Chapter 10
CHAPTER TEN
Tony’s voice on the phone sounded like a man chewing on something he didn’t want to swallow.
“I interviewed the family.”
I set down my coffee. Eight in the morning, standing at the kitchen counter reading Aunt Amelia’s When the Veil Thins like it was assigned homework.
“All of them?”
“All of them.” A pause with weight. “Can you meet me? Diner on Route 1, south of town. Sal’s Place.”
“You’re kidding.”
“That’s actually what it’s called. Noon work?”
“Noon works.”
He hung up without saying goodbye. I looked at the toaster, where Rosaria had materialized with the air of someone who’d been eavesdropping and wasn’t ashamed of it.
“A diner,” she said. “How romantic.”
“It’s not romantic. It’s an investigation.”
“You should wear lipstick.”
I did not wear lipstick. I found Tony already in a corner booth at Sal’s Place with a cup of black coffee and a look on his face that said he was wrestling with something and losing.
The diner hadn’t updated since 1987—vinyl booths, Formica tables, a laminated menu with a lobster in a chef’s hat.
“Thanks for coming.”
“Thanks for calling.” I ordered coffee from the waitress, who looked at Tony and then at me with undisguised curiosity. Small town. New woman having coffee with the detective.
Tony turned his mug between his hands. Big hands.
“I need your take,” he said. “On the family. You know them. I don’t.”
“Could’ve asked that on the phone.”
His jaw worked. “Yeah.” He didn’t elaborate. “Look—you know things. I don’t know how, and honestly I’m not sure I want to know. But you’ve been right so far, and Rosaria really was poisoned, so...”
He trailed off, staring into his coffee like it might finish the sentence for him.
“So you want to compare notes,” I said.
“I want to compare notes.”
Rosaria appeared in the window beside the booth, her reflection superimposed over the parking lot. She took one look at Tony and tilted her head, studying him with the clinical focus of a woman appraising livestock at a county fair.
“Good bone structure,” she said. “Strong jaw. He is still quite handsome.”
I picked up the menu and stared at it very hard.
Rosaria circled the table—or circled Tony’s reflection, drifting from the window to the chrome napkin dispenser to the glass sugar jar, examining him from every angle like an art critic at a gallery.
“Excellent posture. A man who sits up straight has discipline. Salvatore slouches.” She paused at the napkin dispenser, peering at Tony’s hands wrapped around his mug. “Working hands. Not soft like a dentist’s. I approve.”
I bit the inside of my cheek.
“You okay?” Tony asked.
“Fine. Just—deciding between the turkey club and the BLT.”
“Turkey club’s dry.”
“BLT it is.”
“He orders his coffee black,” Rosaria observed from the sugar jar. “No nonsense. I approve of that also.” A beat. “He keeps glancing at you when you are looking at the menu. You really should have worn lipstick.”
I closed the menu with more force than necessary and focused on Tony. “Tell me what you got.”
He pulled a small notebook from his jacket. Dog-eared, coffee-stained, covered in handwriting that looked like a seismograph during an earthquake.
“George Ferraro. Nervous. Couldn’t keep his hands still—kept picking at his cuffs, turning his phone over, drumming on the table. And every time I asked a question, he’d look at Claudia before answering. Like he needed permission.”
“That’s George. He’s always done that with the women in his life. First Rosaria, now Claudia.”
“Claudia was helpful. Very helpful. Offered coffee, pulled out photo albums, walked me through the whole evening minute by minute without being asked. Had an answer for everything.” He flipped a page. “Too helpful?”
“Maybe. Claudia’s always like that. It’s how she operates—she’s the gracious one, the one who steps up. But whether that’s genuine or strategic depends on what day you catch her.”
Tony made a note. “Paula told me to go to hell.”
“That sounds right.”
“Said the family was a nest of vipers, then offered me a beer.” He almost smiled. “I liked her.”
“Everyone likes Paula. That’s her cover.”
“And Sal.” Tony’s expression tightened. “Your ex was nervous. Different than George—George is scared. Sal kept asking what was in his file. What we had on him. Whether anyone had made allegations.”
“You have a file on him?”
“Don’t have a file on anyone yet. But a man who asks about his file usually knows there should be one. Should there?”
I turned my coffee cup. Sal. We hadn’t been close by the end—hadn’t been close for years, if I was honest.
“I don’t know. We weren’t sharing secrets toward the end. But if he’s nervous about a file, there’s a reason.”
“Could the reason be he murdered his mother?”
“Sal’s vain, selfish, allergic to accountability. But murder? He was on a plane to Vegas before the plates were cleared. Airtight.”
“People hire people.”
“Sal’s too cheap to hire a decent hygienist. I don’t see him paying for a hit.”
Tony wrote something down, sat back, rubbed the bridge of his nose. “Someone’s lying. Probably all of them.”
In the window, Rosaria sniffed. “Finally. A man with sense.”
The waitress brought my BLT and topped off both coffees, and we spread his notes across the table.
“Walk me through the night,” Tony said. “The dinner. How did it work? Who was where, who had access to what?”
I took a bite of the BLT to buy myself a second, because Rosaria had just materialized in the napkin dispenser again, and the look on her face said she was about to contribute.
“The dinner was at Rosaria’s house. Sal made the announcement over dessert. It was ugly—people yelling, Rosaria going pale, the whole thing. Dinner broke up around six. Everyone cleared out.”
“Everyone?”
“Everyone. Sal left for the airport—he had a ten o’clock flight to Vegas. George and Claudia went home. Paula went to a gallery opening in Portsmouth.”
Tony wrote it down. “And Rosaria was alone after six.”
“She had a routine,” I said. “Every morning, she’d pick out one of her mother’s teacups—she had a whole collection of them, fine china, different patterns.
She’d choose one for the day and set it on the kitchen counter.
Then at seven-thirty, she’d brew her chamomile and pour it into the cup.
Same thing every night for forty years.”
“The cup just sat there,” Rosaria said from the napkin dispenser, her voice tight. “All day. On the counter. Empty. Waiting.” She flickered, steadied. “Anyone at that dinner could have walked into the kitchen and put something in it.”
“Everyone in the family knew about the routine,” I said, shoving a fry in my mouth to cover the fact that I’d been listening to someone Tony couldn’t see. “The cup, the tea, seven-thirty on the dot. It was just—Rosaria.”
Tony tapped his pen against the notepad. “Here’s what’s bugging me, though. If someone dropped something into an empty cup hours before she used it—residue, powder, liquid, whatever—she’d have noticed. You pour tea into a cup and there’s something sitting at the bottom? You see it. You smell it.”
I hadn’t thought of that. From the napkin dispenser, Rosaria went quiet, which meant she hadn’t thought of it either.
“So what are you saying?”
“I’m saying the more likely scenario is that someone put it in the tea itself. After it was brewed. After it was poured.” He underlined something twice. “Which means someone was in that house at seven-thirty. After everyone supposedly left. Someone came back.”
I glanced at the napkin dispenser before I could stop myself.
Rosaria was still there, but something had changed.
Her expression had gone cloudy—unfocused, like a woman trying to read a sign through fog.
Her mouth opened, then closed. Her edges softened, not flickering the way they did when she talked about her death, but something quieter. Dimmer.
She didn’t remember.
The dinner, the announcement, the yelling—she remembered all of that. But after? After six o’clock, after the front door closed and the house went quiet and she was alone with her teacups and her routine? Nothing. A blank. Everything between the divorce announcement and waking up dead was gone.
She caught me looking and her jaw tightened. “I have told you what I know,” she said, clipped. Defensive. The voice of a woman who’d rather be cruel than admit she was lost.
I looked back at Tony. “But everyone did leave. You just confirmed the alibis.”
“I confirmed as much as I could.” He flipped a page. “Sal had the ten o’clock flight. Airline confirmed, multiple witnesses at the gate, hotel check-in at eleven Pacific. He’s clean—he couldn’t have gone back to the house and made the airport in time.”
“Paula was at the gallery showing in Portsmouth. Private event, twenty-plus witnesses, but no one was watching her all the time. She could have left and gone back.” He paused.
I thought about Paula on my porch, paint under her nails. “She’s the most open about hating Rosaria. People who announce it usually aren’t the ones who act on it.”
“Usually.” Tony underlined something. “George and Claudia. They say they went straight home after the dinner. They are each other’s alibi.”
“But they could be lying.”
“Claudia’s alibi depends on George. George’s depends on Claudia.” He looked at me. “That’s not an alibi. That’s a mutual agreement.”
“He is good at his job,” Rosaria observed, watching Tony’s face. “Thorough. Patient.” She drifted along the window, her reflection pensive. “So different from Salvatore, who never paid attention to anything that was not about himself.”
“They say they went straight home,” I repeated. “But if someone doubled back after six—came back to the house before Rosaria made her tea—“
“Then they’d have had ninety minutes. Plenty of time.” Tony’s pen stopped moving. He sat back and rubbed the bridge of his nose. “The problem is proving it.”
“Do you have any idea who?”
He picked up his coffee. Drank. Set it down with that precise little click. His face did something complicated—a tightening around the jaw, a flicker behind the eyes that he shut down fast. The look of a man holding a card he wasn’t ready to play.
“I’ve got threads,” he said. “Nothing I’d hang a case on.”
Which wasn’t a no. I waited, but he moved on.
“Once Rosaria was found, the family came back to the house, right? That night or the next morning?”
“Next morning, I think. The cleaning lady found her and the family met at the house after the hospital. I wasn’t there, of course.”
“And someone cleaned.” He said it flatly.
I watched his face. He was doing what cops do—laying out pieces, looking for the shape they made.
I could almost see the picture forming behind his eyes.
But he wasn’t saying it. Whatever hunch was pulling at him, he was keeping it close, turning it over the way he turned that pen—testing the weight of it before he committed.
The diner hummed around us. The waitress refilled someone’s coffee across the room. Outside, a truck rumbled past on Route 1.
“I think things are starting to come together,” he said quietly. Then caught himself. “Or they might be. Too early to say.”
“That’s very diplomatic.”
“That’s very careful. Different thing.” He closed the notebook and tucked it in his jacket. “I need more before I put anyone’s name on anything. Physical evidence. Motive. Something that puts a specific person back in that house between six and seven-thirty.”
Rosaria’s reflection had gone very still in the window. That look again—the one she got when she was reaching for a memory locked behind the night she died. Her edges wavered, went soft, and she pulled back before she destabilized.
“Something personal,” I repeated, thinking about a locked diary in a dead woman’s dresser. “I might know where to look.”
Tony studied me. That long, careful look he did, the one that made me feel like I was being read. “Are you going to tell me where?”
“When I have something solid.”
“That’s not how this works.”
“That’s how it works with me.”
He held my gaze for a beat. Then he picked up his coffee, drained it, and set the mug down with the precision of a man who built coffee cup towers for a living.
“Fine. But Gina—“ He leaned forward, and for a second the cop dropped away and it was just him, tired and serious and closer than he needed to be. “Be careful. The killer is smart. Patient. And they think they’ve gotten away with it. Almost did if you didn’t come to me. People like that get dangerous when they realize someone’s looking. ”
“I’ll be careful.”
“Lock your door.”
“You said that last time.”
“I’ll keep saying it.”
He left money on the table—enough for both of us, which I noticed and he pretended was nothing—and walked out. I watched through the window as he crossed the parking lot.
Rosaria watched too, from the napkin dispenser.
“Well,” she said. “He is not wrong about the danger.” She paused. “He is also not wrong about locking your door. For once, listen to someone.”
I finished my coffee, stole one of Tony’s leftover fries, and drove home thinking about teacups and the diary that might hold the answer to all of it. Now, more than ever, I needed to get my hands on that diary.
I picked up my phone and texted Carmen: Do you know if Nonna’s dresser is still in her house? The old one in her bedroom?
Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.
I think so. No one has cleaned out that room yet. Why?
Just wondering.
I set the phone down and looked at Rosaria’s reflection. She was waiting, the way she always waited—imperious, expectant, absolutely certain I’d do what needed to be done.
For once, she was right.