Chapter 7 - The Bishop’s Dawn
The frost was three inches thick on the inside of the carriage house windows by six in the morning.
The Long Island Sound had turned the color of lead, flat and greasy between the frozen salt marshes of the spit. The wind had dropped completely, leaving that vast, terrifying silence that only comes to the North Shore after a December blizzard when the power lines are down and the road plows haven't yet left the depot in Riverhead.
I walked down the stable path alone.
I was wearing my heavy beaver-tail coat and my work boots, the ones I had bought twenty years ago when I still worked the cement mixers on the Gowanus Canal. In my right hand, I carried a thermos of black coffee; in my left, the heavy iron key to the stable padlock.
The lock was frozen. I had to strike it three times with the flat of a ball-peen hammer to crack the rime off the brass before the key would enter the barrel.
The heavy door creaked open six inches, then stuck on a drift of dry snow that had blown under the sill during the night.
I shoved it with my shoulder.
The interior of the stable was dead. The orange light of the salamander had vanished; the heater stood cold and black in the center of the bay, its tank dry, smelling of stale fuel and soot. The card table was still overturned, the broken shards of the Carlo Rossi jug frozen into a dark, purple puddle that looked like clotted liver on the gravel.
Paulie Castiglione’s body was stiff, his hands curled like dried claws where they had frozen into the rime.
The Bishop hadn't moved from the stool.
He was still leaning back against the whitewashed wall, his chin resting on his chest, his swollen feet tucked into the fleece slippers that were now ringed with white salt from the cold. His lips were the color of a wet slate shingle, and his eyes were open, staring at the floorboards between his knees with a fixed, milky dullness that had nothing to do with sleep.
He hadn't frozen to death.
His right hand was tucked into the pocket of Isabelle’s Shetland cardigan. When I pulled it out, his fingers were clamped around a small, brown glass vial of digitalis tablets—the ones he had taken for his valve since sixty-nine.
The vial was empty.
The old man hadn't waited for the cold to finish what his nephew had started. He had known the arithmetic of the family better than that. He had known that a Romano don doesn't let an uncle die of pneumonia when there are people in Brooklyn who might think he had grown soft enough to forgive a betrayal.
I set the thermos down on the hood of the green Buick.
I reached out and closed his eyes. His skin felt like cold suet, hard and waxy under my thumb.
"Rest in peace, Uncle," I said.
The silence of the carriage house didn't change.
I walked to the trunk of the Buick, closed the lid, and leaned against the cold chrome of the bumper. From here, through the open stable door, I could see the rear terrace of the main house.
Smoke was coming from three chimneys now. Thin, blue ribbons of oak smoke that rose straight into the freezing, clear morning air before disappearing into the white sky.
In the second-floor window—the one that belonged to the nursery—three small figures appeared behind the glass.
They were wearing their red winter coats, the ones Isabelle had bought at Best & Co. before the world stopped. Olivia was in the middle, her hands flat against the pane. Nora was on the sill, held by Grace Bennett, whose left arm was wrapped in a thick, white sling of surgical cotton that stood out like a bandage against her dark wool coat.
Olivia didn't wave.
She just stood there, her small face pale against the dark wood of the sash, watching her father come back across the snow.
Then she took her hand from the glass and made a tiny, circular motion with her finger—the sign Isabelle used to make from the dock when the boat was coming into the slip and the lines were ready to be caught.
I didn't pick up the hammer.
I left the iron key in the lock of the stable door.
May you like
I walked back up the drive, my boots breaking through the crust of the snow with a sound like dry paper tearing, each step taking me three feet further from the cold smell of the kerosene and three feet closer to the house where three girls were waiting to tell me what they wanted for breakfast.
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