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His eyes were awash again. “Thanks, little buddy,” he whispered.
He rose up, walked over to where Sean and Kev were working. He tried to call them, but his voice was thickened with emotion.
Kev glanced over. His eyes went wide, as they zoomed in on Bruno’s outstretched, clutching hand. “You found it,” he said.
The other men crowded around him, peering at the object in his hand. Kev gripped his shoulder, his grimy face worried. “You OK?”
“I am now,” Bruno croaked. “It was stuck in a crack in that rotten log. A bug showed me.” That sounded so dumb. He didn’t give a shit.
“May I?” Sean’s hand hovered over his, awaiting permission.
Bruno nodded, let the other man pluck it from his palm.
Sean peered at it, and tried opening it. “It’s been sealed, but there are hinges,” he said. “We could break it open with my blade.”
They crouched around the black plastic tarp that held the skeletons. Bruno accepted Sean’s blade, hesitating. He hated to break the precious thing, but his head would pop if he had to wait until tomorrow to open it. Mamma would understand. Hell, impatience had been one of her defining characteristics.
He slipped the tip of the blade in the seam between the tiny hinges, squinting in the dim light, until the point disappeared. He nudged it deeper, applied pressure, firmly…andcrack,it snapped. Something thudded onto the plastic, a shapeless black wad. Bruno checked the inside. The two pieces were black with mold. Nothing else.
He slipped the delicate gold bits into his jeans pocket, and leaned forward, prodding at the tiny wad with the tip of the knife. The back of was some sort of fibrous, fuzzy material. The front was a layer of black gunk, which crumbled into flakes as he poked it. In between was something small, hard. Irregular. He scraped at it until the shape became clear. His throat tightened. He picked up the tiny thing, rubbing it between his fingers, scraping with his fingernails, until the black shreds came away. A tiny key, made of pure gold.
He knew this key. And his heart sank.
“What is that stuff?” Kev asked.
Bruno tapped the fuzzy stuff. “My baby hair,” he said. “And this, that used to be my baby picture. And this…” He held up the key. “A key to a hidden compartment in my mother’s jewelry box. Another courting gift fromBis-NonnotoBis-Nonna, like the locket. There’s a panel you slide aside, and behind is a lock to a false bottom.”
“And you have this jewelry box in your possession?” Sean asked hopefully. “It’s a family heirloom, right? Does Zia Rosa have it?”
Bruno’s shoulders sagged. “I don’t have it. Zia doesn’t, either.”
Kev let out a long sigh. Sean got up, shook out the kinks in his knees. “Come on, Bruno. You don’t know where it might be? No clue?”
“I knew where it was in 2004, on the night when we left the apartment to go to the bus station,” Bruno said. “It was on the bedside table in my room. Mom put it there so that Rudy wouldn’t pawn her jewelry. Then we left. And I never saw it again. Or my mother.” He shook his head. “Could be anywhere. It’s been decades.”
It had started to rain again, as if to compound their misery.
Kev laid a hand on his shoulder. “No, not anywhere,” he said. “It’s in the possession of whoever might have had a right or an interest in collecting your mother’s stuff from the apartment after she was killed. That’s a select group. A short list, with your Grandma Pina on the top.”
“Lovely prospect,” Bruno said darkly. “If she doesn’t kill me on sight. Or it was stolen by one of our neighbors and traded for crack. Or the super threw it into a Hefty bag, and it ended up in a landfill.”
“So? You’ve got someplace to start. That’s more than before.”
True enough. At least, he had the locket now. A little piece of Mamma, glinting after twenty long years in the ground. A good luck amulet. But damn, he wished he had more to show, after those four guys had busted their asses all day long on his behalf.
Things moved fast after that. A reservoir of energy had been unearthed along with the locket. Davy and Connor were informed of the new development, and they decided to hell with guard duty, they’d just finish the job and get the hell out of there. It went faster with five working, but not fast enough, not with night coming on so fast.
First, the bones had to go back into the ground. They rolled them into the tarp, and placed them back in the hole, then scraped as much of the dirt they had excavated as they could back into the pit. It was difficult, since they had spread it so much, and rain had liquefied more of it into slop. In the end, the hole was still a sad, sunken mud wallow.
So they collected boulders, and laid those on top, as if to weigh down restless spirits. By then, night had fallen, and they were all wearing infrared goggles. When the cairn was knee level, they stopped.
“Satisfied?” Sean asked.
“Almost.” Bruno looked at Kev. “You’re forgetting something.”
Kev let out a bark of laughter. “Oh, yeah. Of course.”
Bruno and Kev unbuckled their pants. The rest followed. They hauled ‘em out, and had a ceremonial collective piss onto the tumbled boulders. Weird effect, with infrared. Hot pee. Cold mud.
