Because It Is My Blood (Birthright #2)(59)

We’d paid off Bertha Sinclair so I thought I was pretty much in the clear.

“You have Balanchine Special Dark?” I asked the vendor.

The vendor nodded. He reached under the table and produced a single bar. I could tell from the wrapper that it wasn’t real. The colors were off, and the paper had an unappetizing, gritty matte finish. It was probably some cheap, 1 percent cacao chocolate in a counterfeit Balanchine wrapper. I bought the bar anyway. Ridiculously, the vendor wanted ten dollars for this knockoff.

“Are you serious?” I asked. A bar of Balanchine Special Dark was usually three or four dollars, tops.

“Supply’s been scarce,” the vendor replied.

“You and I both know this isn’t even Balanchine,” I said.

“What are you? Some kind of expert? Take it or leave it.”

I put the money on the table. Despite the cost, I was curious to see what was being sold in my father’s name.

Mr. Kipling stood a bit away from me while I was making this transaction. He didn’t want to be disbarred, I suppose.

I slipped the chocolate into my bag, and then Mr. Kipling walked me back to my apartment.

“Should we talk about schools?” Mr. Kipling asked.

What was there to talk about? “Homeschooling seems like the only option at this point. I’ll study at home and try to get my GED before summer.”

“And after that? College?”

I looked at Mr. Kipling. “I think we both know that I am no longer college material.”

“That isn’t true!” He argued with me for a while, and I ignored him. “Anya, your father wanted you to go to college.”

If he’d lived, that might have been an option. “And Natty will,” I replied.

“But you? What will you do instead?”

In the short term, I needed to find out who had killed Leo and ordered the hits on the rest of my family. As for long-term goals? It had begun to seem pointless for me to make any. “Mr. Kipling, I’m booked up,” I said lightly. “I’ve got my uncle’s funeral to attend, a cousin to visit in prison, and Win’s birthday party is next Saturday. The only thing I wonder is how I ever had time for school at all.”

Our walk had come to an end, and Mr. Kipling was giving me an annoyingly tragic face. “Okay, my dear, I’ll arrange to hire you a tutor.”

Just outside the front door of the apartment, someone had placed a medium-size box and an envelope. I carried both inside and set them on the kitchen counter. The envelope had no postmark, but envelopes were unlikely to contain explosives, so I opened that first.

It was a note:

Dear Anya,

Perhaps you remember me? My name is Sylvio Freeman. Syl. I had opportunity to meet you last fall when you interviewed at my school. I am aware that you are now back in the city, and for the moment at least, appear to have put your legal difficulties behind you. I had hoped you might speak at a Cacao Now meeting about your experiences. If this suits you, please come—

I tossed the note aside without bothering to finish reading it. I turned to the box. The postmark indicated Japan, and the return address was the Ono Sweets Company, which, of course, meant Yuji Ono. The box was surprisingly heavy. I debated whether to open it. There could be a bomb inside. And yet I doubted that if Yuji Ono wanted to finish me off, he would send a package with his own return address on it.

I retrieved my machete from my bedroom and sliced open the box. Inside was a gallon-size plastic bag filled with dust, and a small white card.

Leo.

Dear Anya,

I am sorry I am not able to come to New York to deliver this myself. I am detained by both business troubles and poor health. I am also sorry about the way we left things. The timing was very poor. Someday, I hope I will be able to better explain my behavior. So you know, I did have opportunity to view Leo’s body before cremation, but there was very little left of it. I do believe it was him. The corpse of his girlfriend, Noriko, was recognizable, and Leo has not been seen in Japan since.

You are still in my thoughts,

YUJI ONO

Oh, Leo.

Some part of me—my heart, I suppose—had hoped Leo’s death might be a mistake, but now I knew it wasn’t. The brain could not deny the evidence. Leo was dead.

I was glad that Natty was at school because I didn’t know what I wanted to say to her yet.

I set the ashes on the coffee table in the living room and contemplated my next move. Leo needed a funeral, but if I gave him one—if I, say, had him buried at the plot in Brooklyn—it could potentially implicate me in his escape. I did not relish the idea of a fifth stint at Liberty. So, perhaps Leo’s service could be informal: ashes scattered in the park on a sunny day, Natty reading a poem, etc. Did it really matter that Leo’s remains shared space with my parents’? They were all dead anyway.

I wanted to cry over Leo. I could feel the rusty gears turning behind my eyes and the tightening of my chest, but the tears would not come.

The longer I looked at Leo’s ashes, the more I began to feel, oddly enough, embarrassed. The steps I’d taken to keep Leo safe had been just the wrong ones. Look at the outcome! My father, wherever he was, would probably be ashamed of me.

I hadn’t moved for hours when Natty got home from school. Her eyes shifted from me to the bag to me. “Poor Leo,” Natty said before she sat down on the couch.