Day of Confession - Allan Folsom [203]
What surprised him was that though he could have left then, he didn’t. Tired as Roscani was from his ordeal, he had stayed, waiting with the rest for word of Hercules’ condition. It was more than something he felt he should do, it was something he wanted to do. Maybe it was because he felt he was as much a part of it all as they were. Or maybe he just wanted to be with them because in some crazy way Hercules had gotten to him, and he cared as much as they did. In the exhausted, confused state they were all in, who the hell knew about anything? At least he’d given up smoking, and that had to be good for something.
Pushed in his chair by the orderly, Roscani went to each of them, taking their hands, saying if there was anything he could do to please call on him. Then he said goodnight. But he wasn’t quite done; purposely he made Harry the last and asked him to come to the door with him.
“Why?” Harry tensed.
“Please,” Roscani said. “It’s a personal thing…”
With a glance at Danny and Elena, Harry took a breath and went with him. At the door they stopped.
“The video they made of you,” Roscani said, “after Pio was killed.”
“What about it?”
“At the end—whoever made it cut something out. A last word or phrase. I tried to figure out what it was. I even had a lip-reading expert look at it. She couldn’t get it either…. Do you remember what you said?”
Harry nodded. “Yes…”
“What was it?”
“I’d been tortured, it took me that long to realize what was going on. I wanted help, I called out a name.”
Roscani was as much in the dark as ever. “Whose name did you call?”
Harry hesitated. “Yours.”
“Mine?”
“You were the only person I knew who could help.”
Slowly Roscani grinned.
So did Harry.
Epilogue
Bath, Maine.
THE PACT HAD BEEN TO LEAVE AND NEVER come back. But two days after the state funeral for Cardinal Palestrina, Harry and Danny did come back. With Harry manning the carry-ons and Danny hobbling on crutches—flying to New York and then Portland, Maine, and driving up from there on a bright summer day.
Elena had gone home to be with her parents and tell them of her plans to leave the convent and then to go to Siena and request dispensation of her vows, and afterward to join Harry in Los Angeles.
Harry drove the rented Chevy through the familiar towns of Freeport and Brunswick and finally into Bath. The old neighborhood had changed little, if at all, the white clapboard houses and faded shingle cottages brilliant in the July sunshine, the big elm and oak trees flush with summer growth as stately and timeless as ever. Passing Bath Iron Works, the ship-building yard where their father had worked and died, they drove slowly south in the direction of Boothbay Harbor, then veering off Route 209, Harry took the fork onto High Street and shortly afterward a right onto Cemetery Road.
The family plot was on a grassy knoll on a hill overlooking the distant bay. It was as they both remembered, well tended, quiet, and peaceful with the chirp of birds in the nearby trees the only sound. Their father had bought the parcel with savings just after Madeline was born, knowing there would be no more children. The plot was for five, and three rested there now. Madeline, their father, and their mother, who had stipulated in her will that she be buried not with her new husband but with Madeline and the father of her children. The last two plots were for Harry and Danny if they chose.
Before, it would have been unthinkable for either brother to consider being buried there. But things had changed, as the two of them had. And who knew what life was yet to bring? It was lovely and tranquil, and in a way the idea was comforting and brought things full circle.
They left it like that, tender and up in the air, discussed but not