Jenny sat at the crowded kitchen table. Detective Dourson’s girlfriend, Lia, set a plate of steaming lasagna in front of her. Terry sat on her left, with Lia’s redheaded friend and Steve across from her. The ends of the table were vacant while the detective and Lia served dinner.
A damp nose bumped insistently against her leg. Lia’s schnauzer, looking for a handout before she had a chance to taste her food.
Lia scooped the dog up. “Chewy’s default is ‘pest.’ How did you get past the baby gate, little man? Back to the kiddie room with you.”
“He’s no bother. I enjoy dogs.”
Detective Dourson—Peter—handed her a glass of wine. “You’ll change your mind about that if we let him stay. Dig in while it’s hot. Lia will be back in a minute.”
Terry offered a basket of garlic toast. “Thank you again for Andrew’s leg. I shall treasure it always.”
Jenny took a slice, handed the basket to Steve. She didn’t know what to think about Terry’s plan to mount the prothesis on his canoe, but her discovery of the false leg led to Andrew’s death. She didn’t think she could bear to have it around. Terry would enjoy it without the baggage.
“You’re quite welcome.”
Lia and Peter joined them, a signal for the group to attack their meal. Between bites, the redhead with the graceful hands—Bailey?—said, “It must have been nice seeing Mrs. Redfern after all these years.”
“It was. She doesn’t remember me, but she’s still very sweet. She patted my hand and asked if I was a Merrill.”
Bailey’s overlarge Shelley Duvall eyes brimmed with compassion. “Dementia?”
“Yes, but she’s doing well, considering. She has a very protective group of friends at Twin Towers. You might recognize them.”
The table gave her a collective confused look.
Jenny explained. “From those silly videos—Susan’s Snippets?”
“I don’t understand,” Lia said.
“With Ms. Snippets coming around the neighborhood, Donna knew someone would eventually tell her where to find Gran. She asked Gran’s friends to watch out for her. They decided the best defense was a good offense and created a plan to distract her.”
“They made it up?” Lia said. “They weren’t random nuts?”
“Watch the videos again. You can tell they were determined to outdo each other.”
Terry shook his head. “Poor Susan. I hope she never finds out.”
Jenny saw Lia and Bailey trade looks over their wine. A change of subject was in order. “I heard from Jay Overstreet again.”
“Again?” Lia asked. “How many times has he called?”
“Five, maybe six. He wants my memories of Andrew for his book.”
“Will you do it?”
“I’m about ready to block him. It’s idiotic to think Andrew was a mobster with his hands on a fifty million dollar egg.”
Terry toyed with his lasagna. “Dick Brewer thought the same thing.”
“He also said Jay Overstreet killed Andrew. I guess he made that up to string me along. Dick was such a putz in high school. No wonder I didn’t recognize him. I can’t believe he killed Andrew.”
Bailey turned those sympathetic eyes on Jenny. “Even if Andrew isn’t Malachi, aren’t you wondering what’s inside that compartment you found at the house?”
“There was no compartment. I was buying time until I could figure out how to get away from Dick.”
“This is just like The Maltese Falcon,” Bailey said. “Do you suppose Malachi’s treasure ever existed?”
Steve snorted. “What businessman trusts a peon with that much money in the middle of a mob war?”
“That seems so obvious,” Lia said. “Why do you suppose the mob bought it?”
Peter snagged the last piece of garlic toast. “I’ve thought about it a lot. Magicians are masters of misdirection, and between Malachi and Pete, they would have foreseen the need for a contingency plan. I bet the Syndicate had informants inside the club and Pete knew they were there.
“So Malachi disappears and Pete plants a story with his inner circle that Malachi hid the money even from him, knowing it would get back to the mob and they would think the trail ended with Malachi. If Malachi had a cache, I bet it was a fraction of what everyone said.”
Words burned into Jenny’s head, words she couldn’t say: Then Andrew died for nothing.
Peter’s phone buzzed. He looked down at the screen, then held it in front of Jenny so only she could see the text:
DNA results indicate a match for immediate family with two degrees of separation.
Jenny looked up at Peter. “What does this mean?”
Peter nodded at the avid faces surrounding them. “Would you like to talk in private?”
Jenny took a sip of her wine. “I think I need to stay near the bottle.”
“We compared your DNA sample to Andrew’s. You’re related.”
“That’s not possible.”
“Two degrees of separation. Sibling or grandparent.”
“My grandfather died in the war. Grandma was a war widow.”
“Did your mother have any memories of her father?”
Jenny shook her head. “He joined up the day after Pearl Harbor. She wasn’t even a year old. He never came back.”
“December 8, 1941. Malachi disappeared in 1940, right before Pete Schmidt sold the Beverly Hills. You ever see any photos of your grandfather? Meet his family?”
Again, Jenny shook her head.
“A lot of unwed mothers assumed identities as war widows back then.”
Jenny blinked. “Why wouldn’t she tell me?”
“If the stories are true, I imagine she thought the less you knew the safer you were.”
“If it was so dangerous, why put me in his house?”
“A calculated risk? She was dying. I imagine she wanted you in a position where Andrew could help you and no one would think anything of it.”
The tears fell now. “Except I shot my mouth off and got him killed.”
“You didn’t know. Everyone involved had been dead for decades. It was a one-in-a-million chance that someone who could make sense of it overheard you.”
The room fell silent as Jenny collected herself. Lia’s chair scraped the floor as she got up, announcing dessert and coffee while she gathered empty plates. Across the table, Steve stared hard at Terry.
Terry excused himself, returning a few minutes later with a towel-wrapped bundle cradled in his arms like an infant. He placed it in front of Jenny. “You didn’t know he was family when you gave this to me. I think you should have it back.”
Jenny ran a hand under her nose and sniffed. The side of her mouth quirked up. “I don’t know what I’ll do with it.”
“Make a lamp out of it, like in A Christmas Story,” Steve cracked.
“I don’t have the right stockings.” Jenny pulled the towel aside and ran a hand over the wood, frowned.
“Is something wrong?” Terry asked.
Everyone leaned in closer.
She ran a finger along a hairline crack. “This wasn’t here when I saw it at the coroner’s office.”
“It was damp for thirty years,” Bailey said. “Now it’s drying out. A little wood filler will fix that.”
“It’s not that. Andrew made puzzle boxes. He gave me one. I still have it.”
“You think the leg is a puzzle box?” Lia asked.
Peter nodded at the leg. “Can you open it?”
“Maybe. He used a system of metal shims. Each shim has a hole drilled in it so they spin around on a nail. The holes are off center, so one side is heavier than the other. You have to rotate the box in a pattern to clear the shims from their latches. Then you can pull it open.”
“I wonder if he showed you the secret of the box on purpose,” Lia said.
Jenny held the prothesis by the ends. “Here goes nothing.” She manipulated the leg in a series of moves as familiar to her as breathing, then set it on the table. “Grab the other end,” she told Bailey.
They pulled.
Nothing.
“I have a rubber mallet in my truck,” Bailey said. “Maybe if you tap it a few times it will shake something loose.”
Lia and Peter served cheesecake and coffee as the group watched Jenny tap, shake and gyrate the leg. On the fifth try, something shifted. Jenny paused, astonished, as everyone whooped.
“What do you suppose is inside?” Bailey asked.
Terry waved a forkful of cheesecake. “It’s the egg.”
“Get real.” Steve said. “There isn’t enough space for that.”
Terry grinned. “This is better than Storage Wars.”
“Why guess?” Jenny said. “Pull!” Bailey tugged. The top of the prothesis came free, revealing a compartment. In it was a gray, plastic tube, two inches in diameter.
“I expected something classier than plastic,” Bailey said.
“Plastic is waterproof,” Lia said.
Jenny tipped the tube out of the slot with one finger. The screw cap stuck. She handed it to Peter. “You give it a shot.”
Peter placed the tube on the table and tapped the edge of the cap with the mallet. He grunted and gave a twist, handing it back to Jenny. Jenny unscrewed the lid and peered in.
“What is it?” Bailey asked.
“Something’s wedged inside.” Jenny used two fingers to ease out a stiffly curled booklet with a red leatherette cover. She pressed it flat. The gold leaf on the front was almost gone, but the embossed image of a harp remained. Above the harp, the words ÉIRE and IRELAND could still be read.
“It’s a passport!” She opened the little booklet, turning it sideways. A photo of Andrew smiled at her. She turned it around so everyone could see.
“Hello, Grandpa,” Peter said. “What name is on it?”
Jenny scanned the faded print. “Michael Collins, born May 28, 1919. Baile … something, Dublin. That’s the Irish version of John Smith. I’ll never find the right family.”
“You have a birthdate and place,” Lia said. “It’s enough. Add in your DNA and I bet you have relatives somewhere.”
Jenny clutched the passport, blinking against incipient tears. “I have roots.”
Bailey held the tube up, shook it gently. Something rattled. When she tipped it, three keys and a fat roll of bills slid out.
Peter nudged the keys apart with a long finger. “One of these is for a safe deposit box. I wonder what’s in it.”
“Has to be the egg,” Terry said.
“If the bank still exists,” Steve said.
“Don’t be a spoilsport,” Bailey said as she peered into the tube. “There’s something else in here.” She handed the tube to Jenny.
Jenny drew out a folded piece of paper covered with foxing. It was a page from a magazine, featuring a photo of Andrew wreathed in smoke. Under the photo, the ad listed European tour dates for a magician named Lazarus.
Lia peered over her shoulder. “Covent Garden, Palais Garnier, La Monnaie, the Colosseum. He must have been huge over there.”
Jenny stared, unable to take it in. “He pulled quarters out of my ears,” she heard herself say. “He made balloon animals for kids.”
Lia placed a hand on hers. “And I bet he enjoyed making children happy just as much as he enjoyed the big stages.”
“He was a public figure,” Peter said. “There’s a record somewhere.”
Steve examined the roll of bills. “That’s a hundred on the outside. If they’re all hundreds, you’ve got the money to go over there and track him down yourself.”
Father Nicholas opened his eyes to darkness and wondered what time it was. Two, three in the morning? He’d dreamt of the Sin City days again, as he had nightly since Mal’s bones rose out of the creek in a mocking imitation of Christ’s resurrection.
When the church secretary showed him the magazine cover with the hideous skull, he’d admonished her about the destructive nature of gossip—a conversation they’d had before and one with little effect. Then he’d prayed: for Mal’s soul, for justice, for direction. He’d been praying ever since.
God had not answered. If Mal’s reappearance was a sign, perhaps it was not meant for him. If he’d sinned—and that was questionable—perhaps it was not a large enough sin to follow him now at the end of his life.
The bible says, “Thou shall not steal.” Nicholas hadn’t stolen, not precisely, and while he’d confessed decades ago—at a church far from Cincinnati, to a priest who did not know him and did not know he was a member of the priesthood—in his heart he never repented his actions.
How could he, when those actions saved the life of a young man in over his head and delivered a devout young woman and her unborn child from mobsters who would destroy her future?
What a pompous boy he’d been: Nicholas, named for the saint of penitent thieves. In his hubris, he’d seen himself as the instrument of Mal’s rehabilitation and demanded a promise from Mal to give up his criminal ways as a condition for abetting his escape.
Uncharitable of him, as only absolution required penitence. His assistance should have been free of conditions.
Rose’s fury put a stop to Mal’s forced conversion.
They’d completed the grisly amputation, spiriting Mal away while murderous criminals lay in a drunken stupor overhead. A veterinarian cut off several more inches of leg to correct the splintered mess he and Ruth had made of the job, then hid Mal in a barn. A mission to Canada provided the means to smuggle him out of the country, funded by the contents of a package hidden in the dismantled hearse.
In return, Mal asked for help disposing of his share of Pete Schmidt’s gems and gold. A third went to Mal, another third went to getting Rose out of Newport and into nursing school. Nicholas donated the rest anonymously to the church.
Mal winked when he offered the share for the church, expecting Nicholas to take it for himself. He’d declined. He planned to enter the seminary and saw this temptation as the first test of his commitment to God.
A message he’d sent through circuitous channels months later turned their brief connection into an uneasy friendship. Rose, pregnant, needed help. For more than forty years, Nicholas served as the conduit through which Mal looked after the family he could not acknowledge.
Mal prospered under a variety of names, performing in Europe as Lazarus while acting as a smuggler and go-between in dealings involving powerful and dangerous men. He could have provided better for his secret family, but they’d all agreed too much prosperity would draw eyes and awaken memories.
This connection and the resulting donations had been a blessing for his church. He’d come to appreciate Nicholas as the patron saint of secret giving as well as penitent thieves. He liked to think of his name as a sign that God had a sense of humor, approving of his actions and the good that came from the bad.
And after all, Mal was not a thief or murderer, though he trafficked with those who were.
Mal returned to Cincinnati when Jenny was ten and her parents died in a car crash. By then Rose’s health was already failing. He needed to be closer at hand, though he wished to remain a step removed. Nicholas thought it a foolish precaution.
Mal treasured his brief encounters with Jenny at church festivals. It had been Nicholas who suggested hiring her as a housekeeper, and he ached for Rose and Jenny when Mal disappeared. With that ache came fear that the past had refused to stay buried.
So Rose and Jenny disappeared as well.
He’d been right, in a sense. They’d arrested a man named Brewer for Mal’s murder. Rose’s uncle Stu had a daughter who married a Brewer. This man must be Stu’s great-grandson. Stu had been greedy and immoral. Not surprising his progeny was as well.
Nicholas recognized Jenny immediately when her photo appeared in the papers, despite the three decades since she’d left Cincinnati. He wondered if she knew this Brewer was a cousin of some sort to her or that Mal was her grandfather.
Stu’s great-grandson killed Mal in pursuit of the treasure Stu lusted for. Mal’s granddaughter caught his killer. Mysterious ways, indeed.
The paper said Jenny was a hospice nurse. Blood ran true there as well, this entire chain of events starting as it did while Rose nursed her dying mother.
How much had Rose told Jenny about her family tree? Nothing, or Jenny would not have returned. He was kin to her, if distant. She might like to know she had family left.
Perhaps he would contact her, tell her the whole story. Mal must have squirreled money away. Perhaps he could help her find it.
He would pray on it.
Nicholas shoved himself into a sitting position against the headboard and turned on the bedside lamp. He picked up the small box on his nightstand, holding it in his hands while repeating a small, private prayer he’d been saying for seventy years.
The box, Mal’s gift, a way to safeguard their private matters. He hadn’t removed the false bottom for more than a decade, hadn’t felt the need, and his arthritic fingers struggled to release the catch.
Seventy years ago, Nicholas briefly felt the presence of the glory of God, embodied in the indescribable beauty of Fabergé’s Cherub and Chariot.
He’d never been given to covetousness. This once, he’d yearned.
He could not keep it, could not give it to the church, not without endangering all of them. When Mal found a place for it in a private collection in Europe, he’d kept a photograph. Black and white, paling beside the original, but it remained unfaded so many years later.
He removed the photo from the shallow compartment and held it close to eyes that could barely make out the image, even in daylight. It was his last vanity, holding on to this remembrance.
He was long past the age when waking in the morning was a given. It would never do for his connection to the egg to come to light, regardless of the time that had passed or good that came from it. Not for his sake. That was in the hands of God, and he was reconciled to God’s judgment. It was the church he thought of, and the many scandals suffered in recent years.
He set the photo down and fumbled in the drawer for the candle and matches he kept there. He lit the candle, staring into the bright flame while he prayed.
When he was done, he lifted the photo with a trembling hand, holding one corner to the hungry flame until it caught, held it as the glorious cherub darkened and rose to Heaven on a plume of smoke.