Chapter 6 - The Blood on the Damask
The linen room on the second floor smelled of lavender, dried eucalyptus, and the hot, metallic tang of arterial blood.
Mrs. Donnelly had dragged two mahogany dining chairs into the center of the space and laid an ironing board across them to serve as a field table. Grace lay on the white linen sheets that covered the board, her head propped on a bundle of bath towels, her face the color of skimmed milk. Her wool sweater had been cut away with kitchen shears, leaving her shoulder bare—pale, muscular, and torn open where the scar-faced man’s lead had plowed through the deltoid and glanced off the collarbone.
Nora was sitting on the floor between Grace’s boots, her arms wrapped around one of the housekeeper’s ankles, her thumb jammed firmly into her mouth. She wasn't crying. Her eyes were round, dark, and fixed on the red swabs Mrs. Donnelly was dropping into a copper basin.
Olivia and Sophie stood by the linen shelves, holding hands. They looked like two miniature versions of Isabelle in their gray flannel nightgowns, their hair braided back by Grace’s hand before the world had come apart at five o'clock.
"The doctor from Bay Shore is at the gate," Mrs. Donnelly said without looking up from the wound. She had a curved needle threaded with gut in her liver-spotted fingers, the same needle she used to mend the needlepoint cushions in the library. "Sal let him through. He's got his bag."
"Does he know what it is?" I asked from the door.
"He knows it's fifty dollars in cash and he doesn't write anything in the blue book," the old woman snapped. "He's been patching your cousins since the strike at the rail yards in fifty-nine. He won't say anything to the county."
I walked into the room.
The canvas ledger was under my arm, its gray cover stained with a purple crescent of Carlo Rossi. I dropped it onto the low stool near the door.
Grace turned her head toward me. Her slate eyes were clouded with the pain, her pupils dilated until the iris was just a thin, gray ring, but she saw the book.
"Paulie?" she whispered. Her voice was barely more than a dry click in her throat.
"Gone," I said.
"And Thomas?"
"He's in the carriage house. He's thinking about his sister."
Grace’s head fell back against the towels with a long, soft breath that sounded like relief. Her right hand, the one that hadn't been hit, reached down toward the floor until her fingers found Nora’s curls, stroking the child’s hair with the same steady, rhythmic motion she had used while singing about the sunshine three hours ago.
"The doctor’s coming, Grace," I said. I knelt beside the ironing board, my knees creaking. "You're going to be fine."
"I don't care about the doctor, Dominic," she whispered, her lips pale, almost blue around the corners. "The ledger... is the precinct on the list?"
"Third page," I said. "The captain and two detectives from the second squad. Frank's name is on the receipt for the sixty thousand, but it's not his handwriting. It's Paulie’s. Anyone who knows Frank's hand can see it was forged in ten seconds."
A single tear cut through the flour dust and blood on Grace’s cheek. It ran down into the corner of her mouth, and she swallowed it down with a dry, clicking sound.
"He wasn't dirty," she said.
"No," I said. "He wasn't dirty."
Olivia took two steps forward from the shelves. She didn't look at the blood on the sheets or the copper basin that was turning pink. She looked at me.
"Daddy?"
The word hit me like a lead weight dropped from the roof.
Fourteen months.
Fourteen months of silence, of empty breakfast tables, of specialists who talked about "affective flattening" and "post-traumatic regression." Fourteen months of coming home to a house that sounded like a tomb where four people were waiting to be buried.
"Yes, baby?" I asked, my voice breaking completely, the gravel turning to mush in my throat.
"Is the man with the scar gone?"
"He's gone, Livvy," I said. "He won't ever come back to the gate."
"And Uncle Thomas?" Sophie asked from behind her sister. She was holding a small, stuffed horse with one ear missing—the one Isabelle had bought her at the county fair three weeks before she died. "Is he going to bring us the whistles?"
"No," I said, reaching out with both hands.
This time, they didn't pull away.
Olivia came first, her small, hard head burying itself into the hollow of my throat, her arms going around my neck with a strength that felt impossible for a seven-year-old child. Sophie followed, climbing onto my knee, her fingers digging into the wool of my vest, her wet face pressing into my cheek until I could smell the lavender soap and the sweet, milky breath of her mouth.
Nora let go of Grace’s ankle and crawled onto my other thigh, her small hands catching the lapels of my coat, pulling herself up until she was level with my chin.
"You are my sunshine," Nora whispered into my ear.
Her voice was tiny, cracked, but she hit the notes. She hit every single one of them.
May you like
I didn't speak. I buried my face in Olivia’s hair, my shoulders shaking with the heavy, dry sobs that a man doesn't know how to let out until forty years of pride have been kicked out from under him. I held them until the doctor’s boots sounded on the stairs, until Mrs. Donnelly took the needle and dropped it into the alcohol, until the rain outside turned to snow and the sleet stopped rattling against the leaded windows of the room where my wife had kept the clean sheets.
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