The Don's Animal-Talking Little Girl novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The Box Under the Car
A cockatiel tells Dilly about a bomb under the Don's car; Etta drags Teo clear of the blast, refuses his protection, and that night his guard shoots the bomber on her back step, and Teo sees the locket on Dilly's neck was his dead sister's.
"Etta, the bird says a man in a gray coat put a ticking box under the long car."
Dilly said it the way she said everything the animals told her.
Flat and calm.
I was on my knees in the wet grass, scraping moss off a headstone from 1911.
"Which bird, baby?"
She pointed down the hill.
The cockatiel sat on the stone angel above the Speranza vault, yellow crest straight up.
That bird showed up on our fence two springs ago and never left.
It wouldn't come down for anyone but Dilly.
Four black cars sat along the gravel lane below it.
Men in dark coats stood around the vault.
Everyone in Bloomfield knew whose vault that was.
I'd been the caretaker here three years, and I'd learned to mow around that family with my eyes on the grass.
"What kind of box?" I said.
Dilly tipped her head at the cockatiel.
"A black one. It goes tick tick. He stuck it under the long car and walked away quick."
The longest car was the one at the front, engine running.
Then I saw the gray coat.
A man was walking out the back gate by our cottage with his hands in his pockets, not looking back.
Nobody walks that fast out of a cemetery.
Dilly had been telling me what animals said since she could talk.
The gray cat said the mailman was sad. The crows said snow was coming before the radio did.
She was right more often than she was wrong, and I had never once let myself believe it.
"Stay here," I said. "Hold onto the cat."
I dropped the scraper and ran.
The hill was steep and slick with leaves.
I came down it yelling before I'd decided what to yell.
"Get away from the car!"
Three men turned at once, and three guns came up at me.
I'd never been on the wrong end of a gun before.
My legs kept running anyway.
"Stop right there," one of them said.
A tall man stepped out of the vault with white roses still in his hand.
Black overcoat, dark curly hair, a face like a closed door.
Teodoro Speranza.
The people allowed close enough called him Teo.
I'd seen him once a year for three years, on the same October Sunday, and never heard him speak.
His driver was holding the back door of the long car open for him.
"There's a bomb under your car," I said.
One of the men laughed.
Teo didn't.
He looked at me, then at the car, then at me again.
"Who told you that?"
I couldn't tell the most dangerous man in Pittsburgh that a cockatiel did.
"A man in a gray coat. He just went out the back gate."
Teo said to the driver, "Out."
The driver let go of the door.
Teo's hand closed on my arm, and suddenly I was moving.
He pulled me behind the granite corner of the vault and put his body over mine.
The car went up.
The sound hit inside my skull.
Glass rained on the gravel. Something burning landed on a grave three rows over.
His coat smelled like cold air and roses.
His heart was slamming against my back, and his voice was completely calm.
"Are you hurt?"
"No."
"Don't get up yet."
His men were already shouting, already running for the back gate.
When he finally let me up, my ears were ringing and my hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Then I heard small feet on the gravel.
Dilly came down the lane in her too-big tan coat, the fat gray cat in her arms and the little white puffball bird on her shoulder.
So much for staying put.
She stopped in front of Teo and looked up at him.
"The bird says you're welcome," she said.
Every man there went quiet.
Teo crouched down so his eyes were level with hers.
"Did the bird see the man's face?"
"He has a scar on his chin. And he smells like gas station coffee."
One of the guards snorted.
Teo looked up at me. "Your daughter?"
"Mine," I said.
It wasn't true on paper. It was true everywhere else.
He stood and brushed the gravel off his knees.
"Whoever did this saw you run down that hill. You'll come with me. Both of you. You'll have a house, men on the door, whatever you need."
"No," I said.
His men looked at me.
"We live here. I work here. My grandmother's up at that cottage on oxygen."
"Then she comes too."
"I don't get in cars with men people try to blow up."
I took Dilly's hand and walked back up the hill.
I could feel him watching me the whole way.
By the time the police came, the black cars were gone.
I told them I heard a bang.
That night I sat up in the kitchen with Gran's old shotgun across my knees.
I'd never fired it.
Gran was asleep, the oxygen machine hissing in her room.
At eleven the gray cat stood up on the windowsill and growled, low and long.
Dilly appeared in the doorway in her socks.
"Etta. The bird says the gray coat man came back. He's at the back door."
The back door handle turned.
I stood up and put myself between Dilly and the door.
"Go to Gran's room. Now."
She didn't move.
The lock gave with a crack.
The door swung in, and the man with the scar on his chin stood on our step with a knife.
I lifted the shotgun.
A shot cracked from the dark yard.
The man folded on the step and didn't move again.
I pressed Dilly's face into my hip so she wouldn't see.
One of Teo's guards lowered his gun at the bottom of the porch.
Teo came up the path behind him, unhurried, his coat dark against the gravestones.
"I told you he'd come back," he said.
"You were watching my house?"
"I was watching her."
He looked past me at Dilly, and his face changed.
The kitchen light had caught the gold locket on her neck.
An oval, with a little sparrow engraved on the front.
She'd worn it since the night Gran found her in a basket on our porch.
Teo stepped over the dead man.
"Where did she get that?"
"It came with her."
His voice went very quiet.
"That locket belonged to my sister. I buried her six years ago."
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