Chapter 5 - The Glass in the Fireplace
Santino Ferrara was not reading.
He was sitting in the corner by the cold grate, where someone had swept the gray ash into a neat pile against the fireback. He had a pair of iron calipers in his hand, measuring something on a yellowed coastal survey map that lay spread across his knees.
"He was in your office," Santino said without looking up from the map.
Emily stopped three feet from the chair. "He left a folder."
"I know what he left. The Tiverton wharf."
"He said there was three hundred dollars in his car," she said.
Santino looked up then. His eyes were small in the gray light from the gables. "Did you take it?"
"I don't know how to drive an Alfa Romeo," she said. "The pedals are too close together."
A faint twitch appeared at the corner of Santino’s mouth—not a smile, but the ghost of one that had died ten years ago and hadn't been buried properly. He laid the calipers down on the margin of the map, right over the sounding marks for the Bristol channel.
"Julian’s father was my mother’s youngest brother," he said, his voice flat. "He died in a hotel room in Miami in sixty-four with four grams of heroin in his shaving kit and eleven dollars in his wallet. We took Julian in when he was nine. We sent him to the school with the little blue caps. We bought him seven suits before he had hair on his chin."
He pointed to the leather folder in Emily’s hands.
"Burn it," he said.
Emily hesitated. "It’s vellum. It smells like dead sheep when it goes up."
"Then throw it in the scuttle behind the desk," he said. "Silvio will take it down to the incinerator with the vegetable peelings."
She didn't move toward the scuttle. She stood holding the folder against her stomach, her thumbs resting on the top edge of the leather.
"There was a number on the back," she said.
Santino’s hazel eyes sharpened. "What number?"
"The truck from this morning. The license plate."
The silence in the library became heavy again, like the water at the bottom of the pool before the wool let go. The baseboard heater clicked—once, twice, three times—before the element hummed into life.
"Julian doesn't know the truck number," Santino said.
"He does," she said. "He wrote it in pencil and tried to rub it out with a rubber gum. You can see the indentation if you hold it against the lamp."
Santino reached out his hand. He didn't take the folder; he took Emily’s wrist.
His grip was not painful, but it was like being caught in an iron hinge. His fingers were cold, smelling of the tobacco he didn't smoke in front of the doctor. He pulled her two inches closer, until she could see the tiny yellow flecks in his hazel irises and the broken capillaries on his cheekbones where the pressure had burst them under ten feet of water.
"Why are you here, Emily?" he asked. His voice was very soft now, almost a whisper against the hum of the heater. "You don't care about the wharf. You don't care about Julian’s three hundred dollars. You didn't come from Cranston to type my letters."
Emily’s throat closed.
She could smell the river on him—not the salt water of Newport, but the black, muddy water of the Seekonk River where the scrap yards sat under the interstate bridge.
"My brother had three ribs broken," she said. Her voice didn't shake. It went thin, like paper that had been left in the sun until it turned yellow. "The steering column went into his lung. He was thirty-one."
Santino didn't drop her wrist.
His thumb moved once, slowly, over the blue vein that pulsed against her skin.
"Leo," he said.
The word was so small Emily thought she had imagined it.
"Leo Taylor," Santino said again. "He drove the number four gravel truck for the union local. He had a red tattoo of a hawk on his left forearm that he got in Portsmouth when he was sixteen."
Emily’s breath stopped in her chest.
"You knew him," she whispered.
"I didn't know him," Santino said, releasing her wrist so suddenly her hand dropped against her thigh. "I knew his truck. It had forty tons of wet stone on the bed when the steering knuckle broke on the bypass. He didn't hit my car because he was drunk, Emily. He hit my car because someone took the cotter pin out of the tie rod while the truck was parked behind the diner in North Attleboro."
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He leaned back into the heavy oak chair, his hands settling back onto the leather push rims.
"Your brother didn't die for me," Santino Ferrara said, looking toward the window where the first gulls were wheeling through the rain. "He died because he was twenty minutes ahead of the car that was supposed to take the bridge first."
