Page 88 of The Killer Cupcake
“Do you have other rooms like that, Melo? Have you done that in other places? Other times?” she asked.
He refused to answer.
“Could the F.B.I. find rooms like that?” she asked, and her voice trembled.
He shrugged like a spoiled boy caught with his hand in the cookie jar.
Kathy let go of a deep sigh. She nodded. She walked over to him slowly, not getting too close. Gone was the comfort and lazyhugs. He only let her close now that the truth was revealed, when he wanted sex. But the intimacy between them, he ran from.
“Melo, are you feeling okay?” she asked.
“I’m not crazy, Kathy!” he snapped.
“I didn’t say that,” she spoke softly.
“I see it in your eyes,” he said and started to walk away. “You’re looking at me the way Maria did when?—”
“When what?”
He kept walking.
“Stay! Damnit,” she demanded.
He stopped.
“Stay, Melo, with me. Please,” she said gently. “When did Maria look at you like this?”
He turned his gaze back to her.
“Did she find a room like that, too? In her house? With me in it? With all those memories?” Kathy asked.
He crossed his arms and stayed silent.
“She told me about what you did to Caesar and how you punished her over the lie about the twins,” Kathy confessed.
“She told you?” He asked with a frown.
“We’ve been friends for years, ever since you broke Nicolas’ heart. I know who you are, Melo. I just didn’t know… about that room, and those men. Men from my life. Men who never harmed me or you. Melo? What have you done?”
Again, she was met with the stern gaze and nothing more.
“I’m not judging you. I’ve done things, Melo. I’ve done things without you, with you, to you, for you, over the years. You know me. I’m not innocent. I’m not judging you,” she said.
He nodded. “You’re right. I confess. Maria looked at me like that when I almost beat Caesar to death with my hammer. She looked at me like that when she found my room. She looked at me like that when I made her help us kill Pa. That’s how she found out about Sandy. Before the accident… before you knewshe knew about Sandy, she did. She said I was crazy, insane, obsessed, possessed by the devil. Maybe she is right. I can’t tell anymore.”
Kathy held back her emotion. It was hard. She wanted to stop peeling back the layers, but she knew she had to go on. She wiped at a tear that escaped and kept her spine straight. “She’s a fucking liar. You’re not crazy. No more crazy than me. You’re a killer. Our fathers were killers. Matteo is a killer. I’m a killer, and so is my mother. My grandmother, Bessie, was a killer, probably better than all of us. Killers are what we are,” she let go of a long sigh. “I wrote everything, Carmelo. Every moment, every heartache, every bit of our story I wrote in journals each time I had bad dreams about killing King Redmond and your father, I wrote it down to remember. It’s the way we survived, okay?”
“I wanted to have everything with you, my first child, my first everything with you,” he confessed. “I almost did. I proved to you that our marriage was legal. I gave you our only child. You took that from me, Kathy. So I did things, bad things, and took things from you.”
Kathy nodded. “I know, Melo. I know.”
“I’m sorry, Kathy. I told you, your love was poison. That you were killing me, but it was my fault too. That was the dream I had upstairs. The dream to remind me where it went wrong. The day I came to New Orleans was not long after I married Maria. And you said something was different about me. I should have told you then. Confessed it and been honest. Men died, many men, men you love and who loved you, because I was scared to be honest. I was so scared, Kathy. I was drowning in the East River, like my mother.”
“I want to understand…” She took a step forward, and he took a step back. She nodded. “We talked about this many times over the years.”
He nodded. “I know. I know. It’s all in the past. I killed us. I buried us. I left our daughter behind. And I’m not sorry. Because, for once, I have you, Kathy. Just you. I was going to bring her, but I needed my time with you. I couldn’t leave Nino behind. I had to do it this way. It was safest. And no one can take you away from me. I had to get Matteo out of prison. I had to give him and Debbie the life I took from them and the kids. I had to find a way to save my soul. My soul is you, Kathy. It’s all I am now. Does that make me a monster? Does that make me my father?”
“It makes you human, Carmelo,” she said. “Let me come closer.”
