The Sinner: A Rizzoli & Isles Novel

lightness in her step as she walked down the stairs and went back into the kitchen.
    The water on the stove was now boiling. The rising steam warmed her face, like a mother’s caress.
    She added two teaspoons of olive oil, then slid the gnocchi into the pot. Three other pots already were simmering on the stove, each releasing its own fragrance. The bouquet of her mother’s kitchen. She inhaled the smells, aching with new appreciation for this sacred place, where food was love.
    She scooped up the potato dumplings as they floated to the surface, set them on a platter, and ladled on veal sauce. She opened the oven and pulled out the casserole dishes that had been left warming inside: Roast potatoes. Green beans. Meatballs. Manicotti. A parade of plenty, which she and her mother carried out in triumph to the dining room. And last, of course, the turkey, which sat in royal isolation at the center of the table, surrounded by its Italian cousins. It was more than their family could ever eat, but that was the point; an abundance of both food and love.
    She sat at the table, across from Irene, and watched the twins being fed. Only an hour ago, when she had looked at Irene in the living room, she had seen a tired young woman whose life was already over, whose skirt sagged from the constant tugging of small hands. Now she looked at that same woman, and she saw a different Irene, one who laughed as she spooned cranberry sauce into little mouths, whose expression turned tender and unfocused as she pressed her lips to a head of curly hair.
    I see a different woman because I’m the one who’s changed, she thought. Not Irene.
    After dinner, as she helped Angela brew coffee and pipe sweet whipped cream into the cannoli shells, she found herself looking with fresh eyes at her mother as well. She saw new streaks of silver in her hair, and a face starting to sag at the jowls. Do you ever regret having us, Mom? she wondered. Do you ever stop and think that you’ve made a mistake? Or were you as sure as I am now, about this baby?
    “Hey, Janie!” yelled Frankie from the living room. “Your cell phone’s ringing in your purse.”
    “Can you get it?” she yelled back.
    “We’re watching the game!”
    “I’ve got whipped cream all over my hands! Will you just answer it?”
    He stalked into the kitchen and practically thrust the phone at her. “It’s some guy.”
    “Frost?”
    “Naw. I don’t know who it is.”
    Gabriel
was her first thought.
He’s heard my message.
    She crossed to the sink and took her time rinsing off her hands. When at last she picked up the phone, she was able to answer with a calm, “Hello?”
    “Detective Rizzoli? It’s Father Brophy.”
    All the tension suddenly whooshed out of her. She sank into a chair. She could feel her mother watching her, and she tried to keep the disappointment from her voice.
    “Yes, Father?”
    “I’m sorry to call you on Christmas Eve, but I can’t seem to get through to Dr. Isles’s phone, and—well, something has come up that I thought you should know about.”
    “What is it?”
    “Dr. Isles wanted contact information for Sister Ursula’s next of kin, so I offered to look it up for her. But it turns out our parish records are a little out of date. We have an old phone number for a brother in Denver, but that phone’s been disconnected.”
    “Mother Mary Clement told me the brother died.”
    “Did she tell you that Sister Ursula also has a nephew living out of state?”
    “The Abbess didn’t mention him.”
    “It seems he’s been in touch with the doctors. That’s what the nurses told me.”
    She looked at the platter of filled cannoli, now getting soggy with their filling of sweet cream. “Where are you going with this, Father?”
    “I know this seems like a minor detail, tracking down some nephew who hasn’t seen his aunt in years. And I know how hard it is, to locate someone who’s out of state, if you don’t even know their first name. But the church has resources even the police don’t have. A good priest knows his flock, Detective. He knows their families and the names of their children. So I called the priest in the Denver parish where Sister Ursula’s brother lived. He remembers the brother quite well. He performed his funeral Mass.”
    “Did you ask him about her relatives? About this nephew?”
    “Yes, I did.”
    “And?”
    “There is no nephew, Detective. He doesn’t exist.”

T WENTY -T WO
     
    M AURA DREAMED of funeral