Chapter 34
The phone rang.
Dante looked at the clock on the desk. One hour, almost to the minute.
He picked it up.
“Mrs. Conte.”
A pause on the line. Then her voice, older than it had sounded in the foyer, thinner.
“Mr. Moretti.”
“Where are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.” A breath. “I need you to know something. I need you to know it before he does.”
“I’m listening.”
“I sealed that room,” she said. “The night your mother died. He told me to. He told me she’d had an accident and that the room needed to be closed and that no one could ever go in again, and I did it because I was afraid, and because I have been afraid of that man since the day I met him.” Her voice cracked. “I packed the girl’s suitcase. I took the folder. I gave him everything he asked for, for thirty years, and he still put a man in a car outside my sister’s house this morning.”
Dante closed his eyes.
“Where is he?”
“I don’t know. I never know. That’s the whole point of him.” A pause. “But I know where he’ll be.”
“Where?”
“Your mother’s room,” Mrs. Conte said. “He goes there. He’s been going there for eleven years. Not the small room — the grave. Tomorrow is the anniversary. He goes every year, at dawn, before anyone’s awake, and he stands at the grave and he talks to her.”
Dante opened his eyes.
“What does he say?”
“I don’t know,” Mrs. Conte said. “I’ve never been close enough to hear.”
She hung up.
Dante set the phone down and looked at Allesia.
“Tomorrow,” he said.
CHAPTER 13 — THE RECKONING BEGINS
Dawn came gray and wet, and the cemetery on the north side was empty.
It was an old place, full of marble angels and iron fences and family plots with names carved so deep they would last another century. Bianca Moretti’s grave was under a stand of elms near the west wall, a low slab of gray granite with her name and two dates and nothing else, because Dante’s father had not been a man for poetry.
Dante had been here twice in eleven years. Both times alone. Both times at night.
Today he came before the sun.
He came with Matteo and four men, and he came with Allesia, who had refused to stay behind and had refused to argue about it, and who now stood twenty yards away behind a mausoleum with the satchel against her chest and her breath fogging in the cold.