Chapter 8 - THE ROAD THROUGH THE WOODS
The Mercedes ate up the dark miles between Chicago and the Wisconsin border at over a hundred miles an hour, the heavy armored chassis holding the wet pavement like a train on rails.
Up front, Sal didn’t say another word. Wait-and-see wasn’t in the old man’s blood; he drove with the fierce, silent concentration of a man who had spent a lifetime keeping the people he loved alive.
In the back seat, the revelation hung in the air like smoke.
“You knew,” Luca said finally, turning halfway in his passenger seat to stare at Sal’s profile in the green glow of the dashboard. “Back at the house on West Addison, you told me you didn’t know about Clara.”
“I told you Marco kept her out of the town cars, and that’s the truth,” Sal said, his eyes never leaving the high beams cutting through the mist. “I didn’t know her name was Clara Bellini, and I never saw her face. Marco asked me to borrow my personal station wagon on Sunday nights and drop him at an old gravel turnout behind the state park up near Lake Geneva. When I picked him up at dawn, he smelled like turpentine, oil paint, and women’s perfume, and he was happier than I’d ever seen him since your mother died.”
Sal glanced into the rearview mirror, his eyes meeting mine before shifting to the sleeping boy in Elena’s lap.
“He made me swear on your mother’s rosary that if your father or Uncle Corrado ever asked where he went on Sundays, I’d tell them I drove him to the boats in Indiana to play cards,” Sal continued softly. “After they pulled his car out of the river, I drove up to that gravel turnout three times by myself and sat there with my thermos, hoping whoever she was would come through the trees so I could tell her Marco didn’t suffer. She never came. I figured she’d gone back to wherever she came from.”
Vanessa was staring at the back of Sal’s gray head, the arrogance that had defined her at the start of the night completely stripped away. “You waited for her in the cold?” she whispered. “And tonight I tried to throw you out into the street with twenty dollars for a cab.”
Sal didn’t offer her easy forgiveness. He wasn’t that kind of man. “You didn’t hurt me, Miss Bellini. You just hurt the people who trusted you. Now hold onto the door handle—we’re coming off the highway.”
Sal killed the headlights fifty yards before the exit ramp for County Road H, navigating purely by the pale moonlight and the memory of thirty-four years of driving northern routes.
Within four minutes, the smooth asphalt ended. The heavy sedan lurched onto a narrow, overgrown track of rutted mud and crushed limestone, pine branches scraping loudly against the bulletproof glass on both sides.
“Luca,” Sal said, slowing the car as a rusted iron chain appeared between two stone pillars ahead, marking the back boundary of the Bellini estate. “My station wagon couldn’t clear the ridge past this chain, so it’s a quarter-mile walk through the birches to the back of the lodge house. Give me the briefcase key.”
“You’re staying with the car and the women, Sal,” Luca said, already reaching beneath his tuxedo jacket to pull a compact black nine-millimeter from the holster at the small of his back—a weapon I hadn’t even realized he was wearing during the engagement dinner.
“Like hell I am,” Sal said quietly. He reached into the driver’s side door pocket, pulled out a heavy brass tire iron wrapped in black electrical tape, and popped the trunk release. “You’ve got a twisted ankle from squash last week, and you don’t know the footing on that ridge in the dark. Besides, if Clara looks out that window and sees a Moretti coming through the trees with a gun, she’ll scream and wake the guards. If she sees my driving coat and cap, she’ll open the door.”
Luca hesitated for two seconds, looking into the eyes of the man who had raised him alongside his father. Then he nodded once.
“Emma,” Luca said, turning to me as he opened his door. “Slide over into the driver’s seat right now. Keep your foot near the brake. If you see headlights coming down the front driveway through those trees, or if we’re not back in twelve minutes, put this car in reverse, back straight out to the county road, and drive Leo and Elena to the Walworth County Sheriff’s station in Elkhorn. Do not wait for me.”
“What about me?” Vanessa asked, her voice small as she reached for the door handle. “I know the layout of the back porch—”
“You stay in that seat and keep your hands where Emma can see them,” Luca told her coldly. “You’ve done enough helping for one lifetime.”
I climbed over the center console into the warm leather seat Sal had just vacated, my heart pounding so hard I could feel it in my teeth. Through the windshield, I watched Luca and the seventy-one-year-old chauffeur step over the rusted chain and vanish into the black wall of birch trees.
Inside the car, the silence was agonizing.
Little Leo stirred in the back seat, rubbing his eyes with his fist as the warmth of the car faded with the engine cut to auxiliary power. “Nonna?” he mumbled, looking around at the dark trees pressing against the windows. “Where’s the big train?”
“Shh, amore mio,” Elena whispered, kissing the top of his curls and rocking him gently. “Uncle Sal went to get your mama. Just close your eyes for one more minute.”
One minute turned into five. Then seven.
Through the thin gap in the pine trees ahead and up the slope, I could just make out the dark silhouette of the two-story timber lodge. A single yellow light burned in a second-floor gable window.
At the nine-minute mark, dual beams of bright white halogen light suddenly swept across the front lawn of the lodge from the main road on the other side of the house.
“He’s here,” Vanessa gasped from the back seat, pressing her face to the glass. “That’s Corrado’s Escalade—and there’s another sedan right behind him!”
My foot moved trembling over the brake pedal, my hand gripping the gearshift just as Luca had ordered. Twelve minutes, he had said. Don’t wait.
Up at the lodge, car doors slammed in the quiet night woods. I saw the beam of a flashlight bobbing toward the front veranda, and heard the distant, booming voice of an older man calling out in Italian to the caretaker at the front door.
Then, out of the dark birch woods on the back side of the lodge, three figures stumbled down the muddy embankment toward us.
Sal was in the lead, moving with surprising speed, holding little Leo’s red wool mitten up in the moonlight like a flag so I wouldn’t reverse away. Behind him came Luca, his tuxedo jacket torn at the shoulder, carrying a thin, barefoot woman wrapped in a patchwork quilt in his arms—while the woman’s arms were locked fiercely around his neck.
I threw open the rear passenger door opposite Elena just as they reached the car.
Before Luca could even set her down on the leather seat, the woman in the quilt saw Elena and the little boy in the dim interior light.
“Leo!” she gasped—a raw, ragged sound that didn’t sound like Vanessa at all. It was deeper, broken from crying, and filled with five years of fierce, starved devotion.
Leo’s dark eyes flew open. He didn’t hesitate, and he wasn’t confused. He scrambled over Elena’s knees and threw his small body straight into the quilt, burying his face in the hollow of his mother’s neck.
“Mama!” he cried out, his little hands tangling in her unwashed dark hair. “Mama, I kept Papa’s clock! I kept it safe!”
“I know, my brave boy, I know,” Clara sobbed, kissing his cheeks, his forehead, his small fingers over and over as Elena wept openly beside them, wrapping both mother and child in her arms.
Up front, Luca and Sal dove into the seats as I scrambled back over the console, landing half on the floor between Vanessa and Clara just as the heavy back doors slammed shut.
“Hold on!” Sal barked, firing the engine and throwing the Mercedes into reverse.
Up on the ridge, less than a hundred yards away, the back porch light of the lodge blazed on. Two men with drawn handguns burst through the rear screen door, with white-haired Corrado Moretti right behind them, his face twisted in fury as the high beams of our Mercedes flared to life and caught him square in the chest.
The man with the scarred nose raised his pistol toward our windshield.
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Instead of backing straight down the rutted mud track, Sal jerked the wheel hard to the left, swinging the nose of the five-ton armored sedan around in the wet grass until the solid steel front bumper clipped the corner support post of the wooden back porch.
With a sound like a cannon shot, the rotted timber post snapped. Half the back porch roof collapsed in a shower of cedar shingles and splintered beams, burying the steps and knocking Corrado and his gunmen flat onto their backs in the mud—without a single shot fired near the child inside our car.
