Page 98 of Ruthless Daddy
The cold came up through me then. Not a drop. A rise. From the soles of my feet up through my legs through my gut into my chest, the way ice came up a windowpane in a Sicilian winter, slow and total and you did not see it happening until the whole pane was white.
“Mudroom,” I said.
The side door was unlatched. Not open — pulled shut behind her, gently, the way a person closed a door they did not want anyone to hear close. But the latch had not caught. I could see the daylight at the seam.
Her coat was off the peg.
“Pietro.”
Sal’s voice. He had come in from the courtyard at some point in the last minute. I had not heard him. He was standing in the doorway from the kitchen with his coat half-off and his eyes already doing the cousin-thing, the read, the calculation, thewhat.
I did not answer him.
I pushed the side door open and went out into the snow in my socks.
The cold did not register. I went down the service passage between the carriage house and the back of Marco’s townhouse and I came to the gap in the hedge that Tonio had walked her past at seven that morning and I stopped.
There was a single set of footprints.
Small. The tread of her boots. The boots she had worn in from the car the night before, the boots that had been by the door this morning when I had brought her coffee in bed.
The prints went south.
They were already filling with the new snow that had started at some point in the last hour, the small fine snow that came after a clear morning, and the prints at the far end of the alley were already only suggestions of prints, and the prints at this end were already softer than they had been when she made them.
She had not run.
The stride was the stride of a woman walking. Even, measured, the spacing of a person who had wanted not to be noticed leaving.
Behind me, somewhere in the carriage house, Tonio was shouting Sal’s name and Olimpo was barking, the big bark, the bark he kept for strangers and emergencies, and Sal was already on a phone, already moving, already doing the things the cousins did when a thing had gone wrong.
I stood in the alley and I could not move.
She had gone, and she had gone alone, and she had told no one.
The Catania thing came up through me like a sickness coming up through a wound. The warehouse. The dark. The girl who had looked at me.
I had stood still then too.
I had stood very, very still.
Sal was already on the phone when I came back through the side door.
He was speaking Italian, fast, low, the dispatcher voice. He had one hand at the back of his neck and the other holding the phone hard against his ear and his eyes on me the whole time he talked, the way a man kept his eyes on the door of a room he had been told a bomb was in.
I did not look at him. I went past him into the kitchen and I sat down at her workstation in the chair she had pushed back thirty-nine minutes earlier and I put both hands flat on the woodthe way I had put them flat on the table in this same kitchen yesterday.
“Dante is coming,” Sal said.
I nodded.
“Marco is fifteen minutes behind him.”
I nodded again.
Tonio was standing in the middle of the room with the dish towel still on his shoulder. He had not moved. His face had gone the color his face went when he was about to either weep or hit a wall, and I did not know him well enough yet to guess which.
“Cugino,” he said.
