Chapter 18: Lidia's Choice

At midnight, someone rang my father's doorbell.

Santino was asleep upstairs with his lip stitched, and one of the seven sat in the hall with a shotgun across his knees.

He opened the door a hand's width and then pulled it wide.

Lidia stood on the porch in the ivory suit with a small suitcase, and her shoes in her hand.

Her stocking feet were wet from the lawn.

"Please," she said. "Gemma, please."

I came down the stairs and stood on the last step.

"Go away, Lidia."

"He's going to kill me."

She held out her wrist.

Four dark marks ran across it, in the shape of fingers, fresh and swollen.

This one was real.

The man in the hall looked at me.

"Let her in," I said. "Stay at the door."

She came into the front room and sat on my father's sofa without being asked, and she began to shake.

"He told me in the car," she said. "After the warehouse. He said it plainly, with the radio on."

"Said what?"

"That the wedding is so I can't be made to testify against him. A wife can't. And if it all comes out anyway, there's a statement."

She opened her bag and took out a folded paper.

I read it under the lamp.

It was typed, with Lidia's name at the bottom and a blank line over it.

It said that Lidia Carbone had acted alone. It said she had wanted Alberto Sartori's money and had given him an injection without anyone's knowledge.

It was written in Dario's lawyer's careful language, and it described the night in more detail than I had ever heard.

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