under the great clock at Grand Central, watching travelers sweep past with overnight bags and paper cups. Her mother arrived in a green wool coat, carrying an old leather purse with a broken clasp. Margaret Bennett had always seemed smaller in crowds. At home she was the woman who fixed loose cabinet doors, remembered the birthdays of neighbors’ children, and made soup for people she disliked when they were sick.
She embraced Claire so tightly that the girl felt the bones in her shoulders. “You didn’t leave the city.”
“I have a job here.”
“We can talk somewhere else.”
“We’re talking now.”
Margaret searched the crowds. Claire followed her glance. Two uniformed transit officers stood near a newsstand, discussing something that appeared unimportant. Her mother was not looking at them. She was looking at a man in a tan overcoat who had been standing at a flower kiosk without buying flowers.
“You’re being followed,” Margaret whispered.
“I don’t think so.”
“Don’t turn around again.”
Claire felt anger rising, partly because fear had already arrived. “Mom, please. I cannot keep living inside a story nobody will tell me.”
Margaret closed her eyes. When she opened them, Claire saw something unfamiliar: not her mother’s caution, but the determination of a woman who had once made a dangerous choice.
“My name was Isabel Caruso,” she said. “Vincent is my brother.”
Claire had imagined secrets about unpaid debts, an unhappy first marriage, perhaps a distant relative who had behaved badly. She had never imagined that the man with the dropped fork was her uncle.
“Does that make Leo your cousin?”
“Leo is your father’s—” Margaret stopped. “No. Leo is my cousin. Your father was Thomas Bennett. He loved us both. I should have told you before he died.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“Because he was the first person in years who made me feel safe. I was selfish about keeping that safety.”
It was the first confession Claire had ever heard from her mother without an explanation tucked around it.
They went to a coffee shop on a side street. Margaret did not ask for a quiet table; she took one near the window, where she could see the entrance. She ordered tea she never drank. Then she told Claire about Saint Agnes, a restaurant their grandmother Giulia had run on the waterfront, and about the charitable apartments upstairs where women lived after leaving violent marriages.
“Your uncle thought it was just a struggling restaurant,” she said. “Leo understood exactly how valuable the building was. He wanted the land. I found invoices for construction work that had never happened and payments made to men I knew from the docks. I confronted him.”
“And the fire?”
“Somebody set it. I was inside when it started. An emergency exit had been chained. I broke a window and got out onto the fire escape.” Margaret stared into her tea. “A woman named Joanne Pike didn’t get out. I had lent Joanne my red coat that night; hers was soaked from the rain.”
“Then why did they say you died?”
“Because I let them.”
The table seemed to tilt beneath Claire. Margaret explained that she had been pregnant and terrified. A man from the fire department had helped her disappear; Thomas, a cook from the restaurant, went with her. They had married quietly in Connecticut. She had built a life one cautious day at a time.
“You let Vincent bury somebody else under your name.”
Margaret’s eyes filled, but she did not reach for a tissue. “Yes.”
“Does Joanne’s family know?”
“I tried to tell them. The letter came back unopened.”
Claire looked out at the afternoon traffic. She loved this woman. She also understood, suddenly, that loving her did not require agreeing with what she had done.
“Why did you send Diane that letter?”
Margaret’s gaze went again toward the window. “Because last month I found out Leo is doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“Buying a building out from under people who live there. And this time it’s the house where Joanne’s daughter works.”
Claire’s phone vibrated on the table. The message came from an unknown number: Tell your mother to stop talking about the fire.
May you like
A second message followed, with a photograph taken less than a minute earlier through the coffee-shop window.
In it, Claire sat opposite her mother, and the sender had circled Margaret’s face in red.
