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He couldn’t start sobbing in front of Grandma Pina, but oh, God. he’d been hoping so hard for a break. “This is it?” The question was redundant, but it burst out of him anyway.
“Everything. Maybe your box got thrown away with the trash.”
He tried not to flinch. “You would have packed it if you’d seen it,” he said. “It was clear that it wasn’t garbage.”
“Then it was stolen by your no-good neighbors. Or Rudy. He probably pawned it for drugs.”
“Maybe.” He sat for a moment, in a state of absolute despair. He wanted to sink down, become one with the chilly concrete. Just a dark grease spot. But desperation jerked him into action again. He leaned over that last box, rifling through it. There had to be something. Some clue, some opening. He yanked out the mail. Bills, credit card offers. Letters from the school guidance counselor, about his bad attitude.
Then his eye snagged on a thick envelope, which was not addressed to Magdalena Ranieri, but to Anthony Ranieri. He peered at it in the dim light. It was from the county coroner’s office. “What’s this?”
Grandma Pina squinted over her glasses. “Oh, that. The coroner’s report, of your mother’s autopsy. Tony called them and requested one.”
“He did?” His voice cracked a little. “Why?”
Pina flapped her hand. “Some silly notion of wanting a record of every mark they left on her. So he’d know what to do to the people who killed her. You know how he carried on. So violent. But then Tony and Rosa ended up running off back to Portland with you before the report even came back. They had some absurd idea that you were in danger. Ridiculous, both of them.”
“Yeah.” Bruno thought of Rudy and his switchblade. “Ridiculous.”
“So, in the end, I had to deal with that.” She pointed at the envelope, with a martyred air. “When I was trying so hard to forget.”
“I don’t know,” Bruno said, staring at the envelope. “Looks like you did OK. With the forgetting part, I mean.”
She drew herself up. “I was devastated! My only child!”
“Yeah, yeah. So broken up, you never even opened it.”
“How could I?” Tears trembled in her eyes. “How could I bear it?”
He could see where Mamma had gotten her flair for dramatics, but that was all she’d gotten, thank God. The flair, but not the content.
He ripped the envelope open, pulled out the sheaf of paper. He wasn’t sure why. But it seemed disrespectful to Magda Ranieri, that this official catalog of her death wounds should go ignored for twenty years. No one had cared enough to open the envelope.
She had died from it. He could at least read it.
It was hard going. Seeing it all laid out in that dispassionate, scientific way did not distance him at all. He couldn’t help but imagine the scene as it happened. See the blood. Hear the blows, the screams.
He couldn’t help but imagine it happening right now, to Lily.
He was about to shove the thing back into its envelope just to save what was left of his sanity, when something caught his eyes.
“…well healed surgical incision over a resected left ovary…”
Resected left ovary? Weird. He read it again. Yeah. One of her ovaries was gone. And ‘well-healed surgical incision’ indicated that it had been gone before her death by torture and beating.
“Do you know anything about Mamma having an ovary removed?”
She looked affronted by the question. “Excuse me?”
He held up the report. “This says her left ovary was removed. Surgically. Why would they do that? Cysts, maybe, or a tumor?”
“I never knew a thing,” she huffed. “Maybe she got a sex disease from one of her men. That kind of thing happens to women of her sort.”
He should have known better than to ask her a reasonable question. She was like a backed up sewer pipe. Spewing filth every time she opened her mouth. The phone rang upstairs. Grandma Pina turned her head, clearly torn between the desire to answer and the danger of leaving an unsupervised low-life thug loose in her basement.
“Go get your phone,” he urged. “I’m almost done. I’ll be good.”
She sniffed again, and scurried up the stairs. He was glad to see her go. His stress levels were high enough without her help.
