Jules shook his head. Laughed. “How long did it take for you to come up with that BS? You should get a job writing propaganda for the fucking Joint Chiefs of Staff.”
“The people on this island,” Leslie said, “don’t deserve your pity.” She shouted, “And they sure as hell don’t have any pity for you!”
“There’s something you need to hear, Leslie,” he said softly. “I didn’t want to be the one to tell you. You are no saint.”
She screamed. Maddie saw Brooks flinch. He covered his head with his sweatshirt hood and she wanted to run to him but she was scared. His mom was going crazy. Digging her fingers into her hair and tugging so golden strands floated in the light-filled air. Like the caterpillar threads in the night sky at the fair.
“You think you know me, Julius? Then how can you not know how my dead babies have been with me? Always. I carry them in here.” She punched her stomach hard. Maddie winced. “My babies! Poisoned by those monsters you feel sorry for.”
“You are not better than everyone on this island,” he said. “You used us. You used our children. And for what? Some revenge plot straight out of a crappy movie?”
“You’ll never know,” she said, “how vengeance heals the soul.”
Maddie stepped out from the shadows. Her sneakers squeaked across the ballroom floor.
“Brooks?”
He stood, walked over to her, had just reached her, when tires screeched outside. She knew it was Vinny and Enzo even before the four of them—Maddie, Brooks, and his parents—made it out onto the Castle’s marble front steps. The twins’ red Cougar’s engine revved and gravel spit out from behind the back wheels. Like in some old movie about gangs and brawls, and she looked to Brooks, almost laughed, because it was so silly, her cousins showing up like this. After everything had worked out okay. They’d all talked to the cops. No one was locked in jail. Penny would be okay. The doctors had promised. And soon, she and Brooks would be far away. Safe.
Brooks’s face was gray. The muscle in his jaw flexing. The car doors swung open and Black Sabbath shattered the quiet. Sounding nothing like music, Maddie thought, but more like hard things hitting one another and breaking. Maddie felt Leslie flinch, then saw her lean close to Jules, whispering in his ear. Whatever Leslie said made Jules stare at his wife like he was confused. He disappeared into the house.
“You guys,” Maddie called out. Brooks pulled her back so her hair swung into her face. “I’m just going to talk to them.”
“Don’t move,” he whispered.
“Yo, Brooks,” Vinny said. Sounding, Maddie thought, friendly enough. “We got to pow-wow, man.”
She saw the glint of something dangling along Enzo’s leg. The thick chain her uncle used at the shop to tow broken-down cars. She thought about running to the cottage, calling her father—maybe he was at the garage, maybe not—it was close to two in the morning.
“I’m going to call Sheriff Stroh,” she said.
“Don’t move, Maddie.” There was a threat in Brooks’s voice.
“You need to go,” Leslie called to Vinny and Enzo. “It’s late.”
“Leslie,” Enzo walked out of the shadows and into the lamplit drive. Maddie saw she was right about the chain. “Leslie Day.”
Now that they were closer, standing between the two old-fashioned lampposts burning with gas, the white moths making them glow a foggy white, Maddie saw all four boys were there. Paulie held a bat. Mute Tim a metal bar.
“Did you rat on us, Leslie?” Vinny said. “You promised you’d protect us.”
“And I will,” Leslie said. “I did!”
She was begging. Maddie saw the thin white cotton of Leslie’s bathrobe tremble.
“Maddie,” Enzo said. “Come here.” He sounded like her father. That same clipped command. Same up-nod with his sharp chin. She almost walked down the steps.
Brooks yanked her behind him.
“She’s staying here.”
Vinny laughed. Ugly and clownish. All that time she’d been scared of Enzo, when Vinny, she saw now, was the one to fear. Hiding under winks and buttery charm.
“You’re right,” he said. “We don’t want her anyway. Not really. Not after you ruined her with your dirty black you-know-what.”
“Vinny?” she said.
His answer came when he grabbed the baseball bat from Paulie’s hands and drove it into the lamppost. An explosion of glass and white moths’ wings. Brooks’s arms wrapped around Maddie, shielding her. The gas flame, free, shot up and burned brighter, bluer.
Vinny hopped up and down. Excited. Giddy with his own power, Maddie thought. Enzo high-fived Paulie. Quiet Tim threw back his head and howled like a wolf.
They smashed the clay pots lining the brick path that led to the front door. The violets and geraniums and purple shamrock Maddie had seen Jules plant. Black dirt sprayed.
They shouted ugly things about busting into the Castle, tying Brooks’s family up, showing Leslie what it felt like to be with a real man (She’d wanted them, Enzo shouted, from that first night at the fair, don’t lie, Leslie!). They promised not to hurt them too bad, but an eye for an eye, Vinny said. Even Maddie, he explained, had to be taught a lesson. They called them liars, cowards, rats, and cheats, and the worst thing Maddie knew anyone on the island could be called. Traitors.
They were only a few strides from the front steps when Maddie heard Jules return and Brooks said, “Dad, no. No.”
She smelled the hard alcohol on her cousins. The cigarette smoke. Their drugstore cologne. Enzo had the LaRosa eyes, like Dom. Like her father. Fringed with dark lashes. So big there was a slice of white that showed above and below his irises. Nonna LaRosa had told them it was good luck. A touch of God.
Vinny lunged forward. A flying leap. Just like when he stole a base, Maddie thought, his long, lean body stretched in a kind of arabesque, as graceful as a dancer onstage. She couldn’t tell what came first, Brooks pushing her aside so she fell into the rosebushes next to the stairs, her face and arms and legs stung by thorns.
Or the shot.
The crack of the blast washed over her like whitecaps pounding the shore in a storm. The flash of the muzzle lit the air and she watched Vinny’s back arch, his arms fly up at his sides, frozen in surrender. Like all the Jesuses on all the crosses that hung on Nonna LaRosa’s walls.
A swell rose up from the dark woods. The breathy buzz of the caterpillars feeding—they were back, Maddie thought numbly—like a damning curse. But it was Enzo screaming, wailing, pounding his fists on his twin brother’s bloody chest.
45.
Jules
The rifle rolled out of his hands. A woman screamed. Was it Leslie? He dropped to his knees and raked his fingers through the grass. His grass. Pulled it toward him as if he could gather it up in one wide swath, wrap it around his shoulders like a cape. Disappear.
His father was screaming too. What have you done? What in God’s name have you done?