Chapter 10 - THE MINT PLANT
The rain had stopped by Friday afternoon, leaving the streets of Philadelphia shining like wet slate under a pale, watery sun.
At a small diner forty miles outside of Altoona, the sign above the door flickered with a tired red neon buzz—HARRY’S PLACE — COFFEE & PIE. Inside, the smell of fried bacon and damp wool hung thick in the warm air behind the plate-glass window.
Clara sat in the corner booth with a cup of black coffee cooling between her palms. Across the table, Sophie was busy with a box of Crayola crayons, coloring the white paper placemat with broad, sweeping strokes of blue and yellow while the gray plush rabbit sat propped up against the ketchup bottle.
The bell above the diner door jingled.
A man in a gray wool overcoat stepped inside, shaking the last drops of mist from the brim of his hat before hanging it on the brass peg by the door. He didn't look like a boss. He didn't look like an auditor. He looked like an old clerk who had finally finished his shift and had nowhere else he needed to be before nightfall.
Marco Falcone walked across the linoleum floor, his footsteps making a dry, rhythmic sound against the tiles, and slid into the booth opposite Clara without asking for permission.
He didn't order coffee. He just pulled a small black notebook from his pocket, laid it flat between the salt shaker and the crayon box, and opened it to a clean, empty page.
"How is the child?" Marco asked, his voice as calm as it had been every morning for twenty years when he stood in the middle of the marble hall waiting for an order that never came.
Clara looked at him for a long moment, her eyes steady, unblinking, the tiredness gone from them at last.
"She draws better houses now," Clara said. "And she gave the man a mouth."
May you like
Marco smiled—just a slight upward curve of the dry lips, thin as a pencil line. He picked up a yellow crayon from the table, tapped it twice against the paper, and looked out the window toward the railway tracks where the afternoon train was already beginning to slow down for the station.
"Good," Marco said, closing the notebook with a sharp, clean snap. "A house shouldn't be that quiet."
