Page 7 of The Mobster’s Maid

I take my apron off. Fold it. Set it on the peg.

And when I finally slip out of the main house for the day, through the side door to my quarters over the garage, at eight, I can still feel the ghost of that green stare on my mouth.

I know, with a certainty I hate a little, that I am going to be thinking about it in the privacy of my bed.

3

Vincenzo

The security room at Vizio is nine screens of the club and one screen of my own kitchen.

I have been in this room every day for ten years. I have never once pulled up the feed on my house.

Until yesterday.

The camera in my kitchen is set into the crown molding above the pantry door, angled to catch the whole room and the island in the middle of it. It was installed nine years ago along with everything else on the property. Standard security protocol. Nobody has looked at it since, because nothing has ever happened in that kitchen worth looking at.

I have been looking at it since three o’clock yesterday afternoon, only a few hours after meeting Rosalie.

The kitchen is empty. Rosalie left the main house at eight this morning, right on the schedule Sal set up for her the week she was hired, and she won’t be back until one in the morning tomorrow. It’s only four in the afternoon.

I’m looking at the empty island, the little wooden board with a scone still sitting on it and the small pot of green heart-leaved plant on the windowsill. Just to see the places she was in, imagine her there.

I am looking at a kitchen where a woman was, and where a woman is coming back.

I flick the feed to the main floor of Vizio. Then back to the kitchen. Then to the roulette wheel upstairs, which is empty at this hour. Then back to the kitchen.

Somewhere in the back of my head, in a voice I have not permitted myself to use in twenty-nine years, an Italian word is trying to attach itself to the empty room on the screen.

Mia.

Sal comes in with an espresso. He sets it on the console beside me.

“Boss.”

“Yes.”

I drink the coffee slowly, savoring its richness.

“Say what you came in to say, Salvatore.”

“You’ve been going home more often than usual. Yesterday morning you went home before ten for the first time in the years I’ve been running your schedule. Now you can’t stop looking at that camera. I’m asking, once, whether you need me to send someone to the house.”

“Why would I need you to send someone to the house.”

“Because,” Sal says, patient, “The last time I saw you look at anything the way you’re looking at that screen, we ended up burying a man.”

I have known Sal for eleven years. He is not being funny.

“She’s not a threat, Sal.”

“Then I don’t understand what I’m watching, boss.”

Neither do I.

“Leave it. I’ll handle it.”

He nods and lets himself out.