Chapter 8 - The Fire on the Ridge
By midnight, the snow had stopped, leaving the valley under six inches of blue-white light that made the slate roofs of Laurel Creek look like silver foil.
Thomas and Clara stood by the woodstove in the bakery, watching the door.
The bell didn't ring. They just heard the rhythmic tink-tink of the copper wire on the left wheel coming down the brick alley from the ridge.
Enzo rolled through the doorway. His face was grey with wood smoke and coal dust, and his rubber boots were caked in frozen mud up to the ankles. But his shoulders were square—not the way they had been when he sat in the glass tower over Boston Harbor, but the way they had been when he was twelve years old and his father had first put a ledger in his hand and told him to read the numbers until they stopped moving.
He didn't say anything. He reached into his coat pocket, pulled out the black pistol, and laid it on the zinc counter right beside the flour scraper.
"Is it finished?" Thomas asked. His voice was barely a whisper above the crackle of the oak logs in the stove.
"The accounts are closed," Enzo said. "There's nothing left in the Boston safe except some old tax forms and a picture of a boat that sank in seventy-six."
Clara walked over from the kneading trough. She didn't look at the gun. She looked down at Enzo’s boots—at the grey cotton socks sticking out of the rubber gaps.
"You're going to freeze your toes off if you stay in that chair," she said.
"I'm not staying in the chair," Enzo said. He put his hands on the wooden arms, pushed down with his palms until his knees locked for the first time in four days, and stood up.
He was taller than Thomas. Taller than he’d looked in the glass tower, where everything was scaled down to fit behind a mahogany desk.
"There's dough left in the trough," Thomas said after a long moment, pointing a floury finger toward the back room. "And my nephew left an extra pair of boots in the root cellar that don't leak quite as bad as those ones."
Enzo looked at Clara. Her face was smudged with flour across the left cheekbone, and her hair had come loose from the yellow twine, falling over her shoulder in a dark wave that smelled of yeast and wood smoke.
"What do you like about me?" Enzo asked.
May you like
Clara didn't laugh this time. She reached out, took the heavy horn-handled knife off the counter, and handed it to him handle-first.
"I like that you didn't leave the quarter in the gutter," she said.
