Chapter 15
15
FIONA
I ’m standing in the walk-in closet, surrounded by Aunt S’s clothes. I couldn’t bear to throw anything away after she died.
All of it is couture and most of it would give Patrick a heart attack if I staged a private little runway show. Aunt S loved her peekaboo tops and cutaway trousers. She honestly believed the human body was a work of art. That’s why she hung the original Georgia O’Keeffe in the living room.
There’s one outfit at the very back of the closet. Aunt S kept it here in case she had an unexpected command performance at the dún .
Her black A-line skirt hits me mid-calf. A matching silk shell looks like something an English princess would wear to tea at the Ritz. There’s a double-breasted jacket with cloth-covered buttons and a wide-brim hat with a somber black ribbon.
“Holy hell,” Patrick says, when I enter the living room.
I genuflect, like I learned to do for my first communion .
“You look amazing,” he says.
My face ignites.
I’m not a girl who blushes. I spend my time figuring out ways to make other people flush. But Patrick’s praise hooks something deep inside me, and for just a moment, I’m back in our crappy hotel room, balancing on my knees and forearms as he fucks me blind, telling me I’m beautiful, I’m strong, I’m brave.
His lips turn up as he registers my reaction, just the corners, and something inside me trembles as I wait to see if he’ll really smile.
“Good girl,” he says, crossing the room to tuck a strand of hair behind my ear. The tiny hairs on the backs of his fingers brush my cheek, and I catch my breath like I’m about to come.
No. Not like I’m about to come. He’s taken me from zero to sixty in less than ten seconds. My clit throbs, and I squeeze my thighs together to keep from straddling him on the couch.
He laughs, as if he can see straight through Aunt S’s proper skirt. “Give me a minute,” he says. “And we can be on our way.”
On our way? Right. We’re going to the funeral. We’re burying my father. That’s why I’m wearing this outrageous costume.
He closes the bedroom door behind him, and I cross to the living room windows, fanning myself with one hand to get some air. I lean my head against the glass, wondering what the hell he’s done to me.
I’m Fiona Fucking Ingram. I’ve been fooling men with my fake orgasms since I turned sixteen. I don’t cream at a few nice words. I’ve got a hell of a lot more control than that.
Patrick takes more than a minute. He takes five. But he comes out of the bedroom dressed in the plain black suit he wore to Da’s wake. This time, he’s wearing a white shirt, so bright it takes away all the breath I’ve managed to gather. His tie today is the dark green of grass under starlight, with a sprinkling of Celtic knots that match his golden ring .
He squirms under my inspection. “It’s a Fishtown tie,” he says defensively.
I don’t care if the silk was woven by the devil himself. I just think about how it would feel, lashed around my wrists. I gulp air like I’ve just downed a ghost pepper smoothie.
“I need to stop at a drug store,” I make myself say. “I need sunglasses.”
“So no one sees you weeping over your da’s grave?”
“So no one sees my bruises,” I snap. I won’t be crying. Not today. Although the thought of how little sorrow I feel makes me wonder if I’m some sort of monster.
My makeup skills are excellent, but I don’t trust the results in broad daylight. Not when I’m going to be under intense scrutiny as the grieving daughter. Or the girl making an upstart bid for Queen.
Moran’s phone starts to serenade him from his pocket. He takes it out with an automatic motion and thumbs an icon to stop the song. “Alarm,” he says to my unasked question. “Don’t want to be late.”
Another alarm goes off fifteen minutes later, as we’re leaving the CVS. This sound is louder and faster paced. I blink behind my cat’s-eye sunglasses. As he turns off the music, he says, “Sorry.”
Fifteen minutes later, we’re caught at a traffic light and a third alarm goes off—the steady beeping of a smoke detector. He grimaces and kills the sound. It’s not until he opens my door at St. Augustine’s, handing me down from the Land Rover, that I realize I didn’t tell him our destination.
This is the oldest Catholic cemetery in Boston. The tombstones cluster around the chapel like giant sea urchin spikes. A place has been reserved for my father since he was a child; he’ll spend eternity between his own parents.
My mother is buried an hour south of here. I’ve never visited her grave.
Father Bertram conducts the service in the chapel. I sit in the front row, with Patrick by my side. Uncle Aran is in the pew across the aisle.
The chapel fills behind us, most of the Old Colony Crew sitting behind my uncle. Keenan Rivers is on the aisle, directly behind Uncle Aran. Sacco, the mafia don, sits a few rows back. The pews fill in with the people who paid my father protection money for decades—the ones who’ve run his brothels and gambling dens, along with legitimate business owners who only want to guarantee smooth operations. Everyone lines up behind Uncle Aran.
A handful of people sit behind me. There’s Oona, my former nanny, back to her job as a cook at the dún . There’s a reporter, scribbling on a pocket notebook. I’d love to throw him out the door, but it isn’t worth making a scene.
There are a couple of young women who join us, so similar in appearance they could be twins—wide-set eyes in heart-shaped faces, plump lips, and breasts so huge there’s no way they’re real. One has dyed black hair; the other is a platinum blonde, but my father clearly had a type for his girlfriends, his cailíns .
A few men at the very back look like they’ve been sleeping rough. The chapel is warm and dry, and they can nod off without anyone taking great offense.
Just before the service starts, a few Irish relatives slip into the pews behind me. There’s an aunt and three uncles I last saw on my trip to Dublin, each of them with red eyes and drawn faces, exhausted from travel, if not from sorrow. None of my cousins have made the trip.
But when my family realize how the crowd has lined up, they shift over to Uncle Aran’s side. I want to stand up, to demand they come back to me. Uncle Aran isn’t flesh and blood. He married into the family, married Aunt Siobhan. But the Irish Ingrams understand power when they see it.
I set my shoulders, refusing to look at them again.
Even the latecomers stand at the back, instead of sitting with me. They’ll pay, all of them. They’re all betting on the wrong horse.
Father Bertram starts the service half an hour after the announced time, to give everyone a chance to settle. He looks lost in front of the altar, like he’s floating on a sea of flowers. Every captain in the Grand Irish Union has sent a display to honor his general. There are blankets and wreaths and horseshoes, and one huge round of white carnations trimmed with red roses, made up to look like a baseball. I wonder if there are any flowers left in Boston, maybe in all of New England.
Father Bertram wears purple vestments, a sign of penance.
My father never repented a single thing he did, not in his entire life. He lived hard. He died hard. And he truly believed that a single hint of regret might kill him. His men would refuse to be led by a man who showed even a shadow of doubt.
Maybe that’s why he never announced who would take over when he died. He was like an expectant parent, keeping the name of his baby secret until the birth, so he didn’t have to listen to every last friend and relative who thought he was making a mistake.
But goddamn it, he owed me. I did everything my father ever asked of me. Almost everything. I tried.
Water under the fucking bridge. He didn’t name me his heir. And now, I’m fighting for my life with the Crew. Fighting a battle no sane man would say I can win.
It doesn’t take long for Father Bertram to finish saying mass. Uncle Aran takes communion. All the senior officers do.
I don’t go up to the altar rail. I haven’t gone to confession in eight years.
Outside, by the open grave, the wind has picked up. Father Bertram’s fleshy lips look like liver in the daylight. I wonder how much he knows about his predecessor, whether he has nightmares about Father Colin’s untimely death. I do.
I hear the echo of that shot eight years ago, and I flinch. Patrick feels it. He puts his hand beneath my elbow to steady me. If anyone’s watching, they’ll think I’m overcome with emotion as Father Bertram leads us all in the Lord’s Prayer.
The service ends and the crowd breaks into clusters of two or three. Before I can tell Patrick I’m ready to go, Oona Maguire bustles to my side. When she was my nanny, she marked my height on the frame of my bedroom door every year, on my birthday. When I turned nine, I stretched on tiptoe, and I was taller than she was. In the intervening years, she’s shrunk even more. Her face looks like it’s carved out of a dried apple.
“ Coinín beag ,” she says, hugging my waist, calling me her little rabbit. I don’t know where to put my hands, so I wave them in the air, helpless.
Oona looks up at me. Her eyes are red. Her lips are chapped. Tears stain her cheeks, and I realize she may be the only person in the entire cemetery who honestly mourns my father.
“ Coinín beag ,” she says again. “I brought something for you.” She slips a battered tote bag from her shoulder and begins fumbling inside.
I imagine she has something that belonged to my father. One of his cigarette lighters. Maybe a pen from his desk. Even though there’s nothing I want, my throat tightens at the kindness.
But I’m wrong. I very much want the thing she pulls out of her bag.
It’s a cigar box, cedar, decorated in gaudy green and red. The metal clasp is tarnished. One of the hinges slips when the lid opens too far.
I know that last bit, because I kept the box tucked under my mattress for years. I filled it with my treasures. My secrets. My past.
“Oh my God,” I whisper, clutching it close to my chest.
“Your uncle is changing things,” Oona says, pursing her lips. “ And not for the better. He’ll be turning your bedroom into an office, he says.”
Of all the petty, manipulative…
She says, “I couldn’t have him taking all your things.”
I hold the box closer, catching a whiff of its clean-smelling wood. “Thank you,” I say. “Thank you so much.”
She stretches a hand up to cup my jaw. “You be a good girl, now.”
“I will,” I lie.
Turning to Patrick, she cocks her head to one side, like a bird on a ledge. “You take care of our girl, Paddy Moran.”
I’m amazed that she calls him by a nickname. I’m even more astonished by his grave tone as he says, “I will, Miz Maguire.”
She harrumphs. “It was Oona when ya lived in the dún . It can be Oona now.”
“Oona,” he says meekly.
“Go on now,” she says. “Carry that box for Herself.”
I’m shocked when he takes the cigar box from my hands. He looks like he’s a schoolboy in some black-and-white movie, carrying home an innocent girl’s books.
“Now get her out of here before her uncle decides to work some mischief.” Oona makes a shooing motion, as if she’s frightening off a mouse with her non-existent apron.
“Do you need a ride back to the dún ?” Patrick asks courteously.
“Don’t worry about me,” she says. “Go on. Be a good boy, Paddy.”
Obediently, he takes my arm. We’re halfway to the parking lot before I manage to splutter, “ Be a good boy, Paddy? ”
A smile ghosts his lips.
I can’t let it rest. “When did you live at the dún? ”
“Before you were born,” he says. I’m astonished to hear his voice grow wistful as he clarifies his words. “Before I was married.”
“When the hell were you going to tell?— ”
Patrick cuts me off, shouldering in front of me before I reach the car.
“I need to talk to Fiona.” The voice beyond Patrick’s broad shoulders is high and nasal, like someone fighting nasty spring allergies.
“Call and make an appointment.” Patrick’s snarl sounds like he’s three seconds shy of ignition. There’s a violence in his words, a savagery like a pickax to the base of my skull.
“I—I don’t have t— time?—”
I’ve finally placed the voice. And Patrick’s bodyguard act is amusing, but I can’t imagine being threatened by anyone who’s reduced to absolute stammering by a few gruff words.
“Down, boy,” I say to my self-appointed protector. I put a hand on Patrick’s arm before I step around the wall of his body.
He scowls, but I’m too busy smothering a laugh to put him in his place.
The man waiting to talk to me is half Patrick’s size. His rumpled brown suit looks like he’s been wearing it for weeks, and a button is missing from his yellowed shirt. Dandruff dusts his shoulders. His smudged eyeglasses slip down the bridge of his nose, causing him to blink like a startled frog. The finger he uses to push them back in place is stained with ink.
It’s something of a miracle that Quentin O’Roark has made it to my father’s funeral. Q is— was —Da’s Quartermaster. He knows where every dollar of the Old Colony’s Crew wealth came from and where every penny is stored. His office is in one of the townhouses across from the dún . I was only there once, on a summer afternoon, when the room easily topped one hundred degrees from the heat of all Q’s computers. I’m pretty sure he hasn’t left the house for years.
“Quentin,” I say, like we stand around chatting on a regular basis. A flash of surprise widens his eyes. I wonder how many other people in the cemetery remember his full name.
“Fiona.” His gaze stays glued to mine. He sounds like he’s reading lines from a play as he loudly announces: “I’m sorry for your loss.”
“Thank you,” I say.
And then, before I can think of something civil to continue the conversation—ask about his family (does he even have one?), or maybe about his health—he leans in close. Talking fast, like he’s reciting all of the Generally Accepted Accounting Principles in less than a minute, he says, “The ten million dollars you promised for the museum. You need to pull it from sources no one else knows about. Dowd will do everything he can to stop you. Call Rónnad.”
“Who?” I ask, feeling like I’ve been caught in the spray of a machine gun.
“Call her,” he says urgently. “Today.”
“I don’t?—”
He reaches out and shakes my hand. His palm is sweaty, but he’s holding a scrap of paper. He grips my fingers until he’s certain I’ve accepted the transfer.
“Who is she?” I ask. “Why are you helping me?”
But Q answers in that too-loud, too-fake voice. “Great to see you, Fiona. Wish it was under other circumstances.”
He leaves before I can force out any more questions, darting across the parking lot like a pack of wolves is nipping at his heels.
Patrick shakes his head, but he opens my door and sees me settled in my seat. He hands me my cigar box after I’ve fastened my safety belt.
I’m already studying the paper by the time he locks his own door. “What’s that?” he asks.
I show him the scrap. It’s blank, except for ten inked numbers divided into three neat groups—a phone number. But there’s no sign at all of who this Rónnad is, or why Q believes so strongly that I can trust her to get me the money I need.