Page 72 of Wicked Mafia Beast
The trembling in my hands spreads to my arms, my shoulders, my jaw. I clench my teeth until my molars ache and shuffle through the scattered pages until I find my mother's section again.
Medical records. Prescription history documenting an escalating reliance on sedatives and anti-anxiety medication over the final two years of her life. Therapy notes I've never seen. A documented decline from a vibrant woman who sang in the carand made grilled cheese with three kinds of cheese into a hollow shell who couldn't leave her bedroom.
I always thought grief killed her. Depression. The slow erosion of living with a man who valued his empire more than his wife.
I was wrong.
Six months before her death, Seamus made a move against a rival family. The retaliation was bloody. Catherine witnessed a meeting she was never supposed to see. What she heard, what she saw, the documents don't detail. But the aftermath is documented in excruciating detail from her therapist.
Seamus didn't silence her with a bullet. He was smarter than that. Subtler. He used threats. Isolation. Cutting her off from friends, from family, from anyone who might listen. He turned her own home into a prison and let the walls crush her slowly, day by day, until there was nothing left of the woman who used to laugh too loud and dance in the rain.
The therapist's notes fill in the details Catherine never spoke aloud. Seamus moved her to the east wing of the house, away from the main living areas, away from staff, away from me. He had her phone line disconnected and told her friends she was receiving treatment at a private facility and didn't want visitors. He intercepted her mail. Controlled her medication. Reduced her world to four walls and a window she wasn't allowed to open.
And then the final entry, dated three weeks before her death, written in the therapist's careful hand:
Patient disclosed that S.M. threatened harm to her daughter if patient attempted to contact authorities or outside parties. Patient stated she would "endure anything" to keep her child safe. Patient shows signs of severe psychological deterioration.Recommend immediate intervention. Note: patient refused, citing above threat.
She didn't break because she was weak.
She broke because she was strong enough to let Seamus destroy her rather than risk him touching me.
My mother didn't die of a broken heart. She died protecting mine.
I read over the therapist notes again. How did Kon get his hands on these? On any of this information?
The sob that tears out of my chest is an ugly, animal sound. I press my fist against my mouth to muffle it, pages shaking in my other hand. My mother was all alone and no one helped her.
There's more. I don't want to read more, but I can’t help it.
Text messages between Seamus and Declan, dated months before my mother’s death. My father worrying about Catherine's "state of mind." Seamus reassuring him that she'd "come around." Declan responding with a single line that sears itself into my brain like a brand:
Do what you have to do. Just keep her quiet. I’m tired of the fuss.
He knew. My father knew what Seamus was doing to his wife. To my mother. And he chose his brother over her.
Another page slides free from the scattered pile around my knees. An older file. Decades old. The paper yellowed at the edges.
LEVERAGE: DECLAN MALONE.
A police report, yellowed at the edges, buried under layers of sealed records and redacted names. Dated forty years ago. Boston Police Department.
Single-vehicle incident. Rain conditions. Pedestrian struck on Route 9 outside Brookline. Victim: Margaret Malone, age 42, pronounced dead at scene. Driver fled on foot. No witnesses. Case classified as hit-and-run. Status: unsolved.
My grandmother. Killed in a hit-and-run that was never solved.
Except the next page tells a different story.
Luca's handwriting, precise and methodical, fills the margins of a supplementary report. Phone records. Financial transfers. A statement from a retired Boston PD detective whose conscience apparently caught up with him thirty years too late.
Declan Malone was behind the wheel. Sixteen years old. Blood alcohol twice the legal limit. Seamus, fifteen, sat in the passenger seat. The boys had taken the family car without permission, spent the evening drinking at a house party in Brookline.
On the drive home, rain-slicked pavement, poor visibility, Declan hit a pedestrian on Route 9. They didn't stop. Seamus told his brother to keep driving and Declan listened, the way he always listened to Seamus, even then.
The pedestrian was Margaret Malone. Age 42. Their mother. Out walking the shoulder of Route 9 at eleven o'clock at night, looking for the sons who hadn't come home.
She died on the wet pavement while her boys drove away in the dark.
The retired detective's statement fills the next page. Paid off by a Malone family lawyer within forty-eight hours. Witnessstatements fabricated. Evidence misfiled. An unsolved case that was never meant to be solved.
