Chapter 5 - The Grave with No Body
The funeral procession was a lie.
Rocco knew it from the way the men carried themselves. Real mourners watched the coffin. Armed men watched windows, doors, and hands.
Father Jude moved toward the sanctuary.
“I’ll delay them.”
“They won’t hesitate because you’re a priest,” Rocco said.
“No. But they may hesitate because their mothers still attend Christmas Mass.”
Samuel guided Mercer toward a side room and locked him inside. Clara found an old wooden crutch in the church’s donation closet.
Rocco tested it beneath his arm.
“You can’t walk on that ankle,” she said.
“I don’t intend to walk far.”
“Where are we going?”
“To your mother’s grave.”
“With armed men outside?”
“They came to stop us from finding something. That tells me we’re close.”
Father Jude led the false mourners into the sanctuary, loudly explaining that the cemetery gate had jammed. While the men argued, Rocco, Clara, and Samuel slipped through a coal chute behind the rectory.
They emerged among wet headstones.
The cemetery climbed along a hillside behind the church. Bare trees bent beneath the wind. Clara led them toward a row of older graves near the stone wall.
EVELYN ROSE BELL.
BELOVED WIFE AND MOTHER.
1958–1995.
Clara knelt and brushed leaves from the marker.
“What did Ray hide here?”
Samuel stared at the ground.
“I don’t know.”
Rocco examined the stone. The base had been repaired more recently than the surrounding graves. A thin iron plate was fitted beneath the inscription.
He removed Samuel’s brass key and found a small opening behind the plate.
The key turned.
A section of the headstone released with a click.
Inside was a metal cylinder wrapped in oilcloth.
Clara looked toward the church. Voices were rising.
Rocco opened the cylinder.
It contained a photograph, a small cassette tape, and half of a black-and-white map.
The photograph showed five people standing in front of the abandoned mine.
Ray was one of them.
Gino was another.
A younger Samuel stood beside Evelyn.
The fifth man was Rocco’s father, Antonio Castellano.
On the back, Evelyn had written:
ANTONIO KNOWS. GINO KNOWS HE KNOWS.
Rocco read it twice.
“My father came here.”
Samuel nodded slowly.
“Only once. Evelyn contacted him after she discovered Gino’s companies. Antonio promised to stop the operation.”
“Two weeks later, he died in a plane crash.”
“I know.”
Rocco looked at the cassette.
“What’s on this?”
“Evelyn recorded every conversation she could,” Samuel said. “She didn’t trust paper alone.”
Clara touched the photograph.
“My mother knew the head of the Castellano family.”
“She knew a man trying to stop his brother,” Samuel answered.
A branch snapped behind them.
Rocco turned.
One of Gino’s men stood between two headstones, gun raised.
Clara froze.
The man was young, perhaps twenty-five. Rocco recognized him as Leo Marconi, the son of a captain who had served the Castellanos for decades.
“Mr. Castellano,” Leo said, “your uncle wants you home.”
“My uncle cut my brake line.”
Leo’s eyes shifted.
“I don’t know anything about that.”
“That’s the problem with loyal men. They rarely know what they’re dying for.”
Leo tightened his grip.
“Give me the cylinder.”
Rocco held it out.
Leo stepped closer.
Samuel moved first.
He threw a handful of wet soil into Leo’s face. Clara struck the man’s wrist with the wooden crutch. The gun fired into the air.
Rocco drove his shoulder into Leo’s knees.
They fell between the graves.
Pain exploded through Rocco’s ankle, but he caught Leo’s gun hand and slammed it against the stone until the weapon dropped.
Clara seized it.
“Stop moving!”
Leo stared at her.
She was shaking, but the barrel remained aimed at his chest.
More men shouted near the cemetery gate.
Rocco pulled Leo upright and pressed him against the headstone.
“How many?”
“Six.”
“Who leads them?”
“Vittorio Saye.”
Rocco’s expression changed.
Vittorio had been Ray’s replacement. Quiet, patient, and devoted to Gino.
“Did Vittorio sabotage my car?”
Leo said nothing.
Rocco pushed him harder against the stone.
“Did he?”
“Yes.”
Clara looked at Rocco.
The answer had confirmed what all of them already suspected, yet hearing it aloud seemed to remove the last protection around the truth.
Gino had not merely followed Rocco to Cedar Hollow.
He had tried to kill him before he arrived.
“Why is the tunnel so important?” Rocco asked.
Leo’s breathing quickened.
“I don’t know.”
“Wrong answer.”
“I swear.”
“What did Gino tell you?”
“That the tunnel opens access to a private rail junction. He said it would make the family untouchable.”
“Untouchable by whom?”
“The other families. The government. Everyone.”
Samuel took the cylinder.
“We need to leave.”
Rocco looked toward the tree line.
A maintenance road curved behind the cemetery. An old hearse sat beside a storage shed.
“Can you drive?” he asked Samuel.
“I own a delivery van.”
“That wasn’t the question.”
Samuel took the keys from a hook inside the shed.
They forced Leo into the rear compartment of the hearse and climbed inside. As Samuel started the engine, Vittorio’s men broke through the cemetery gate.
Bullets struck the rear doors.
Clara ducked beside Rocco.
Samuel drove through a row of plastic flower stands, crashed through a chain barrier, and sent the hearse sliding onto the maintenance road.
For several minutes, no one spoke.
Then Clara began laughing.
It was not amusement. It was shock escaping through the wrong door.
“My bakery burned down,” she said. “My mother was murdered, a dead chauffeur hid evidence inside her grave, and now I’m escaping the cemetery in a stolen hearse with a mafia boss.”
Samuel glanced at her in the mirror.
“The hearse belongs to the church.”
“That’s the detail you’re correcting?”
Rocco looked down at the photograph.
Antonio knows. Gino knows he knows.
His father’s plane had disappeared over the Atlantic when Rocco was twelve. Gino had been the one to deliver the news. Gino had held his shoulders and promised that he would never be alone.
Every lesson after that had come from his uncle.
Every enemy.
Every alliance.
Every rule about love and loyalty.
Rocco turned the photograph over again.
Beneath Evelyn’s message, another line was written in Ray’s hand.
THE PLANE DID NOT FALL INTO THE OCEAN.
He looked at Samuel.
“What does this mean?”
Samuel saw the writing and gripped the wheel.
“I don’t know.”
Rocco placed the cassette in his palm.
“Then we find something that can play this.”
Clara pointed toward the road behind them.
A black SUV had appeared around the curve.
Then another.
Samuel pressed the accelerator.
The old hearse shuddered.
“Where can we go?” Clara asked.
Samuel looked toward the mountains.
“There’s one place Danner’s men won’t search.”
May you like
“Where?”
“The house where your mother died.”
