Page 68 of With a Vengeance

Twenty-Nine

Anna thought nothingwould top the jolt of surprise she experienced when Dante admitted he was the one who sent the evidence to Aunt Retta. She was wrong. Her legs go numb beneath her, and she finds herself leaning against the bar just to remain upright.

“Are you okay?” Dante says.

Anna responds with a weak shake of her head.

Yet she also should have known there was more to it than mere greed. Kenneth Wentworth planned something unthinkable, in the process damaging dozens of families. Only someone damaged in their own way could have gone through with it. And now that Anna knows why, just one more question remains.

Who else knew about it?

“I need to go,” Anna says.

Dante grabs her arm. “We should really talk about this.”

“No.” Anna breaks free of his grip. “Not now. Please.”

She flees the car, hurrying farther back on the train. In Car 12, she stops at the door of Room A and starts knocking. Sal, already annoyed as she opens the door, appears doubly so when she sees Anna.

“Did you know about my mother and Kenneth Wentworth?” Anna says.

Sal gives a noncommittal shrug. “I’d heard a few things here and there.”

“Did you also know that’s the reason he targeted my father?”

Sal leaves the door open as she retreats into the room, giving Anna the choice to enter or not. She does, stepping gingerly inside and closing the door behind her. The room, while large for a train, feels too small for the two women. In addition to physical baggage, in the form of Sal’s multiple suitcases, the room is also filled by their shared past. Anna can feel it pushing against her and straining at the walls. A history too fraught to be contained in such a tight space.

“I didn’t know that for sure,” Sal says. “Ken Wentworth never explained why he was doing it. Just that it was going to happen and he needed me to be a part of it.”

“Why’dyoudo it, Sal?” Anna winces at the way she sounds. So young. So vulnerable. She sounds, she realizes, like the girl she used to be. The girl who, in her mind, no longer exists. She’s gone. Dead. A ghost. “I understand why the others took part. Even Edith. But all this time, I never figured out your reasons. Why did you betray my father like that? Why did you betray all of us?”

Sal drops into the chair by the window, her fancy clothes and bleached hair doing nothing to keep her from looking weary and old. A startling change from when Anna knew her. Back then, Sal had seemed not much older than Anna herself. Now no trace of that youthful woman exists. Gone, too, is the wry moxie that had made such an impression on young Anna. Present-day Sal strikes her as bitter and exhausted.

“It’s complicated,” she says, reaching for her handbag. “In ways you won’t understand.”

But Anna thinks she already does. She remembers how eager Sal was to please, constantly at her father’s side, attending to hisneeds even outside the office. That’s one of the reasons Anna had come to think of her as an older sister. Sal was always around, often joining the family in ways that went beyond being a devoted employee.

“You were secretly in love with my father,” Anna says, amazed she’d never considered the possibility. “And you knew he’d never love you back.”

Sal scoffs as she takes the lipstick and nail polish from her handbag. “That’s an insult. Not just to me, but to our entire sex. Women can be motivated by things other than unrequited love.”

“Then what motivated you? Greed?”

“Unlike some of the others, the money was secondary.”

“Then why?” Anna says, still sounding childlike and wounded. “What made you do it?”

Sal opens the nail polish and, left hand splayed, begins to paint her nails the same crimson shade as her lips. “Shame,” she says. “That and fear.”

“I don’t buy that. People died, Sal.Tommydied. All because of what Kenneth Wentworth did. And you helped him cover it up. What could possibly be more shameful than that? What was it you were so afraid of?”

Anna waits for an answer that doesn’t arrive. As Sal continues painting her nails, stubbornly silent, it dawns on Anna that she’s on the right track. It’s clear another person was involved in her decision. If not her father, then someone else.

“Was it Kenneth Wentworth?” she says. “While he was still pining for my mother, were you in love with him?”

“I told you, I didn’t do it because of a man.” Sal spins the chair around to stare directly into Anna’s eyes. “I did it because of a woman.”

Thirty

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