He Sacrificed Our Son, But Won't Let Me Go novel · Chapter 3 of 32

Chapter 3: The Crypt

Maura and Cormac let themselves into the mausoleum and find a small welded casket. Carlo arrives and refuses to open it, and Vincent stands beside his wife against his father.

The mausoleum stood at the back of the cemetery in West Roxbury, behind a black iron fence with a Saraceno S worked into every gate.

Cormac parked on the service road with the lights off.

"Shift change is at two," he said, reading the dashboard clock. "It's one fifty-eight. If I'm arrested tonight, I want you to tell Mom's headstone I was brave."

"Mom's headstone doesn't listen."

"Then tell it twice."

Maura got out with the key in her fist.

The guard at the gate yawned, nodded to someone on the radio, and walked off toward the road.

For twelve minutes nobody was watching the door.

The key turned with a heavy click, and the door swung in.

Inside, the air was cold and smelled of stone and lilies.

Rows of marble drawers ran down both walls, with the brass names of men who had died at sixty in their beds and men who had died at thirty on pavement.

Vincent's younger brother was there, third row from the floor, with a photograph of a laughing man with Nico's curls.

At the far end, on a low marble stand, there was a small white casket.

Maura stopped walking.

It had no brass plate.

It had a spray of white roses laid across the lid and a thin grey line along the seam where the metal had been joined.

"Mo," Cormac said quietly from the door. "Mo, you don't have to."

She crossed the floor and put both palms flat on the lid.

It was cold.

"Finn," she said.

Her voice came out small in all that stone.

"Baby, it's Mama."

Nothing answered her, and she had known nothing would, and she pressed her forehead to the metal anyway.

"I'm going to take you home," she said. "Mom's plot. Next to Grandma. There's a tree there. You'd like the tree."

Cormac came and stood at her shoulder and did not say a word.

After a minute he put a hand on the seam and ran his thumb along it.

"That's a weld," he said. "Somebody welded it shut. That's not a funeral home seal, that's a torch."

"For a child?"

"I'm just saying it's a lot of metal for a very small box."

Headlights swept across the open doorway.

Two cars, then a third.

Maura did not turn around.

"I told you the guard was too easy," Cormac whispered. "Nobody in this family leaves a door unwatched. They let us in."

Men's shoes came up the gravel path, unhurried.

"Maura."

Carlo Saraceno stepped through the door in his long grey overcoat with his hat in his hand.

Two men in dark jackets stayed outside and did not look in.

"I could have given you the key myself," he said. "All you had to do was ask."

"I asked you nine days ago," Maura said. "You said it wasn't a good time."

"A father says many things in grief."

He crossed to the casket and stood across from her with the white roses between them.

His eyes were wet again, and she realized with a small, cold surprise that they were always wet when he looked at her.

"Open it," she said.

"Child."

"I'm a nurse, Carlo. I have seen burns. I held a man's hand in the burn unit at Mass General for two years."

"You have never seen a child," he said, very gently. "Not this way. I did not seal this box to hurt you. I sealed it so you would not carry the picture for the rest of your life."

"Then I'll carry it."

"I will not allow it."

"It's my son."

"He is a Saraceno." Carlo's voice did not rise. "He is in the family's ground, with his uncle, with the men who would have died for him. That is where he stays."

Maura's hands closed on the lid.

"Then I'll open it myself."

Cormac stepped up beside her and flexed his fingers.

Carlo smiled at him sadly and nodded at the door, and the two men in the dark jackets came in.

"Don't," said a voice from the path.

Vincent stood in the doorway in his shirtsleeves, his bandaged hands at his sides.

He had not slept. She could tell from the way he stood, with his weight on one leg.

He walked the length of the mausoleum without looking at the men, and he stopped at Maura's left shoulder and stayed there.

"Papa," he said. "She gets to see her son."

"You gave her the key."

"I did."

"You are tired, Vincent, and you are not thinking."

"I've been thinking for nine days." He did not touch Maura. He did not have to. He stood where he was and let his father see which side of the box he was on. "Open it, or let her."

For a long moment, nobody breathed.

Carlo looked at his son, then at the woman who had brought a lawyer to a child's birthday party, and put his hat back on.

"I will not dig a grave for a second time in my own family," he said. "Take it to a judge, Maura. Find one who will sign."

He turned in the doorway.

"And Vincent. You will come home tonight and sleep in your own bed."

Vincent did not answer.

When the footsteps had faded down the gravel, Cormac shook his head.

"That man," he said, "should be stopped."

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