For Two Hours, the Mafia Boss Didn’t Move—Because a Terrified Girl Was Hiding Beneath His Table

The rain stopped at two in the afternoon, leaving the city of Providence washed in a hard, maritime clarity.

The car that brought Megan down from Newport was not a luxury sedan; it was an olive-drab International Harvester Scout with a manual transmission and four-wheel drive that smelled of grease and wet canvas. The driver was a silent man named Keller who wore a wool watch cap pulled down to his eyebrows and drove with two fingers on the wheel, ignoring the traffic on Route 114 with the cold indifference of an armored car pilot.

When the Scout idled outside the brick building on Wickenden Street, Megan sat with her hands tucked into the pockets of the oversized charcoal sweater.

The front window of the shop was dark. The gold-leaf lettering—Kostas Floral & Botanical—was peeling at the corners, the dry skin of the letters curling away from the glass like dead skin. Inside, through the dusty pane, she could see the empty wire stands, the dry zinc buckets, and the dead leaves of an umbrella plant that had frozen during the February cold snap.

Keller reached over and dropped a heavy brass ring holding four keys into her lap.

"The square one is the street door," he said, speaking for the first time since they had crossed the Mount Hope Bridge. "The round one is the deadbolt upstairs. Mr. Vance said to tell you the water heater was replaced on Monday. If you smell gas, call the number on the card."

Megan looked down at the keys. They were cold, heavy, and real. "Is he coming here?"

"Mr. Vance has four container ships arriving from Halifax," Keller said, shifting the Scout into reverse. "He doesn't spend his afternoons on Wickenden Street. Don't lose the square key; it’s an old tumbler. Hard to cut."

The Scout pulled away from the curb with a throaty roar of its straight-six engine, leaving Megan standing on the wet brick sidewalk with her canvas duffel bag between her boots.

The street smelled of the bay—low tide, mud, and diesel from the tugs idling down at the Hurricane Barrier. A few college students from Brown, wrapped in heavy scarves, walked past without looking at her. She was just another woman in an oversized sweater standing outside a failed shop.

She inserted the square key into the brass cylinder. It turned with a dry, mechanical scrape that vibrated through her wrist.

The interior of the shop was ice-cold, but the air was clean—the dead vegetation had been cleared out, leaving only the ghost of damp peat and dried moss. A staircase of yellow pine led from the rear workroom toward the upper levels.

Megan climbed the steps, her boots loud on the bare treads.

The second floor took her breath away.

The space was forty feet deep, running the entire length of the building from the street to the rear alley. The northern wall was almost entirely glass: five massive sash windows, four panes wide, that looked out over the slate roofs of the East Side toward the copper dome of the state house. The floors were four-inch yellow pine, scrubbed gray by decades of lye and water, completely clear of furniture except for two items.

In the center of the room sat her drafting table.

The birch top was clean, its warm amber grain glowing in the silver northern light. The cast-iron wheel that controlled the tilt of the surface had been freshly greased; a thin film of clean oil glistened on the cogs.

Beside the table stood a heavy wooden crate, its lid pried off and resting against the slats.

Megan walked toward it slowly, her boots dragging on the pine. She looked inside.

Resting in beds of excelsior and gray wool blankets were her tools: the Japanese flush-cut saws with their bamboo-wrapped handles; the set of six two-inch gouges she had ground by hand in the RISD basement; her brass calipers; and three jars of rabbit-skin glue crystals that had been sealed with paraffin. On top of the tools lay a small manila envelope.

She opened it. Inside was a cashier's check for one thousand two hundred dollars drawn on the Narragansett Trust, made out to Megan Walsh, with a typed notation on the memo line: Initial material requisition – Account #410.

She sat down on the iron stool attached to the drafting table. The metal was cold through her trousers, but the wood beneath her palms was smooth, familiar, and unbroken.

A sudden, violent sound from the street made her jump.

A car had backfired near the corner of Benefit Street. Megan’s hands flew to the edge of the birch top, her shoulders hunching, her heart slamming against her ribs with the old, familiar terror. She waited for the sound of boots on the stairs, for the functional laugh, for Rick’s voice telling her that she had made an idiot of herself again.

Ten seconds passed. The radiator beneath the central window clicked—a soft, metallic ting as steam began to rise through the cast-iron coils.

She stood up, walked to the heavy oak door that led to the landing, and dropped the brass deadbolt into its strike.

Click.

The lock was not as massive as the one in Newport, but the cylinder was new, the brass screws three inches long, anchored directly into the structural stud.

She returned to the crate, lifted out her four-inch block plane, and ran her thumb across the carbon-steel iron. It was sharp enough to shave hair.