Black Fall



  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  To my patient, earnest, talented, and occasionally blunt muse of a wife,

  Who told me what she really thought of my characters and made me write a better book.

  PROLOGUE

  It was a bright, chilly night. The full moon was hidden by clouds, but it was never really dark in New York. A light breeze drifted through the open double doors of St. Patrick’s Cathedral as Jonas stared up at the vaulted ceilings. At least the funeral’s classy, he thought, and immediately felt a twinge of guilt. His dad hadn’t been big on sarcasm.

  The design was beautiful, though. Ribs crisscrossed overhead in the shape of eight-pointed stars, arching so high that it made him feel dizzy and small. His mother stood beside him, posture perfect and dignified while he struggled to not tug his collar or shuffle his feet. As much as he tried to ignore them, tatters of conversation floated up from the crowd.

  “What do you think she’ll do now? Go back to work?”

  “She still has the boy to think of. Besides, I heard her condition—”

  The black leather shoes were new and uncomfortable, and his feet felt sore from standing on the stone floor. The big guy who’d picked him up from school knotted his tie too tightly. He was wearing cufflinks for the first time and didn’t like the way they made the cuffs hang loosely over his wrists. His mind wasn’t wandering, it was running away. He wanted to be anywhere but here.

  “He looks like his father. It’s unnatural, considering how he was—”

  They’d rushed him to a store on Park Avenue, measured him, then taken him to an old-fashioned barbershop where a hunched Italian man who’d earned his barber’s license in 1967 shaved him and cut his hair. Back to the clothing store where, face still warm and damp, he’d been fitted for the suit, tried on the shoes, and left wearing them.

  Two hundred people sat in the pews. They stared at him, his mother, the five-foot-tall picture of his father, and the urn set on a small wooden table beside them. They stared like hungry animals. The pressure of it was suffocating. He wanted to rip the stupid jacket and shoes off and go grieve his father alone.

  The mourners, most of whom he’d never met, began to come up one by one or as families.

  “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Black.”

  “My condolences, Mrs. Black.”

  No one looked at Jonas or called his mother, Alice, by her first name. It was as if they were scared of her. She’d always seemed delicate, and sometimes sad when his father was away. Now she looked cold and intimidating. He’d never met the woman standing beside him before, and he was scared of her too.

  “Mrs. Black, my… family would like to assure you we had nothing to do with—”

  “Not now, Vincent,” Alice said, cutting the man off.

  Distaste flickered in his eyes but didn’t quite spread to his face. He was tall and pale, with limp, yellow hair plastered to his skull. His gray eyes seemed to look through Jonas and his mother, focused on something else. “Of course, Mrs. Black. My apologies.”

  Jonas’ eye was caught by a glint of moonlight that slipped past the cloud cover and through one of the stained glass windows. There was a sudden commotion in the pews—a young man having a seizure. The boy’s older brother, a large man who looked to be his twenties, grabbed the kid by the upper arm and walked him outside, almost dragging him. A similarly large woman from the same group—not fat, more like a pro wrestler in formal clothes—walked quickly up to Jonas’ mother and said, “I’m so sorry, Mrs. Black. He’s young, and Phillip isn’t here…”

  “It’s alright, Leticia. I was touched your family came on such short notice. Why don’t you take the others home? There’s no ill will between our families.”

  Leticia bobbed her head. “Of course there isn’t. Thank you, Mrs. Black.” As she turned, Jonas thought he saw her eyes flash yellow but, before it could register, she’d gone back to her group. They all stood—at least two dozen of them—and filed out of the Cathedral.

  “Your father was an important man, Jonas,” his mother said.

  My father was a salesman, and I’m not even sure what he sold, Jonas thought. He swallowed and blinked back tears. No, he thought, shaking his head slightly, that’s not fair. That had been his dad’s job, but he was exceptional in many ways. He never got angry, never raised his voice, and always had time for Jonas and Alice when he was home. It was almost as if he didn’t have needs of his own, and he’d filled his life with quietly supporting everyone around him.

  Still, Jonas couldn’t fathom why they were being treated like royalty. He went to a public school, wore regular clothes any day but today, and had a normal girlfriend who’d liked him enough to stick around for the past year. He was supposed to be bored, not get his life trashed.

  He glanced at his mother, taking in her rigid posture, her blank, polite expression, so different from the smiling, insightful woman she’d been on his father’s arm. She looked lifeless. I can’t make this worse for her, he thought.

  He stopped fidgeting, stood up a little straighter, and tried to look politely neutral in the face of calamity.

  More people started to trickle out, pausing to talk in little clumps as they made their way to the door. Finally, it was just Jonas, his mother, and Marcus Fangston, a longtime family friend.

  Marcus put his hand on Alice’s elbow and said, “If there’s anything I can do, let me know.”

  “I will, Marcus. Thank you.”

  “Goodbye, Jonas. Come see me sometime.”

  Jonas nodded numbly. He had a dull ache in the back of his right knee, and a scream was frozen in his throat, but he fought it down. As Marcus walked toward the exit, Jonas’ mother retrieved the urn and started walking toward the doors. Then she stopped. Jonas heard the sound of porcelain on porcelain as she removed the lid and sniffed.

  “Mom, what are you—”

  “Marcus!” she snapped.

  Marcus stopped and turned, eyebrows raised in surprise. Then, with a sigh, he walked back to where she was standing. “Alice, it’s been a long day—”

  “This isn’t him,” she said sharply, hefting the urn.

  His shoulders dropped. “Alice, we’re all devastated by Victor’s death, but this isn’t the time to—”

  “You listen to me, Marcus,” she said, in a tight, clipped voice. “I am not some mewling housewife to be appeased, drugged, and sent to therapy. Did you think I wouldn’t know? That I don’t remember what human ash smells like?” Her voice rose to a shriek, loud enough to echo off the Cathedral walls. “This is not my husband!”

  Fangston gaped, and Jonas watched in horror as she slammed the urn to the ground, scattering shards of porcelain and white ash across the floor.

  That was when Jonas found out what human ash smelled like: incense, charcoal, and chalk dust. It slipped through his fingers like white sand and crushed seashells. It got into his mouth, nostrils, and eyes. It colored his hair and mingled with his tears. But no matter how frantically he tried to gather the pieces back together, his father was never coming home.

  OCTOBER