Chapter 5: Cane Fourteen

Nunzio lost the van at the first red light on Wabash.

He drove me home with his jaw tight and said nothing, but he kept pushing mints at me across the seat.

Orazio was waiting on the porch in Beverly with no coat.

"He gave me this," I said, and held out the brass key.

Orazio looked at it.

He did not reach for it.

"It's yours," he said. "Whatever is behind it is yours first."

"You don't want it?"

"I want to give my word the same way you gave me yours." His mouth flattened. "I said I wouldn't touch him. I'll find him."

"They had masks."

"They had a van that belongs to the Sarto laundry."

He said it so calmly that it took me a moment to understand he already knew.

"You could have said so in the garage," I said.

"I could have, yes. And you would have stayed home."

I stared at him.

I was very angry, and a little impressed.

The key opened box 214 at a small savings bank on Archer Avenue, at ten the next morning.

I went in alone, as the director had asked.

A teller led me down a hall to a locked room the size of a closet.

Orazio waited in the car with Nunzio.

I had made them promise.

The box held a manila envelope, and in the envelope were nine photocopied pages.

I spread them across the little steel table.

They were lab sheets, each stamped with the clinic's blue logo, and each one was a column of numbers.

I read them twice before I saw it.

Cane 14, my embryo, had a line through the word FITZGERALD in the margin and a different word handwritten above it.

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