He Took His Childhood Friend Away, So I Came Back a Mafia Heiress novel · Chapter 10 of 24

Chapter 10: The Fire Report

On Monday morning the keys to my father's house came by courier, in a plain brown envelope with no note.

There were three keys on a ring, and a brass tag on the ring that said WATER ST in a hand I didn't know.

"Nunzio wants you to go there," Aurelio said.

He was sitting across from me in his office above the tailor, and he hadn't touched his coffee.

"Why would he want that?"

"Because he thinks you'll walk through the door and fall apart." He folded his hands. "Before you go, Signora, there is something I have kept for sixteen years. I would rather you read it first."

He took a manila folder from the bottom drawer of his desk.

It was soft at the edges and smelled faintly of old tobacco.

"The fire marshal's report," he said. "The first one, not the one that was filed."

I held out my hand, and he put the folder into it.

I read it standing up.

I read that the fire began in the east wing of a three-storey house on Water Street, at ten past two in the morning.

I read that the investigator found traces of an accelerant on the back stairs.

I read that the back door, the one that opened onto the garden, had been closed from the outside with a steel padlock through the hasp.

My mouth had gone dry.

"Locked from outside," I said.

"Yes."

"By who?"

"He didn't say. That page is the last one he wrote." Aurelio's voice was quiet. "Two days later he was transferred to a desk in Trenton. A week after that, the file was reclassified as an electrical fault, and the case was closed."

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