Chapter 5 - THE SECRET HIDDEN INSIDE LUCIA’S BOOK
The pastedown lifted like the skin of a boiled egg.
Behind it, a channel cut into the board, no wider than my thumb. And in the channel, folded in thirds, eight sheets of green-lined ledger paper.
Gabriel made a sound.
“Careful,” I whispered. “They’re brittle.”
I eased them out one at a time. They hadn’t been wet. Whoever hid them had sealed them in wax paper and tucked them into the board where the water couldn’t reach. A photograph came with them, slipped between the second and third sheets.
Gabriel took the first page in both hands.
His mother’s handwriting. Looping. Quick. Numbers marching in columns.
“Pantry fund,” he read, in a voice that wasn’t quite his. “February eleventh. Deposit, two thousand. Mrs. Kowalski’s raffle. February twelfth. Withdrawn, eighteen hundred. V. Reason: shelf repairs.” He swallowed. “There are no shelf repairs. The shelves are the same shelves.”
“Gabriel.”
“March third. Confronted V. He cried. He promised.” His thumb shook against the paper. “March ninth. Found second set of books in the warehouse. He is lying to me. He is lying to all of us.”
“V,” I said.
“Vincent.” He said the name like it was something spoiled.
He turned the page.
“March thirteenth. Told Idie I found something. Didn’t say what. Anthony would start a war.”
Another page.
“March fourteenth.” He stopped. He read it silently first, and his face did something I couldn’t watch.
“What?”
He read it aloud.
“V. wants to talk it out tomorrow night, after close. Says he’ll bring the money back. I want to believe him. The boiler’s out again, so I’ll be here late. Gabriel has a spelling test. Remind him: necessary. One C, two S’s.”
The sound he made was half laugh, half something that tore.
“One C,” he whispered. “Two S’s.”
He pressed the heel of his hand against his mouth.
I looked at the window to give him the privacy of the glass.
After a while he drew a breath and kept reading.
“Nora and her mother coming at seven. Save the skin for Nora Q.”
My name.
The ink looked wet. It couldn’t have been. It had been dry for twenty-seven years.
My own name, in a dead woman’s hand, on the last line of her last page.
“Nora Q,” Gabriel said slowly. “That’s—”
“Quinn,” I whispered.
He held out the photograph.
It was black and white, curled at the edges. A long table in a crowded restaurant. Twenty or thirty children, elbows and grins. Lucia Hart stood behind them in her apron, laughing at the photographer, one hand on a small girl’s shoulder.
The girl was five. Dark braids. A gap in her teeth. A chicken drumstick gripped in both fists, enormous, shining, utterly triumphant.
I knew that girl.
She had been me.
On the back, in that same quick hand:
Little Nora Q. Third helping. Still hungry. I’ll save her the skin.
The room went very quiet.
Somewhere below us, a garbage truck ground through its gears. The radiator ticked. A pigeon shifted on the ledge.
“That’s me,” I said.
“I know.”
“I was there.” My voice came out thin and odd. “I was five. March fifteenth. I…”
I stopped.
Because it was coming. I could feel it coming the way you feel a train through the soles of your shoes.
Smoke.
Not the smell. The taste. Black and bitter, at the back of my throat.
My mother’s hand around my wrist, hard enough to bruise. Her coat over my head. Her voice, high and cracked, saying run, Nora, run, don’t look back.
And before that.
Before the smoke.
A dark alley behind a restaurant on Forty-Seventh. A little girl, early for dinner, because her mother’s shift had ended sooner than expected and she had begged to come early. The back door propped open. A man coming out of it.
Tall. A long charcoal overcoat and a red silk scarf. Whistling something soft. Fingers flipping a silver dollar across his knuckles, tink, tink, tink, the way a magician does.
He stopped when he saw me.
He crouched.
“Well, aren’t you a pretty thing.”
Cherry pipe tobacco on his breath.
“You’re early, sweetheart. Do me a favor. Don’t tell anyone you saw me.”
A silver dollar in my palm. Warm from his hand.
“Keep that. It’s lucky.”
Then the window behind him glowed orange. And my mother was running, and the world was loud.
I opened my eyes.
I was holding my keys. I hadn’t realized I’d taken them from the table. The silver dollar lay against my palm, its eagle rubbed smooth, a crooked V scratched across its chest.
“Nora?” Gabriel was kneeling beside my chair. “Nora. Breathe.”
“My mother said I won it at a church raffle.”
“Okay.”
“She said it so many times. She made me say it back. Remember, Nora, you won it at church.” My laugh cracked. “I was five. I believed her. I believed her for twenty-seven years.”
“She was protecting you.”
“She was terrified.” It came out of me in a rush. “She cleaned offices at night. She had a little girl who had seen a man who owned half the neighborhood walk out of a burning building. She took the coin out of my hand that night, and she looked at it, and she gave it back. Because she knew what it was.”
“What was it?”
“A promise.” I looked up. “A bribe. A seal.”
He didn’t answer.
He reached into his trouser pocket and drew something out.
A silver dollar.
Old. The face worn thin as a thumbnail.
A V scratched across the eagle’s chest.
“My uncle gave me this when I was twelve,” Gabriel said. His voice was perfectly flat. “He does it for every child in the family. He scratches the V himself. For luck. For loyalty.” He turned it over once on his palm. “I’ve carried it every day since my father’s funeral.”
He set it on the blotter beside mine.
Two coins. Two Vs. Twenty-seven years apart. Side by side on a worktable in a third-floor walk-up in Pilsen.
“Gabriel.”
“Don’t.”
“I saw him.”
“I know.”
“I don’t remember his face. I remember the coat. The whistling. The tobacco.” I pressed my hand over my eyes. “I’m no kind of witness.”
“You’re the only one.”
“I was five.”
“You were there.” He took my wrist, very gently, the way you would lift a bird. “Nora. Look at me.”
I looked.
“You think you walked into my life tonight because you needed chicken. You didn’t.” His voice shook. “She saved you the skin. She wrote your name on the last page she ever wrote. And you carried the thing that proves it in your pocket for twenty-seven years.”
I couldn’t speak.
“My mother put you in her book,” he said. “And you came back.”
Outside, the sun finally cleared the rooftops and laid a thin gold line across the table.
Across two silver dollars.
Across a green book.
Across the whole impossible shape of it.
May you like
I was not an outsider to this.
I never had been.
