Chapter 14: The Man From Savannah

Gianna's POV

"I'll read them," I said in the car, with the gold-edged card in my lap.

Dario looked at me.

"She wants you at a microphone," he said. "She wants your voice in that room as the sister's blessing."

"I know what she wants."

"Then why say yes?"

"Because she is handing me the speakers," I said.

He took my hand off the card and held it against his chest.

"My consigliere found something this morning," he said. "He went through the lawyer's old payments."

"What?"

"A fireman. Retired, in Savannah. Paid forty thousand dollars in cash, three weeks after the fire."

"Paid for what?"

"For his report," Dario said. "The one that says who came out of the loft door that night."

We were in Savannah before noon.

The house was small and yellow, with a porch and a rusted flag bracket.

An old man sat on the porch in a canvas chair with a cane across his knees.

He watched our car stop. He watched Dario get out.

"I know your face," the old man said. "You were in the paper. Chicago."

"I am Dario Ricci."

"Then you are the one I carried."

Dario did not move.

"Sir," I said, and came up beside him. "May I sit?"

He looked at me for a while. His eyes were pale in a face that had been outdoors for sixty years.

"Sit," he said.

I sat on the porch step.

"Five years ago you were at the Sartori boathouse," Dario said. "You were paid to write a report."

"I was paid not to write one." The old man's mouth twisted.

"A lawyer came to my kitchen with an envelope. He said the family had a son to protect."

"What did you see?"

"A kid," he said. "At the loft door, on her knees. A girl of seventeen, maybe."

"She had a man's collar in both hands. She had dragged him forty feet through the smoke."

My throat closed.

"He was twice her size," the old man said. "She couldn't lift him over the sill."

Keep reading free with an account. Start He Mocked the Voice I Ruined to Save Him from Chapter 1, then sign up free to read the rest of this chapter.