Married to My Ex-Father-in-Law novel · Chapter 21 of 32

Chapter 21: Consent

I held the phone out to Dom.

He read it at seventy miles an hour.

He didn't say anything. He just drove a little faster.

At nine that night we sat at Nonna's kitchen table on Holmes Street.

Me. Dom. Carmela, with her son asleep upstairs in Nonna's bed. Nonna at the stove.

And the detective, in his windbreaker, who'd come because I asked and had said four times on the phone that he was off the clock.

Nonna put a plate of eggplant in front of him.

"I've eaten, ma'am."

"You haven't eaten this." She sat down across from him and folded her hands on her handbag. "Eat. Then talk."

He ate.

He ate all of it, and she gave him more without asking, and he ate that too.

Carmela watched him over her wine.

"Are you married, Detective?"

"Carm," I said.

"I'm asking for the case."

"Divorced," he said, with his mouth full.

"Interesting," said Carmela.

I laid it out on the oilcloth.

The fax from the lab in its plastic sleeve. Full gold onlay, tooth nineteen, Nicholas Scarpa.

Dom's phone, with the photos from the cabin. The barbecue receipt from Tuesday. The new notebook. A. says Thursday. Then Mexico.

The text on my own phone. Wear black, Dani.

Then Nonna opened her handbag and took out the dish towel.

She unfolded it and set cast 1147 on the table between the salt and the pepper.

The detective put his fork down.

I showed him the molar. The walls standing. The seat for the gold.

"And the film the medical examiner has shows a full crown," he said slowly.

"Porcelain. On a boy whose mother gave you his toothbrush yesterday."

He looked at the plaster for a long time.

"DNA off a toothbrush takes weeks," he said. "Weeks I don't have, with a closed identification and a funeral tomorrow."

"How fast can a dentist look at a mouth?"

He almost smiled. "About as fast as you just did."

He took his phone out into Nonna's back hall.

We heard him through the wall, low, for twenty minutes.

When he came back, he sat down heavily.

"The medical examiner will reopen it," he said. "She'll compare the body's teeth to this cast and that invoice, and a dentist of her choosing will sit in. But the identification's closed and the body's been released. She needs the family's consent, in writing, to touch it again."

Everybody looked at Dom.

He held out his hand.

The detective took a folded form out of his windbreaker.

Dom unfolded it on Nonna's oilcloth and read every line of it, all the way to the bottom.

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