Red, White & Dead. Laura Caldwell

would be best if I finished high school somewhere else instead of going with her. They thought it would be good for me to be away, too, somewhere new where everything wasn’t about my father.”

      “So you went to Naples?”

      “No, I lived with a cousin in a lovely area, in Frascati, in the hills, outside of Rome.”

      “Was it hard for you to be away from the U.S.?”

      “Yes and no. Italy is certainly different from the United States, different from every country, in fact. But throughout my whole life my mother had been telling us about Italy. The stories about Italy were our nighttime tales. I found much of that had sunk in and made a difference when I moved here.”

      “How often did you get to see my dad after that?”

      “Not very often.” Her voice was somber. “That was one of the hardest things.”

      “Were you not close?”

      “It wasn’t that.” She said nothing else.

      “So what was it?”

      “I suppose it was simply that he lived in the States, and I lived in Italy. I fell in love with the country, and I stayed.”

      Could he be alive? “What do you know about how he died?”

      “He died in a helicopter crash, Isabel.” She said it like Ee-sabel. “You know that.” A pause. “Did your mother not talk to you about this when you were young?”

      “Yes, but I suppose that as an adult, I wonder about the details.”

      “Such a tragedy. It was horrible.”

      “Do you still think about him?”

      “Of course. All the time.”

       Do you ever see him like I did? Do you ever hear him?

      But before I said anything, Elena was suddenly saying she needed to go, that it was lovely to talk to me.

      “I had some other questions about my dad,” I said.

      “And I’d love to answer them, but right now I must go. I have a work dinner.”

      “Where are you working?”

      “I’ll tell you next time we talk, cara.”

      It was obvious she wanted to get off the phone. “We should stay in better touch,” I said.

      “Yes, cara, you are right.”

      “Do you have an e-mail address?”

      “Of course. We e-mail, we text. We’re very forward in Rome. Everyone walks around the city with their cell phones attached to their cheeks.” She gave me her e-mail address. “Must go. Ciao, ciao.” And then she hung up.

      I leaned forward and turned on the monitor again.

      Although their bodies have never been found, copious amounts of blood (identified as blood from both Louie and Big Joe) were found in the basement of their parents’ home the day after their disappearance. No arrests have ever been made in the disappearance of the Brothers Rizzato.

      11

      The next few days skidded by quickly, an inefficient bunch of days where I thought of little but my father and checked my BlackBerry religiously for a call or e-mail from my aunt.

      I had e-mailed her the morning after our talk, mentioning that I might visit Italy. I heard nothing back. I called the next day and left a message this time. Again nothing.

      I sent out some more résumés, made follow-up calls and a few halfhearted attempts to establish new contacts. Still nothing.

      I grew frustrated, short-tempered. I could think of little else to do about my job search or my dad search. I talked to Mayburn but he was in too much of a twist about Lucy and the fact that she was living with Michael to be of much help. I couldn’t shake the feeling that if I could just speak to Aunt Elena again and find what else she knew, if anything, about my dad’s death, then maybe I would know where to go from there. Or, even better, I could just put the whole thing away. I didn’t want to go any further with my mother because she had endured a lot of loss over her life. The last thing she needed was her bored, out-of-work daughter shooting around assertions about what she’d maybe heard in a dark stairwell.

      Meanwhile, the one thing getting me through my week was someone else on a dark stairwell, and it wasn’t my dad.

      Theo had called Tuesday night, and again Wednesday and Thursday, and each night I met him on the stairwell, and each night it was the same. And yet even better.

      He worked during the days at his software company, and so he was gone every morning, leaving me flushed and sleepy and satisfied. It was as if Theo rounded down the sharp angles that I collected every day and that I’d been collecting from my months off work.

      Friday morning, I got up an hour after Theo left and found a message on my voice mail. It was from Elena. She’d left it at three in the morning Chicago time, a vague, “Hello, cara. I am sorry I haven’t been able to get back to you. Let’s chat soon.” And that was it. She didn’t mention my possible visit.

      I called her again. Heard nothing back. I e-mailed again, telling her once more that I was considering a visit and mentioning a few dates. I didn’t go so far as to inquire if I could stay with her. Even though we were family, our contact had been so minimal over the years it felt rude.

      On Saturday morning, I received an e-mail. Cara, she wrote, I do not think you would enjoy Rome in the summer. There are so many tourists, and it is about to get very hot. Also, I am busy working in a new galleria that has just opened in the last few years. It is a personal passion of mine, very close to my heart. Perhaps you should come in October or November?

      I sat back from the computer as my cell phone rang.

      “Izzy?” a woman’s voice said when I answered. “It’s Lucy DeSanto.”

      “Lucy!” My voice went high. She was about the last person I expected to hear from.

      In my mind, I pictured her—a tiny, toned blonde with a pixie haircut and a big smile.

      “Hi,” she said. “So, I heard that you ran into Michael.”

      Michael ran after me, I wanted to say, but instead I just mumbled a chagrined, “Yeah, I did.”

      Lucy and I had a brief but complicated history. The cold fact was that I’d originally met her because Mayburn asked me to pretend I was a neighborhood mom (and wanted to be her friend) so I could get inside her house and onto her husband’s computer. The ruse worked, and the evidence I collected landed Michael with a federal indictment. But it also worked its guilt on me. I genuinely liked Lucy, and I felt bad duping her. When she found out what Mayburn and I had been doing, I thought she would be pissed as hell. But instead, Lucy—sweet, elegant Lucy—had been forgiving. She’d always been in love with her husband, but she hadn’t known he was involved with the Mafia. That knowledge had devastated her, and yet she was glad the secret was out. Then she’d started up with Mayburn, and the last few times I’d seen her they’d seemed over-the-moon happy.

      And yet now here we were, back on familiar territory, where I found myself apologizing, once again, for messing around in her life.

      “That’s okay,” she said. “I know you did it for John.”

      I chuckled. “It’s funny to hear him called John.” I’d met Mayburn because he was the private investigator often hired by my former law firm. And no one called him anything but Mayburn. “He misses you,” I said.

      “I miss him.” She sighed. “But, Izzy, I have kids. And I want the kids to grow up with their dad, with a family that’s a whole unit. I loved Michael for a long time, and he says he’s done with that business.”