Dead Cold Mysteries Box Set #1: Books 1-4 (A Dead Cold Box Set), Blake Banner [classic children's novels txt] 📗

She was in the kitchen, putting her bag down on the side. She took a plate from the draining board and dropped the steaks on it, still wrapped in paper. I approached the breakfast bar and stood watching her a moment unpacking the bag and opening the wine. She spoke without looking at me.

“Young Jewish man has been shot, he’s bleeding to death. He manages to stagger home to his parents’ house, where he rings the bell and falls to his knees. His mother opens the door and he says to her, ‘Mamma, I’m dying!’ She puts her hands on her hips and says, ‘You’ll die, but foist you’ll eat!’”

I smiled. “You told me that one already, but you told me it was your aunt.”

She shrugged. She still wouldn’t look at me. “It might have been. Kind of thing she would have said.” I drew breath and she raised a finger. “Don’t ask. I’ll tell you in my own time.”

“I was going to say I could peel some potatoes.”

She nodded. The cork popped and she poured two glasses. “It needs to breathe. I got a good one.”

I pulled a bag of potatoes from the vegetable trolley. “You hungry?” I wasn’t.

I was too tired to be hungry, but Dehan said, “Starving.”

I chose four big ones and started peeling. She started making a large salad.

“That’s what my dad was like: ‘You’ll die, but foist you’ll eat.’ He was gentle, the true meaning of a gentleman. He was generous, and kind. But he was strong, what we call a mensch. And his family was everything to him.”

I smiled at the potato as I cut it into strips. “Were you a daddy’s girl?”

“You bet. When does a stereotype become an archetype, Stone?”

“I don’t know. I never thought about it.”

“It was the kind of question my dad was always asking. And he had an answer for all of them. A stereotype is always consistent. An archetype is full of contradictions.” She took the chopped potatoes and dropped them into the oil. They hissed loudly. “He was talking about himself.” She imitated his voice, “‘If I had been a stereotypic Jew, I would not have married your mother. But as a Jewish archetype, I had to marry your mother!’”

I smiled again. “An intelligent man.”

“Part of the archetype.”

I nodded. “I guess.”

She was quiet for a while, watching the potatoes fry. She said suddenly, “Why is north up? Why are the French rude? Why does the Earth wobble? Why are Africans black? You name it, he asked it, and had an answer. It was like he was trying to get inside the mind of God, and explain it.”

She tested one of the French fries. Then she put the griddle on to heat with a bit of oil and sprinkled coarse salt over the meat. When the griddle was smoking, she threw the steaks on. They hissed and flames leapt up around them.

“But there are no answers, Stone, no explanations. All you can do is describe, you can’t explain.”

“Isn’t that a little fatalistic, Carmen?”

She shrugged and flipped the steaks. “Maybe. You want to put the fries on the plates?”

We sat and ate in silence for a while. The steaks were good, so was the wine. After a bit, she said, “The fifteenth of January, 2005, was a Saturday.”

I sat back. Sean O’Conor’s body had been found on the Sunday morning, on the sixteenth.

“Mom and Dad had closed the café. We’d had dinner and I was eighteen. They had rented a movie, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. My dad loved that kind of thing, he was such a dreamer. Mom said she loved it, but we knew that after ten minutes she’d go make a cup of tea, start washing up, clean the windows…” She smiled, focused on my face, then my plate. “You’re not eating.”

She sipped. I couldn’t eat, but I forced myself. I cut a slice of meat and stuffed it in my mouth.

“It was nine o’clock. We heard hammering on the door. My dad went down to see who it was. We heard voices, my dad trying to reason with somebody. The other voice was…” She was searching for the word. “Sneering, contemptuous, amused, overpowering. It scared me. Then we heard feet on the stairs.”

“Who was it?”

She cut savagely into her steak. “I should tell you first that for a few weeks he had been coming on to my mom. He didn’t like me; I was ‘too Jewish’, but my mom was real pretty, even at forty she was trim and cute. She went to see Father O’Neil for advice because she didn’t know what to do. My dad was strong, in his mind and in his personality, but physically he didn’t stand a chance.”

“Against who, Dehan?”

“So Father O’Neil tells her…” She laughed a dry, sick laugh. “He tells her to pray, this was his guidance. From a church that sacked the wealth of the western world, that marched to war against the most powerful warriors and empires in history, his advice is, accept the fate that God has decreed for you, and don’t forget to pray. Pray for forgiveness. And now the time had come, there in our living room, with the TV on, and my father standing there shaking, and I felt so sick I was going to throw up right there on the floor. He was there, drunk, stinking of whiskey, to claim what he said was his.”

“Father O’Neil?”

“Mick Harragan.”

I went cold. “Mick.”

“He raped her. My dad tried to stop him, but Mick beat him to a pulp. He put him in the hospital and he beat me up too, until I couldn’t move. Then he raped her, right there in front of us. He told us that if we talked, we would