I had to think of a plan. Not for the first time tonight, I wished I had my gun. It was somewhere in a police evidence locker.
Then, I heard the snap of a twig and all my senses electrified. Someone was near.
I scooted into a little alcove formed by the doorway of the mausoleum and tried to press myself as tightly as I could against it. It moved a little. I froze. Was there a chance the door was unlocked? Even so, it probably would make a god-awful screeching or creaking noise if I opened the door. The sound of footsteps on dried leaves grew closer. He was heading my way. I didn’t have a choice. If the door opened I needed to hide inside. If the noise alerted him to my whereabouts, I’d try to lock the door from the inside. Or I’d be trapped. It was hard to say. I’d have to take my chances.
I reached up and turned the knob while I pressed my back against the door. It silently opened. I scrambled inside and shut the door behind me. Slits high up on the ceiling let in enough light for me to see there weren’t any windows. I rummaged around in my bag and found a lighter. I snapped it on and saw that I could lock the door from the inside. I slid the lock closed and looked at my phone. I had twenty-five minutes to catch the last train out of Colma unless I intended to stay the night in the cemetery — not something I was interested in doing.
I’d wait here for five minutes, until the men outside had moved on, and then make a run for the gate.
I put the flashlight app on my phone and peered around the mausoleum. It was just as creepy as I’d imagined. A coffin was in the center of the room.
The stack of letters crumpled uncomfortably in my inside pocket. I extracted the stack and with shaking hands unfolded the first letter. What was so important my mom had to hide these? Who was she hiding them from? And why?
The first letter was in Italian.
It was a love letter. From Turricci. I gasped as I read it.
My unfamiliarity with some Italian and his flowing script made it hard at first to decipher what he was saying. He was apologizing for something. When I figured it out, I felt sick. He was my mother’s guardian and yet he was in love with her and forced himself on her? She had to flee Italy to America. He wrote that he was saddened that she hated him so much and hoped she would one day forgive him. He begged her to leave my father. Turricci said he tried to make up for his “past indiscretions” by buying her land and a villa. He said he would never give up as long as he lived. There was much more. I skimmed the four pages and then put it in my outside coat pocket. I picked up the next envelope.
This one was filled with vitriol. It practically jumped off the page. In it, Turricci accused my mother of ruining his life. He said he was unable to love anyone else and that he would rather see her dead than see her with my father. He included a clipping of my father and mother that had run in the Monterey Herald newspaper. They were at a fundraiser at Pebble Beach golf course. I traced my mother’s face in the faded newspaper picture. She was looking up at my father adoringly. My father’s face was scratched out with pen. The pen had ripped a hole where my father’s face had been.
My heart was pounding. There was more. The letters spanned twenty-three years. The last letter was dated shortly before my mother’s death. In it, Turricci said that he would not rest until she was dead. Any love he’d ever felt for her had evaporated. He would never forgive her for taking his child away, he wrote.
I couldn’t get air into my lungs. My face felt like ice. My vision grew fuzzy. This was the proof I had been looking for, but it came bundled with a jagged knife that ripped open the fabric of my world, exposing a reality I had never imagined in my worst nightmares.
He was my father.
With hands shaking madly, I quickly flipped through the letter to the last page, printed on different paper. It was my birth certificate.
I smoothed out the creases and tried to focus on the name after the word: father. Mateo Antonio Turricci was my father.
My stomach heaved. I shoved all the papers in my pocket and lunged for the door. I didn’t care if the men were outside waiting for me, I needed air. I needed to run.
I yanked open the door and ran, gasping and crying as I headed toward the front gate of the cemetery, not caring who saw me. I had fifteen minutes to make it to the train. They wouldn’t dare kill me on the train with all its cameras. I had a head start and I would make it. I knew it.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
THE ENTRANCE TO THE gate was twenty feet in front of me by the time I heard panting and footsteps crunching behind me. I knew if they had guns, I was within shooting distance. I could hear them talking to one another.
“There! To your right.”
I turned and came at the iron fence at a running start and used a nearby headstone as a stepping stone that propelled me halfway up the fence. I clutched the metal bars and shimmied my way up. By this time, the men were at the bottom. I expected my leg to be yanked and to fall to the ground, but miraculously, I was inches from their reach. I half-expected the roar of a gunshot as I flung my leg over the pointed barb at the top. My coat caught as I tried to swing my other leg over and came down on another spear-like barb. The pain took my breath away and made me lose my grip completely. I would’ve fallen to the ground except a big fat chunk of my thigh was impaled on this barb.
The voices below me grew dim and I concentrated on not passing out as I gripped the fence as tight as I could and lifted my leg, slowly off the barb, hoping that I wouldn’t bleed to death from taking it out. Gingerly, I felt where the hole was. Instead of a gushing foundation of blood from my artery, I only felt some dampness spreading. I would live. For now.
I slipped to the other side and pushed myself away from the fence so the men’s greedy hands wouldn’t grab me as I fell. I landed in a ball and cried out in pain from the pressure of landing on my injured leg.
I didn’t wait to see what the men had planned, but they clearly couldn’t scale the fence. As I race-walked and limped away I heard this:
“Mr. Turricci, per la stazione ferroviaria.”
Good God. He was here. And he was after me. He was the one who wanted me dead. My own father. The name listed as my father on my birth certificate.
I kept running, breathing loudly as I hobbled through the fog. I saw the sign for the train. I was almost there. I dipped into the entrance to BART, limping painfully and hoping it wasn’t too late.
The platform was deserted and a few lights were out, making it even dimmer than normal. I headed for the far end of the platform and ducked into the shadows behind a pillar close to the tracks. My blood raced and I could hear the pounding of my heart in my ears. My body shook as I silently prayed for the train to come. I clutched the incriminating documents inside my coat, wadding them up into a tight ball in the palm of my sweaty hand. My legs shook uncontrollably and I reached down to see if more blood had come out.
I heard the distant rumble down the tracks. The train was almost here. Far, far down the tunnel, I could see the smallest glow from the headlights of the BART train. Only a few more seconds. I could still make it. If the train came right now, I could slip inside and maybe it would pull away before he caught up to me. But then I heard it, the sound of someone running.
The pounding of footsteps grew closer. I heard someone shout my name. Someone with a thick Italian accent. A voice that was disturbingly familiar, as if my very cells recognized him at my core. Giving one last glance down the tracks at the oncoming train, I knew it was too late. I was out of time.
I turned to face this man. I was going to get my very first glimpse of my own father: the man who raped and murdered my mother. A dark figure in a trench coat hurtled down the stairs, hopped the turn style and then ran into the light.
As train roared into the station, filling the tunnel with light and sound, the man’s face was illuminated. I gasped, the air sucked out of my lungs.
Mateo Antonio Turricci was the man I’d tried so desperately to sleep with at the hotel in Sicily. My vision started to close in and my legs gave
out. I felt myself slumping, falling off the platform and onto the tracks.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
I WOKE CONFUSED. THE last thing I remember was being yanked from the edge of the tracks. I was in a big bed. I pulled myself up onto my elbows and glanced around with blurry eyes.
The room was glowing orange, lit by a dying blaze in a giant fireplace I could stand up in. The room contained velvet upholstered chairs, gorgeous oil paintings, and a goon asleep on a folding chair in the corner. He was snoring.
Then I noticed my clothes were on a chair beside the bed. I glanced down. I was wearing a silky nightgown.
It all came back to me and I was horrified. I’d tried to sleep with my own father. No wonder he had reacted so violently when I kissed him. I felt sick. Not only was he my father, but he was also the person who raped and killed my mother. I leaned over and dry heaved over the side of the bed. I had nothing left in me.
I clutched for my clothes and drew them to my chest. My jacket crackled. The letters were still inside.
Reaching into my jacket pocket and keeping my eye on the man in the corner, I painstakingly withdrew the letters, slowly, slowly so they didn’t make any noise. There was still one envelope I hadn’t opened. I looked at it carefully. It had never been opened. The postal mark was after my mother’s death.
Heart pounding, without taking my eyes off the gorilla in the corner, I quietly slit open the envelope with a fingernail. It was from a DNA service. It had my name on it. My mother must have snuck something from me to garner my DNA.
I knew it was a fairly new capacity – to be able to check someone’s DNA instead of doing a paternity test. I wondered why she had never done a paternity test with my father. Then I realized. My father—the man who raised me and the man I loved more than any other man in the world—hadn’t known. He’d always assumed I was his daughter.
My heart broke for her right then. What a horrid secret to keep.
With shaking fingers, I read on.
It had my father’s name on it: Lorenzo Santella. 99 percent likelihood.
I sagged with relief and tears spurted out of my eyes. Turricci was not my father.
But the letter had been dated after my mother’s death. She had never known. She had died before learning I wasn’t Turricci’s daughter.
As my heart rate slowed, all the puzzle pieces clicked into place. It all made sense, now. My entire life made sense.
No wonder my mother loved Christopher. He was her love child with my father – or the man I believed was my father. The love of her life.
Me? My whole life my mother had believed that I was the product of a rape. A rape by this man, Turricci. A killer. A monster. A man my mother loathed. When she looked at me, she must have seen the man she hated. But she still loved me. I knew she loved me. Not as much as she loved, Christopher, though.
If she had lived, she would’ve known I wasn’t Turricci’s daughter. But she would never know now. This man, Turricci, had cheated me out of the true love my mother should have had for me. Hatred surged through me. I crumpled the papers loudly in my fist.
The man across the room startled awake and I quickly shoved the papers back in my jacket pocket.
He acknowledged me with a grunt and then leaned over and knocked on the door.
A few minutes later, Turricci walked in. He met my eyes and nodded.
“You know now, don’t you?”
I didn’t answer.
“I wanted so much to tell you in Sicily, but you left. I wanted to explain why I couldn’t make love to you. Why my love for you is infinitely deeper than a love a man has for a woman.”
He leaned down and kissed my brow. I struggled to get away from him and tried to spit in his face, but it only came straight back down and dribbled down my chin.
He patiently took out a silk handkerchief and gently wiped my face. I started swinging and connected once with his jaw before I was pushed back into the pillow from a hand that came out of nowhere.
The gorilla was holding me down. Turricci didn’t react.
“When you walked into my hotel, I knew who you were immediately. I’ve kept tabs on you since I found out that you were mine.”
I glared.
“Your brother was the one who contacted me. He let me know that you were my daughter.”
“What?” I had vowed not to talk, but this news startled me.
“He found your birth certificate. He sent me a copy.”
Anger flared through me.
“Is that why you killed Christopher?”
“No. I didn’t kill your brother. Only your mother.”
His words sent me thrashing toward him, wind milling my arms at him, teeth bared, fingernails at the ready, swearing at him, ready to tear his throat open. But the goon flattened me back on the pillow with one beefy arm. A screaming pain shot up from my leg like an electrical jolt and had me gasping. I realized then how hurt I was. I glanced down and saw a thick bandage around my thigh. Someone had given me medical care, but the pain was still intense.
I closed my eyes.
This man before me killed my mother and father. I would not rest until I had avenged them. I needed to make a plan. I needed to escape so I could kill this man before me.
But Turricci was not done talking.
“When your mother left me brokenhearted in Sicily, I thought my life was over. I believed that without her love I was doomed to be alone. So, I plotted. I made plans to win her back. I wrote her and begged her and offered her, not only my heart, but all my earthly belongings.”
He closed his eyes for a second.
“But she didn’t want me.”
Slowly, my love for her grew into hate. I had never hated anything or anyone as desperately as I hated your mother. I hated your father, too. But he was just a pawn. It was your mother who ruined my life.
I prayed every day that my hatred would lessen.
I thought I had accepted your mother’s betrayal. But then I made the mistake of going to Geneva during the fete season and saw your parents.
They were dancing in a corner at the gala and when I saw the way your mother looked at your father I knew that my hatred would never dissipate until your mother was dead.
He paused and I stared at him. “Why did you try to cover it up?”
“I didn’t. Not at first. The fire was an unfortunate result of my cigarette. But then I got the letter from Christopher. It came the next day, before he knew about the fire. It was then that I knew I had to cover up the murders. I knew that I needed to make sure suspicion never fell on me because if it did you would never accept me as your father.”
I narrowed my eyes at him. My fists clenched at my sides. If I had a knife I would leap out of bed and stab him right in the jugular.
He had killed everyone I cared about.
“Why did you kill Ethel?”
He tilted his head and frowned.
“The homeless lady? The one who lived outside my building in the Tenderloin. You know the one you burned down?”
He shook his head. “My men started the fire, yes, but I don’t know this Ethel you speak of.”
Liar. I scowled.
“Why did you kill Vito?”
He sighed and nodded. “Yes, the old man’s blood is on my hands. But it is entirely his fault. He didn’t need to get involved. You see, he had complicated things. Vito, your mother’s precious friend, had run your father’s company into the ground with his gambling debts. It was not my problem. Until he suspected I was behind the murders. Then he tried to blackmail me. He wanted me to pay an exorbitant sum for a mediocre development in San Francisco. He was a fool. He’d been gone from the old country so long that he’d forgotten who he was dealing with. He was so Americanized. He had grown soft. You don’t blackmail Mateo Turricci. What a fool.”
“He was a good man.” I said, glowering.
Turricci shrugged. “He wasn’t as foolish as I thought. He’d actually drawn up a will leaving everything to you right b
efore he died. I think he wanted the money so you would be provided for since he had squandered your inheritance. I think he may have been trying to put things right.”
I swallowed the lump that had risen to my throat, remembering the look in Vito’s eyes as I pressed a blade against his fleshy neck. He died thinking I hated him.
Because of this fucker.
“I hate you.” I spit the words out.
Turricci sighed.
“You do now. But that will change. You are my flesh and blood and nothing can change that.” His gaze was piercing.
Something could change that. A nice crisp piece of paper in my jacket. But I was biding my time. I’d eyed the fireplace poker and was calculating how quickly I could get to it and if I could beat the goon to get to Turricci.
“One of my greatest fears has been to die alone,” he said. “I could have the most beautiful woman in the world as my wife, but I would always question whether she was with me for my money. But when you have la famiglia. When you have children. They are there for love and honor. L'affetto verso i genitori e fondamento di ogni virtu.”
I rolled my eyes. He was spouting Italian proverbs about children being there for their parents. He continued.
“Now, I’ve connected with my own flesh and blood, my own child. I will not die alone. Il sangue non è acqua.” Blood is thicker than water.
With those words, I knew I had one last card to play and that I better play it fast.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
[Gia Santella 01.0] Gia in the City of the Dead Page 16
