I hauled the laundry basket up and stashed it in a corner, clothes and all. The house was filled with food smells and the clank of flatware being set. My father channelsurfed in the living room, raising the volume to compete with the kitchen activity.

“Shut it down,” my mother shouted at my father. “You’ll make us all deaf.”

My father concentrated on the screen, pretending oblivion.

By the time I sat down to dinner my fillings were vibrating, and I’d developed a twitch in my left eye.

“Isn’t this nice?” my mother said. “Everyone sitting down to dinner together. Too bad Valerie isn’t here.”

My sister, Valerie, had been married to the same man for a hundred years and had two children. Valerie was the normal daughter.

Grandma Mazur was directly across from me and was downright frightening, with her hair still uncombed and her eyes focused inward. As my father would put it, her lights were on, but there was no one home.

“How much of that codeine has Grandma taken so far?” I asked my mother.

“Just one pill that I know of,” my mother said.

I felt my eye jump and put my finger to it. “She seems to be … disconnected.”

My father stopped buttering his bread and looked up. His mouth opened to say something, but he thought better of it and went back to buttering his bread.

“Mom,” my mother called out, “how many pills have you taken?”

Grandma’s head rotated in my mother’s direction. “Pills?”

“It’s a terrible thing that an old lady can’t be safe on the streets,” my mother said. “You’d think we lived in Washington, D.C. Next thing we’ll have drive-by shootings. The burg was never like this in the old days.”

I didn’t want to burst her bubble about the old days, but in the old days the burg had a Mafia staff car parked in every third driveway. Men were walked out of their homes, still in pajamas, and taken at gunpoint to the Meadowlands or the Camden landfill for ceremonial dispatch. Usually families and neighbors weren’t at risk, but there’d always been the possibility that a stray bullet would embed itself in the wrong body.

And the burg was never safe from the Mancuso and Morelli men. Kenny was crazier and more brazen than most, but I suspected he wasn’t the first of the Mancusos to leave a scar on a woman’s body. To my knowledge none of them had ever ice-picked an old woman, but the Mancusos and Morellis were notorious for their violent, alcohol-fueled tempers and for their ability to sweet-talk a woman into an abusive relationship.

I knew some of this firsthand. When Morelli had charmed the pants off me fourteen years ago, he hadn’t been abusive, but he hadn’t been kind, either.

* * *

Grandma was sound asleep by seven o’clock, snoring like a drunken lumberjack.

I slipped into my jacket and grabbed my pocketbook.

“Where are you going?” my mother wanted to know.