Alone (Bone Secrets, #4)(21)

Mason kept his mouth shut. If Lorenzo was fishing for information, he wasn’t going to get it from him.

The old man moved his gaze to his envelope, his finger toying with a ripped corner. Mason noticed the envelope was weathered and thin at the edges. It’d lived in someone’s storage for a long time.

“My family moved here when I was twenty. There were eight of us. My parents and my younger four sisters and brother. We didn’t speak English. Us children picked it up pretty quickly. My parents not so much. They eventually learned enough to get by, but either kept to themselves or socialized with other Italian-speaking families. There weren’t many of us in the city back then.”

“You lived in Portland?” Ray asked. “And you came from Italy?”

Lorenzo nodded but still kept his gaze and hand on the envelope. Mason noticed he wore a plain gold band on his left hand. He had working man’s hands, the nails short and stained. The stain looked permanent.

“My father opened a garage. He knew automobiles. Especially Italian ones, but there weren’t many of those here. He learned the American autos very quickly and gained a reputation as an honest man.”

Mason looked at Lorenzo’s nails again. Auto grease?

“My brother and I worked in his shop. We did well.”

Mason mentally patted himself on the back.

“One of my sisters did the books. The other girls were much younger and stayed home with my mother.” Lorenzo paused, his lips pressed tight as if they were reluctant to pass on the words. “My youngest sister, Lucia, was a disappointment to the family.”

What the hell did that mean? Mason raised a brow but kept his jaws shut.

Lorenzo opened and closed his mouth a few times as he tried to phrase his next sentence. “I was gone, you understand, by the time she was grown. I had a family and had moved south to open a garage in Medford. I didn’t pay mind to my parents’ complaints about her wild ways. I thought they just didn’t understand young people, especially American young people. My sisters wanted to be American teens. They wanted to dress and speak like the others they went to school with. My parents struggled to keep up.”

Here it comes.

“Lucia had been gone for two weeks by the time my mother told me she’d left. She didn’t want me to know. My father was humiliated that his daughter had left him, and he wrote her off, declared she was dead to him. She had a boyfriend and had been out late a few times, but she’d never vanished before. According to my mother, her battles with my father were epic screaming matches. My mother sent her to live with my aunt for a while, hoping she’d settle down and get along with my father when she returned. It didn’t work. They fought worse. One day she left, swearing she wasn’t returning. And she never did.”

Lorenzo looked at Ray then at Mason. “I saw the old photos, grainy from the newspaper, on the news today. I’d never heard of the deaths before. I guess we lived too far away. Medford was very small and a good distance from the big city of Portland.”

“Surely your parents or siblings heard of the women’s deaths and wondered if one was Lucia,” said Ray.

Lorenzo shrugged. “To them, she wasn’t missing. She’d left. My parents never spoke of her again.”

“But what about your siblings? Your sisters had to wonder what happened?”

Lorenzo gave a sad smile. “You don’t know my father. If he said Lucia was dead to the family, then she was. My sisters may have wondered where she went, but as far as the few discussions I’ve had with them, they’ve always assumed she’d formed a new life elsewhere.”

“No one looked for her? No one asked questions?” Ray sounded flabbergasted.

Lorenzo shook his head. “If they did, I didn’t know about it. I had my own family to deal with. Five boys,” he added proudly.

Mason wanted to punch the old man. Holy shit. What kind of family lets a sister vanish and not ask questions?

When’s the last time you talked to your brother? Fuck that. Mason knew his brother was alive and ornery as ever in Washington.

“So you’re wondering if one of the women in the past was your sister,” Mason stated.

Lorenzo nodded. “The descriptions match. The date matches. Lucia vanished two weeks before the estimated date of those deaths.”

“You remember the date your sister left?” Ray asked, one brow rising. Mason had caught the same inconsistency in the man’s story. If he hadn’t been around and had brushed off his sister’s disappearance, why did the date stick in his head?

Lorenzo fiddled with the envelope. “She left on my father’s birthday.”

Mason nodded. No doubt the father took that very personally and frequently commented on the disrespect. Sounded like something his old man would have done.

Scowling, Lorenzo shoved the envelope across the table to Mason. Mason wondered what kind of relationship he’d had with his father. An immigrant with old country values, trying to survive and keep his history in a new world.

“Those are the only pictures I have of Lucia. They are old, of course. Perhaps there are photos of the dead that were not released to the public. Maybe you have something else that you can compare them to.”

“Our best bet would be a DNA sample,” said Ray. “We still have the skeletal remains of the women. They can extract DNA and create a comparison.”