The Toil and Trouble Trilogy, Book One

by Val St. Crowe

  * * *

  I’m in the dressing room backstage, struggling into my Hecate costume. It’s pretty cool, even if it is a dress. It’s black and shredded at the ends. I look like a very creepy witch. I wear my hair down in my face, and I make it all tangled. It’s fun. Something’s been sort of bothering me about what Tito told me. He said that the only people who would know for sure if my mother was a rat are the police. He’s right. I have to know the truth about my mother. Which means somehow I’m going to have to go to the police. I know I can’t just march into the police station and ask them, however.

  I’ve got to figure out another way to get information about it. And I’ve only got one idea.

  I find Brice before I go onstage. He’s chatting with the chick playing Lady Macbeth’s maidservant. She goes to St. Anne’s. I used to remember her name, but I don’t. She’s got blonde hair. She’s really pretty. For some reason, it kind of bugs me that Brice is talking to her. It kind of feels good to interrupt them and ask Brice if I can talk to him.

  Immediately, he follows me away from the girl. “What’s up? Do you need more charms?”

  “I think we’re good for now,” I say, “but I did want to ask you about something. Can you do other things besides make charms like these?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like, maybe make an invisibility charm?”

  Brice’s eyes light up. “Who needs to be invisible?”

  I don’t want to get into this with him. “Just, can you do it?”

  “I might be able to. I don’t know. I’ve never tried. What are you pulling here, Olivia? You think people want to buy things that would make them invisible?”

  I think, actually, that my family might make something exactly like that. But it will have the virus in it, and Brice’s won’t. I want his charm instead. I hear a few lines from the stage. Crap! “That’s my cue. I’ll talk to you about this in a minute,” I tell him.

  I go onstage and do my scene. It’s a lot of fun, being creepy Hecate. My part in the play isn’t huge. In fact, I think sometimes, when Macbeth is performed, they actually cut the character. The Shakespeare Theater has this thing about doing uncut Shakespeare, however. We pride ourselves in doing the plays the way Shakespeare would have done them. It’s cool, because it means that people like me can have small parts in the show. I’m not like Brice. I don’t have any desire to be a professional actress or anything. This is just fun for me. After I deliver my monologue, I exit.

  Brice is waiting for me the minute I get offstage. “What are you planning, Olivia? I have to know.”

  “I don’t want to sell it,” I tell him. “It’s for something else.”

  “What is it for?”

  “I could pay you for it.” I happen to have some money these days, even though most of my take went to the family. I get to keep some of it.

  “I don’t want money for it, Olivia. I just want to know what’s going on.”

  “Brice, you know I can’t tell you stuff like this.”

  “Hell, I practically work for you now.”

  He’s kind of right. I realize that I’m making a lot of money from Brice’s charms, and I’m not paying him. “Actually, I should be paying you for what you’re doing. We’re doing well, and it’s because of you, and—”

  “I don’t want your mob money, okay,” says Brice. “I don’t need to be involved anymore than I already am. Let’s keep this money-free.”

  I shrug. If that’s the way he wants it. But it kind of doesn’t make sense. He doesn’t want money from my family, but he also wants to be all up in my business.

  “You know all my secrets,” he says. “Why won’t you tell me yours?”

  I sigh. Fine. I drag Brice all the way back to place we talked before, past the dressing rooms. It’s dark there. We stand in the shadows. Somehow, the lack of light makes it easier to talk about my mother and my father and the fact that I might not know anything about either of them. That both of them may have betrayed me. My mother by selling out the family. My father by killing her. I finish up by explaining that I want to break into the police headquarters to look for files on my mother. I want to see if I can find out the truth.

  When I’m done, Brice says, “Parents do lie. We should find out the truth.”

  “We?” I say. “I don’t want you involved in this.”

  “You’ll need me,” he says. “We can go after the show tomorrow, okay? There are other things my talents might help with besides being invisible. Besides, it sounds exciting.” His eyes are twinkling again. I like it when they do that. I remember kissing Brice, just for a second. How nice that felt. But that’s never going to happen again, so there’s no point in dwelling on it.

  Maybe it would be good for Brice to come along with me. Maybe he could help. “Okay, we’ll both go. But we have to be careful.”

  “Of course,” says Brice.

  I guess we don’t need to be hiding back here anymore. But neither of us has anything to do in the play until curtain call. I’m not sure what else to talk to Brice about. I definitely don’t want to talk about kissing.

  “Olivia,” says Brice, “what will you do if it is true?”

  Do? I wasn’t planning on doing anything. I just wanted to know. I hadn’t thought that far ahead. “Well, I won’t be able to do anything about it, really.”

  “I mean, will you stay in the jettatori if it’s true? Will you still be loyal to your father if you find out he killed your mother?”

  “I...” I hadn’t thought of that either. I don’t like the way I’m feeling towards either of my parents these last few days. But not being loyal to my father? He’s my father. “If he killed my mother, it would be because she betrayed us. She would have deserved to die.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  “Of course I do.” I don’t give myself time to think about it.

  “Hold up,” says Brice. “Your father’s killed people, right? Maybe not your mom, but other people. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I guess so.”

  “But you’d side with him, just because your mother turned in a criminal to the police?”

  When he puts it like that, it sounds idiotic. But he doesn’t get it. His family isn’t like my family. “There are things that are worse than killing someone. Betrayal is one of them. You don’t sell out your family. Family first. Family is everything.”

  Brice shakes his head. “I don’t know if I believe that.”

  “Maybe my dad isn’t the only person who’s had to kill someone, you know?” I say.

  Brice gives me a funny look. “What are you saying?”

  “Nothing. I’m not saying anything.” This was a stupid idea. I start walking up the hall.

  Brice comes after me. “Okay, maybe it’s a good idea if you don’t tell me everything. But I still want to break into the police office with you.”

  I smile at him. “Sure. Fine. You’re coming.”

  He slings an arm around me. “You and me, Olivia. It’s gonna be cool.”

   

  Chapter Five

  Michael Ercalono is fat with wisps of graying hair on his head. He sits at the head of a table in the back room at Franco’s Pasta House, a restaurant the Ercalono family controls. There are two other men with him. Tommy, Vincent, and I stand in the back room, surveying them. Michael gestures with one meaty hand at the empty chairs at the table. “Sit.”

  We sit.

  Almost immediately, a girl comes in with a heaping plate of spaghetti and meatballs. She sets it in the center of the table. Wordlessly, we all begin to serve ourselves. The atmosphere is tense, even though we’re all sharing a meal together. I’m not sure what to expect. The Ercalono family called this sit down. I’m guessing they want to talk about what happened to Joey.

  Michael twirls spaghetti on his fork using a spoon. “There were men at my house last night. Men with guns. My little granddaughter Sophia was staying with us. She was very frightened.” He’s conversati
onal about this, but there’s a tinge of threat in his tone.

  I don’t know anything about men at his house. I look down at my spaghetti and wonder if I should say anything. Instead, I just take a bite.

  “Well,” says Vincent, “my niece Tina was crying because her grandfather wouldn’t wake up last night.”

  Inwardly, I groan. It’s pretty clear that Vincent is responsible for the men at Michael’s house last night.

  Michael points his fork at Vincent. “There’s a code we follow here, boy. You’re young. You might not understand. But we don’t go after each other in our homes. Now, Guido was a regrettable incident. It was done without my knowledge. I didn’t authorize it. I know better than to directly mess with Lucio’s family. But my family is reeling from the loss of Joey.”

  He’s denying responsibility for the hit on Guido? Why would he do that? Either it’s true, or he’s angling to keep us from retaliating further. I speak up. “It’s regrettable that anyone showed up to threaten your family. That was done without my knowledge. I didn’t authorize it.”

  Michael looks at me for the first time. He raises his eyebrows, smiles and little, and tucks another bite of spaghetti into his mouth. He chews. We all wait. “You’re Lucio’s girl, right? I’ve heard about you.”

  I don’t know if he’s trying to tell me that he knows that I’m the one who whacked his grandson or not.

  “The fact is that your people shot my father and took responsibility for it,” says Vincent. “How could we not retaliate?”

  Tommy shifts in his seat. “I’m sure you’re aware, Michael, that the loss of Guido has left the family without current leadership. We’re in a transitional period right now.”

  I’m not sure Tommy’s admitting that is a good idea.

  “So,” says Michael to Vincent, “you’re claiming responsibility for coming to my home last night? For terrorizing my family?”

  “My father deserves justice,” says Vincent.

  “I think what he’s trying to say,” I break in, “is that we were under the impression that you were guaranteeing Joey would not hurt Tressa. When that confidence was broken, we acted.”

  “I agree,” says Michael. “I would have done the same thing had something like that happened to one of my young daughters. That’s why I didn’t authorize anyone to attack Guido. You’ll make sure your father understands that, won’t you?”

  Why is he insisting he didn’t authorize it so strongly? There’s definitely worry in his eyes. I know my father is feared and respected, but he’s in jail right now. He’s not calling the shots anymore. Doesn’t Michael know that? Or does Michael know something that I don’t know? “Whether you ordered it or not,” I say, “the fact is, Guido’s still in a coma.”

  “That’s right,” says Vincent, “and I won’t rest until justice is served.”

  I glare at Vincent. He is screwing everything up. That’s why there should only be one boss. So there aren’t conflicting interests. “It’s his father,” I say to Michael. “Of course he’s upset. Anyone would be.”

  “I don’t want there to be more violence between our families,” says Michael, twirling some more spaghetti.

  “Well, you should have thought of that before you shot my father,” says Vincent, and his voice is starting to get louder. “Because there will be violence now.”

  What? Is Vincent trying to start some kind of jettatori war? Doesn’t he know anything? The last war between families happened when my father was a child. It was chaos. It was bloody. It was awful. No one wants to go back to that. Besides, it significantly cut into everyone’s profits. “Unless,” I say, “we have some recompense.”

  Vincent seethes. “You can’t listen to her. She doesn’t speak for the family.”

  “Vincent,” I say sweetly, “I know you’re angry, but that’s no reason to take it out on me. I didn’t hurt your father.” I turn back to Michael. “If you didn’t issue the hit on Guido, you won’t mind rounding up the men who did and turning them over to us for punishment.”

  “What about the distress you’ve caused my granddaughter?”

  “Vincent’s addressed that you’ve caused distress to our daughters as well,” I say. “We won’t kill the men. We’ll return them to you. But you agree to let Vincent get justice for what was done.”

  Michael rubs his double chin with one hand, thinking. “All right, I suppose it’s fair.” He reaches a hand across the table to me to shake hands.

  I grasp it.

  Then he offers his hand to Vincent. Vincent glares at me and glares at Michael, but finally, he also shakes Michael’s hand. Michael shakes Tommy’s hand last.

  “You’ll deliver them to us by the end of the day today?” I say.

  Michael nods. He smiles at me again. “You remind me a lot of Lucio, Olivia. Well played.”

  Afterwards, we go back to the deli to report to the rest of the family what’s happened. Tommy heads inside, but Vincent grabs me and stops me before I can follow him. His eyes are dark with hatred as he surveys me. “You’re just a girl,” he says to me. “You can’t take this from me.”

  I shove him. “Let go of me, Vincent.”

  “I’ll show you,” he says. “You just wait.”