Chapter 18
Marco
Cold. The fire out. My phone on my chest, screen dark.
I lay still for a second with the blanket tangled around my legs and the smell of cold ash in the room and I did the math in my head before I let myself look at the screen.
Ten at O’Hare last night. Nine hours in the air.
Morning landing in Palermo, seven-ish her time, which was midnight mine.
She would have been on the ground six hours. Six and change.
I turned the phone over.
No missed calls. No texts. The last thing on the screen was my own message from last night, the one I had sent when the flight icon on the tracker had shown her wheels-up over the Atlantic. Safe flight, baby girl. I love you. Call when you land.
Delivered. Not read.
I sat up on the couch.
I had slept in my clothes. My shirt was wrinkled where I had lain on it and my belt buckle had pressed a red shape into the skin above my hip. The grey blanket she had been wrapped in yesterday was still across the arm of the couch. The cushion where she had sat was still shaped like her.
I told myself she was in the car from the airport.
I told myself Palermo traffic. I told myself her father had pulled her straight into the study without giving her time to stop in her room for the charger.
I told myself the phone had died on the flight and she was plugged in somewhere and the bar was climbing back up from zero and any minute the screen would light with her name.
I opened the airline app.
The flight had landed at six-forty-three Palermo time.
On time. Gate B7. Baggage carousel three.
All the small green confirmations that told me the plane had arrived, the doors had opened, the passengers had walked off into the morning.
One of those passengers had been Serafina Scordato.
The app did not know where she had gone after that. Neither did I.
I typed.
Landed?
I hit send.
Delivered.
I watched the word delivered sit under the message in small grey letters and I watched it sit there for a full minute, and then I put the phone face-down on the table because watching the word was not going to change the word.
I stood up.
The floor was cold through my socks. I walked to the kitchen in the grey light and I filled the kettle and I put it on the range and I lit the burner with a match from the book on the table because the ignition on the range had stopped working two winters ago and I had never fixed it because I liked the match.
The match scraped. The burner caught. The blue ring of flame came up under the copper bottom of the kettle and I stood at the counter with my hands flat on the oiled wood and I looked out the window at the slope.
The vines were grey in the grey light.
The row where I had knelt with her yesterday was the fourth from the top. I could count it from here. I had counted it twice last night after she had gone to sleep on the couch with her head on my thigh, before the phone call, before the thing that had put us on the road to O’Hare.
The kettle whistled.
I turned the burner off. I did not make coffee. I stood with my hand on the handle and checked the phone again.
Delivered. Not read.
I sent a second one.
Sera. Just let me know you landed.
Delivered.
I sat down at the oak table. The notebook was still in the middle of it, the rubber band where I had put it back yesterday.
The oil lamp. The matches. I laid my palm flat on the table the way she had laid her palm on the cover of the notebook, and I left it there, and the wood was cold under my hand and it did not warm.
Ninety minutes.
I gave it ninety minutes. I told myself ninety minutes was a reasonable window.
I told myself she was maybe just now at the house, maybe just now being led into the study, maybe just now sitting across from her father in the cracked leather chair, maybe just now reaching for her phone to step out and call me and being told by Arturo Scordato in his quiet voice that the call could wait ten minutes.
Ten minutes became fifteen. Fifteen became an hour. An hour became ninety.
The phone did not ring.
I got up.
I went through the house doing the small closing sequence I had done a hundred times alone. I banked the ash in the hearth. I set the screen in front of it. I emptied the kettle.
I pulled on my boots. I shouldered my coat. I took the brass key out of my pocket and I stepped out onto the porch and I turned and I locked the door. I stood for one second with my hand on the key and I looked at the door I had painted green a long time ago.
The Mercedes was cold. I slid in and I set the phone on the passenger seat where she had sat yesterday and I started the engine, and I backed out of the turn-around, and I drove.
Eleven in the morning, the back room at Caruso’s.
Dante at the head of the small round table, sleeves rolled, a black coffee in front of him untouched.
Santo across from him, arms across his chest, the chair tilted back on two legs the way dad had hated.
Donatella at three o’clock in a black sweater and jeans, no makeup, hair pulled back fast. She had come from a workout. She had come anyway.
I sat down.
“She didn’t call.”
That came out fine. The next one was where it broke.
“I drove her—I drove her to O’Hare last night.
Ten p.m. flight. She landed at six-forty-three Palermo time.
I sent two texts. Delivered, not read. It’s been—it’s been six hours past the call window.
She told me she would call when she landed.
She said it. She said it twice. I had her say it. I made her say it because I—“
My voice did the thing.
I stopped. I put my palms flat on the table. I waited a beat. I started again.
“She is not calling. She promised. So something’s wrong.”
Dante did not move.
“Slow down,” he said. “Sit back. Drink water.”
“I don’t want water.”
“Marco. Sit back. Drink the water.”
“I don’t any fucking w—”
Deep breath.
I sat back.
Donatella slid the glass across the table. I drank.
“Maybe her father took the phone for the morning,” Dante said. “Maybe he wanted her undivided in the room. Old man, old habits—“
“Her father’s seventy-one. He’s not a child. He doesn’t grab phones.”
“He might today.”
“Even if he did. She’d find a landline. She’d borrow Maria’s phone in the kitchen. She’d—Dante, she would call. Six hours late is not a missed window. Six hours late is a signal.”
Santo was watching me with the flat dark eyes. Donatella looked at him once and I saw her register what I was registering, which was that Santo had come into this room expecting to play the brother who said calm down and was now revising the expectation.
“The flight tracker showed her wheels-up at ten-eleven. Landed at six-forty-three local. The app shows the landing. I have not had a confirmation from her since. Her phone is delivering messages but not reading them.”
“Could be on a charger somewhere,” Dante said. “Could be in a bag in a car—“
“It could be,” I said. “It could be. I have been telling myself it could be for six hours. I drove an hour and a half listening to myself tell me it could be. I’m telling you it isn’t.”
I heard my own voice climbing. I heard it. I could not bring it down.
“She got off that plane and somebody put her somewhere I can’t reach her. That’s what happened. Someone has my—“
I stopped.
Santo’s chair came forward.
The two front legs landed on the floor with the small clean sound they made and he leaned his forearms on the edge of the table and he looked at me, and his face had done the thing his face did when he had finished his own private argument and had arrived at the position he was going to hold.
“Marco,” he said. “I think you’re right.”
The room shifted.
It was a small shift. Donatella’s eyes went to him fast. Dante’s hand stilled on his coffee cup.
“She’s not calling because she can’t.”
He said it plainly.
I could not look at him for a second. It was, perversely, the worst thing he could have given me.
“Okay,” Dante said. “Who do we have in Palermo, Marco.”
“L.C.,” I said. “My contact. The one who fed us the Scordato file last spring. The one who confirmed Gianni was sniffing at Valenti two months ago. He’s not on a payroll. He’s—he owes me. From a thing in 2019.”
“Reliable?”
“He’s been right every time. He’s also an old man and he’s not a soldier. He’s a clerk in a notary’s office in the Vucciria. He hears things because notaries hear everything.”
“Call him.”
I took out my phone.
My hand was not steady. Dona got up out of her chair and came around the table. She sat down in the chair beside mine and put her hand flat on the back of my neck.
The weight of it.
I closed my eyes for one breath, then dialed.
The line rang four times. He picked up on the fifth.
“Pronto.”
“It’s me.”
A pause. He had clocked that I was calling outside the window we used and that there was no preamble. I heard him move—a chair, the small sound of a door closing.
“Tell me.”
“Serafina Scordato landed in Palermo at six-forty-three this morning. She has not called me. I need eyes on the house. I need to know if she’s in it. I need to know if she’s in it and able to leave it. I need to know yesterday.”
There was a long second.
“Marco,” he said. His voice was lower. “It has been more difficult these past weeks. To gather. People are not talking the way they were. The houses are closed. Gianni is—people are watching who comes to the back door. I will look. I will look today. But I have to be careful. I cannot promise the speed I could promise in the spring.”
I did not answer.
“I will call you tonight,” he said. “Late. After the house sleeps. That is the best I can do.”
“Tonight.”
“Tonight.”
He hung up.
I set the phone face-down on the table.
Donatella’s hand was still on the back of my neck. She left it there.
Nero was empty at six.