Chapter 23
The place Luca picked for dinner with our mamma is called The Codfather.
Nothing says comfort food like a fried seafood joint with cartoon fish in fedoras painted on the walls.
But when you uncover a pen drive that reveals a person close to you has been lying to your face for months, pretending to be someone they’re not, it’s hard to find comfort, even in deep-fried oil-soaked seafood.
I can’t resist the urge to twist my necklace around my index finger. The chain bites into my neck with each tightening loop, reminding me of what it looked like before I washed it in bleach—dark with blood.
Luca leans back in the booth, drumming his fingers on the table next to his empty fried seafood platter. “You’re doing that thing again.”
“What thing?” I ask.
“Necklace twirling. It’s like clicking a pen but more annoying.”
After losing my necklace the first time, I’m afraid that if I let go, it’ll vanish and reappear someplace worse, like an evidence locker.
I considered placing it in my hiding spot along with the pen drive, but it’s not a risk I can take anymore.
This necklace links directly to me and someone got to it once before, along with breaking into my home.
As far as I’m concerned, there’s no safer place for this other than on my neck.
“And you drumming your fingers on the table isn’t equally annoying?” I shoot back at him.
“Kids, enough bickering!” Our mamma, Rosetta, presses her napkin to her lips with unnecessary force.
A Scarlet Mischief pink imprint—her favorite lipstick she’s worn since the 1990s—of her lips sticks to the napkin.
The color is on par for our family history.
“What is going on? What did you need so urgently that I had to miss Last Firsts Club to come here?”
“Last Firsts Club?” Luca looks to me as if I have any idea what that tongue twister is.
Mamma straightens up before answering, which means this is going to be a very detailed explanation.
“It’s a group of advanced-age people who meet at the community center once a month with a common goal: If it’s your last chance to do something for the first time, you do it.
It’s kind of like a bucket list but more positive.
No one wants to think about checking off a list before kicking the bucket, but if you look at it like it might be your last chance to do something, it feels less morbid. ”
Bucket list, Last Firsts list… the concept sounds like the same morbidity to me, but what do I know?
“Anyway,” Mamma continues, “Luca, we haven’t spoken in a while. Are you seeing anyone special?”
I snort a mouthful of soda out of my nose trying to withhold a laugh. “Yeah, Luca, tell Mamma about your girlfriend.”
Luca passes me a look that could kill. “I’m not dating Freida anymore. I think she’s ghosting me. I’ve tried everything to reach her, but she won’t answer calls or texts.”
“Who is Freida?” Mamma asks with a lilt in her voice.
“No one!” Luca answers before I can. “It’s just a girl I was talking to. The lady Ivory Cobb who disappeared, it’s her daughter. But it’s over. She was too young for me anyway.”
“Oh, well, probably best not to attach your cart to her horse.” Mamma injects a wise old woman tone to the words. “So, you both invited me here. What do you need?”
What I need is to un-live the last week, but I should probably come up with something more doable than time travel.
“I need advice. Someone sent my attorney this necklace,” I murmur so the waiter refilling our drinks won’t hear. I slide my fingers along the chain. “Whoever it is stole it from my car.”
Mamma blinks. “And…?”
“There was blood on it,” I whisper.
She gawps at me with a not-so-subtle horror. “Don’t tell me you washed it off,” she chides.
“Well, what else was I supposed to do? If my necklace has blood on it, what do you think the police will think? Especially considering,” I pause on the right word, “my history.”
“If you explain it to them, I’m sure they’d understand.” Mamma is of the generation where she still trusts in people to do the right thing.
Both Luca and I turn a baffled expression on her. “You mean like I tried to do last time and ended up serving time in prison for it?”
“Okay, you made your point.” She raises her hands in surrender. “Do you think someone’s trying to set you up again?”
“I don’t know what to think.” Except that yes, a setup is exactly what it feels like because I’ve been through it once before and this has an uncanny resemblance to that.
When you have a record, people don’t need evidence—just a good story.
And someone is clearly writing one for me, leaving props around that could eventually pin Ivory’s disappearance on me.
“Well, connect the dots for me,” Mamma suggests, and for the first time I feel like I have guidance. A support system I’ve been lacking the last four years.
I explain to her how my lawyer hired a private investigator to tail Ramsey Shenk’s girlfriend, and he thinks Ramsey might still be alive and wants to come out of hiding.
When I get to the part that Ramsey can’t resurrect himself while I have video evidence that could put him immediately behind bars for Stew’s death, Mamma earnestly grabs my hand.
“Oh, you think Ramsey is behind Ivory’s disappearance so he can frame you for murder. That way you can’t use your evidence against him!”
Luca and I exchange a look that Mamma catches too easily.
She arcs her finger from me to Luca and back again. “What was that look about?”
“I don’t think Ramsey abducted Ivory himself,” I answer for the both of us, “but his people could have. A man who can get away with murder and frame an innocent woman for embezzlement has to have people.”
“And even if he doesn’t have people,” Luca chimes in, “he has a tunnel-visioned girlfriend who wants her hands on Ramsey’s money.”
“The worst part is,” I squeeze Mamma’s hand and reach for Luca’s, and for the first time in four years I feel like we’re a family again, “if I’m in jail again,” or dead, I think despondently, “my evidence stays suppressed.”
I glance out the window at a playful Bernese mountain dog in my periphery, and something catches my eye. Actually, someone. Fred Cobb is walking along the sidewalk half a block down next to the dog. And the interesting part is he’s not alone.
A dark-haired woman walks beside Fred holding the leash to the Berner. The two are perfectly in step and talking way too close. She touches Fred’s arm, and he leans in as if she said something intimate. It’s highly inappropriate behavior for a man whose wife vanished three days ago.
“Is that Fred?” I mutter.
Luca twists in the booth. “What the—it sure looks like it.”
Mamma gasps like we’re sharing gossip. “Who is the woman he’s with?”
Good question, but I have theories. None of them charitable. Before either of them can lecture me about keeping a safe distance like my attorney advised, I’m already sliding out of the booth.
“Sit your buns back down,” Mamma demands.
“I just want a better look.”
Hope is a drumbeat pushing me forward. Maybe that is his mistress. Maybe I can finally figure out who she is and start piecing all of this together… All I need is a picture of her.
“Gianna Shari Catalano!” Mamma scolds, but I’m halfway to the door with no plans to stop now.
The evening sun is low and blinding as I step outside.
Fred and the dark-haired woman are speed-walking down the sidewalk, now disappearing around a corner.
I push my gait into a sprint while digging in my purse for my phone.
My fingers catch on receipts, gum wrappers, the empty pepper spray I keep forgetting to replace—but not the phone.
Of course the phone has lodged itself in the deepest possible pocket.
“Come on,” I grumble. “Seriously?”
If that woman is his mistress, I can figure out who Z is, though I’m still leaning toward Zala.
After that, I can redirect the police in her direction, proving that Fred lied to them.
Bam—obstruction of justice and hindering the investigation.
While my past makes me an easy scapegoat, the perfect fall girl, if I can slide the puzzle pieces together in the right order, maybe I’ll be able to give Detective Yankovic a new picture that doesn’t make me look like a kidnapper.
My fingertips finally contact the smooth edge of the phone. I yank it up triumphantly and immediately step off the curb. Bad timing.
The sound impacts me first—an engine revving hard.
The roar explodes from my left. It punches the air out of my lungs before I can think.
I look up, but it’s too late. High beams blow out my vision as the car charges toward me.
Time jerks like someone hit pause. There’s a fraction of a second where my brain tries to negotiate—maybe it’ll stop, maybe I can jump back—but before my body can react the bumper slams into my hip.
The impact is brutal and intimate. Metal meets bone.
I feel myself lift, weightless and crooked, the world tilting as pavement rushes up to claim me.
Glimpses of color—gray concrete, blue sky, a flash of pink—invade my vision all at once in a kaleidoscopic blur.
The phone flies from my hand, spinning away.
Then the ground slams into me. All the air leaves my body at once.
Pain fractures through me in sharp, disconnected bursts—hip, ribs, shoulder, skull—my thoughts shattering with it.
The world narrows to noise and light and the taste of coppery blood in my mouth.
Somewhere nearby, tires screech. I lie there, stunned, staring at the empty stretch of road where the car should be, where it was a second ago.
A fleeting thought fades away as I ponder that the car barreling away is one I’ve seen before.
As the edges of the world dissolve into abyss, my brain sparks with the familiar face of the driver through the windshield. The recognition hits me harder than the car did. And then there’s nothing but dark rushing in, fast and merciless.