Papa had set Nico's plate at Nico's chair, and he was smiling when he told me to sit.
"Next to me, my girl. Where you belong."
The blue plate with the chipped rim. The fork on the left, the napkin folded the way Nico never folded it. I took the seat beside it, and the cousins passed the bread around the empty place like water around a stone. Nobody said a word. Who had told Papa that was a kindness?
Rafe had stopped the car on Alder Street and left the engine running. "I'll be here," he said, and that was the whole terms of his visit. I had slammed the door anyway.
I had not slept. I had lain on top of the covers at Gull Point with my shoes on, and he had held the window until the sky went gray, and I had asked him nothing more. A man who knew about the voicemail could say anything about 11:43. I wanted the police file with my own eyes. I wanted Nico's phone, whose call list would say yes or no in numbers I could read.
Papa took my hand and Aldo's, and the table closed up around the grace. Halfway through it my father's voice broke. He cried the way he did everything, slowly and with his whole weight, tears running into the creases by his mouth, and he did not wipe them. I held on. I believed him completely. That was the trouble with loving him.
Uncle Aldo sat at the far end with a plate of veal he did not touch. He was gray around the mouth. Every few minutes his hand went to his coat and the peppermints rattled and stopped, as if he had caught them at something.
"Your mother's Mass is next week, kid," he said to me, not looking at Nico's chair. "Tuesday the fourth. Nine years. Father wants us there at eight."
"I know what day it is."
"Sure. Sure you do." He asked Papa about a driver for the church, someone new from the restaurants.
"I never send a man I haven't looked in the eye," Papa said, and went on cutting his meat.
After the coffee he took me into the study. "The books slid, Livia. Since the funeral. Nobody else can read your handwriting." He kissed my forehead, and left me with the ledger.
I kept our books from the age of nineteen, so I went down the column the way I always did, with a finger, counting. Rent. Linen. Produce. Then a line in the second week of October, Wednesday the eighth, in Aldo's careful capitals: Harbor Marine Repair, $40,000. Santa Lucia hull work.
The Santa Lucia had been sold two years ago. I had done the bill of sale myself.
"That's Aldo's cousin's yard." Papa stood in the doorway, easy, a cup in his hand. "Ask Aldo."
I found Aldo in the hall, shrugging into his coat. "Paper's in the safe, kid," he said, and asked whether I had lost weight. He was out the front door before I could ask again.
Aldo padding the books, then. Papa had told me yesterday that Aldo sold my photographs to a Kessick crew, and a man who would do that would round up a hull. I wrote a small question mark in pencil and moved on.
Papa went to see Father Doyle out. I heard the front door, the voices on the step.
The bottom drawer of his desk was the only one that had always been locked. I took a hairpin from my hair, the way Nico taught me, and it gave on the second try. The goodbyes on the step were long ones.
A manila file. Detective Frank Doherty's name on the cover, the man Papa paid. I turned pages with two fingers and photographed each one, flat, quick, my phone making its small fake shutter sound. On the second sheet, a 911 call at 12:04 a.m., Saturday the eleventh, from a phone registered to Rafe Corvino. And lower, in a typed box, one line.
No phone recovered from the deceased.
The police had never had it. Papa told me they had. Doherty had lied to my father, I decided, to cover some loss in the evidence room.
The front door closed. Boots in the hall, heavy and unhurried, my father's.
I shut the file, slid the drawer, and was in his chair with the ledger open when he came in. The lock had clicked as the door opened. I thought it had.
"You're pale," he said.
"I was looking for a pencil." My voice came out as flat as the page. "Mine's dead. I'm sorry, Papa, I should have asked."
He took one from the cup and put it in my hand. His palm was warm on my cheek. "You never have to ask in this house."
I smiled up at him. I had lied to my father, with my brother's hairpin still in my fist, and it went down smooth as milk. That was the cost, and I would be paying it for some time.
On the way out I passed the dining room. Papa's hand had been on the back of Nico's chair when I came in, and now it was there again. "He'd have hated this fuss," he said, to no one, and his shoulders shook. I put my arm around him. I believed him, and I held him, and I kept the phone against my hip.
Rafe was where he said he would be. The engine hummed. He did not ask me anything, and I did not offer.
Cedar and rain, the windows fogged with my breath. I opened the photographs and went through them with my thumb. Page, page, page. The 911 sheet. The typed box.
On the last frame, which I had taken without reading, a small square of yellow paper clipped behind the file, and a note in Doherty's handwriting.
"Watchman W. Hensley: second man on Pier 9 before the shot. Changed his story after a visit from Enzo Corvino, 10/13."