Page 59

Izzy

I might feel better after talking to my mother, but I don’t know how Taylor feels after talking to hers.

I return from the lake to find the door to Taylor’s house shut.

I’m sure it’s unlocked, but I knock anyway.

I hear a few faint barks from Nutmeg, but nobody comes to greet me, so I let myself in.

“Taylor?” I call out.

Her muffled reply drifts down from upstairs.

Nutmeg greets me when I enter her bedroom, panting with excitement as I give her a satisfying scratch behind the ears.

Taylor is sprawled on her bed, her eyes fixated on her phone, mindlessly scrolling through a social app. I recognize the automatic finger flick.

“How are you holding up?” I ask as Nutmeg jumps onto the bed and cuddles next to Taylor.

This is my first time up here. The room is painted light pink, and the furniture is worn and secondhand.

She’s decorated the walls with a few framed prints, but there’s also a poster of Katy Perry and one of Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games.

It’s a younger girl’s sanctuary, left untouched because she either outgrew the need to have the decor match her age or she’s taken solace in the memories of simpler times.

“I’m okay. Thanks for checking on me,” she says, though her quiet voice and downcast eyes contradict this assertion.

“How’d it go with your mom?” I ask.

“Way better than I expected,” Taylor says, though without cheer. “But now I have to tell my dad. He’s going to lose it.” She puts down her phone, sending me a sad half smile.

“Maybe he’ll surprise you like your mom did,” I offer hopefully.

Taylor’s expression conveys her doubts.

I take a seat on a desk chair across from the bed. “I was afraid my mom would try to strangle me through the phone, but I told her everything—where I am, why I came here, and what we found out about David and Aunt Susie.”

Taylor perks up. “Whoa. How’d that go?”

“She’s pissed,” I admit. “But I think, in a way, she’s also relieved.

She needed closure, and now we’ve got some.

It feels like I’ve ended the family curse.

I don’t know if they’ll find any evidence that David killed my aunt, but we’re all hoping he’ll at least be held accountable for Fiona. That’ll be some measure of justice.”

“You think she’s dead?” Taylor asked.

My thoughts flicker to the dream I had about getting buried alive, a faceless figure gripping the shovel that piled on the dirt, bit by bit, until it covered my entire body.

“She has to be,” I say.

“But why bury the evidence on his own property?”

“They feel a compulsion to keep a trophy close by,” I say, echoing Erika’s earlier observation. “These guys get off on thinking they’re smarter than everyone else.”

“Sometimes they are,” Taylor says darkly. “Anna Olsen’s killer got away with it.”

We pause, a quiet moment of reverence.

“That reminds me,” I say, “my mom said Susie told her about an Irish mobster in the area.”

Taylor’s eyes go wide. “She did? Does that mean Susie showed her the letter?”

“I don’t think so,” I say. “She didn’t mention the letter on our phone call. And I’ve never heard of the Irish Mob. That detail wasn’t in Anna’s letter, but my mom definitely said the mobster was Irish.”

“I haven’t heard of the Irish Mob, either,” Taylor says, frowning.

Simultaneously, we grab our phones and start googling. Taylor fills me in about the Winter Hill Gang out of Somerville, Massachusetts, founded by Buddy McLean, though the most famous member was Whitey Bulger. He spent years on the run before he was caught, eventually dying in prison.

I focus on New York and learn more about the Westies, who hailed from Manhattan’s Hell’s Kitchen.

This group was nasty with a capital N. They covered all the crime bases—drugs, illegal gambling, and contract killings—and they were best known for their ruthlessness and reliance on extreme violence.

And as an interesting side note, I find out they even formed an alliance with the Italian Mob, who gave them the highest praise a gang could receive—“f’ing crazy,” according to one top-level capo.

With the backing of the Italians, the Westies spread their influence north to Times Square, their power growing in proportion to their brutality.

“I don’t get it,” Taylor says. “What are the Westies doing in Times Square? Isn’t it just a big tourist trap?”

I’m with Taylor. All I know about Times Square is that it’s full of chain restaurants and mangy Elmos that pressure tourists into pricey photo ops. But there must be something to it, so I keep digging.

After some time clicking and reading, I come across an article detailing the Mob’s focus on the sex trade in 1970s New York City, which was only a few years after Anna Olsen fell off the face of the earth. Evidently, these gangsters made big money off porn, pimps, and prostitutes.

I let Taylor in on Times Square’s smutty past.

“Wait, porn was in movie theaters?” she asks.

We swap incredulous looks.

“Guess it got cleaned up, but probably not until after the Mob made a lot of money selling sex,” I say.

“Don’t you think it’s interesting that the Irish Mob seems to be connected to this lake, to two of the three disappearances, and to the sex trade?

And we happen to know that David has a shady porn business. ”

Taylor quietly absorbs this information.

“It feels like all of this is connected to David somehow, but that can’t be,” she says. “He’s not old enough to have even known Anna.”

That gets me thinking. “Well, what if David had a connection to some Irish gangster who lived at the lake back in Anna’s day. Know any Irish guys David was close to?”

Taylor sits up straighter.

“Cormac,” she says with dismay. “Cormac… Gallagher . He became David’s surrogate father after his real father died. And David was like his personal assistant or something. My parents know more about it than I do, but Gallagher is an Irish name, right?”

“Could there be a more Irish one?” I ask. “And he’s got a redheaded daughter. How Irish is that?”

We look at each other, dumbfounded.

“We need to talk to Lucas, pronto,” I say.

“Nutmeg, you stay here,” she orders. “We’ll be right back.”

Finally, there’s something that propels Taylor out of bed in a flash.