CHAPTER NINETEEN
MINA
Rest lasts fourteen hours.
At nine Thursday morning, I find Jo removing the casket catalogs from the archive shelf.
She freezes with one in each hand.
“Those are heavy,” she says.
“They are also where Bianca hid documents.”
“I heard.”
“From whom?”
“Felix talks when fed.”
“You’re searching.”
“I’m dusting.”
“You have never dusted a catalog in your life.”
She sets them on the table. The one beneath her arm has a cut along the rear board.
My headache sharpens, but not from the concussion.
“How many?” I ask.
Jo sits.
“Three.”
“Three what?”
“Backings. Sal opened three after the fire.”
I close the archive door.
“You watched him?”
“I found him here the next morning. He was burning papers in the cremation barrel.”
“We did not have a cremation barrel.”
“It was a steel disposal drum behind the garage. Mina, please don’t correct the equipment while I confess.”
I lean against the table because the floor feels less committed than usual.
“What did he burn?”
“Transfer records. Bianca’s notes. He said if Victor found them, you would be next.”
The name arrives without ceremony.
“Victor.”
“Sal said Bianca found money hidden in body shipments. Paolo knew part of it. Victor controlled the changes. Sal took three million from the account because it was the only portion he could move fast. He said he needed to buy time.”
“By leaving.”
“He believed Victor would follow the money instead of you.”
“Did he?”
“For a while.”
“You let me believe Gabe killed Bianca.”
Jo flinches. “I did not know what happened in the chapel. Sal would not say. He only said the Corsos could not be trusted.”
“And you trusted him.”
“He was my brother.”
“He was my father.”
The difference fills the room.
Jo presses both hands flat on the table. “I thought he would return in a week. Then a month. By the time I understood he had left us with the debt, telling you would not bring him back or Bianca. It would only give Victor a reason to wonder what we knew.”
“Did Victor come here?”
Jo looks at the closed archive door. “Every Tuesday for six months.”
“Why?”
“He brought account statements. Asked whether Sal called. Paid for repairs he said the Corsos owed after the fire.”
“And searched.”
“Not openly.”
“There is no other reason a man like Victor visits a burned funeral home every Tuesday.”
“He sat in the kitchen. Drank coffee. Asked about your license, your schedule, whether you were dating.”
My skin goes cold. “You answered?”
“I lied.”
“About what?”
“Everything I could. Said you stayed with Anika some nights. Said the international records went to county storage. Said Bianca kept no copies. He stopped coming after you bought the building’s debt from the bank.”
“I did not buy the Corso security interest.”
“No. But the public mortgage changed. He thought the rest had surfaced during underwriting.”
I remember Victor’s surprise when Gabe said the marriage. Not objection. Calculation.
“Why did you keep the catalogs?”
Jo rubs the edge of one blue cover. “Bianca loved expensive things we received for free. She called these furniture magazines for people who could not complain about taste.”
“That is not an answer.”
“Because Sal opened only three. There were four old catalogs. I moved the last one and convinced myself not knowing whether it contained something was safer than knowing.”
“Where?”
“Tax cabinet.”
“You knew.”
“I suspected.”
“Our family has abused that distinction enough.”
Jo’s face tightens. “Yes.”
I want her to defend herself so anger can remain simple. She does not.
“When Bianca died,” Jo says, “I lost a niece. When Sal ran, I lost a brother. I looked at you and decided losing your trust later was cheaper than losing you then.”
“You do not get to price that for me.”
“No.”
“I may never forgive it.”
“I understand.”
We sit across from each other with the blue catalog between us, both waiting for a sentence that repairs five years.
There isn’t one.
There is only the next correct action.
“So you made me safe by keeping me ignorant.”
The sentence belongs to Gabe and me. I hear the pattern.
Jo hears something else. “I was afraid.”
“So was I.”
“You were twenty-four.”
“Exactly.”
I leave before anger becomes cruelty.
Gabe waits in the kitchen with two coffees and a folder. He looks at my face once and puts the folder aside.
“Jo told you.”
“You knew?”
“No. She called Felix ten minutes ago and asked whether hiding evidence for five years carries a statute of limitations.”
“What did he say?”
“He asked what kind.”
“Enthusiastic but responsible.”
Gabe slides one coffee toward me.
I want to keep the information because it is mine, because sharing it gives another person a chance to control what it means.
Instead, I tell him everything.
He does not interrupt. When I finish, he opens the folder.
“Felix found the missing interval in the access archive. Four loads changed with VS-6. Each amendment used Victor’s office credential, but the final clearance used Sal or Paolo.”
“Victor created the false load and made one of them approve something that looked routine.”
“Likely.”
“Jo says Sal knew.”
“After Bianca died.”
“And burned proof.”
“Yes.”
No absolution. No insistence that fear made it acceptable.
“There may be one catalog left,” I say. “The catalog Bianca used in the arrangement office. Blue cover, 2019 edition. We replaced it after the fire, but Jo never throws away a book with prices.”
We find it in a cabinet beneath twelve years of tax organizers.
The backing opens along an old seam.
Inside are four yellow carbon copies folded into quarters.
Real paper, not indentation.
One carries R7-441C and Antonio Greco’s false transfer. One records the three-million-dollar movement. One lists an empty container cleared as human remains. The last is dated the day Paolo died and bears Victor’s office code.
At the bottom, Paolo wrote by hand:
Ask V. why dead men need weapons. If I’m right, tell Gabe I should have waited.
Gabe reads it standing beside me.
His hand grips the table edge.
I cover it with mine.
He does not look at me. His thumb turns beneath my palm until our hands meet.
“He knew,” he says.
“Enough to leave it where I would find it.”
“He apologized.”
“In writing. Coward.”
The word is gentle. Gabe’s mouth moves once.
I photograph every page and hand him the originals to log with Felix.
No hidden copy. No private trap.
Gabe takes them, then stops.
“You’re giving me all of it.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“Because I am tired of becoming the people I’m angry with.”
His fingers close carefully around the folder.
“Elena needs to see Paolo’s note before the captains do,” I say.
Gabe looks at the handwriting through the sleeve. “I can tell her.”
“Do you want to?”
“No.”
The answer comes without shame.
“Then I will go with you.”
We bring Jo too, though she argues that the funeral home cannot close for family feelings during business hours. Evan agrees to manage the phones and looks proud enough that she gives him three additional instructions to correct it.
Elena receives us in her kitchen. Paolo’s coffee cup remains upside down in the drying rack. Six other cups are in the cabinet.
Gabe places the carbon copy on the table.
His mother reads the note once.
If I’m right, tell Gabe I should have waited.
“He always apologized sideways,” she says.
Gabe sits across from her. “He was right.”
“About waiting?”
“About Victor.”
“That is not what I asked.”
He looks at the paper. “He should have told me. I should have listened before Thursday. Both.”
Elena folds her hands. “You are both trying to make the other choice perfect because the real choice ended badly.”
“If I had approved the strike—”
“Another man might be dead instead.”
“Paolo would be alive.”
“You do not know that.”
“It is likely.”
“Likelihood is not memory.”
Gabe becomes silent in the way that used to end conversations. Elena waits. I do too.
Finally, he says, “I was angry when he called. He had ignored me for two days. I saw his name and let it ring once before answering. The call ended before I picked up.”
That is the detail beneath the wound. Not strategy. One ring.
His mother reaches across the table and takes his hand.
“I ignored his call last month because he wanted me to make lasagna for sixteen men,” she says. “He called Rosa and complained. Love is full of unanswered phones, Gabriele. Death does not make each one a murder.”
Gabe looks at their joined hands.
Jo puts a plate of almond cookies between us without explaining where she found them.
Elena reads Bianca’s note next. Her fingers trace the words dead man’s name is Antonio Greco.
“She protected someone she never met,” Elena says.
“She protected the record,” I answer.
“Same thing, sometimes.”
We leave copies with Elena and take the originals back into custody. At the front door, she hugs me before I decide what to do with my arms.
“You are not responsible for fixing my son,” she says against my hair.
“Good. I have a building.”
“He is responsible for himself.”
Gabe hears.
“I know,” he says.
Both women look at him.
“Understood,” he corrects.
In the archive, Jo begins to cry without sound.
I am not ready to forgive her.
I go sit beside her anyway.