Chapter 6 - THE NIGHT IN THE RAIN
Raphael stopped breathing.
His father had died fifteen years earlier.
Clara had been twelve.
She could not possibly have witnessed it.
Unless Daniel meant another night.
“What exactly did she see?” Raphael asked.
Daniel replied:
“She doesn’t remember.”
Clara looked confused.
Raphael thought of her flinching when hands moved suddenly.
Her limp.
The gaps around what happened when she was nineteen.
Trauma could bury memory.
“Where did it happen?”
“Behind the old Bellanova restaurant.”
Raphael’s face changed.
That was where his father had been struck.
Exactly six blocks from St. Leonard’s.
Clara whispered:
“I worked there when I was nineteen.”
Raphael stared at her.
The restaurant had reopened under new ownership years after his father’s death.
Daniel continued.
“Clara found something hidden in the basement wall.”
“What?”
“A coat.”
Raphael remembered.
His father had worn a dark overcoat the night he died.
The coat vanished before police arrived.
“What was on it?”
Daniel’s voice lowered.
“Blood that didn’t belong to Raphael’s father.”
Clara pressed both hands against her temples.
Something was returning.
A basement.
A loose brick.
A folded coat.
A gold cuff link.
Someone behind her.
A hand grabbing her shoulder.
Then pain.
She gasped.
Raphael caught her.
“I remember stairs.”
“What stairs?”
“They pushed me.”
Her hand moved to her damaged leg.
“That’s how I got hurt.”
Raphael’s eyes turned cold.
“Who pushed you?”
“I don’t know.”
But she remembered a voice.
A man whispering:
You never saw the coat.
Then Daniel said:
“Bianca has spent years looking for what was inside the pocket.”
“What was inside?”
“I don’t know.”
Raphael did.
His father always carried a small black notebook.
Names.
Debts.
Promises.
The real map of his organization.
It disappeared after his death.
If Clara had found that coat, she might have found the notebook.
“Clara,” Raphael said carefully, “what happened to the tin box you keep in your bag?”
Her eyes widened.
“How do you know about that?”
“Mrs. Dora mentioned it once.”
Clara slowly opened her cloth bag.
The rusted tin box was gone.
Someone had taken it during the chaos at the church.
Inside that box, Clara said, was the only object she had kept from the night she was injured.
A gold cuff link.
Raphael felt the world shift.
May you like
Because his father never wore gold cuff links.
But Anthony Morelli did.
