Chapter 4 - THE HOUSE IN HACKENSACK AND THE BLUE TIN
"Nobody leaves this room," Damian told Nico, pointing at Uncle Salvatore and Valentina as he already had his car keys in one hand and the tiny white leather baby shoe in the other. "If Sal or Valentina goes near a phone or a window before I get back from Hackensack, break their wrists."
"Damian, wait!" Uncle Salvatore called out, gripping the edge of the mahogany table, looking every bit of his sixty-eight years as sweat beaded on his forehead. "Don't go to Hackensack without knowing why Frankie and I did it! If Lorenzo Russo’s men are watching Valentina’s cousin, they already know Matteo’s ticket was redeemed!"
Damian didn't slow down. He lifted his seventy-nine-year-old mother effortlessly into his arms to carry her out to his armored black Range Rover, pausing only at the doorway to look back at me.
"Emma, get your coat," Damian commanded. "You're riding up front with me."
Three minutes later, we were tearing west down Route 4 toward Hackensack at eighty miles an hour, the rain lashing against the windshield as the amber streetlights flashed across Damian’s chiseled, set jaw.
In the heated backseat, Rosa sat buckled in with her husband’s diner apron folded tightly against her chest and her diamond ring back on her finger.
Up front, my hands were shaking in my lap as I stared at the dashboard clock: 9:48 P.M.
My fifty-six-year-old mother, Helen Collins, was alone in our small clapboard house on Oak Ridge Lane—recovering from hip replacement surgery, unable to walk without an aluminum walker.
"Emma," Damian said, his voice cutting through the hum of the V8 engine, low and steady. "Tell me about the boy next door to your mother."
"His name is Leo," I said rapidly, trying to keep my voice from breaking. "He’s seven years old. He lives in the brick bungalow at 40 Oak Ridge with a quiet older woman named Mrs. Gable, who told the neighborhood she was a retired pediatric nurse raising her late daughter’s boy. Since my mother had her hip surgery two months ago, Leo comes through the hedge gap every afternoon at three o'clock with a thermos of minestrone soup from Mrs. Gable, and my mom helps him read his first-grade library books."
In the backseat, Rosa let out a choked sob. "Minestrone soup with little star pasta and a parmesan rind?"
I turned in my seat to look at her. "Yes, ma'am. My mom said it was the best soup she’d ever tasted—just like the old Italian diners in Jersey City used to make."
"That’s my sister Clara’s recipe!" Rosa wept, gripping the back of Damian’s leather headrest. "Damian, Clara died ten years ago, and her nursing partner at Hackensack General was Martha Gable! Frankie didn't put that blue sewing tin in the attic—he gave the contents to Martha Gable before his heart attack!"
Damian’s knuckles on the leather steering wheel turned white.
"Wait," Damian said, his dark eyes narrowing as he glanced at me for a fraction of a second. "Emma, earlier tonight in the dining room, you said the pawnshop clerk in Newark told you the gold bracelet was redeemed twenty minutes before you got there by a woman using your mother’s maiden name. If your mother can't walk without a walker, why did Mrs. Gable use your mother’s name at the pawnshop?"
I pulled my cell phone out of my purse with trembling fingers, my mind racing back to four months ago when my mother first fell and broke her hip on our front porch steps.
"My mother’s maiden name is Helen Novak," I said slowly. "Wait... when Mrs. Gable drove my mother to Hackensack University Medical Center after she fell in June, Mrs. Gable didn't go home while my mother was in surgery. She sat in the hospital chapel for six hours holding a small blue metal tin."
I remembered it clearly now. I had arrived at the hospital from work in my maid’s uniform, exhausted and terrified for my mom, and Mrs. Gable had been sitting in the front pew crying over an old blue biscuit tin. When she saw me, she had quickly shoved the tin into her canvas tote bag and asked me where I worked.
When I told her I worked at the Coletti estate in Englewood Cliffs, Mrs. Gable’s face had gone as white as a hospital sheet.
"She knew," I whispered, looking over at Damian. "Four months ago, when Mrs. Gable found out I was working in your house, she realized Valentina Russo was living under your roof. And on Tuesday, when I told my mom over the phone that Matteo had stolen Rosa’s bracelet and pawned it in Newark, my mom must have told Mrs. Gable!"
"And Martha Gable used your mother’s ID to buy that bracelet back so the Russo family wouldn't trace her real name to Hackensack," Damian finished grimly, pressing the accelerator down to the floorboards as we took the Hackensack exit ramp at sixty miles an hour.
"Damian, slow down, you're scaring me," Rosa whispered from the backseat, though she was leaning forward between our seats, staring through the rain-streaked glass. "Look—tell me what happened the night of the fire at the shore house in twenty-nineteen. You told me Elena died in the upstairs bedroom when the gas line exploded."
Damian’s jaw clenched so hard I thought his teeth would shatter. For five seconds, the only sound in the cab was the rhythmic slap of the windshield wipers.
"Elena wasn't five months pregnant when the shore house blew up, Mom," Damian said, his voice raw and stripped of every wall he kept around himself. "She was eight and a half months pregnant. We lied to the family and said she was due in July because my father found out someone inside our own crew was selling our travel schedules to the Russo family during the port strike."
Rosa gasped. "She was full term?"
"I wasn't supposed to leave her that night," Damian whispered, seven years of survivor's hell bleeding into every word. "My Uncle Sal called me at midnight and said one of our warehouse foremen had been shot at the Newark docks. It was a trap to get me thirty miles north. By the time I got back to Point Pleasant, the house was gone. The state medical examiner—who owed Lorenzo Russo his gambling markers—handed me a closed lead coffin and a death certificate for my wife and unborn child."
I stared at Damian’s profile in the dim dashboard light—this powerful, solitary man who walked through his mansion like a ghost, who never smiled until he saw his mother’s old diner apron tonight.
"Elena didn't die in that fire, did she?" I whispered.
"Elena died at Hackensack General seven months later, Emma," Damian said, looking down at the date from the pawn ticket burned into his memory: 10/14/2019. "No—wait. If my son was born in October of twenty-nineteen, five months after the fire really means Elena wasn't eight months pregnant that night. It means someone pulled her out of that house alive before the gas ignited, hid her for seven months until the baby was born, and my own father and Uncle Sal never told me!"
As the Range Rover turned sharply onto the quiet, maple-lined residential street of Oak Ridge Lane, my heart stopped dead in my chest.
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Sitting at the curb directly in front of my mother’s dark clapboard house—with its headlights off and the engine idling in the rain—was a sleek black Maserati Quattroporte bearing New York dealer plates.
And standing on my mother’s front porch, using a heavy crowbar to pry open the front screen door while a little boy’s face peered terrified through the upstairs bedroom curtains, were two men in dark leather coats.
