Chapter 23: The Wire

The reply card fell out of the envelope onto the hatch-cover table.

It was the kind with a little box to tick. Accepts with pleasure. Declines with regret.

I turned it over.

On the back, in pencil so light I had to tilt it to the window, Gia had written one line.

Bridal shop on Atwells. Monday the 22nd. 10 a.m. Fitting room. Come.

Sandro read it over my shoulder.

"It's a trap," he said.

"It's my sister."

"Those aren't different things in that family."

"No," I said. "But she wrote it in pencil. Renato would have used a pen."

The marshal didn't like it either.

She said so three times in the car on the way down, and once more parked across from the bridal shop.

Renato's driver was smoking on the sidewalk outside it, the way he'd stood by our front door for ten years.

The marshal went in first, in a raincoat, holding a catalog like a mother of the bride.

I went in the back way, through the alley, past the trash cans.

The seamstress didn't look up from her pins.

She pointed at the last curtain with her chin.

Gia was standing on a little round platform in front of three mirrors.

She was in the wedding dress.

It was ivory silk, cut high in the waist, let out twice already. Her stomach was enormous under it. Thirty-five weeks.

She saw me in the mirror and didn't turn around.

"You came," she said.

"You wrote in pencil."

Her face crumpled for one second, and then she fixed it.

"Did you get my message? At Christmas?"

"I deleted it. Like you said."

"Did you believe it?"

"I wrote it down," I said. "That's as far as I go with anybody."

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