V
I lied when I’d told my sister Nicole we were going home.
The walls surrounding us now remained unchanged from our childhood. The roof above our heads had sheltered us, the floors the same we’d run across as children, chasing each other down the vast hallways. Even the scent of the place evoked memories of childhood. But nothing else about this building made me think of home.
Slowly, Nickie wandered down our father’s hallway. I watched the back of her dark head as she trailed her fingers across the walls, the banisters of the stairs, items of furniture, as though it had been years since she was last here instead of a matter of days. A lot had changed in that time. Nicole was still shaken, understandably, from what had happened.
She shivered and turned back to where I stood, framed by the front door, the keys in my hands. “It feels weird being here when dad is ...” She trailed off.
“Not here,” I filled in for her.
I didn’t want to say dead, knowing it had been her hands that brought about his demise. Or at least I hoped he’d met his demise. I’d be feeling a whole lot better right now if we’d been able to find a body. Though I’d heard the crack when Nicole had struck him across the head with the tree branch, and had seen him fall, it bothered me that we hadn’t been able to find him out in the forest. We’d taken the keys from his car, which was how we’d gotten into the house, so he wouldn’t have had a vehicle to get away in, not that he’d have been in any state to drive, and the temperature had been close to freezing that night—I knew that better than anyone.
As though the memory preempted it, my injured finger began to throb. The loss of the tip of my finger itched more than it hurt now. The irritation drove me crazy, and it was all I could do to stop myself from using my other hand to dig my nails into the blackening scab and burrow down into it. I managed to hold myself back, even though the intense itching—like thousands of tiny bugs crawling beneath the surface of my skin—made me scream with the discomfort. I knew doing this would only prolong the healing process, and the injury was healing now. When that scab came off, I hoped there would be fresh new skin beneath it. My hand was never going to be pretty, but that was the least of my worries.
“Yeah,” said Nickie, exhaling a sigh. “The place feels different with him not around. We grew up here, but right now it feels like we’re invading. Do you know what I mean?”
I nodded. I knew exactly what she meant. I didn’t feel like we were supposed to be here either. “Your room is still your room, though,” I told her, “and we need to make sure everyone thinks we’re supposed to be here. Wandering around like a couple of meek lambs is only going to get us killed.”
“Yeah, I know. I’ll get over it. Just feels weird right now.”
When we were children, this house had been home. Yes, there had been men coming and going at all hours of the night and day, and sometimes we heard raised voices. During those times, our mother would shepherd us into her bedroom and sit with us on the bed, with us tucked in under each arm. She’d smile brightly and tell us stories in a voice that was strangely too quiet and too loud at the same time. But we weren’t frightened of these men. Quite the opposite. We knew most of them as ‘uncle’—Uncle Stevie, and Uncle Louie, and Uncle Lawrence. They would stop to ruffle our hair and call us ‘kiddo’ and more often than not brought us some kind of candy. Only when I got older did I start to grow suspicious of them. Perhaps it was because of their constant presence around our house, or the way my mother reacted to them. In time, I’d grown mistrustful of my father as well. I’ve never been an angel, but perhaps if I’d been raised in a different household, I’d have turned out differently, too.
The last thing I wanted for my and X’s baby was to raise him or her the same way, but until I got X freed from jail, I didn’t have any choice. We were going to need money for lawyers, but more than that, I needed my father’s people. Men with connections. X might have killed plenty of people, but he wasn’t responsible for Harvey Baglione’s death. There had to be a body, and I knew he’d been shot, and not killed by X’s car as the police believed. If I could find the body and the gun, the cops would have to let X go free. Someone must know what happened to Harvey’s body, and I intended to find out.
I needed to figure out a way to get my father’s men on my side, and there were only two things men like them responded to—money and fear.
I put my hand to the swell of my belly and immediately snatched it away again. That was a habit I needed to break, at least until I’d made my mark. My pregnancy would be seen as a weakness, and I couldn’t afford to be weak.
There were a couple of guys I knew I’d have trouble with. My father’s right-hand man, the same one who’d kept all of his businesses running while he’d been inside, would be the one I’d have most problems dealing with. Everyone knew by now the reason I’d been away for so long was because I was going to testify against my father. That made me a snitch, and a snitch was a very bad thing in this business. Being a rat was bad enough, but I was also a woman. Women in this world were either wives or mistresses. The last thing these men would want was a woman telling them what to do.
My father’s men wouldn’t dare to kill me, not without my father’s strict instructions, which was something they were never going to get. The fear of Mickey Five Fingers turning up and discovering they’d killed his daughter would be enough to steady their hands, at least for the moment. I had no idea how long that would last. At some point, they’d realize their boss wasn’t coming home, and when that happened, things would take a new turn. I hoped I’d have X out of jail by then, and we could all take off to some place new.
“What do we do now?” Nickie asked, turning her dark eyes on me, wide and worried.
“I’ve got someone I need to see.”
She shook her head. “You can’t leave me here alone!”
“No one is going to hurt you, Nicole.”
“Really, ’cause it seems like everyone wants to hurt us these days.”
“What our father did was never about physically hurting us. He never has, remember? He’s taken everyone we love away from us, and that’s how he causes us pain. Even though he’s gone, we’re still suffering.”
Emotional pain took far longer to heal than a physical one. A physical injury would heal in time, but we kept the loss of our loved ones with us for the rest of our lives.
“You’re still your father’s daughter, Nickie,” I continued, “and you need to remember that. No one else knows what happened, and we need to keep it that way. As far as we’re aware, he went away on a business trip and we have every right to be here.”
She took a deep breath and nodded. “Okay, but I still don’t want to stay here alone. Where are you going, anyway?”
I tightened my jaw. “I’m going to pay one of our father’s friends a visit.”