It was the beginning of Marlene’s return to the world, but not an easy road to travel with her family’s propensity to attract trouble. She’d been forced to call on her violent tendencies again on New Year’s Eve to save her son Zak and help stop terrorists from blowing up Times Square. But she had done it with a clear conscience, quite sure that killing terrorists fell under the heading of protecting the community.
After that, she’d hoped for a respite from danger. But then Fulton had been shot and Kane escaped. She hadn’t needed to hear Fulton’s message from Kane; she knew that the game was on and had been back to packing heat ever since.
And yet, her concerns recently had more to do with her father than Kane’s escape or her husband’s election campaign.
At noon she’d gone to take her father to lunch with the purpose of trying to talk him into moving out of the family home in Queens and into a nice assisted-living community.
He’d been living alone ever since her mother had died earlier that year, and she worried that he wasn’t coming out of his funk. The last years of her mother’s life had been rough. Concetta Ciampi had developed Alzheimer’s and had become increasingly difficult to deal with. Half the time she couldn’t remember Marlene’s name and had taken to walking out of the house and wandering the neighborhood, lost.
Mariano Ciampi had grown increasingly frustrated and frightened by the whole process. The woman he’d been married to for more than sixty years no longer knew who he was most of the time or thought he’d replaced the “real” Mariano. And he no longer recognized her as the woman he loved since meeting her on the boat on the way to the United States from Italy. His frustrations had made him angry, and Marlene had worried that he might physically harm his wife in a fit.
Then came the morning when he called. Her mother, he said, wasn’t breathing. He was afraid that she was dead. She’d arrived to find her father grieving downstairs and her mother lying on her back upstairs, her sightless eyes fixed on the crucifix above her bed. She’d bent over to close her mother’s eyes and noticed the tiny spots that indicated hemorrhaging in the eyes, sometimes an indication of strangulation or smothering.
She’d gone back downstairs and gently questioned her father. He said they’d gone to bed early, like normal, and when he woke up that morning, her body was cold and she wouldn’t respond when he called her name and touched her.
The medical examiner, who knew Marlene and didn’t want to extend the formalities any longer than necessary, did a cursory examination and pronounced the verdict “natural causes.” There’d been a quick burial, a service attended by dozens of people Marlene didn’t know as well as family, then a period of grieving in which she had not allowed herself to entertain the thought that her father might have killed her mother. Gradually the immediate sadness passed, but the question continued to trouble her sleep. Many nights she got up and made her way across Crosby to the loft building on the other side and up to the little art studio Butch had created for her. There she’d paint away into the morning, imagining how to ask her father if he’d murdered the woman he loved.
Using the excuse that she was working on a case, Marlene had questioned another medical examiner to see if there were other explanations for the hemorrhage spots besides murder.
Marlene had decided then that her mother’s death had been through natural causes. She was wrong to think otherwise of her father, a good and gentle man all of his life, dedicated to his family, and absolutely and madly in love with his wife. But that didn’t answer the problem of what to do with him.
He wasn’t as bad off as her mother had been, but he wasn’t all there anymore, either. He often forgot things-whether it was a doctor’s appointment, or something as simple as his key and locking himself out of his house. A couple of times he’d called her, his voice weepy and on the edge of panic, to say he had driven somewhere but couldn’t quite figure out how to get back. He was lost but too afraid of strangers to ask for directions, so Marlene would have to go retrieve him, or call the neighbor she’d left a spare house key with to let him in.
Ever since the death of her mother, he’d grown more frail. She was worried that he wasn’t eating or sleeping well. She had plenty of money from the sale of her security company-more than she or Butch or their children would be able to use in their lifetimes-and wanted to use it to make his life, and hers, easier. She’d found a fabulous assisted-care facility, “more like a permanent vacation in a five-star hotel,” she told him. But he refused to go.
“I will not go into a nursing home,” he’d shouted.
“Take it easy, Pops,” she replied in as calm a voice as she could muster. “It’s not a nursing home. I would never do that to you. It’s a community for senior citizens. You’d have your own apartment, a social center, including a pool and a billiards and card room. There’s someone around 24/7 if you need help, and all your meals and laundry and stuff is taken care of…. It’s like Club Med.”
“Call it whatever you want, but it’s where you send people to die who are no longer useful,” her father shouted again and retreated up to his bedroom.
“I plan to die in the same house I lived in with your mother for more than fifty years!” he yelled through the door when she asked him to open it. “This is the house where you and your sisters and brothers were brought the day you was born. You were all raised here…this is where we were a family, goddammit!”
Marlene used a bobby pin from her hair and unlocked the door. He didn’t seem to notice but looked around behind her as if he expected to see someone spying. “You know I’ve seen her,” he whispered.
“Who, Pops?”
“Your mother. She sometimes shows up in the doorway at night when I’m in bed. If I get up and try to find her, she disappears. But I can hear her moving around out there…. I think she’s waiting for me. But if I go to this living facility, she won’t know where to find me so that we can go to heaven together.”
The old man had sat down on the bed and started weeping. “I miss her so much,” he said. “I’d even take the crazy version back.”
Marlene had laid down on the bed next to him and pulled him close. In some ways, it was romantic, the way her old man looked forward to spending eternity with his sweetheart. But his visions of an unsettled ghost made her wonder if the manner of her mother’s death was weighing on her father’s conscience. But she couldn’t ask him. She just couldn’t, and instead she said, “It’s your imagination, Pops. Mom’s in heaven with Jesus waiting for you there.”
She repeated an offer for him to come live with her, Butch, and the boys, but not even the promise of daily contact with his beloved grandsons could get him to budge. “We’d get on each other’s nerves,” he said, “and then I’d have no place to go that was my own. I want my house, where I can do what I want, when I want. Besides, the guys at the VFW would miss me.”
So she’d left the debate for another day. Marlene had arrived at 10 °Centre Street a bit unsettled, but she brightened when she saw Harry Kipman walking up to the entrance. She adored Harry. He liked to play the irascible intellectual, but she knew he was not just bright, but kind and warm. She hadn’t minded the teasing about her weaponry, but it did remind her that she was falling back into old patterns.
Doesn’t matter, she thought, I’m defending my family, and I’m not about to leave their security up to someone else.
As soon as he could start barking orders, Fulton had immediately beefed up the police presence around her husband until wherever Butch went, he looked like a presidential candidate surrounded by Secret Service agents. She accepted the extra police patrols around the loft and even the presence of escorts when the boys went out. But she’d declined her own bodyguard.
She’d fought it again when Butch came home and announced that the Department of Homeland Security was beefing up the detail. However, Jaxon, another longtime friend of the family, had persuaded her that the new teams were professionals who knew how to stay out of the way but would be ready just in case.
Marlene wasn’t the only one who wasn’t thrilled with being shadowed by federal agents. Even more
