Chapter 6 - The Salt in the Well
The kitchen at three in the morning was larger than it seemed by day.
The copper pans hanging from the iron rack above the island caught the green light from the emergency exit sign over the delivery door, turning them into rows of dull, hanging shields. Emily sat on a wooden stool by the cold vegetable sink, an unpeeled apple in her hand and an old paring knife she had found in the bread drawer resting on her knee.
She hadn't gone up to her room on the third floor.
If she went up there, the ceiling looked too close, like the underside of the ice on the pond behind her mother’s house in Pawtucket.
A floorboard creaked in the service hall.
It was not Silvio. Silvio walked on his heels, heavy and slow, like a man carrying an iron bucket. This sound was light, with a faint, sliding rhythm that paused at every doorway.
The swinging door from the pantry opened three inches.
A man’s hand appeared—not Julian’s hand, but a hand with three blue ink dots tattooed between the thumb and forefinger: the mark of the men who worked the coal barges in Fall River.
Emily didn't move. She kept her thumb against the blunt spine of the paring knife.
The door swung fully open.
It was the driver from the dock. The short man with the oil-drum shoulders. His red watch cap was gone, revealing a scalp shaved down to gray bristles, with a white, four-inch surgical scar running from behind his left ear into his collar. He didn't have the toothpick now. His lower lip was split where Coyle’s boot had taken him, swollen to the thickness of a thumb.
He didn't look surprised to see her.
"The girl," he said. His voice was a rasp, like a shovel hitting cinders. "The one from the pool."
"The pantry is locked," Emily said. Her voice was flat, level, the voice she had used when the drunken men in Cranston tried to climb the chain-link fence after the nine o'clock whistle. "Mr. Silvio has the key in his waistcoat."
The man took two steps onto the black-and-white linoleum. He was wearing an old army field jacket that smelled of sour beer and wet wool. His right hand stayed inside his pocket, heavy, dragging the cloth down until the hem touched his knee.
"Silvio’s asleep," the man said. "Silvio drinks that sweet wine from Portugal with his supper. A man his age, you could drop an anvil down the stairs and he’d think it was the wind off the rocks."
He stopped five feet from the vegetable sink.
"Julian said you were smart," the man continued. "He said you were the kind of girl who knows when to look at the floor."
"Julian is upstairs," Emily said. "In the south bedroom. He has three locks on his door that he bought from the locksmith in Providence."
The man laughed once—a dry, clicking sound in his throat. "Julian’s twenty miles down the road in an Alfa Romeo with two bags from his mother’s dressing table. Julian’s done, little girl. Julian’s father had a debt, and Julian thought he could pay it off with the Sakonnet wharf. But the people in Boston don't want the wharf. They want the books."
He took his hand out of his field jacket.
It did not hold a gun. It held a small, square bottle of brown glass with a rubber dropper, the kind pharmacies used for paregoric or eye drops.
"The old man drinks two cups of water before he takes his heart pills," the man said, setting the bottle on the stainless-steel drainboard between them. "Every morning at five. You put three drops in the silver pitcher on the dumbwaiter. That’s all."
"And if I don't?"
"Then we find your mother," the man said simply. "She lives on the second floor above the bakery on Hope Street. She has three geraniums in the window and a blue kettle with a chipped spout. She walks to the church at seven every morning with her rosary in an old tobacco pouch."
Emily looked at the brown bottle.
The label had been soaked off, but there was a faint ring of white crust around the rubber neck where the liquid had dried into small, salty crystals.
"It tastes like iron," she said.
The man’s small, piggish eyes narrowed. "What?"
"The steering knuckle," Emily whispered, her fingers closing around the apple until her knuckles turned the color of lard. "On my brother’s truck. You were the one who took the pin out behind the diner."
The man didn't move for two seconds.
Then he reached for the bottle, his mouth opening to say something that would probably have been an excuse or an order, but Emily didn't wait to hear the syllable.
She didn't use the knife on him.
She took the small paring knife, drove the point two inches into the wooden rim of the vegetable sink, and with her left hand, swung the heavy, unpeeled winter apple directly into the bridge of his broken nose.
The sound was wet, like a wet sponge hitting a cellar wall.
The man roared—a muffled, gargling sound—and clutched his face with both palms.
The door behind him did not swing open; it slammed back against the baseboard with a violence that shook the copper pans from their hooks.
Santino Ferrara was in the doorway.
He was not in the chair.
He was on his feet, his broad shoulders wedged into the frame of the pantry door, his weight supported by two heavy ash-wood crutches with leather arm-cradles that had been buckled around his biceps. His navy sweater was gone; he wore only a white cotton undershirt that showed the long, purple scars running from his armpits down across his ribs where the surgeons had wired his thorax together after the bypass crash.
In his right hand, resting across the crossbar of the crutch, was an old twelve-gauge Ithaca shotgun with the stock sawed down to the grip.
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"Get down on the floor, Marty," Santino said.
The voice was not loud. It didn't have to be. It had the weight of fifty tons of wet stone falling through the floorboards.
