I Vanished with the Don's True Heir novel · Chapter 2 of 32

Chapter 2: Closed for Season

Caterina escapes the hospital, sells her earrings, drowns her phone and rides a bus eleven hours to Lubec, Maine, where a woman with a shotgun opens the motel door.

I pressed my thumb on the hole in my hand until it stopped bleeding.

Then I looked at the curtain on the other side of my bed.

It didn't reach the wall either.

Beyond it was another bay, and an old man asleep with his mouth open, and beyond him was a red sign that said STAIRS.

My clothes were in a plastic bag on the chair. Somebody had folded the dress so the blood was on the inside.

I left the dress.

I put my coat on over the hospital gown and buttoned it to the throat.

My shoes. My purse.

I checked the purse by feel.

Wallet. Keys. A lipstick.

And the card, in the zip pocket where I'd kept it for ten months.

Through the gap I could see the back of Achille's driver. He was scrolling on his phone with one thumb.

I lifted the far curtain and stepped into the old man's bay.

He opened one eye.

I put a finger to my lips.

He closed the eye.

The stairwell door was heavy. I eased it shut behind me and stood on the landing with my heart going like the baby's.

Then I went down.

One flight down to the basement. One hand on the rail, one under my belly.

Halfway down I felt a warm trickle and stopped and waited.

It was only a little.

"Stay with me," I told her. "Stay with me, honey."

I came out by the loading dock into the dark, into rain that was turning to ice.

Nobody followed me.

I walked until I found a cab.

I sat in the back of it outside a pawn shop on Kensington Avenue until the sky went grey and the window opened.

The pawn window had a metal grille and a man behind it eating a breakfast sandwich.

I took out my earrings.

Diamond studs.

Livio gave them to me on our first anniversary, in the walk-in at Falcone's.

He said it was the only room where nobody would interrupt him.

"I need cash," I said.

The man looked at the stones through a little glass.

Then he looked at my coat, and the plastic hospital band on my wrist.

He gave me eleven hundred dollars and didn't ask a single question.

I bit through the band in the cab.

On the way to the bus station I told the driver to stop on the bridge over the Schuylkill.

I got out.

I held my phone over the rail.

It lit up in my hand.

LIVIO.

I watched it ring.

Four times. Five.

He'd stood in a hallway and said he didn't want to hear about it.

So I didn't let him.

I opened my fingers and the phone went down into the brown water without a sound.

The station smelled like wet floors and coffee.

I bought a ticket to Bangor with cash.

At the newsstand I bought a toothbrush and a pair of grey sweatpants with PHILADELPHIA printed down the leg.

I changed in the restroom stall.

Then I sat at the back of the bus with my coat on and my hood up.

I didn't sleep.

New Jersey. New York. Connecticut.

Somewhere in Massachusetts, I took the card out.

A red and white lighthouse on the front, on a green cliff.

Inside, in neat blue ink:

"Happy birthday, my Livio. I think of you every day. Mama."

On the envelope, a postmark from Lubec, Maine.

A return address: Quoddy Tide Motel, Route 189.

I'd found it in his father's safe last spring, with twenty-seven others just like it, all sealed.

Twenty-eight birthdays.

His mother died when he was six.

That's what everybody said. A car on an icy road. A closed casket.

Dead women don't buy birthday cards.

In Bangor I paid a man with a van forty dollars to drive me the rest of the way.

He talked about his ex-wife for two hours, which was fine.

I didn't have to talk at all.

The coast road ran through black trees and white fields and towns with one gas pump each.

Then the trees stopped, and there was the ocean.

"Lubec," the man said. "End of America. That's Canada over there."

The lights across the water were another country.

It was eleven hours since I'd pulled out the IV.

The sleet had come back.

He let me off at the bottom of a hill.

At the top was a long, low motel with a sign on a pole.

QUODDY TIDE, it said, but half the letters were dark.

Under it, a cardboard sign was taped to the office door.

CLOSED FOR SEASON.

I climbed the hill anyway.

The wind off the water went straight through my coat.

There was one light on, behind the office blinds.

I knocked.

Nothing.

I knocked again, harder.

"We're closed," a woman's voice said through the door. "Can't you read?"

"Please," I said. "I need to talk to you."

A bolt slid back.

The door opened six inches.

The first thing through it was the barrel of a shotgun.

The second was a face.

Short silver hair. Reading glasses on a cord. Dark eyes, set deep under heavy brows.

My husband's eyes.

She looked at my belly and then at my face.

"Whatever you're selling," she said, "I don't want it."

I took the card out of my pocket and held it up in the light.

"Your son never opened these."

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