The Starting Point Bar & Grill occupied a featureless one-story concrete block building. From the outside, it looked about as inviting as a commercial storage unit. But behind the broken steps and narrow door of the entrance lay a warm sanctuary of polished tables, dark corners, and nonstop oldies played at a respectfully low volume. They took a table in the back corner. Behind their heads, both walls were lined with LP album covers from the glorious days of vinyl: The Beach Boys, Fleetwood Mac, Ted Nugent, The Doors …
Despite her earlier determination, Lucy stayed for two drinks. Olivetti was amiable, and not at all pushy, and soon she felt able to relax. He disarmed her with gentle questions. He listened attentively to her account of life since Jack and showed sympathy at exactly the right moments. He was quite ready to answer her questions about his own background: raised by a single mother in Utica, New York, graduated from Rutgers Law, married at twenty-seven and divorced five years later, no children, something of a workaholic.
Inevitably the conversation led to their Italian heritage—a subject they stumbled into somewhat obliquely.
“Your maiden name … you mentioned it was Cappelli?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“Oh?” He looked puzzled. “Sorry. Why did I think that?”
“It was mentioned in one of Detective Scarlatti’s reports. She must have thought my Italian background somehow supported her suspicions about Jack.”
“Could be right. So, are you first generation?”
“My sister and I were born here, but our parents came from Sicily.”
His interest visibly sharpened. “Sicily?”
“Yes,” she responded, with a careful smile, “but without the sinister implication Scarlatti was fixated on. My father was a miner, not a mobster.”
“Well, we have something in common.”
“Your father was a miner?”
“No, but according to my mother, he was Sicilian. That was unusual, because my mother was a northerner, and traditionally northern Italians tended to scorn the people from the south. They certainly didn’t want their daughters marrying southerners.”
“But your mother did.”
“She always had a mind of her own—probably the main reason why I made it through school.” He made a wry face. “She rode me pretty hard.”
“Did you ever know your father?”
“He died when I was four. I only have a few memories.”
“What happened?”
“Drowned in some kind of freak accident. He was fishing with a few friends on Lago d’Iseo. It’s one of those lakes near Milan.”
Lucy could tell from the man’s expression that he didn’t want to take the subject any further. The conversation moved to other topics, and they parted with his promise to call her after he’d done some digging into the file on Cal Parrish’s murder.
Lucy had come very close to asking him back to the house for a coffee.
The Starting Point …
She began to wonder if he’d picked the place because of its name.
17
Trust.
It was always an issue with Lucy.
It was why she didn’t tell Robert Olivetti that she’d been arranging a parallel investigation of her own. She had first met National Insurance Crime Bureau investigator Brandon Kimball through a series of e-mails and, later, on a thirty-minute telephone call. He had persuaded her to send him a copy of Jack’s spreadsheet. Her final assessment of Kimball’s unusual qualities was based on a face-to-face meeting at Lucy’s home, where he spent an afternoon impressing her with his quick and incisive mind. He was ex-NYPD, a thin man whose salt-and-pepper goatee and ponytail might have led inattentive observers to misjudge him—to their serious detriment, Lucy suspected. He had flown out to Newark from Des Plaines, Illinois, for the sole purpose of meeting with her. She played him the recording of Jack’s conversation with Mulvaney, and took him on a narrative tour of the events since his murder, just as she had for Olivetti. She explained why she didn’t trust anyone in the police after the smear campaign against Jack, and he accepted that. He agreed to work with her confidentially, in exchange for her agreement that she would report to him anything that Olivetti turned up.
“Good, or bad,” he said, looking her in the eye.
“You have my word.”
As with Olivetti, Lucy didn’t mention Dominic Lanza’s visit. She didn’t want to plant immediate seeds of doubt in the investigator’s mind … and somehow, behind it all and barely admitted to herself, she wanted to hold that perilous connection in reserve.
Meanwhile, despite her lingering resistance, the relationship with Olivetti was moving in a direction she hadn’t prepared for. He called her a few nights after Brandon Kimball’s visit and, getting right to the point, he asked her to dinner. On an impulse, she accepted. It helped that she’d finally found a reliable babysitter—the teenaged daughter of a couple who lived a few doors down. Tracy Galvez was an only child, mature beyond her sixteen years, and had come highly recommended by two other couples living on the street. It also helped that, after a few test runs, Tracy had made a point of telling her that Kevin was the best behaved little boy she had ever looked after.
They met at Café Bello. It was packed and a bit noisy, but the food was good and the evening was, well, actually great fun. By unspoken agreement, they refrained from discussing the case, and, by the end of the evening, Lucy felt comfortable enough to give him a parting hug.
Over the next few weeks, in her quiet moments, she continually questioned herself and made resolutions to draw a line in the relationship. Her rising interest in Robert felt like betrayal. Then he would call, and her resolve would evaporate. She found herself rebelling against herself—rebelling against her reserve, against her reticence, and against all the baggage she knew she’d been dragging around for far too long.
Against all odds, and against every woven fiber of Jack’s memory, a relationship began to blossom. So far, they had only met at restaurants in Bayonne, and once for a quiet evening at a Portuguese place on Ferry Street in Newark. Robert had never been to Lucy’s home, nor had he invited her to his, but the natural trajectory of events was inching in that direction.
Meanwhile, Kevin had been exhibiting increasingly frequent episodes of odd behavior. Occasionally he limped, favoring his right leg. He sometimes talked about things he couldn’t possibly know—events in Lucy’s past life, or in Jack’s. Events she had never mentioned. Things a boy of his age shouldn’t even understand.
She had kept all this to herself.
But then the boy spoke French.
They were in the car, approaching a church. A man wielding an extension pole was just adding the final letter to a motto on a marquee sign next to the road.
“What does that man’s sign say, Mommy?”
“It says, ‘Feed your faith, not your fear.’”
The spillover effects of 9/11 are everywhere, she was thinking—just before her son almost caused her to lose control of her car.
“Qui perd sa langue, perd sa foi,” the boy said.
Lucy felt suddenly light-headed. She braked so hard the car behind nearly rear-ended her. Angry horns blared. She swung to the curb.
Jack’s mother, Elise, had been born Elise Ouellette in northern Maine. Her parents had come from Quebec. For decades, French Canadians living in the New England states had been discriminated against. In the 1920s, the largest Ku Klux Klan chapter outside the South was headquartered in Maine, and their primary target was the French Canadian minority. Elise had been beaten in school for speaking French. Jack had related his mother’s family history to Lucy, and he had occasionally repeated one of her sayings: Qui perd sa langue, perd sa foi. Who loses his language, loses his faith.
Lucy leaned toward Kevin. “Jack,” she whispered, “is that you?”
“I was,” the boy replied. “But I’m gone.”
Then Kevin was back, and the moment was gone as well.
Lucy almost broke down. Then an
d there she decided she needed to talk to someone. And the only person she could think of was Robert Olivetti.
* * *
They were back at The Starting Point, sitting in the same back corner.
“Try the meatloaf,” the middle-aged lady said as she dropped two menus on the table. “We’re famous for it.” She was the same woman who’d been working behind the bar on their last visit. If she remembered them, she gave no sign of it.
“She’s right, Robert. It’s amazing.”
He raised an eyebrow. “And you know this because…?”
“I live just down the street.”
He cocked his head. “So, our first visit here wasn’t your first visit here.”
“Not exactly. Try the meatloaf! You’re going to need some serious sustenance to get you through today’s conversation.”
“That sounds ominous.” He turned to their server. “I guess it’s the meatloaf.”
“It comes with mashed potatoes, gravy, and candy-glazed carrots. Is that okay?”
Olivetti managed a strained grin. “Bring it on.”
“And for the lady?”
“The same. Thank you.”
The woman retrieved their menus and headed for the kitchen.
“You’re acting very mysterious, Lucy. Why today, and why here?”
Today was Sunday, and Lucy had roused him at seven this morning just to ask him to meet her for lunch at The Starting Point.
“Today, because something happened yesterday that I want to tell you about, and here, because it’s close to my house.” While Robert pondered that enigmatic reply, Lucy took a long pull on her beer. Her hand trembled as she set the glass down. “You’re going to think I’m crazy.”
“I guess I’ll have to be the judge of that. Why don’t you start by telling me what happened yesterday?”
“Yesterday was just the latest … incident. You need to hear this from the beginning.”
“How far back is the beginning?”
“Last Christmas.”
He took a deep breath. “Okay. When you’re ready.”
Lucy started talking. She began slowly, describing Kevin’s opening act on Christmas Day in Florida, his rising obsession with going home … home to Bayonne, a city he had never seen, in a state he had left while still a fetus. She picked her words carefully, watching Robert’s face, waiting for the first sign of skepticism, the first signs of dismissal. But soon, at full sail, running downwind through her memories, all restraint was forgotten. Her words and her fears and her speculations just tumbled out as she described her son’s episodes of limping, their side trip to Jack’s childhood home, the boy’s use of pet names for her that only Jack had used, his unnerving lip-sync serenade of “Every Breath You Take,” and the whole screwdriver-in-the-taillight business.
“—and, then, yesterday topped it off.”
“What did he do?”
Lucy had been watching for any telltale sign, a narrowed gaze, a disbelieving curve of the mouth—any hint of the effect of her words—but Robert’s expression had remained steadfastly neutral throughout.
“He spoke to me in French.” She explained the significance of the phrase Kevin had quoted, and the child’s unsettling response when she asked, “Jack, is that you?”
The sudden arrival of their meal interrupted Lucy’s narrative. She hadn’t yet told Robert the truth about how she found the USB drive. She was saving that for last.
Robert examined the plate in front of him. It was heaped with food—thick cut carrots, dense slabs of meatloaf, and a Matterhorn of mashed potatoes, all swimming in thick, dark gravy.
“I think,” he ventured slowly, “that you and I could have shared an order.”
“You’re right. I’d forgotten.”
“Well, might as well make the best of it.” He picked up his knife and fork and dug in.
They ate in silence, mainly because Robert seemed distracted, as if he was turning everything over in his mind, and Lucy was reluctant to interrupt.
“Have you asked Kevin who shot him?”
The question came out of the blue. Lucy’s expression darkened. She set down her fork. She felt her body shift away from him.
“Are you mocking me, Robert?”
He looked suddenly alarmed. He reached a hand across and gently covered one of hers. “No! Not at all. I’m sorry if it sounded like that. I’m trying to do what we all do when we read a novel that slips outside life’s norms, or, say, when we watch one of those sci-fi channels. I’m suspending disbelief. I’m accepting, for the sake of discussion, that everything you have told me happened, and that one possible explanation for those events is that, somehow, by some means we don’t understand, some of Jack’s memories have been replicated in Kevin.”
Lucy’s shoulders relaxed. “Okay. I guess that’s all I can ask.”
“So I’m saying—assuming all of the above—the one thing we most need to know…” His voice trailed off.
She waited.
“Forgive me for putting this so bluntly. We need to know if Kevin is carrying any memory of the last seconds of Jack’s life.”
“In other words, does he remember the face of the man who shot him?”
“Yes.”
A second passed, and then Lucy said, “Why don’t we ask him?”
Robert tilted his head.
“We?”
“You’re thinking: ‘Kevin has never met me. Why would he tell me anything?’”
“That’s exactly what I’m thinking.”
“He probably won’t say anything … at first. You’d have to earn his trust.”
Robert regarded her carefully. “Have I just passed some kind of test?”
“As a matter of fact…”
“And if I had failed?”
“Then, today’s visit to The Starting Point would have been The Ending Point in our relationship.”
“Does that mean … we have a relationship?”
Moment of truth, Lucy …
“I think we do.”
18
“Have you spoken to anyone else about this … this thing with Kevin?”
Lucy unlocked the front door to her house.
“No. Just you.” She swung the door open and called out, “Tracy? I’m home!”
No reply.
“Tracy?”
“In here!” came the answer.
They found Tracy and Kevin sitting at the kitchen table. Playing cards. Jack’s old scrimshaw cribbage board lay on the table between them.
As they entered, Tracy looked up and blurted, “Kevin’s amazing! He taught me to play this cool game!”
Kevin was sitting across from the teenager, straight-backed and serious. He stared at Olivetti. He laid down his cards. “Mommy, I know that man,” he announced.
A second passed as the comment sunk in. Olivetti turned to Lucy. “Did you orchestrate this?”
“I’ve never mentioned you to him.”
Olivetti went pale.
Tracy looked from face to face, clearly puzzled by the exchange. She pushed back her chair. “Guess I should go.” She circled the table and gave Kevin a hug. Lucy walked the girl to the door.
As she was leaving, Tracy turned in the doorway and said, “You know, I saw that deck of cards in the kitchen drawer and I asked Kevin if he’d like to play Go Fish and he said, ‘No, wait,’ and ran upstairs and came back with that ivory scoreboard.”
“He must have seen it in my bedside table. It belonged to my husband.”
“But he’s so young! How did he learn to count cards like that?”
“Kevin’s pretty smart.”
“He sure is! I mean, most of the time he’s just a little boy, but then all of a sudden he acts all grown up.”
“He spends a lot of time with adults,” Lucy replied, dissembling. “He’s probably growing up a bit too fast.”
“He’s a cool kid! I’ll totally babysit him anytime.”
“Thanks, Tracy.” Lucy smiled. “That totally makes
me glad.”
When Lucy returned to the kitchen, she found Robert sitting in Tracy’s place at the table.
“And what’s my last name?” The question was directed to Kevin, but his eyes were on Lucy.
“Olly.”
“Olly what?”
“Olly … vetty.”
“Did you—?” Lucy began.
“I didn’t tell him anything. When you were out of the room, he asked me if I would play cards. He addressed me by my first name.” Robert turned to the boy. “Kevin, do you remember where we met?”
Lucy watched her son’s face. She saw his eyes widen … and then she saw the blink. She knew what was coming next. Kevin jumped off his chair and scuttled over to her. She kneeled down.
“Mommy…”
“What is it, honey?”
“I’m tired.”
“I know.” She hugged him tight. Over the boy’s shoulder, she said, “Sometimes, it all just wears him out.” She rose to her feet and took his hand. “I’ll be right back.”
As she led Kevin away, Olivetti just sat and stared.
* * *
Robert Olivetti stayed for the afternoon, for dinner, and into the evening.
After Kevin awoke from his nap, and until Lucy finally put the boy to bed for the night, there were no more paranormal moments. Kevin remained firmly fixed in his five-year-old persona, and Robert, suppressing every sign of his earlier discomfiture, maintained a relaxed and friendly mien, assuming a sort of uncle role. Despite this, at times it seemed to Lucy that man and boy were circling each other, each taking the other’s measure. It was a peculiar dynamic, one that Lucy eventually put down more to her own overactive imagination than to any basis in reality.
Eventually, they had the inevitable conversation.
The one about Kevin’s memories, and Jack’s murder.
They were sitting on the couch. “Has there ever been an episode when you could have asked him?” Robert chose his words carefully. “I mean, a moment when he seemed to remember that parking garage?”
“No.”
“Anything at all relating to his investigation?”
Lucy was quiet. “There was one thing.”
“What?”
“I was waiting for the right time to tell you.”
Storm Rising Page 13
