“Hi, I’m Bennie Rosato,” she said, practicing in the quiet car. “Pleased to meet you, I’m Bennie. Bennie Rosato.”
She cut the ignition, grabbed her cloth bag and Bennie’s messenger bag, got out of the car, and chirped it locked. Two men walked past her, talking, and she kept her head down. She hoped she didn’t run into any of Bennie’s neighbors because her twin never dressed this good. She reached Bennie’s house, a three-story brick rowhouse with shiny black shutters, climbed the front steps, and picked the key that said Schlage as the house key. It slid easily into the lock, and she opened the front door, went in, and let it close behind her. She felt for a light switch, flipped it on, and stopped dead. She had forgotten one thing. Bennie had a big dog.
She stiffened as the dog lifted its head from its paws, got to his feet, and walked slowly toward her. His toenails clicked on the hardwood floor. His head hung low. His tail wasn’t wagging, and he didn’t look happy. The dog knew she wasn’t Bennie, no matter what she looked like.
And in the next second, he started to growl.
Chapter Four
Mary DiNunzio was supposed to go down the shore for the weekend, but she was dying to meet her mysterious cousin, a widow named Fiorella Bucatina, in visiting from Italy. Everybody had crowded into her parents’ kitchen, stuffing it like a Marx Brothers stateroom, if the Marx Brothers were Italian-American. No matter how many people came over for dinner, her parents never ate in the dining room, which was reserved for Christmas, Easter, or some other occasion when something really good happened to Jesus Christ.
The kitchen was humid because Mary’s parents didn’t believe in air conditioners, microwaves, or anything invented after the demise of the Latin Mass. An ancient coffeepot percolated on the stove near photographs of the Holy Trinity—Sinatra, JFK, and Pope John—and a cast-iron switchplate held laminated Mass cards and split fronds of palm. The DiNunzios owned the Kitchen That Time Forgot, and Mary wouldn’t have it any other way.
Fresh basil, frying meatballs, and locatelli scented the air, and Tony Bennett was on the radio, but nobody could hear him because they were talking over each other. Mary’s father, Mariano “Matty” DiNunzio, hadn’t gotten a new battery for his hearing aid, so he was shouting about the Phillies with her boyfriend Anthony. Her mother Vita stood at the oven in her flowered housedress, stirring a dented pot of bubbling gravy and gesturing with her wooden spoon at Mary’s best friend, Judy Carrier. Judy had long ago become an honorary DiNunzio, despite her white-blond hair, Delft blue eyes, and upturned nose, though she always joked that they kept her around because she could reach the top shelf.
Suddenly there was a noise, and everybody turned at the sound of footsteps coming downstairs. Mary couldn’t help but feel a tingle of anticipation. “Ma,” she said, “is that Fiorella, queen of the witches?”
“Basta!” Her mother’s brown eyes flared behind her thick trifocals. “No make fun. Donna Fiorella, she has a strong powers, she’s a mos’ powerful strega in Abruzzi!”
“Not stronger than you, Ma.” Mary didn’t like her mother thinking that her superpowers were inferior.
“Sì, sì, yes. Her husband, he had the cancer. Donna Fiorella, she made it go away, pffft!”
“But he died, didn’t he?”
“Sì, a truck, it hit him.”
“VEET, I’M SO HUNGRY!” her father shouted, his hearing aid a plastic parenthesis behind his ear. He was dressed for the special occasion in his white short-sleeved shirt and baggy dark trousers. “WHY’S SHE TAKIN’ SO LONG?”
“Shhhh, Matty!” her mother said, brandishing her spoon like a lethal weapon.
“I’ve never met a witch queen,” Judy whispered.
“SHE’S NOT A WITCH QUEEN,” Mary and her father replied in unison, but only one of them was loud enough to be heard. A union tilesetter his working life, her father didn’t share her mother’s folkloric beliefs, but he loved her enough to tolerate them. Together a billion years, Mary’s parents were the Chang and Eng of married couples.
“Think she’ll look like Strega Nonna?” Judy asked. “A little old lady in orthopedic shoes?”
“No doubt.” Mary smiled. “I wish Bennie were here. She should see a little DiNunzio magic. Maybe if I had a witch in my corner, it would help me make partner.”
Judy laughed. “She’s probably still at work. Why don’t we call her? She might like a nice home-cooked meal.”
“Nah, she’s too busy. She wouldn’t want to come.”
“Maria, shhh!” her mother hissed. She’d had her hair done at the corner beauty parlor, where they teased it into a stormcloud to cover her bald spot. She patted it into place as Fiorella Bucatina appeared in the doorway and struck a pose.
The sight of her silenced all the chatter.
Chapter Five
Bennie stopped pounding on the lid, her chest heaving. Her cheeks burned, blood rich. Her heart hammered. Heat thickened the air. Her fists stung, her arms ached. Sweat drenched her, gluing her shirt to her body. Panic lurked beneath the surface of her consciousness, like an undertow. Why would Alice do this to her?
Bennie wracked her brain, thinking back. She’d believed she was an only child until Alice had called from prison a few years ago, saying she was charged with murder and needed a lawyer. Bennie would never forget seeing her for the first time, over a filthy counter in a no-contact interview room. Alice had on an orange jumpsuit, and her hair was short then, scissored into crude layers and dyed a brassy red. Still, Bennie had taken one look at her and had seen a mirror image. She’d been struck dumb, but Alice had spoken with confidence, words that marked a turning point in Bennie’s life.
Pleased to meet you. I’m your twin.
Bennie had proved that Alice wasn’t guilty in court, but it had been harder to prove that Alice was really her twin. Her mother, Carmela Rosato, was the only parent Bennie had ever known, but by the time Alice surfaced, her mother’s depression had worsened to the point that she’d been hospitalized, comatose and unable to speak. Bennie never met her father, one William Winslow, who hadn’t stayed around long enough to marry her mother, and she’d had to track him down to verify Alice’s story. It had turned out to be true. Their mother had given birth to two babies but kept only one, because she was broke and battling depression, so she’d kept Bennie and put Alice up for adoption. So to Bennie, Alice was a complete and total stranger, who just happened to be family.
Bennie had felt so strange when she learned she had a twin; like being found when she didn’t know she was lost. She didn’t remember even meeting her father, and her whole life, it had been just her and her mother, alone against the world. In the beginning, her mother worked as a secretary, but in time, her mental illness overcame her, inching over her like a shadow growing longer toward day’s end. She’d gotten professional help while she was still well enough to ask for it, and Bennie remembered going with her, and eventually taking her, to a series of doctors and hospitals who experimented with drugs, dosages, and finally, electroshock.
All the time her mother had grown less and less capable, and Bennie had taken care of her, instead of the other way around, even from middle school. The news that there had been two children, twins, helped Bennie understand her mother’s downward slide, because such a devoted mother would be wracked with guilt over giving up her own child. Bennie had plenty of guilt herself, when the fact of Alice came to light. She’d tried to compensate for being the one chosen, but Alice had come in and out of her life only to make trouble. Their relationship was tumultuous, but after one big blow-up, Alice finally had redeemed herself. They’d made peace, and Bennie had gotten her sister the job at PLG.
As for your life, it’s over.
Bennie still couldn’t understand why this was happening, now. She’d had no warning, could fathom no reasons except ancient jealousy. Payback. Resentment. Her thoughts wandered, and she couldn’t understand how in God’s name she’d let this happen. She should’ve been on her guard. She should’ve known be
tter. There was a time, early on in their relationship, when she hadn’t trusted Alice at all, even before she’d glimpsed how dark her soul could be. Like a test in school, it turned out that the first answer was the correct one.
In those early days, Bennie had viewed Alice as the typical prisoner who would say or do anything to get a lawyer, and her story about who had really committed the murder was almost a stereotype. The murder victim was a cop who was also her live-in boyfriend, and Alice claimed she was framed for the murder by a conspiracy of corrupt cops. Bennie thought back to how Alice had sucked her into the representation.
At their first meeting, Alice had given her a photo that she said was their father, William Winslow, holding the two of them as babies. She claimed he’d given her the picture during one of his visits to the prison. Bennie had never seen a picture of her father, much less talked with him in the flesh, and even though the man in the photo had light hair and blue eyes, she immediately suspected that Alice was trying to reel her in using the photo, like bait wriggling on a barbed hook.
Alice had followed it up with a second photo, one of her mother. The photo was also allegedly from her father, and on the back it read To Bill, in her mother’s handwriting. It showed her mother sitting with girlfriends on stools at a luncheonette, at about age sixteen or seventeen years old. Her pretty face was half-turned to the camera, which caught her lively expression, vivid with the mischief of youth.
The picture came as a revelation because Bennie had seen her mother only in heartbreaking decline, but even so, she’d wondered if the photo was a fake and the handwriting on its back a forgery. She hadn’t credited Alice’s version of its origin, guessing that it had come from one of the other girls on the stools.
She tried to remember at which point she’d lost her objectivity about Alice. Even though Alice’s story about the cop’s death turned out to be true, and she hadn’t killed him, it didn’t mean that she wasn’t a con artist. And later, something happened that made Bennie wonder if Alice really had murdered someone, at least once in her life. Before now.
Oh my God. I can’t breathe.
Bennie inhaled once, then again. Her lungs didn’t fill. She opened her mouth but still couldn’t get a good breath. Her heart fluttered, arrhythmic and panicky. Reality came back into terrifying focus. How long until she ran out of oxygen? How long could she live without food? How long without water? She had no sense of time. Her watch was gone.
Panic washed over her, drowning any power of reason. She started panting. She couldn’t get her breath and she couldn’t control herself anymore. She couldn’t think of anything but being sealed in a box until she suffocated. Tears of fright sprang to her eyes, and she began pounding on the lid again, then kicking up with her feet and knees. She screamed and hollered and prayed that somebody would hear her or Alice would come back.
She pounded on and on, fighting for her life against the darkness, unyielding.
Chapter Six
Alice backed up against the front door of Bennie’s house, edging away from the growling dog. She dropped her bags, shaking as the dog sniffed her sneakers, pressing his nose against the droplets of blood. He growled louder, and when his black lips curled so his teeth showed, she forgot her fear and kicked him. He yelped and sprawled backwards, his back legs slipping out from under him, then her instincts took over.
She went after him, kicking him again and again, connecting twice with his chest, but he ran yelping from the living room. She chased him to the back of the house, where there was a dark kitchen. She flicked on the light, and in the corner was an open door to a basement. She could hear him falling down the stairs, whimpering, so she slammed the door closed behind him. She leaned on the doorjamb, panting and listening. If the dog knew what was good for him, he’d bleed to death. She didn’t need a complication like that right now.
She’d never been in Bennie’s house and looked around. The kitchen was modern and clean, with white enamel cabinets and shiny black-and-red granite counters. Dog photos lined the windowsill, and a framed rowing poster hung above a rectangular cherry table, set aglow by a glass pendant lamp shaped like a red teardrop. She returned to the living room and checked it out; tan couch with dark end tables, a matching coffee table, an entertainment center that held books, a TV, and a stereo. Bottom line, it was a nice room, but it wasn’t her taste at all.
She would have gone for a leather sectional sofa, maybe in black, and cool glass tables with chrome edges. She would have had a much bigger TV and a larger house, for parties. The two of them couldn’t be more different, and if they hadn’t gotten the blood test, Alice never would have believed they were related, much less twins. She had hardly believed it when she found she had a twin, especially one as useful as a lawyer, supposedly brilliant.
Their father appeared out of the woodwork, when she was in jail, to tell her about Bennie. It turned out that he’d been following both his daughters’ lives, even though he never showed himself. He was trying to save her life, and it came at just the right time, before her trial. She went online and read everything she could about the famous Bennie Rosato, and when they sat face-to-matching-face, she claimed to love hazelnut coffee, sports, and big dogs, just like Bennie.
Alice had even pretended to care about their mother, because any idiot could see that Bennie was all about old Carmela. Just like she could hear in Bennie’s questions that she wanted to know about the father who left them alone with a mentally ill mother. So she fed Bennie what little information she had about him, filling in the blanks with fantasy. She leaned on the twin thing, which put Bennie on the defensive from day one. She made Bennie feel guilty because she hadn’t been abandoned, even though Bennie had the worse childhood of the two, taking care of that crazy mom and flat broke. She’d even tried to convince Bennie that she’d been born underweight as the result of something called “twin transfusion syndrome,” where twins share the placenta in the womb, so one twin’s blood goes to nourish the other. So it was fate that she would end up standing in Bennie’s house, about to take over her life. It was Bennie’s own fault, for being such a sucker.
Alice went to the front door, picked up the messenger bag, took out Bennie’s wallet and checkbook, then grabbed her black cloth bag and headed upstairs.
She had banking to conduct, after all.
Chapter Seven
Mary blinked as Fiorella Bucatina posed in the threshold, placing a hand on each doorjamb. Fiorella was in her seventies, but her skin was preternaturally unlined, though it didn’t look Botoxed or lifted, and her hair, a rich espresso brown, had no gray at all. A chic coif emphasized her lovely, almond-shaped eyes, prominent cheekbones, and Cupid’s bow mouth lipsticked a come-hither crimson. She was petite, and her black knit dress showed off curves that could shame a fertility goddess. The woman was no Strega Nonna. On the contrary, she was Strega Sophia Loren.
“Wow,” Judy said, and Anthony’s mouth dropped open.
“HIYA, FIORELLA,” Mary’s father said, rising.
Her mother faced Fiorella Bucatina with a nervous smile. “Per favore, Donna Fiorella, sit, per favore. Ti piaci?”
“Thank you.” Fiorella sashayed to the chair and sat down as if it were a throne. Gold bangles jangled on one slim forearm, and she had sensational legs that ended in black slingbacks.
“Donna Fiorella,” her mother said, gesturing, “please, meet . . . ecce mia sposa Mariano e mia figlia, Maria.”
“I prefer English.” Fiorella’s speech bore no trace of an Italian accent. In fact, she sounded like Queen Elizabeth, or maybe Madonna.
“IT’S A PLEASURE.” Her father extended his hand, and Fiorella’s red-lacquered nails spread around his fist like talons.
“I had no idea you were so handsome, Mariano.”
Her father blushed all the way to his liver spots. “WELCOME. IT’S ALWAYS NICE TO SEE FAMILY.”
“It’s lovely to meet you, finally.” Fiorella smiled seductively, and Mary stepped in.
“Fiorel
la, this is my boyfriend Anthony and my friend Judy, from work.”
“PLEASE, SIDDOWN, EVERYBODY.” Her father gestured Mary, Anthony, and Judy into their seats. “FIORELLA, SORRY TO HEAR ABOUT YOUR HUSBAND.”
“Thank you, Mariano. This is a very sad time for me.”
“IT’S A SIN.” Her father’s expression fell into sympathetic lines, and his shoulders collapsed like an old house. Her mother winced, then fluttered too quickly to the stove, where she slid a floured sheet of homemade gnocchi into the boiling water. They landed with a steamy hiss in the sudden silence. It was a moment slow to pass, and Mary knew they were all thinking of Mike, her late husband, an elementary school teacher who had been killed, and whose death Mary’s parents had taken very hard. It had happened years ago, but Mary still thought of him every day, too.
“FIORELLA, HOW LONG WERE YOU MARRIED?”
“Three months. Can you imagine what that was like for me, losing my beloved husband, as a new bride?” Fiorella touched her father’s arm, and Mary thought her hand lingered too long, so she interrupted again.
“Were you married before?” she asked
“Enzo was my fifth husband,” Fiorella answered, without batting a mascaraed eye.
If her father was shocked, he didn’t let it show. “VITA AND ME, WE GOT MORE MILES THAN A CHEVY.”
Everybody laughed, including Fiorella, who said, “Mariano, you have such a wonderful sense of humor. If I had been married to you, I’m sure I would have been married only once.”
“HA!” Her father went to the stove. “I’LL GET THE COFFEE.”
“I love your dress,” Judy said, and Fiorella lifted an eyebrow.