Chapter 12: The Empty Shelf

My father stood in my closet with his hand flat on the empty shelf, and he was shaking.

I had never seen him shake.

He had stood on the ice with his hand on Gregor Vasko's chest, and he had not blinked.

Now he stood in a bedroom with a broken door and looked at a bare plank of wood.

"Dad," I said.

He did not turn around.

"Don't touch anything," a policeman called from the hall. "We're dusting the frame."

Two officers walked through the house with flashlights.

Paolo followed them from room to room in his brace, swearing, and Luca sat on the stairs with his crutches across his knees.

"They came through the back," one officer said. "Cut the porch light and popped the lock."

He pointed at the living room.

"Nothing else is gone. TV, laptops, your father's watches. All here."

He looked at the paper in his hand.

"So whatever they took, they came for it."

"A case," I said. "A grey metal case, about this big, with a lock. It was my mother's."

"What's in it?"

I opened my mouth.

"Nothing," my father said, from the closet door.

The officer looked at him.

"Mr. Brescia?"

"It was a box of old papers," my father said. "Family things. It has no value to anyone else."

"Then why would someone take it?"

"I don't know."

The officer looked at me, and he looked at my father again, and he wrote something down.

When the police left, my brothers stood in the hall in the quiet.

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