Chapter 5 - The Brother's Grave
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Dominic did not sleep after that phone call.
Neither did I.
By midnight he had three lawyers and a private investigator on the phone.
By dawn he had a court order to review Adrian's death records.
Frank drove us to the cemetery in silence.
Salvatore insisted on coming.
Dominic tried to argue and lost to a seventy-eight-year-old man holding a chipped knight.
Some battles even Dominic Romano knows not to fight.
The Romano plot sat on a hill above bare trees.
Adrian's stone was black granite with gold letters.
Beloved son and brother.
Taken too soon.
I held Salvatore's wheelchair on the gravel path.
He stared at the stone like it had personally lied to him.
Grave, he said for the third day in a row.
Empty, he added, and we finally understood.
Dominic knelt in the wet grass beside the chair.
Father, are you certain, he asked.
Salvatore nodded without hesitation.
You knew, Dominic said.
Salvatore shook his head.
Now know, he forced out.
Heart know.
That distinction broke Dominic's composure for half a second.
He had grieved a brother for twelve years beside a father who sensed the lie and could not speak it well enough after his stroke.
The investigator, a retired detective named Nora Bennett, met us by the gate.
She was fifty with short gray hair and no patience for powerful men.
Dominic had hired her because she consulted for the NYPD and federal task forces.
She carried Adrian's file in a waterproof case.
I reviewed the original identification, she said.
The body recovered from the water was burned beyond visual recognition.
Identification relied on dental records and personal effects.
There is a gap in the chain, she said.
The dental X-rays sent to the examiner came from a private office that closed a month later.
No original films survive.
No DNA sample was retained by the county.
In other words, Dominic said, anyone with money could have named that body Adrian.
Anyone with money and access, Nora corrected.
And a reason to make this family stop looking.
Salvatore pointed at the gravestone.
Dominic stood slowly.
Open the records for the burial itself, he ordered.
Nora already had those pages ready.
The casket was closed at the family's request.
The funeral home received the body directly from the county.
Weight was recorded at intake.
She handed Dominic the sheet.
He read it twice.
One hundred and ninety pounds, he said.
Adrian weighed one hundred and sixty-five at his last physical.
He was a boxer in college.
He never carried that weight.
Twenty-five pounds of difference hidden inside a sealed casket no mother was allowed to open.
Salvatore made a low sound in his throat.
Dominic folded the paper with unnatural care.
Someone buried a stranger with my brother's name, he said.
While Adrian was supposedly in Sicily forgetting us.
Or while someone else planned to become Adrian, Nora said.
She looked toward the estate cars as if she already distrusted everyone in them.
Back at the house the man in the library was waiting with news of his own.
He had passed the first blood comparison.
Not a full DNA match yet, Dr. Harris explained.
Blood type matched Adrian's exactly.
The fingerprint card, however, was inconclusive because of scarring on two fingers.
Scarring consistent with burns from an explosion, the stranger said quickly.
Too quickly.
He had an answer for every wound the story required.
Then he opened his hand on the library table.
Adrian's ring lay in his palm.
Heavy gold.
Romano crest.
A scratch across the lion's eye that Dominic recognized instantly.
Dominic picked it up like it might burn him.
Where did you get this, he asked.
I kept it even when I did not know my name, the man said.
The nuns returned it when I left Sicily.
A symbol can be stolen more easily than a life, Nora said from the doorway.
The man smiled at her without warmth.
And a brother can be doubted more easily than a stranger, he answered.
For the first time doubt entered Dominic's eyes in the wrong direction.
Salvatore saw it and so did I.
The ring was doing exactly what it was designed to do.
It was making Dominic want the lie to be true.
That afternoon Dominic allowed one private test no lawyer had suggested.
He took the stranger into Salvatore's room alone except for me.
No guards inside.
No Celeste.
No Nora.
Just a father and two men claiming the same blood.
Salvatore pointed at a photograph on his dresser.
It showed two boys and their father at the lake house.
The younger boy held a fish.
The older boy held a broken oar.
Dominic watched the stranger study it.
Tell Father what happened five minutes after that photograph, Dominic said.
The man laughed easily.
I pushed you in the water, he said.
You cried and Father made me apologize.
Salvatore did not move.
What else, Dominic pressed.
You lost a shoe, the man added.
It was a good guess.
Most lake stories include lost shoes and apologies.
Salvatore reached for his pen.
I steadied the paper without being asked.
His letters came slower than at the dinner and twice as angry.
NO OAR.
Dominic read it aloud.
The stranger frowned.
It was a long time ago, he said.
Salvatore wrote again, his hand tearing the paper.
FIRE.
Dominic went pale.
He took the photograph from the dresser and held it closer.
The oar in young Adrian's hands was not broken.
It was charred at one end.
Only three people knew why.
Adrian had used it to pull a burning lantern away from Dominic when they were boys.
The real story was not a push into water.
It was a fire on the dock that nearly took Dominic's leg.
Adrian had carried his little brother to the house on his back.
Salvatore had beaten the flames out with a blanket.
They never told their mother how close it had been.
There was no shoe.
There was no apology at the water.
There was a scar on Adrian's forearm from that lantern oil.
Dominic looked at the stranger's forearms where his sleeves had been rolled for blood tests.
The skin was marked with tattoos and the eyebrow scar's twin on his chin.
There was no burn scar on the left forearm.
Wrong arm unmarked.
Wrong memory spoken with total confidence.
Leave us, Dominic told him quietly.
Frank escorted the man back to the library without a word.
The door locked.
Two guards remained outside.
One guard remained in the hall.
The estate alarms were set by six that evening.
No one was supposed to enter or leave without Frank's personal code.
At nine fourteen the library camera went dark.
At nine fifteen Frank found the library empty.
The window was still locked from the inside.
The guards swore no one had passed them.
A service panel behind the bookcase stood open.
That panel led to the old staff corridor.
That corridor required a key only three people in this house possessed.
Dominic.
Frank.
And the housekeeper who had retired the previous spring.
Someone inside this locked house had opened a dead man's escape route.
Dominic did not shout.
He went quieter than I had ever heard him.
Search every room, he said.
Search every car.
Search the grounds with dogs.
Nora Bennett put her hand on the open panel and looked back at us.
Your traitor is not outside the walls, she said.
Your traitor fed this man his lines, his ring, and his way out.
Salvatore had been silent through the alarm and the search.
Now he tugged hard on my sleeve.
I bent down with the pen and paper I now carried everywhere.
He did not try for a full word this time.
He drew with painful focus.
First a square.
Then a smaller square inside it.
Then a crooked horse head I recognized at once.
The knight.
He tapped the drawing.
Then he tapped the real chipped knight in his other hand.
Then he turned it over and pressed my fingers against its loose base.
The felt shifted beneath my thumb.
He nodded frantically.
He pressed the pen again and wrote three letters beneath the drawing.
HID.
My blood went cold.
For six months that knight had sat beside his bed while everyone in this house spoke over him as if he were already gone.
May you like
Whatever Salvatore had hidden while he still could was not in a grave at all.
It was waiting inside the piece in my hand, while the man who stole his face was running free with help from someone still inside our walls.
