Chapter 4 - The Ledger’s Shadow
The next morning, the rain had turned to sleet, driving horizontally against the brickwork of Laurel Creek until the street looked like a grey mirror.
Clara was already at the zinc table, kneading a trough of heavy grey dough with her knuckles, her sleeves rolled up to her shoulders. She didn't look up when Enzo rolled out of the flour alcove.
"My dad says you can stay in the back room behind the flour bins," she said, her voice steady against the rhythmic thump-thump of her fists in the trough. "There's an old cot that belonged to my uncle before he went down to the mines in Williamson. It's got no springs left, but if you double up the wool blankets, it keeps the wind off."
"I'm not staying," Enzo said.
"Where are you going?" She stopped, her flour-white hands resting on the grey mound. "The bus doesn't come back until Saturday. And even then, it only goes as far as Clarksburg. You look like you wouldn't last ten minutes in Clarksburg without somebody taking your coat."
"I have business," Enzo said.
"Business." She laughed—short and dry, like corn husks rubbing together in a bin. "Nobody comes to Laurel Creek for business unless they're running from the sheriff or the tax man. Which one are you?"
"Neither."
"Then you're just lost." She went back to her kneading. "My dad says people from the cities don't know how to be lost. They think if they walk far enough down a road, somebody's going to put up a sign telling them they've won a prize."
Before Enzo could answer, the bell above the bakery door jangled.
It wasn't a customer. A man stood in the doorway, shaking the sleet from the brim of a black Stetson that had never seen a West Virginia coal seam. He wore a heavy wool trench coat with the collar turned up to his ears, and under his arm he carried a small leather case with brass corners.
Enzo didn't move his hands from the armrests of the chair. He didn't have to.
The man was middle-aged, with hair the color of wet slate and eyes that looked like they’d been bleached by thirty years of fluorescent lighting in the back offices of the Suffolk County courthouse. His name was Vincent Rossi, though everyone in the North End called him The Needle because he could find a missing signature in a five-thousand-page title search before you’d finished your espresso.
Rossi stepped inside, the rubber soles of his city shoes squeaking on the wet sawdust. He looked around the bakery with a slow, clinical disgust—at the greasy walls, at the rusted iron stove, at the sacks of cornmeal leaning against the lime-washed brick.
Then he looked at Enzo.
"Mr. Falcone," Rossi said, his voice smooth and flat as an unpaved road. "Your uncle was under the impression you’d gone to Baltimore for the shipping hearings."
"My uncle is mistaken," Enzo said.
Rossi took two steps closer, his heels grinding a piece of hard rye crust into the floor. He didn't look at Clara, who had stopped kneading entirely, her hands frozen in the dough.
"Your uncle isn't mistaken about much these days, Enzo. Especially not about property. When a man leaves forty floors of glass and steel to sit in a dry-goods store with people who bake bread in the dirt, the family starts to wonder if he's lost his arithmetic."
"Tell Marco I'm checking the accounts," Enzo said.
Rossi smiled. It didn't reach his eyes; it just pulled the corners of his mouth back over teeth that were a little too white for Laurel Creek. "The accounts are already settled. The Boston docks were signed over to the Delaware syndicate this morning at nine o'clock. Your uncle thought it would save you the trouble of managing them from a wheelchair."
Enzo’s fingers tightened on the wooden arms of the chair until the old oak groaned.
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"Whose signature?" Enzo asked.
"Yours," Rossi said simply, setting the brass-cornered leather case down on the zinc counter right beside the rye loaf. He popped the two latches with a double click that sounded like a pistol bolt in the small room. "Or at least, one that looks very much like it on a quit-claim deed dated three weeks ago. Marco is a careful man, Enzo. He doesn't like loose ends. And a Falcone who goes walkabout in the hills is about as loose as they come."
