Chapter 3 - The Debt Ray Could Never Repay
Clara turned the lock just as Deputy Mercer reached the sidewalk.
He knocked once.
Not loudly.
He did not need to.
Samuel pulled the blinds over the front windows and motioned for Clara to wheel Rocco toward the kitchen.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Move.”
“Dad, who is he?”
“I’ll explain downstairs.”
The deputy knocked again.
“Mr. Bell,” he called through the glass. “Open the door.”
Samuel lifted a flour bin from beneath the preparation table, revealing a square wooden hatch.
Rocco looked at him.
“You keep all your customers in the cellar?”
“Only the dangerous ones.”
Clara stared at her father.
“You know him.”
“I knew the man who raised him.”
“Ray wasn’t my father,” Rocco said.
Samuel’s eyes flashed.
“No. But he became more of one than the man who gave you his name.”
Before Rocco could answer, glass shattered in the front room.
Samuel pulled open the hatch.
“Down.”
Rocco glanced at the narrow stairs.
“My ankle is fractured.”
Clara stepped behind him.
“Then you’re about to hate me.”
She hooked one arm beneath his shoulder while Samuel supported his injured leg. Together they lowered him from the wheelchair and carried him down the steps.
Rocco clenched his jaw against the pain.
Above them, the bakery door opened.
Boots crossed the floor.
Samuel closed the hatch, leaving them in darkness.
A second later, a small bulb flickered to life.
The cellar was larger than Rocco expected. Shelves of canned fruit lined one wall. Flour sacks were stacked beside an old furnace. At the far end stood a steel door that did not belong beneath a small-town bakery.
Rocco looked at Samuel.
“What’s behind that?”
“The reason Silas Danner wants this building.”
Clara’s face hardened.
“You told me there was nothing down here.”
“I told you there was nothing you needed to see.”
“They’re threatening us, Dad. They’re taking the bakery, and you still think I don’t need to know?”
Above them, pans crashed to the floor.
Mercer’s voice drifted through the boards.
“Search the back.”
Samuel lowered his voice.
“Ray came to Cedar Hollow thirty-one years ago. He wasn’t alone. Gino Castellano came with him.”
Rocco’s pain disappeared beneath a colder sensation.
“My uncle was here?”
Samuel nodded.
“At that time, this town still had mines, rail access, and men desperate enough to sell anything. Your family wanted a private route through the mountains. Guns, cash, people—anything that needed to move without federal eyes.”
“My father controlled the family then.”
“Your father didn’t know.”
Rocco stared at him.
Samuel continued.
“Gino was building something of his own. Ray was his driver and enforcer. My wife, Evelyn, worked at the county records office. She discovered that Gino had created shell companies to purchase land surrounding an abandoned railway tunnel.”
Clara stood motionless.
“My mother died in a house fire.”
Samuel closed his eyes.
“The fire wasn’t an accident.”
Clara’s lips parted, but no sound came.
“Gino ordered Ray to retrieve the records and burn the house,” Samuel said. “Ray took the files. But when he arrived, the fire had already been started by another man. Ray went inside anyway.”
Samuel looked at Clara.
“He brought you out.”
Clara leaned against a shelf.
“I was a baby.”
“Eleven months old.”
“My mother?”
“Ray went back for her. The roof collapsed before he reached the bedroom.”
Rocco felt the shape of the truth forming.
“The debt,” he said.
Samuel nodded.
“Ray believed that if he had refused Gino sooner, Evelyn would still be alive.”
Above them, a heavy object scraped across the kitchen floor.
Someone had found the hatch.
Samuel crossed to the steel door and removed a chain from around his neck. A brass key hung from it.
He inserted the key into the lock.
The door opened onto a narrow tunnel.
“Where does this lead?”
“The old church basement.”
Clara did not move.
“You lied to me my entire life.”
“I kept you alive.”
“You let me believe she died because of bad wiring.”
“I let you grow up without wondering whether the men who killed her might return.”
“They returned anyway.”
The hatch lifted.
Light spilled into the cellar.
Deputy Mercer looked down.
“Well,” he said. “There you are.”
Samuel shoved Clara toward the tunnel.
Rocco reached inside his boot and drew the small knife he had kept hidden since Boston.
Mercer descended slowly, gun in hand.
“Mr. Danner wants to speak with the stranger.”
“I don’t want to speak with Mr. Danner,” Rocco said.
Mercer smiled.
“You don’t seem to understand your position.”
Rocco looked at the angle of the deputy’s wrist, the distance between them, and the wet flour coating the stone floor.
He waited until Mercer stepped from the last stair.
Then he threw the knife.
The blade struck the bulb overhead.
Darkness swallowed the cellar.
Mercer fired.
Clara screamed.
Rocco rolled sideways as the bullet struck a shelf. Glass jars exploded. Samuel lunged at the deputy. The two men crashed into the flour sacks.
Rocco heard a grunt, then the metallic scrape of the gun sliding across the floor.
His hand found it first.
When Samuel relit the emergency lamp, Mercer was on his knees.
Rocco held the gun against his forehead.
The deputy looked at him differently now.
Not as a beggar.
Not as an injured stranger.
As a man he had underestimated.
“Who told Danner I was here?” Rocco asked.
Mercer said nothing.
Rocco cocked the weapon.
Clara stared at him.
“Rocco.”
Her voice was quiet, but it stopped him more effectively than a shout.
He looked at her.
She was frightened.
Not of Mercer.
Of him.
For the first time in years, that mattered.
Rocco removed the gun from the deputy’s forehead and struck him across the temple instead. Mercer collapsed.
Samuel exhaled.
“You really are a Castellano.”
“I’m beginning to wish people would stop saying that.”
They dragged Mercer into the tunnel and tied his hands with electrical cord.
Samuel opened the steel door wider.
Inside the passage, Clara stopped beside Rocco.
“Did Ray know who ordered the fire?”
“Yes,” Samuel said.
“Did he ever prove it?”
Samuel’s expression darkened.
“He hid the proof.”
“Where?”
“That’s the problem. He divided it into pieces so no single person could use it.”
Samuel reached beneath his shirt and removed the brass key.
“This opens the first lock.”
Rocco touched the envelope in his coat.
“What opens the second?”
Samuel looked at him.
“According to Ray, the son of the man Gino betrayed.”
A vehicle engine roared outside.
Then another.
Samuel peered through the tunnel entrance.
“They’ll block the church road.”
Rocco looked down at his injured leg, then at the unconscious deputy.
His uncle knew he had come to Cedar Hollow.
That meant Ray’s secret was not merely buried in this town.
Someone was killing to keep it buried.
“What exactly is behind the steel door?” Clara asked.
Samuel hesitated.
“A ledger written by your mother.”
A shot rang out above them.
Then the bakery filled with the smell of gasoline.
Samuel’s face changed.
May you like
“Run.”
Flames dropped through the open hatch.
