Boiling Over

by Thea McAlistair

  Pearl giggled through her tears as she took her arm back.

  Sev cleared his throat. “Gattina, why don’t you play outside for a little while? Alex and I would like to talk to Mrs. Manco, and it would be very boring.” He gave me a look. “Isn’t that right?”

  “Uh, yes. Like chores and…taxes.” Shit, I was even worse at this than I thought. “Stay in the yard. Don’t go wandering into those trees.”

  Unperturbed by my bad acting, Pearl shrugged. “Okay. Can I take Daisy?”

  “Sure. But don’t let her out. If she gets lost, we’ll never get her back. And be careful with your wrist!”

  Apparently, that was good enough for her because she sprang up and grabbed the cage. Daisy yowled her displeasure but, thankfully, didn’t try clawing through the bars. Once they were gone, I allowed myself a small sigh of relief.

  “Our apologies,” Sev said. “We did not mean to surprise you by arriving so quickly. We only knew we were coming ourselves around eight o’clock.”

  Crista shrugged. “I think we are all rather used to, ah, emergencies when we work with Bella.” She nodded at us. “I imagine something must have gone very wrong if she sent you here.”

  Sev snorted. “Wrong is an understatement.”

  Her eyes scanned Sev’s face, lingering on the scar running down his left cheek from eye to chin. A souvenir of prison, though she had no way of knowing. Still, if she knew Bella, she had to know men with scars like that were not to be trifled with.

  “Well, I am happy to help,” Crista said. “I consider it returning the favor. Bella has been very good to me since Leo died.”

  Bella, good to people? What a riot. Then again, she had poured what had to be hundreds if not thousands of dollars into setting up this new life for us. And she had a soft spot for her now-deceased daughter and husband. She might want to help a childhood friend, particularly if said friend was now the widow of a man in her service.

  “In any case,” Crista continued, “you may tell me your story or not. Either way, I will still help you. I will make you answer one thing though: Is the little girl safe?”

  “She is,” Sev replied. “She is not running from anything. It is us who need to hide.”

  Crista’s eyes narrowed. “Then why bring her?”

  I took a breath. Time to test our story. “Why wouldn’t we? We’re her family.”

  “My stepdaughter,” Sev added. He gestured at me. “Alex is my late wife’s brother.”

  Crista’s gaze tracked between us, looking for the lie, maybe. After a second, she nodded. “I can imagine how hard raising her by yourself must be.”

  “I am not by myself.” He smiled at me. “But yes, it is a new experience.”

  Christ, he was a much better liar than me. I almost believed Pearl was his daughter, and I knew he’d met her less than a month ago. Crista was buying it. Her expression switched from squinting suspicion to pouting pity.

  “If you’ll forgive me, what was your wife’s name?” she asked.

  “Marianne,” I said quickly. Maybe too quickly. “And we had a brother named Martin who died a few days ago.”

  Sev’s brow furrowed for a moment before smoothing back to placid earnestness. We had agreed on the fictional woman’s name, not that Martin was supposed to be family as well. But Pearl would start talking about him at some point and having him be her other uncle would make everything sound a little less peculiar. While Martin would have never hurt a fly, grown men taking care of children who weren’t their own always raised a few eyebrows.

  “I’m very sorry for your loss,” said Crista. “Both of you.”

  “Thank you, we miss them both very much,” Sev murmured. “Now, signora, if you will excuse us. We thank you for your help and your hospitality, but I believe Alex and I must go find this house we are to be living in.”

  “Yes, of course!” She took the now-bloodied dishtowel from Sev. “It’s on the other side of town. Not far though. I can point your place out from the porch.” She smiled. Even her teeth were petite. “I will meet you outside in one moment. I must put this away.” She disappeared through a door on the far side of the room.

  As soon as she left, Sev smiled at me. “How friendly she is.”

  I tried to smile with him. “Yeah, friendly is one way of looking at it. You did a good job there, selling the dead wife thing.”

  He shrugged. “Loss feels the same, I think, no matter how it happens.”

  I winced. How stupid of me. He’d given up everything for me—nice home, easy job, his mother’s love, all in the last few weeks—and here I was asking how he managed to sound so pained. “I didn’t mean—”

  “I know what you meant.” His smile turned sad. “That’s one of the things I like about you. Your face shows everything, even when your words are not the best words.”

  I laughed uneasily. “Right, tell the writer his words aren’t good. Good revenge.”

  He stared at me a moment before heading for the front door. If my face was an open book, his was a lockbox of state secrets. The easy grins, I’d already learned, were a front for so many other emotions. Had he actually forgiven me, or was he still hurt? My stomach knotted up thinking about the latter.

  “Sev.”

  He turned his head. “Caro.” He walked outside without another word.

  Chapter Two

  Rendered speechless with anxiety, I followed Sev outside. Pearl sat near the car, singing to herself while chucking handfuls of grass at Daisy through the bars of the cage. The cat looked displeased at this particular turn of events. At our approach, Pearl scrambled to her feet.

  “Daisy doesn’t want to eat it,” she declared.

  “She doesn’t eat grass,” I said. “She’s a carnivore.”

  “What’s carnivore mean?”

  “It means she eats only meat. Come on, time to get back in the car.”

  She froze. “I don’t want to.”

  What? “It’s too hot for games—”

  “I don’t want to!”

  My eyes fell on her bandaged wrist. She probably had a point. If I’d been knocked around, I wouldn’t want to go back inside either.

  “Hey, Sev?” He paused opening the driver’s side door of the Oldsmobile to look at me. “How do you feel about walking up and coming back for the car? Pearl’s not keen on being a passenger right now.”

  “Ah. Well, I don’t mind. One moment.”

  I caught a glimpse of something slipping into his trouser pocket. His cigarette case? No, he tended to carry that in his jacket. His knife then. He’d gotten a new one almost as soon as we got to Boston. His old one had sunk to the bottom of the Westwick River as bloody evidence. He’d only killed Emma to protect me, but I knew she wasn’t his first kill. Sev was so gentle and affable with me, but a mob man was a mob man until he died, and there would always be an element of danger to him.

  Crista’s voice snapped me out of the hole I was digging for myself. “Are you all right, Mr. Carrow? You’re looking lost.”

  In her accent, Carrow sounded like caro. Sev winked at me. He knew my false name was Bella’s little joke. Caro mio, my beloved. At least the pseudonym covered any slip-ups he might make. Sev’s name had proved harder to disguise. Severo wasn’t exactly the most common name on the census, so his new papers said Sebastiano. We’d blame any hitch in my abbreviation on an early mishearing and refusal to adjust.

  It took me a second to gather my thoughts. “Pearl’s a little afraid of the car right now, so we were hoping you’d give us walking directions?”

  “Oh certainly.” She stepped off the porch. “I’d be happy to take you, even, if you are ready.”

  “Ready when you are,” I said, hoping the smile I’d plastered on my face disguised my nervousness. “Come on, Pearl. We’re going to take a little walk across town.”

  “Okay.” She hauled Daisy’s cage up with a grunt and shoved it into my arms. “You’ll have to hold her. She’s too heavy for me to carry all the way.”

&nbs
p; In ordinary circumstances, I would have laughed myself hoarse at the proposition of lugging a cat for over a mile, but since nothing about the circumstances were ordinary, I resigned myself to being Daisy’s lackey. Besides, Pearl had had too many things go wrong in her short life. If I could lift the burden of just one thing, even if that thing was a cat, I would do it.

  It was about a five-minute walk into town, and the trip might have been less if Pearl hadn’t stopped to exclaim about every plant and insect. I knew very little about nature, and so had nothing useful to say. Crista, however, seemed to know everything’s name, range, and food source from memory. Before we even reached the first storefront, I’d been educated on at least six types of shrub, three species of beetle, two breeds of butterflies, and the life cycle of cicadas.

  “Mrs. Manco knows a lot,” Pearl exclaimed. “Maybe more than you!”

  Had I just been insulted by a first grader? “She sure does know about bugs. Oh, hey, look, we’ve made it into town.”

  As I suspected from my glimpses on the drive up, Chickadee wasn’t so much a town as one long street with a handful of intersections. The first place we passed was a grocer, followed by a hardware store. Across the street from those was a garage with several truck hulls rusting by a gas pump out front. A barber, a diner, a clothing shop. Baker, butcher, drugstore. Townhall was little more than a brick square. The library next to it wasn’t much either, only differentiating itself from the other municipal buildings by having tall rounded windows to let in light. Bank. Post office. The white church I’d seen from the road, as I suspected, was only about forty feet high. Methodist said the billboard in its yard.

  Sev asked Crista something in Italian, and she answered in the same language.

  I shifted Daisy’s cage to my other hand. The barely healed injuries down my arm from the knifing Pearl’s father had given me ached. “Huh?”

  “Sorry.” Sev smiled. “I asked her if this was the only church in town.”

  “And it is,” she said. She pointed somewhere to our right. “I have to go to the Franciscan mission about five miles away.”

  “And you walk there?” Sev asked. She nodded. He tsked. “That’s no good. Sunday, I will pick you up, and we will go together.”

  She showed her petite teeth again. “Thank you. You’re very kind.”

  I clenched my jaw against the jealousy. Stop being ridiculous. Sev was always polite. He would never allow a lady to walk miles to go to church. Besides, he didn’t go for women. Right? I had never bothered to ask even though I knew some people went either way. Was it even my business to ask? He had picked me and gone above and beyond to prove it. And she had to be, what, forty years old? That was a big jump. Then again, we had a big age difference—

  “Alex?” His hand on my arm made me flinch. “Are you all right? You’re very red.”

  “Just hot,” I mumbled. Not a lie, exactly. I did feel too warm, and in our rush to flee Boston, I’d put on a wool jacket without thinking. I’d been pouring sweat all day.

  “Well, here.” Sev took Daisy’s cage. She growled and took a swipe at me as she passed between our hands. “We will stop for a minute.” He waved at a window ledge a few feet away. “Sit. Gattina, wait a moment.”

  I considered protesting, but I was glad for the chance to suss out all the negative emotions pouring through me. To breathe, as Donnie would have said. His voice still bounced around in my head sometimes, echoes of his fatherly wisdom. What was I going to do without him and Martin making sure I kept my nose clean?

  Pushing their memories away, I scrambled for something else for my mind to latch on to. I settled on watching the other pedestrians. There were quite a few, considering it was a Wednesday afternoon, people running errands among the few stores. Normal, if less populated than home. Except something about it seemed odd. It took me a minute to place my finger on it: I was only hearing English. No Yiddish or Chinese or Italian. Not even an Irish accent. And Sev and Crista were by far the darkest-complexioned people on the street. Even as I watched, a man passed a few inches from them and gave them a hateful glare.

  Breathe.

  A blonde woman in a sculpted brown hat had emerged from the door of the post office a few feet to my right. “Crista, how nice to see you,” she exclaimed. “Are these our new guests?”

  Great, more people. I looked to Pearl in the hopes she would be so fidgety I could justify continuing along, but she seemed content enough poking at some kind of beetle crawling on the nearby wall. Damn.

  “Hello, Judy, yes! Everyone, this is Judith Howe.” Crista made introductions for us, and hands were shaken all around. Judith was young, perhaps twenty-five, and had a pink Cupid’s-bow mouth and round cheeks—very pretty by Hollywood standards.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Judith. She glanced up at me through long lashes. If I had ever been in for the ladies, that look would’ve wound me up fast. “I’m sorry, Crista, dear, I don’t mean to badger: Have you seen Walter at all today? I was supposed to meet him in his office at two, but everyone at the factory says he never came in this morning. I checked with Joe, and he says he didn’t even see him while delivering the mail. I would ask Mr. Gaines, but he’s in Burlington and won’t be back until later.”

  At Walter’s name, Crista’s eye twitched. Judith didn’t seem to notice. “I’m afraid I haven’t. But, well, Walter is often gone, isn’t he?”

  “He hasn’t gone on a business trip in the last six or seven months. And he’s never broken a luncheon date with me.”

  “I’m sure he’s somewhere.” Crista glanced around as if she expected to see him lurking nearby. “Oh, maybe Mr. Parrish has seen him.” She waved at a man coming out of the library with a stack of books under his arm. “Mr. Parrish!”

  The man noticed and waved back before jogging across the road. Now Judith looked uncomfortable—she blanched like Crista had called over a Bengal tiger. I couldn’t fathom why. Parrish was a beanpole, very slim and as tall as me, and his thick glasses made his blue eyes seem far too big for his face. One punch from someone my size and he’d be flat on his back, if not knocked out. Even a delicate woman like Crista might have been able to toss him over. Hell, maybe even Pearl could if she aimed right.

  “Hello, Mrs. Manco, Miss Howe.” His nasal voice warbled as he pushed his glasses up with one finger. “What can I do for you?”

  “Have you seen Walter today?” Crista asked.

  Mr. Parrish shook his head. “Not since yesterday.” He turned to me and Sev and extended a hand. “You must be Mr. Carrow and Mr. Arrighi. Arthur Parrish. I’m the local librarian.” He smiled at Pearl. “I hear you’re staying for the summer, and I do hope you’ll stop by sometime.”

  Christ, did everyone in town know who we were already? Crista must have gone around and blabbed as soon as she got the note from Bella. “Fine by me,” I grumbled.

  Sev gave me a brief warning look. “We’re very pleased to meet all of you.” He beamed at the small crowd now surrounding us. “I apologize for Alex, he’s a little overheated. So, if you’ll pardon us, I think we should go so he can get some rest.”

  There was a flurry of farewells as Judith and Arthur excused themselves from the conversation and went their own ways. Arthur walked toward the north, Judith to the south, but after a few yards, she turned her head and paused as if checking up on him. I shook my head. The last thing I needed was to get involved in some small town’s petty business.

  I unfolded myself from my awkward seat, and after convincing Pearl to put down the bug she had collected, the rest of us continued down Main. As we passed the schoolhouse, I noted a sweet smell hung in the air. Maple. The source was an enormous brick building farther up the street. The sign running between the first and second floors read Trask and Co. Maple Sugar Mill in bold, red letters with gold outlining. I glanced at Sev. This was where Bella had said she’d gotten him a job.

  “Big business?” I asked.

  “The only business, besides the few shops,” Crista ans
wered. “Walter Trask owns it.”

  “Is this the Walter they were looking for?” Sev asked.

  There it was, the twitch again. “Judith has a nervous disposition. Sometimes he goes up to his groves to check for blights and forgets to tell people. He’s always back by sunset.”

  Odd. But if everyone in town was as irritating as the people I’d already met, I might also conveniently “forget” to tell them where I was going so I could hide in the woods in peace for a while. Or Bella might have sent him on some kind of illegal jaunt that took longer than anticipated.

  There was nothing on Main Street after the maple syrup factory, and we continued walking for another few minutes. A row of houses was perched across a ridge running perpendicular to the road. Not a street, exactly, but it had the ambition to become one. The house second from the left had a bike parked in front. Crista pointed to the building on the end.

  “That is the Reeds’ house where you’ll be staying,” she said. “This is their summer home, but they’re not there often.”

  The house did look quite summery with sunflower-yellow shutters against the white walls. It had all its shingles and no haphazard patching jobs. The bricks in the walk were even, and someone had gone through and ripped up all the little plants that had undoubtedly grown in the cracks at some point. Perhaps the most luxurious thing about the building was the open porch with a suspended wicker swing. I almost opened my mouth to protest such opulent surroundings, but luckily Sev got the first word in.

  “It’s very beautiful, and the Reeds have been very generous about letting us stay.” Sev passed Daisy’s cage back to me and produced a key from his jacket pocket and handed it to me as well. “Why don’t you go inside and lie down. I will go back with Crista and get the car.”

  “Oh, yeah, sure. See you in a few.”

  While they turned and headed back the way we’d come, I led Pearl into the house. Like the outside, the walls were painted a vivid white. I stood in the foyer with a staircase and stared straight into a kitchen at the back. To my left was a closed door. The right opened to a tasteful parlor with maple-wood furniture. I shut the front door and set Daisy’s cage down as Pearl bolted up the stairs.