I curled up in a pew in the candlelit mission and waited for morning to come. I still needed to figure out how to get back to San Francisco. The rental car, parked back near my godfather’s house, was a loss. I thought again of the cars in my parents’ garage but if what my godfather said was true—that someone else out there wanted me dead—my parents’ house was an obvious place to look. I didn’t even know where to start. I’d been convinced that my godfather was the killer, but now it looked like someone else was on the scene. I supposed there was a chance my godfather was lying and that one of his many enemies had broken into his house to kill him and it had nothing to do with me.
I didn’t think my family had any enemies. If my godfather had really sent those men to protect me and bring me back to Monterey, that still didn’t explain why would someone kill my parents and then try to kill me?
What I did know was that I’d have to figure out some other way to get back home. I didn’t dare go to Dante’s mother’s house again. Before, when I thought it was my godfather who wanted me dead, I hadn’t worried about her safety. But with this new information — all bets were off. I couldn’t take the chance of putting anyone else in danger. Not after what happened to Kato.
I curled up on a back pew. The mission bells ringing at eight woke me. The church around me was filled with tourists who had just got off a tour bus and were loudly commenting on the beautiful sacristy. With my coat pulled over my head, they’d probably thought I was a vagrant. I felt like one.
After tidying up a bit in one of the bathrooms at the mission, I snuck onto one of the empty tour buses parked out front. I waited to make my move until I saw a driver pull out a pack of smokes and sneak around the backside of the bus. I didn’t care where it was headed as long as it was far away from here. I sat in a row toward the back and buried my face in a brochure about the Mission when people started boarding the bus. When the bus started up, a couple of elderly ladies kept looking at me and whispering. I closed my eyes and pretended to sleep. I figured I’d probably taken one of their seats.
It wasn’t until the bus pulled over for a snack break at a coffee shop in Salinas and all of the passengers had filed out except me, that the tour guide noticed me.
“Excuse me. I don’t recall you being on the bus before.” The woman’s neat bun and the frown between her eyes meant no nonsense. “This tour is for the Women’s Club of Gilroy.”
I acted shocked and jumped out of my seat, grabbing my bag. “Oh, my gosh, I had a migraine and must’ve crawled on the wrong bus and fallen asleep. I can’t believe I got on the wrong one. Oh no!”
I acted so distraught, she believed me. I rushed past her. “I need to find a phone. My friends are going to be worried sick.”
I rented a car in Salinas under another fake identity Darling had given me.
Back in San Francisco, I dropped off the rental car and took a cab back to the Tenderloin. As I paid the cabbie, I looked around again for Ethel. I hadn’t seen her since before I left for Europe. I hoped she was okay and not passed out drunk in some alley. Her absence worried me. I’d lost too many people around me not to worry.
When I finally made it to my room and gave Django enough pets for him to settle down, I curled up in my bed with all my clothes on and just stared at the wall. Now that I was safe and could relax, the implications of the day before struck me full force.
My godfather was dead. Although I had just settled under the covers, I leaped out of bed, got a chair so I could reach my mother’s box from its high shelf in my kitchen area.
The answer had to be in there somewhere.
I reached for the box and felt empty air.
My hand ran over the shelf again. There it was, pushed farther back than I had thought.
I opened a can of tuna and shared it with Django as I sorted through a stack of love letters from my dad. I read about six of them and my heart both hurt and filled with happiness at the love my parents had shared.
From what I could piece together, my mother and father had started dating when they were fourteen years old. When my father turned sixteen, he left Sicily and came to Monterey to work for his father on a fishing boat. The two teens pledged their eternal love for one another and made plans to marry once my mother turned eighteen. Then the letters grew sad. My mother’s parents were both killed in a freak boat wreck on their way to Sardinia.
“My love. I am so lost. The pain is almost too much to bear. When I think about mama and papa, the world around me turns black. If I didn’t have you, I would just walk off the cliff by my house. Thoughts of you are the only thing that stop me from doing that.”
I stopped reading for a second. I was living my mother’s life. We were both orphans who had lost everything. Except, unlike her, I had no boyfriend. I had no one to love. My world had been black since their death.
Even though she always loved Christopher more, even though I always felt second best, her absence left a hole in my heart. And I knew no man would ever love me as much as my father had loved me.
My father wrote back begging her to be patient and to wait for him. He even offered to come back to Sicily and get her as soon as he had saved enough money.
The next letter my mother wrote sounded a bit more upbeat. She had been taken in by a friend of the family she called Uncle Tony.
I paused on that name. Uncle Tony was Mateo Antonio Turricci. I’d bet on it. I read on. He had become her guardian. That must be why he gave her that villa and the surrounding land. That explained the connection between Vito and Turricci—they knew each other from the old country. But it still didn’t explain why Turricci was going to pay Vito an insane amount of money for a development worth one-fourth of that.