Chapter 5 - THE PORCH ON OAK RIDGE AND THE WOODEN SOLDIER
Damian didn't touch the brakes until we were twenty feet from the rear bumper of the black Maserati.
Instead of stopping at the curb, he cut the steering wheel hard to the left, jumping the four-inch concrete curb and driving the three-ton armored Range Rover straight across my mother’s wet front lawn to pin the two men in the glare of our high beams right against the porch steps.
"Stay in the car and lock the doors!" Damian barked to me and Rosa as he threw the transmission into park and burst out of the driver’s door before the truck had even stopped rocking on its suspension.
The taller of the two men on the porch spun around, dropping the iron crowbar and reaching beneath his wet leather trench coat for a shoulder holster.
He never cleared the leather.
Damian took the three wooden porch steps in a single bound, caught the man’s gun wrist in mid-draw, and slammed his elbow straight across the bridge of the thug’s nose with a crack loud enough to be heard through our closed windshield.
The second man lunged at Damian from behind with a switchblade—only for me to hit the panic alarm button on the Range Rover’s dashboard while throwing my passenger door wide open and swinging my mother’s heavy spare steel cane from the footwell straight into the back of the second man’s knee.
The man buckled with a howl onto the wet porch boards, and Damian finished him with a brutal kick to the ribs that sent him rolling down into the hydrangea bushes.
Within ten seconds, both men were zip-tied wrist-to-ankle against the cast-iron porch railing with plastic cuffs from Damian’s door panel.
"Emma, are you hurt?" Damian breathed, grabbing my shoulders under the porch light, his dark eyes scanning my face with fierce, protective alarm before I could even catch my breath.
"I'm fine!" I gasped, already pulling my house key from my purse and unlocking the damaged front door. "Mom! Leo!"
We rushed into the warm, familiar front hallway of my childhood home, followed closely by Rosa, who had refused to stay in the truck once the fighting stopped.
At the top of the narrow carpeted stairs stood my mother, Helen, leaning heavily on her aluminum walker—and positioned bravely in front of the upstairs bathroom door with my late father’s old wooden Little League baseball bat held in her right hand.
Behind the half-open bathroom door stood Mrs. Gable, her white hair pinned in a neat bun, holding a seven-year-old boy with thick, wavy dark hair and Damian’s exact piercing dark eyes.
"Emma!" my mother cried out, her knees nearly giving way with relief as she lowered the baseball bat. "Thank God! Those men cut the phone line at the pole ten minutes ago! They kept yelling through the door for Martha to hand over the blue box!"
Seven-year-old Leo stepped out from behind Mrs. Gable’s skirt at the top of the stairs.
He was wearing blue dinosaur pajamas, one white sock on his left foot, and his right foot was bare—where the scuffed white leather baby shoe had been tied onto the drawstring of his backpack before Mrs. Gable dropped it in Newark on Tuesday.
In his small hands, Leo was clutching two things: a battered blue metal sewing tin, and a hand-carved wooden toy soldier painted in red and gold.
Leo looked down the staircase straight at Damian standing in the front hall.
The seven-year-old didn't cry or hide. He looked at Damian’s tall frame, his dark hair wet from the rain, and then down at the wooden toy soldier in his hand.
"Are you the man who fixed the soldier's arm?" Leo asked clearly from the top step.
Damian stood at the bottom of the stairs as if his boots had been nailed into the oak floorboards.
His throat worked silently for three full seconds before a single sound came out.
That hand-carved wooden soldier had belonged to Damian when he was seven years old. When its left wooden arm broke off behind the counter of Rosa’s Diner in 1992, Damian and his father had glued it back on using a brass dowel pin—and seven years ago, Damian had placed that exact wooden soldier inside the crib of the nursery at the Point Pleasant shore house two days before the fire.
"Yeah, buddy," Damian whispered, his voice breaking so completely that my own eyes filled with tears. "I fixed his arm with a brass pin so it wouldn't fall off again."
Leo walked slowly down three steps and sat down on the carpeted stair, holding the wooden soldier out toward him. "Grandma Martha said when the man who knows about the brass pin comes to the door, I don't have to hide in the closet anymore."
Damian climbed the stairs not like a mafia boss, but like a man approaching an altar. He dropped to his knees two steps below the boy, resting his hands palms-up on the carpet so he wouldn't startle him.
Behind us in the front hallway, seventy-nine-year-old Rosa covered her mouth with both hands, weeping silently against my shoulder as she looked at the living image of her son at seven years old.
"Martha," Damian said softly, lifting his tear-filled eyes from the boy to the retired nurse standing at the top of the landing. "How did you get him out of Point Pleasant? The entire second floor of that house collapsed before the fire trucks even arrived."
Martha Gable walked down the steps and sat beside Leo, placing a gentle hand on the boy’s dark curls.
"Because the fire was in March of twenty-nineteen, Mr. Coletti—and your wife wasn't in that house when it burned," Martha said quietly, gesturing toward the battered blue sewing tin in Leo’s lap. "Open your father’s tin. Everything Frankie and I hid from the Russo family is inside."
Damian reached out with a trembling hand and lifted the lid off the blue metal sewing tin.
Inside, resting on top of the gold charm bracelet Emma had tried to buy back in Newark, was a laminated state birth certificate from Hackensack University Medical Center dated October 14, 2019—and beneath it, a color photograph taken inside a hospital room on that exact same day.
Wait.
I leaned over the stair railing beside Rosa and looked down at the photograph in Damian’s hands.
In the photo, holding the newborn baby boy wrapped in a blue hospital blanket, was Damian’s late father, Frankie Coletti.
And lying in the hospital bed beside him, smiling weakly at the camera with an oxygen cannula in her nose and NO burn scars anywhere on her face or arms, was a dark-haired woman—alive and whole seven months after her supposed death in the Point Pleasant fire.
"Elena was two months pregnant in March when she found out who set that bomb on the gas line at the shore house, Damian," Martha Gable said softly. "She staged her own death with your father’s help and hid in my sister’s convent in Morristown for seven months until Leo was born—because the person who wired the shore house to blow up wasn't Lorenzo Russo."
Damian stared at the back of the hospital photograph, where his late wife Elena had written a final note in blue ink two hours before she died of a postpartum amniotic embolism.
"If she wasn't hiding from Lorenzo Russo," Damian whispered, his face turning gray as he read his dead wife's handwriting, "who was she hiding from?"
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Martha pointed down through the open front door at the black Maserati parked across the street.
"From the woman who was sitting in the back seat of that Maserati five minutes ago before she drove off in the second car," Martha said. "Elena’s own younger cousin—Valentina Russo."
