House Secrets (48 page)

Eddie had busted him all up inside. His ribs on both sides were broken, and his kidneys were horribly bruised. He wouldn’t be surprised if his spleen had ruptured. Every time the old man had asked him a question, and every time he had hesitated, Eddie had hit him. He hit him with a fist that felt like a wrecking ball slamming into his body. And in the end, he admitted to every lie. He confessed to everything.

They put him down on his back on a damp, concrete floor. His hands were tied behind him and there was duct tape over his mouth. His eyes took in the building, some sort of circular, concrete structure. He thought it might be a grain silo, and he had this vivid image of tons of wheat pouring down on him, crushing him, smothering him.

He heard something behind him then, metal scraping on metal, like rusty hinges being forced open. Eddie and his brother, two men build like a matched pair of oxen, were grunting with the effort. If
they
were grunting, it had to be very heavy. As frightened as he already was, it frightened him even more not being able to see what they were doing.

Eddie suddenly came into his field of vision. He bent down, grabbed him by an ankle, and with one hand, dragged him across the
concrete floor. He flipped him over onto his belly and cut the rope binding his hands behind his back. Thank God! If he could get the tape off his mouth maybe he could reason with Eddie. But before he could remove the tape, Eddie placed a foot against his shoulder and shoved and he felt himself falling.

He didn’t fall far, maybe six feet. He landed on his back, the breath knocked out of him, waves of pain coursing through his body. He lay there for a minute with his eyes closed, willing himself not to pass out. He couldn’t pass out. He wondered if his back was broken or if one of his fractured ribs had punctured a lung. He finally opened his eyes and looked up.

Calvetti was standing there on the edge of the opening that he had been thrown through. A short, frail, white-haired old man—a man who at that moment seemed as old and as terrifying as death itself. He just stood there, looking down at Morelli, studying him, his face expressionless. There was
nothing
there: not anger, not regret, and certainly not pity.

Morelli reached up to scrape the tape off his mouth so he could talk to Calvetti. He ripped at the tape so frantically that his fingernails scratched grooves into one of his cheeks. “Dominic!” he screamed when the tape was finally off. Then, struggling to control his fear, he lowered his voice and said as calmly as he could, “Don’t do this. Please. I can still be president. I can still achieve our dream.”

Calvetti just shook his head—one time, slowly, from side to side—and then he looked over and nodded to Eddie.

Morelli watched in horror as Eddie and his brother began to lower a heavy concrete door. The door was on massive hinges and was three inches thick. Morelli struggled to get to his feet but with his injuries he was too slow. By the time he got up, Eddie and his brother had closed the door, sealing the space he was in. The last thing Paul Morelli saw before the door closed was Dominic Calvetti’s black eyes silently condemning him to hell.

Morelli raised his hands. He was tall enough that he could touch the door. He pushed against it but knew that even if he hadn’t been
injured, he wouldn’t have been able to move it. Then he heard something click, as if some sort of mechanism had been engaged to lock the door.

He sank to the floor in pain, his injuries aggravated by straining against the door. He bit down on the knuckles of his right hand to stop himself from screaming, to force himself to think.

He was now in the dark, but while the door had been open, he’d gotten a brief look at his surroundings. He knew he was in a hidden space beneath the floor of a building that he thought might have been an empty grain silo. But just then he realized it wasn’t a silo. He could hear liquid splashing onto the floor above him. A lot of liquid, as if it was being pumped into the building through several large-diameter pipes. He realized then that he was in a tank, a tank normally filled with water or some other fluid, and when the tank was full, the door above his head would be invisible.

Once again the panic began to wash over him and once again he held it back, suppressing his fear. Think, he told himself. Calm down and think. Why didn’t Calvetti just shoot him and bury him in the woods near the cabin? Why go to the trouble of transporting him to this place? And Eddie hadn’t hit him in the face. He’d battered his body something awful but had never touched his face, and that
had
to mean that Calvetti hadn’t wanted to mar his looks. Yes, that had to be it. Calvetti was just going to leave him here for a while, thinking he’d scare him so badly that he’d never fail him or lie to him again. He wouldn’t throw away all their years of work, not for a daughter he hadn’t loved or a granddaughter that had only been a small part of his life. Yes, the fact that Dominic hadn’t killed him meant that there was still hope.

He searched his pockets. They were empty. No, wait. He felt something. It was a small disposable cigarette lighter. Where had that come from? He didn’t smoke and he’d used wooden matches to light the fire in the cabin. He flicked on the lighter and raised it above his head and looked around. The concrete walls were complete
bare, no other openings or outlets that he could see, but just as the heat from the lighter began to burn his thumb he saw something in the shadows on his right-hand side. He crawled on his knees in the dark in the direction of whatever he’d seen, and flicked the lighter again.

Oh, Christ! It was a skeleton. And it had been there a long time. There was no flesh or hair on the bones, just a few tattered bits of cloth and leather. He noticed, just before the lighter began to burn him again, that there was something near the skeleton’s right hand.

He waited impatiently until the lighter cooled a bit, then spun the wheel again with his thumb. The object he’d seen near the skeleton’s hand was a pair of rusted nail clippers, the file blade of the clippers sticking out. What was the man doing with the file blade? Had he figured a way out?

He let the flame die again and took a few shallow, rapid breaths. He told himself not to panic. He ignited the lighter once more to see what the dead man had been doing with the nail file—and then he screamed.

He screamed until his throat was raw. He screamed for Calvetti to release him. He screamed for God to save him. But even as his screams were echoing throughout the chamber he knew that the likelihood of Calvetti returning for him was less than the possibility of God reaching down from heaven and opening the door above him.

Now he knew why Calvetti hadn’t simply killed him. And he also knew why Calvetti had placed the cigarette lighter in his pocket. Calvetti wanted him to die slowly and painfully, and he wanted him to know
while
he was dying that there would be no last minute rescue, that no one was going to find him and save him. Dominic Calvetti wanted him to suffer a slow, horrible death knowing—with absolute certainty—that there was no hope.

He knew this because scratched into the concrete wall above the skeleton were the words: