The Don's Runaway Substitute novel · Chapter 15 of 24
Chapter 15: The Parish Hall
The Pozzi parish hall had folding tables, a coffee urn and a crucifix over the stage.
Seven family heads sat along the long table with their sons behind them.
Three of them were Allegra's uncles, grey men in dark coats, who looked at my face and then looked away at the wall.
Dario sat at the middle with his right hand wrapped in a bandage.
He had put on a fresh cardigan, and he had brought a pastry box.
"Vincenzo," he said warmly. "And the Don's wife. Sit, sit."
Vincenzo did not sit.
He stood beside my chair with one hand resting on its back.
A guard at the door had taken my phone and Vincenzo's, and the families' guns, and set them all in one basket under the crucifix.
"You called us," said the oldest of the Pozzi uncles to Dario. "Say what you called us for."
Dario got to his feet, slowly, as a man does when he is carrying grief.
"Three years ago," he said, "my nephew's fiancée left this city. We were told she went to Paris."
"We were told by you," the uncle said.
"We were told by me, and I believed it." Dario turned toward me with wet eyes. "Then a flower-seller walks into the Don's bed the same week, with the dead girl's face."
"She isn't dead," said one of the younger sons.
"Isn't she?" Dario said gently. "Last night this woman and her husband dragged me into an orchard and told me I'd buried Allegra under a cherry tree. They have a recording. It is a woman with a stolen face, begging an old man to confess."
"I'm the one who begged?" I said.
"Quiet, kiddo."
"You've stopped calling me kiddo when anyone's listening."
Someone near the back laughed, and then looked sorry.
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