Chapter 4 - What They Couldn’t Find
“Lock your door,” I told Mrs. Alvarez.
“Call 911.”
Mateo was already giving Nadia my address.
I rode with him because I couldn’t stand still, not because I trusted him.
By the time we reached my building, police lights washed the brick walls blue.
The men were gone.
My door hung crooked.
A uniformed officer stopped me on the landing, took my name, and asked me to wait while they finished checking the apartment.
Mateo stayed one stair below me.
For once, being six-foot-three wasn’t useful.
Inside, somebody had slit my mattress, emptied the kitchen drawers, and torn the backing off my mother’s framed photograph.
My laptop sat untouched on the table.
My grandmother’s gold earrings were still beside the sink.
“They weren’t looking for money,” the officer said.
I knew what they wanted before I knew where it was.
Rosalia’s prayer book.
When she died, my mother had wrapped it in a dish towel and told me never to throw it away.
After Mom’s accident, I’d kept it in a cardboard box.
Last month, a ceiling leak had forced me to move the box downstairs.
Mrs. Alvarez opened her door when the officer knocked.
She wore slippers and held a rolling pin.
“I know,” she said before anyone asked.
“It isn’t a weapon.
It’s what I had.”
The box sat untouched in her hall closet.
I opened it on her kitchen table.
Mrs. Alvarez put a glass of water beside me.
“Your mother used to sit right there,” she said.
“When you were working late.”
“What did she talk about?”
“You.
Mostly you.”
My fingers stopped on the cardboard flap.
“She said you could sleep through a thunderstorm, but you always woke up when somebody needed help.”
I looked away before she could see my face.
For eight years, I had remembered the call I missed.
Somebody else remembered the daughter who usually answered.
Baby pictures.
A cracked Christmas ornament.
The prayer book, its brown cover soft as worn leather.
Between the back cover and a loose lining, I found a photograph and a folded letter.
The photograph showed Rosalia beside a teenage boy whose left arm was bandaged.
Even at eighteen, Salvatore had the same severe eyes.
The letter was in English.
My mother’s handwriting.
Tessa, if anything happens, don’t let them tell you I was careless.
The room seemed to shrink around me.
Mateo stayed near the doorway.
I read the next line aloud.
“The man who met me called himself Carlo Vitiello.”
Mrs. Alvarez sat down hard.
Beneath the letter was a receipt for a storage unit.
The payment date was three days before my mother died.
May you like
On the back, she’d written five words.
He knows about the recording.
