The Treasure Box by Penelope J. Stokes

Author:Penelope J. Stokes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: book
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Published: 2010-03-25T00:00:00+00:00

15

MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN

A full hour after the monitor had gone dark, the smoke continued to hover in a shapeless cloud over Vita Kirk’s soul. In her mind she still saw shattering glass and flying splinters and blood spattering against the walls. Her ears rattled with the gunfire, the screams, the squeal of tires, the wail of a policeman’s siren come too late. She even tasted the acrid sting of gunpowder on the back of her tongue and smelled the lingering odor of violence, of death.

In a stupor of astonishment, Vita shut down the computer, took a sweater from the hall tree in the entryway, and went out into the backyard.

It wasn’t a yard, really, but an enclosed garden, with walls made of the same rough limestone as the blocks that formed the foundation of the little Victorian house. Three stone walls encased the perimeter of the yard and butted up against the back of the house. A single gate opened to a walkway that meanderedaround to the front but Vita kept it padlocked except when Eddy the yardman came to mow the grass.

In the far corner, near the alley, a large weeping willow draped its graceful branches over the top of the wall, and bright purple and yellow irises bloomed against the mossy stones. Along one side, fragrant white lilies of the valley crowded into a bank of bleeding hearts. In the blue-gray dimness of the garden, Vita could not see their color, but she knew.

Red. Red like Cathleen’s dancing dress. Red like the wine and blood that had mingled on the white linen tablecloths in Benedetti’s restaurant.

Pushing the image from her mind, Vita settled herself in the swing, drew the sweater closer around her shoulders, and looked up into the night sky. A sliver of moon hung tangled in the upper branches of the willow, and here and there a star winked back at her. The only constellation visible from this angle was sturdy, muscular Orion, his silver sword hanging from his belt.

A fragment of a verse—or perhaps a poem, something— whispered inside Vita’s head: Those who live by the sword die by the sword. She had seen The Untouchables. She knew what gangsters did. The hit was on Angelo and his associates. Cathleen was just a bystander caught in the cross fire.

Vita’s mind conjured up images of the carnage in the upstairs flat. Downstairs, in the restaurant, it would have been worse. Mentally she tallied up the victims: Angelo Benedetti, who turned out to be no angel at all. Perhaps a dozen or more of Benedetti’s famiglia—like Angelo, probably guilty of countless notorious crimes. They probably deserved to die by the sword, but at the moment Vita felt disinclined to render such a judgment. And what of Cathleen and Derrick? They, too, were guilty—of greed and deception, of theft and betrayal. Guilty of wanting too much and loving too little. But was death a just punishment for such offenses, when all of humanity labored under the same faults and frailties?

And one more.

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