Chapter 1 - The Descent
The cold in West Virginia did not bite; it settled. It was a heavy, grey moisture that came down off the ridges around Laurel Creek and got inside your wool before you even reached the bottom of the porch steps. Enzo Falcone sat with his knees pulled slightly up toward his chest, though the left one didn’t want to cooperate. The brakes on the chair were rusted open on the left side, which meant if he didn’t keep his heel dragged slightly in the dirt, the whole contraption drifted sideways toward the open drain by the butcher's shop.
Four days ago, his shoes had been handmade in Milan—calfskin, unlined, so soft they felt like gloves until they touched the salt on a Boston sidewalk. Now his feet were in a pair of greasy, grey cotton socks stuffed into oversized rubber boots he’d fished out of a dry-goods bin behind the hardware store for four dollars. They didn't lace; they just gaped around his calves like dead fish.
Nobody looked at his face. That was the first thing he’d noticed when he’d let the Greyhound drop him off at the crossroads behind the gas station. In Boston, people looked at Enzo Falcone’s chin, or his ears, or the space three inches above his left eyebrow where a scar from an old tumbler had healed flat and pale. They looked to see if he was bored. They looked to see if they were about to lose something they’d spent twenty years building.
Here, they looked at the wheels. One wheel had a missing spoke, replaced with a length of copper wire some tin-shingler had twisted tight with pliers. Every time it hit the crack in the concrete outside the hardware store, the wire gave a metallic tink, like a small bell rung by someone who wanted to be left alone.
"You're in the grease-line, mister," a voice said.
It was the boy from the feed store, nineteen or twenty, with forearms like cured ham and dirt permanently wedged under his thumbnail. He didn't stop rolling his cart of salt bags; he just kicked Enzo’s front caster three inches to the left with the toe of his boot without breaking stride.
"Thanks," Enzo said. His voice was lower than it had been in the city, where every sound had to bounce off granite and steel to be heard. Here, it just dropped into the mud and stayed there.
"Don't mention it. Rain's coming down from the gap. If you’re gonna sit, move back by the awning before the tin starts leaking."
Enzo didn't move. He sat and watched his hands. They were large hands—the kind of hands that could palm a heavy ledger or gesture once to a man three tables away in a North End restaurant and see that man clear out before the soup was cold. But the skin over the knuckles had gone thin and greyish, like lard left out in the sun.
He thought about the letter in his pocket. It wasn't paper anymore; it was a little wad of lint and pulp after three days in the pocket of an oilcloth coat that smelled of old perch. Desmond Cole had written it on hotel stationery from the Bellevue-Stratford, but he must have been shaking when he did it. The ink had smeared where his palm dragged across the margin. A mountain town. Desmond had never talked about West Virginia. For forty years, Desmond had been the shadow behind Enzo’s shoulder—the man who knew which judges took cash and which ones preferred title deeds, the man who had pulled Enzo out of the Charles River when he was twelve years old with water in his lungs and grease on his knees.
And then Desmond had died with a bag of kitchen garbage in his hand, leaving behind a brown envelope and a sentence that tasted like iron: If you find it, please don't be angry with me.
Enzo reached into his lap, picked up the three pennies and a nickel that some woman in a duck-down coat had dropped twenty minutes ago, and laid them in a neat row on his thigh.
"You dropped this earlier," a voice said.
It wasn't a Boston voice, and it wasn't the flat, nasal drawl of the mountain men who came down from the hollows to buy chewing tobacco and fan belts. It was lighter—clearer, like water running over river glass.
Enzo looked up.
She was kneeling in the slush. Her coat was patched at the elbows with squares of blue denim that didn't quite match the wool, and her hair was tied back with a piece of yellow twine. In her hand she held a single quarter—the one that had bounced off the rim of his paper cup and rolled all the way into the gutter where the greasy leaves were piled four deep.
"I didn't drop it," Enzo said. "It missed."
"Same thing," she said. She didn't stand up. She crouched there in the grey slush, her heels dug into the mud, looking not at his rusted spokes, not at his rubber boots, but straight into the corners of his eyes where the tiredness lived like old sediment. "My name’s Clara. My daddy has the bakery two doors down from the dry goods. You're the one who came in on the Tuesday bus."
"Am I?"
"Nobody else got off that bus with a basket. And nobody else sits by the drain without a hat." She reached out and laid the quarter right in the center of his palm, her fingers cool and dry against his skin. "You look like you're waiting for somebody who isn't coming back."
"Everyone I know isn't coming back," Enzo said.
Clara smiled—not the kind of smile people gave him in the North End, which was mostly teeth and calculation, but something small and private, like she’d just remembered a joke she’d heard years ago. "Well. That's a lot of empty chairs. You want a loaf of rye? My dad bakes them too dark on Tuesdays, and he throws them out if we don't clear the bench by four."
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"I don't have twenty cents for rye," Enzo said.
"I didn't say anything about twenty cents." She stood up, brushed a bit of wet gravel from her knee, and turned toward the brick archway down the block where a sign shaped like a pretzel hung by one rusty chain. "Bring the chair around the side. The front step's too high for those little wheels."
