Rogue Island Read Online Free PDF

Carlos, which means “free man,” and Leticia, which means “joy,” but Efrain insisted on Scott and Melissa. He wanted them to be American through and through. Their children were their life. Now they didn’t have enough money to bury them.
    Their fellow parishioners at the Church of the Holy Name of Jesus raised enough for two little wooden coffins. The Providence firefighters’ local donated the headstone. In a paroxysm of generosity, Lugo’s Mortuary supplied the hearse at half price.
    On Monday morning, the crowns of the tallest headstones in the North Burial Ground poked above the crusted snow cover. Rosie and I stood with a little knot of mourners huddled at a pit hacked into the frozen turf. Mike Austin, the firefighter who had brought Scott’s body down the ladder, helped carry him to his grave. Brian Bazinet, who had descended with Melissa, helped carry her.
    I cocked my head to catch the priest’s ancient words of comfort and glory, but they were swallowed by Graciela’s keening and the white noise of hundreds of Bridgestones, Dunlops, and Goodyears swishing by on the interstate thirty yards to the west. Off to the east, the gravedigger watched from his backhoe, its engine muttering.
    After the mourners slogged to their battered Toyotas and Chevrolets, Rosie and I picked up clumps of frozen earth and dropped them into the grave. They landed on the little coffins with hollow thuds. Then we stood aside and watched the gravedigger finish the job. I tried to find calm in the steady rhythm of his work, but in my mind I could still hear Graciela’s anguished wail and the low rumble of her husband as he tried to comfort her.
    Journalism professors preach that you should never get emotionally involved in your stories, that to remain objective you must cultivate a professional detachment. They are so full of shit. If you don’t care, your stories will be so bloodless that readers won’t care either.
    I said a prayer in case He was listening. But where was He when the snowplow was burying the hydrant? Where was He when the twins were screaming for help?
    Rosie and I crunched through the snow to the Bronco, then turned and looked back at the patch of brown earth in a blinding field of white. We didn’t speak. What was there to say?
    Somebody had to pay for this, and Polecki and Roselli weren’t up to the job.
    *  *  *
    Twenty minutes later, I walked into the newsroom and found a thick manila envelope on my desk. On the front were the words “You owe me—Gloria.” She’d stuffed the envelope with eight-by-tens.
    I thought about logging on, but I didn’t want to deal with the latest Lomax message just yet. I dumped the envelope out on the desk, studied the prints, and found a lot of familiar faces. Old Mrs. Doaks, who had babysat the Mulligan kids when we were little, stood at the police lines and craned her neck. Three of the Tillinghast boys, apprentices in their older brother’s truck-hijacking start-up venture, scowled at the flames and looked like they wanted to hurt somebody. Jack Centofanti, a retired fireman who missed the action so much that he spent his afternoons hanging around the firehouse, lent a hand by directing traffic. That face took me back. When I was a kid, Jack and his tackle box appeared at our front door at 4:00 A.M. every time the fish were biting at Shad Factory Pond across the river in East Providence. He’d been a steady loser at the low-stakes poker-and-beer nights that had filled our parlor with bawdy stories and good fellowship every Saturday night. Jack had been my father’s best friend. When he spoke at Pop’s funeral, he made a Mount Hope milkman sound like a hero for raising a girl who didn’t wind up pregnant and two boys who managed to stay out of jail.
    I kept flipping through the same pictures over and over. Each time I saw a face at more than one fire, I circled it in red grease