32. Harry
32
HARRY
Ruby is so excited about the wedding that I haven’t told her what Carlos and I have been up to. Carlos managed to get hold of Ruby’s medical records from the hospital in Chicago—I didn’t ask how—and has been trying to locate the source of the compound used to poison her. It seems that Arsenic hasn’t been produced in the US since 1985, but Carlos knows a lot of people, the kind of people who know how to get hold of poison should they be in desperate need of bumping off someone unsavory.
So far, we’ve had no luck in tracing it to anyone with even a remote connection to either the Jacksons or my family. Whoever poisoned Ruby has covered their tracks well. Which, according to Carlos, suggests that we will know them when we find them.
I don’t know what I’ll do with the information when I eventually find it.
One thing I do know is that I will never allow anyone to hurt Ruby again. It scares me sometimes, the intensity of my feelings for her.
I don’t recall this kind of all-consuming love between my parents. Admittedly, my father has a real aversion to showing his emotions. But even in quiet moments at home during my childhood, the kind of moments when they would sit in the kitchen drinking coffee, my dad reading the newspaper, my mom either sewing or mending a hole in the knees of my school pants, I never saw them touch. Never saw them speak with their eyes or heard them share a private joke.
Knowing what I know now, I wonder if he ever loved her. Or perhaps he did in his own way, but that love paled in comparison to whatever he felt for Celia Jackson. I have to believe that he loved my mom. Because the alternative…
I can’t imagine spending my life with the wrong person.
Now that I’ve found Ruby, I understand that I would kill for her. I would spend the rest of my life in jail if it meant that she could live her life unharmed. Just thinking about someone hurting her makes my fists clench and my pulse race.
Because what is the point of love if it isn’t at the heart of everything you do?
At midday, I meet Carlos at the site of an old tenement block in a prime Manhattan location. With the joint venture preparing to take off, he is thinking of relocating, building another tower taller and sleeker than the first, and splitting it fifty-fifty between the two companies. Weiss Petroleum has outgrown the space it currently inhabits in Russo Tower, so it would make sense, and when I see the plans drawn up by the architect, excitement hums through my veins.
Everything that I want to give Ruby is within touching distance. This is everything I’ve ever dreamed of but bigger, grander, way beyond even my own expectations. I’ve never enjoyed extravagance, but I can already see Ruby surrounded by opulence, wearing designer labels, expensive perfume, getting her hair styled in celebrity salons; she’s a gem, and she deserves the best setting. You wouldn’t stick a diamond inside a plastic clasp.
I’ve already started making inquiries about buying a private plane too. No more busy airport lounges and economy class for my Ruby.
Wandering around the empty offices, I don’t see the grimy flaking walls around me but the view from the windows overlooking the Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty and the World Trade Center. One day, perhaps, I’ll grow bored with this skyline, but right now, it fills me with a sense of pride: this is what I’ve achieved since taking over the family business.
Peering outside, I scan the sidewalks for a man in a black overcoat loitering around and trying to appear inconspicuous. There’s no one there. I haven’t spotted him in a while, since Ruby came back to New York with me. Perhaps I’ve been too preoccupied to notice, but I’ve not even felt as if I were being followed. So, perhaps I did imagine it after all.
My thoughts instinctively drift back to my father. I haven’t spoken to him since that night in Chicago. I don’t even know if he is back in New York or if he and Celia have finally gotten what they wanted. Each other.
Part of me can’t help wondering if reality will live up to their dream. Do they even really know each other after all these years spent apart, after everything that happened?
When I think of Ruby, I wholeheartedly believe that love will see us through a lifetime of ups and downs, of cold winters and baking summers, of children and grandchildren, vacations and Thanksgivings, chaos and peace. But when it comes to my dad and Ruby’s mom, I think that they will get what they both deserve in the end.
On a whim, I ask the taxi driver to take me to my dad’s house. He has already lost my sister; guilt will rest heavily on my shoulders for the rest of my life if I don’t invite him to my wedding. I realize that I’m doing this as much for myself as for him, but it doesn’t matter. I will have tried, and the rest will be down to him.
The house, when the taxi pulls up on the curb outside, appears lonely, sad windows overlooking an unloved porch. The trees are spindly and bare awaiting spring’s revival, and the steps littered with mulchy leaves.
I pay the driver and watch him pull back into the traffic before I climb the steps and ring the doorbell. No answer. I try again, listening for the sound of my dad’s footsteps and hearing only car horns, tires on the street, and raised voices from somewhere nearby.
I realize with a sharp pang of disappointment that this is the first time I’ve felt uncomfortable letting myself in with my key. It’s almost as if I never fully moved out until I met Ruby. As if I’d left half of me behind in case I ever wanted to move back in, and now that I’m getting married, I no longer belong here.
Even the key feels strange in my hand.
I glance back at the street, at the silver-blond woman carrying a chihuahua on the opposite side of the road, watching me with narrowed eyes like I’m about to break in. Deep breath. I slot the key into the lock.
Inside, I close the door behind me, and stand in the narrow hallway, listening to the sound of the house breathing. “Dad?” He doesn’t answer, but a sick feeling of dread starts to congeal in my stomach.
Pocketing the keys, I make my way through to the enormous living room, half expecting to find him slumped on the floor, one hand curled around an empty whisky glass. Now that I’ve got the vision in my head, I can’t shake it, and I make my way through the house, opening doors and peering around rooms with my heart hammering inside my chest.
Eventually, I find myself standing outside my dad’s study. It’s the only room I haven’t checked, and now that I’m here it makes sense that this is where he’ll be.
I grip the handle and push the door open, the breath escaping my lungs with a whoosh when I find the study empty. I shake my head, scattering all sorts of grim images from my mind. He isn’t here. From the deathly silence and icy chill, I guess that he didn’t come back to New York after all.
With relief battling with pictures of him and Celia inside my head, I go to close the door when I spot the open file on his desk.
My dad has always been fastidious about keeping things tidy. He keeps every invoice he ever received in chronological order in a drawer in the filing cabinet. He could recite every transaction that passed through his bank account over the last three months. He can’t even eat a slice of toast here without spreading napkins across the desk surface to catch crumbs.
Anywhere else, I’d have ignored the file because it’s obviously personal, closed the door, and walked away without a backward glance. But because my dad has done something so out of character, I can’t turn around and leave it there.
I step inside the study, recalling all the times I would come in here to show him school assignments at the end of the day when I was a kid. It was the only time he ever gave me his full attention, and even then, it was always followed by a comment like, “You could’ve done some more research,” or “That was too easy, move onto the next level.”
The document is typed. Official. But not something I recognize.
Peering more closely, I realize that it’s a postmortem report. My mom’s name is printed at the top of the sheet. I stare at her name, the individual letters dancing about in front of my eyes and making it hard to concentrate. I didn’t know there had been a postmortem. She was sick—there was no need to determine cause of death. But here it is, so why did no one tell me about it?
I skip through the details of the coroner who carried out the postmortem, the measurements and weights, and get straight to the point of the report: why my mom died.
The word arsenic jumps out at me. Once I’ve seen it, everything else fades into insignificance; even the room has disappeared like I’m floating above the earth, anchored only by the document in my hand.
My mom was poisoned.
My mom ingested arsenic. It was the poison that killed her, according to the report, or rather heart complications and kidney failure arising from the poison.
“What does this even mean?” I mutter to myself.
It’s going round and around inside my head: my mom was poisoned. Ruby was poisoned. My mom and Ruby. The two women I love most in the world apart from my sister Melanie. What are the chances of that…?
“Yeah, I thought it was a coincidence too.”
I’m so absorbed in my thoughts that I didn’t even hear my dad moving around inside the house. He looks rough. Disheveled. Tired. There’s gray in his hair that I never noticed before, and the heavy pouches under his eyes swallow half his cheeks.
“You’re here.”
“Ha! Thought I’d run away, did you?”
“Celia…”
My brain is still five minutes behind real life, trying to wrap itself around the report in my hand. The house seemed so empty, abandoned, but looking at him now, I understand why. He isn’t living here in the true sense of the word, he’s existing. A man in limbo.
His eyes are bloodshot as he holds the name on his tongue and releases it again, his gaze drifting back to the document. “Needed to check it for myself.”
“H-how long have you had this?” Dumb question. He must’ve requested it after Mom died.
“Wanted to be sure.” He’s holding his own conversation, not following mine.
“About what?” The word is still yelling at me.
Arsenic… Arsenic… ARSENIC!
Then it dawns on me like a river bursting its banks in a torrential downpour. He wanted to be with Celia. He doesn’t want me to marry Ruby. He killed my mom so that he could be free.
“You did this?” My voice barely stumbles off my tongue. “You poisoned Mom?”
He blinks at me, the words penetrating his bubble of self-pity. “What? No. What kind of animal do you fucking take me for?”
The worst kind.
The murdering kind.
Before I know what I’m doing, I’ve crossed the room and shoved him in the chest so hard that he staggers backwards through the door. I’m already on him. I grab his jacket, drag him towards me, our noses almost touching, his stale breath making me feel nauseous.
“You fucking poisoned Mom, and then you tried to kill Ruby.”
“No.” His eyes flash a warning at me, but I’m too far gone to read it, too consumed by the overwhelming need to hurt him the way he hurt Ruby. “Harry?—”
I throw him across the landing with a strength I never knew I possessed. He crashes into the balustrade at the top of the stairs, the wooden posts cracking with the force. He grabs hold of the banister, stops himself from hurtling backwards down the stairs, and crawls over the wooden splinters towards me.
One hand outstretched, he says, panting, “Hear me out, Harry.”
My chest is heaving with rage. I barely even register how pathetic he looks on his hands and knees.
“I’m listening.”
“How’s Ruby?” The question catches me off-guard, completely out of the blue.
“She’s… Why do you even fucking care?”
ARSENIC …
“That’s what I’m trying to tell you.” He touches the back of his head tentatively, testing the damage. “I needed to check the report for myself. To be sure.”
“After you poisoned Ruby? You could’ve fucking killed her.”
I can’t even look at him. He did kill someone: my mom. And the thought of Ruby’s cold lifeless body on a slab in the morgue is more than I can bear.
“I’ll ignore the accusations after the way I spoke to Ruby.” He swallows, his lips drawing away from his gums. “But I will not accept my own fucking son believing that I killed his mother.”
“Who did then?”
“Not now. I’m not doing this now.”
He clambers onto his feet and blunders past me, back into the study. He walks around the desk, opens a drawer and pulls out a half-full bottle of whisky and two glasses. He pours a large slug into each and hands one to me which I accept mechanically. My hand trembles as I raise it to my lips.
My dad downs his shot in one and refills his glass. “I was having you followed. I wanted to scare you; make you think twice about marrying into that family.” This isn’t his first drink of the day—his words are already slurred. “I’ll hold my hands up when I’m wrong, and I was wrong about you and her.”
“Her?” Hysteria gurgles in my throat and threatens to erupt. “Ruby?”
He shakes his head and rubs his hand across the week-old stubble on his chin. “Seems I was wrong about a lot of things. Your sister…”
“What about Melanie?”
“I know you instructed a PI to find her.”
This is too much, too soon. What else has he been keeping from me? “How?”
“Bank transfers. You made it too easy.” He takes another swig. “She’d have come back if that’s what she wanted. Took you longer to figure it out than I anticipated. All those bum leads, and still you kept chasing them.”
It takes me a beat too long to understand.
“Yep, that was me too.” He slugs back his drink and refills the glass. “I never wanted to marry your mom.”
My hackles are up. The fucking asshole is going to offload his shit onto me so that he can get a decent night’s sleep, no more secrets weighing him down.
“You are some fucking piece of work,” I growl.
He ignores me, lost in his memories. “I had no choice. I either married her or kissed goodbye to everything I’d worked so hard to build. They knew they had me over a fucking barrel—I could never have done it without them.”
“Them?”
“ The family . Our connections from back home in Ireland.” A puff of mirthless air escapes his lips, and he turns damp eyes towards me. “I turned my back on love, devoted myself to my wife and our kids, and kept my head down. It’s what’s expected of a Mafia boss. I take over, I pass it on to you. I don’t expect you to believe me, Harry, but I tried my best to love her. I grew to love her . She was … a wonderful woman who deserved fucking better than she got. She deserved fucking better than a ruthless Mafia king.”
That’s the truest thing he’s said so far.
I set the drink down on the desk. I need to get this straight, and I need to be able to think clearly. “Who poisoned Mom?”
Tears well in his eyes, and it’s like a punch in the gut. I’ve never seen my dad cry, not even after Mom died. “Isn’t it obvious?”
I stare at the report. I don’t need to read it to see the words printed underneath the heading: C ause of death . I already know the answer. The common denominator between the two families, and the only person who could’ve poisoned Ruby and avoided having the finger pointed at her.
Her mom. Celia.
“No.” I pick up my glass and swallow a mouthful of whisky—it burns as it goes down. “No. She wouldn’t do that to her own daughter.”
“That’s what I thought till I heard it from the horse’s mouth.”
I gape at him. “She-she confessed?”
“Not in so many words. Thought she could get her away from you, keep her in Chicago to take care of Graham. She wouldn’t have killed her.”
I’m not listening. The whisky has added clarity to my thoughts, and I’m one step ahead, trying to figure out my next move.