Poor Waitress Shielded Mafia Boss’s Father From Vicious Dog — What He Did Next Made Everyone Cry

Chapter 7

The key haunted her for two days.

It lay in the drawer beside her bed, and every time she passed it, she thought about it, and the thought kept growing into something that refused to leave her alone. Because there was a simple logic she couldn’t argue with.

The old man had stood in front of that gate. He had asked who built it. They had driven him away like a stray animal. But people didn’t drive strangers away that way. They drove strangers away by calling the police. People only threw coffee at someone they found troublesome. And they only found trouble in those who had once belonged there.

She thought he must have worked there as a gardener, a guard, a plumber — an old man who’d spent his entire life working for wealthy people, then grown ill and been forgotten. Somewhere inside that enormous house, there had to be someone who knew his name. There had to be someone waiting for him.

On Saturday morning, she woke earlier than she did even for a night shift. She put on the nicest clothes she owned — a blue sweater and black pants she’d worn only twice in four years. Once when she went to the hospital with Ruth. Once when she interviewed for the job she didn’t get.

She took two buses. The first lasted forty minutes. The second traveled along a road bordered only by stone walls and rows of trees, and each time it stopped, fewer people remained until she was the last passenger aboard. She walked the final stretch through the snow.

The gate looked different in daylight. Not taller, but cleaner — and that cleanliness was what made a person feel dirty.

Delaney pressed the bell. She had practiced her words the entire bus ride. I found an old man. He has a key to this house. Is anyone here missing a family member? She wasn’t there to ask for anything, and she wanted to make that clear in the very first sentence.

The guard came out first, looked at her through the iron bars, and she said the word she had rehearsed. He told her to wait.

Then the woman appeared. A fur coat. Sunglasses in the middle of a sunless morning. Walking across the snow in shoes that never slipped.

She didn’t open the gate. She stood inside, and Delaney stood outside, black painted iron bars between them.

Delaney repeated herself a second time, more slowly, and held up the key so the woman could see it.

Margarite Howerin looked. And there was one brief moment — so brief that it would take Delaney months to understand she had witnessed it — when the woman’s entire body went still. Because Margarite knew what the keys to this house looked like. She knew the gardener’s key, the pool cleaner’s key, the side door key, the storage room key. And the one in the girl’s hand wasn’t any of them.

She removed her sunglasses.

“What’s your name?”

“Delaney Woods.”

“Where do you work?”

“A diner on Lakewood Street.”

Margarite nodded slowly. Then she smiled — and that smile was worse than no smile at all.

“Do you know how many girls stand exactly where you’re standing every month?” she asked. “Four. Four on average. Some bring photographs. Some bring hospital papers. Some bring an elderly woman and claim she’s a real aunt. Last month, one brought a ring. Do you know why?”

Delaney didn’t answer.

“Because my father lost something. And this entire city caught the scent of money.”

“I’m not here for money.”

“They all say that.”

She put her sunglasses back on. Dropped the key. “Get out of here.”

Delaney remained there for three more seconds. Those three seconds would return to find her in the late hours of the night for years to come. Then she turned away.

She didn’t throw down the key. She held it in her fist through both bus rides home, squeezing so tightly that when she stepped off the bus, the jagged outline of its teeth had been pressed into her palm.