They Crossed My Name Out of the Family Bible Chapter 09
Chapter 9 – The Missing Girl
Nothing was taken.
That’s what made it terrifying.
Ines’s team swept every room. No forced entry. Nothing moved, nothing missing, no cash, no weapons.
“They weren’t robbing us,” Dara said. “They were looking for something.”
“For what?”
I already knew. I just didn’t want to say it in a room with windows.
–
I put us on rotating watch, told them nobody leaves this wing alone, and went to report it and walked straight into Dante Ricci in the stairwell at six in the morning, in a t-shirt, holding two coffees.
“One of these is for you,” he said. “I was going to leave it at your door like a coward.”
“Somebody’s been in my wing.”
He set both cups down on the step.
“Since when?”
“Ten days. Maybe two weeks. No damage to the lock.”
“Then it’s someone with a key, or someone with training,” he said. “I’ll pull my own unit’s movement logs. All of them.
Mine first.”
That surprised me. “You’d flag yourself?”
“I’d flag myself.” He met my eyes. “There was a corridor full of my men saying filth about your women and I hadn’t
noticed. I’d rather be embarrassed than useless.”
“Marry him,” said Nonna.
“Shut up.”
“Sorry?” said Dante.
“Nothing. Internal staffing issue.”
He handed me the coffee. Our fingers touched for about a second and a half, and I thought about the oath, and about
how the oath contains exactly one exception, and then I thought about how I am a girl who was thrown away by six
people and has absolutely no business wanting anything from anybody.
“Four years I’ve been here,” he said. “Nobody has closed a case in ninety minutes. Nobody has knocked out a Capo in
front of the old man. Who are you, Siena Marchetti?”
“Nobody,” I said. “Ask my parents.”
I meant it as a joke. It came out flat and ugly, and he heard it.
He didn’t push. That’s the thing about Dante Ricci I keep failing to get over. He just picked up his coffee, walked me to
the top of the stairs, and said, quietly:
“For the record, Commander. Whoever taught you that you were nobody was lying.”
Then Monday came, and everything cracked open.
The old man opened the Table with Cross Street. Six Capos got to hear, in detail, how the girl they’d called he for a year had closed a file they’d failed twice.
Then Director Falco slid a thin blue folder down the table to me.
“New intake. Missing person. Filed by a founding family. Top priority – they’ve put a great deal of money in front of the Table for it.”
“How long missing?”
“Thirteen months,” Falco said. “Reported eleven days ago.”
Something in my chest went very still.
“Thirteen months missing,” I repeated. “Reported eleven days ago.”
“That’s what I said.”
“Why the delay?”
Falco shifted. “The filing family states that she was living on their property and they, ah. Failed to observe her
departure.”
Every Capo at that table laughed.
I didn’t.
I opened the folder.
There’s a specific sound a room makes when everybody in it realizes something at once and nobody wants to be first to speak.
Photograph clipped to the corner. A girl in a green dress, hair to her waist, not smiling, taken at a Commission dinner thirteen months ago.
MARCHETTI, SIENA VITTORIA. Age 17 at time of disappearance. Only daughter of Don Rafael Marchetti.
Reward for information: eight figures.
Attached: a personal statement from the family.
I turned the page.
My mother’s handwriting. I’d know it in the dark. She writes her S’s like little hooks.
To whoever finds her –
Her name is Siena. She turned eighteen on the eleventh, not the fourth, and I let her celebrate the wrong day her entire life because I was too proud to correct a priest.
She takes four sugars. She hates pink. She sleeps on her left side. She has answered my questions for seventeen years and I stopped answering hers for one, and I did it on purpose, and it was the worst decision of my life, and I cannot write the reason down because the reason is the thing that will get her killed.
Please. If she is alive, do not tell anyone you have found her.
Tell me. Only me.
– C. Marchetti
My hands were completely steady. I have no idea how.
Seven Capos were watching my face. The old man was watching my face. Dante Ricci had gone rigid across the
table.
“Commander Marchetti,” Don Vittorio said gently. “Is there something you’d like to tell this room?”
I closed the folder.
“Yes, sir,” I said. “This one’s mine.”
