Chapter 3 - THE PEARL ROSARY AND THE SCARRED HANDS
Nobody moved.
Vanessa looked as if the floor had opened up beneath her high heels. She backed away from the table until her shoulders hit the marble mantelpiece, her hands clutching the front of her white silk dress.
"She’s lying!" Vanessa’s voice cracked, shrill and desperate in the high-ceilinged dining room. "Luca, listen to yourself! She’s a housemaid! She heard Daniel and Enzo talking in the study this week and made the whole thing up to extort you!"
Luca didn't even glance at her. His dark eyes were locked entirely on mine, intense and searching, stripping away every defense I had spent the last fourteen months hiding behind while I scrubbed his floors and ironed his shirts.
"What was your mother’s full name, Sophie?" Luca asked quietly.
"Sarah Clara Keller," I answered, my hands trembling against my apron as the memories of our tiny North End apartment flooded back. "Before she married my dad and took his last name, her maiden name was Sterling. She was a pediatric critical-care nurse at St. Jude’s until she died of leukemia in 2004, when I was five years old."
At the end of the table, seventy-two-year-old Enzo Moretti sank slowly back into his chair, his hand gripping the carved armrest until his knuckles turned white.
"Elena’s nurse..." Enzo whispered, staring at my face—at my dark brown hair and the shape of my chin—as if seeing a ghost from twenty-eight years ago. "Clara didn't have a daughter named Vanessa. The little girl Clara used to bring to the hospital garden to play while Luca was recovering... her name was Sophia. Named after Elena’s mother."
"I go by Sophie now," I said softly.
Luca took a step closer to me, his gaze dropping to the turned-over blue bowl with R.K. 2024 pressed into the bottom clay. "If your mother had the original bowl my mother gave her in 1998, where is it?"
"It broke during the fire that destroyed my father’s studio in April 2024," I said, turning my eyes directly onto Vanessa and Daniel. "The original 1998 bowl always sat on the shelf above my dad’s desk in our studio on Hanover Street, right next to the locked tin box where my dad kept my mother’s pearl rosary. Whenever people came into the shop and admired the 1998 bowl, my dad and I would make replicas of it for charity auctions—including the one we donated to the St. Jude’s fundraiser two years ago."
I looked straight at Vanessa, the fear of losing my job vanishing beneath a wave of cold, clear realization.
"You were at that fundraiser in April 2024," I said to her. "When you bought our replica bowl and asked me to take your picture with it, you asked me why there were three little blue dots painted under the handle. And I was so proud of my mother that I told you the whole story—about how Mrs. Elena Moretti had commissioned the original bowl from my dad in 1998 to thank my mom for nursing her son through scarlet fever."
Daniel took a sudden step backward, looking at Vanessa in dawning horror. "Wait a minute... when I met you at that fundraiser in Boston, you didn't already have the rosary! You told me you left it in your hotel safe and showed it to me three days later!"
"Three days later," I repeated, my voice breaking as I thought of my sixty-four-year-old father sitting in his small rented apartment in Dorchester right now, unable to close his scarred fingers around a coffee mug without pain. "Forty-eight hours after that fundraiser, someone jimmied the back alley window of my father’s pottery studio at two in the morning. My dad heard glass breaking downstairs and went down to check. Whoever was in the office hit him over the head behind the kiln, took my mother’s rosary and her 1998 St. Jude’s nursing badge out of the tin box, and knocked over the main propane line onto the pilot light so the fire would destroy the original bowl and make it look like an accident!"
"No!" Vanessa screamed, looking wildly from Luca to Daniel. "I didn't set any fire! I swear to God, Luca, I didn't touch her father!"
Luca crossed the room in three long strides. He didn't touch Vanessa, yet the sheer, terrifying presence of him backing her into the corner of the mantelpiece made her drop to her knees on the carpet, sobbing into her hands.
"If you didn't break into Robert Keller’s studio," Luca said, his voice colder than winter ice off Boston Harbor, "then who gave you my mother’s rosary three days after that fundraiser, Vanessa? And how did you know Daniel was going to be at St. Jude’s looking for Clara Sterling’s daughter in the first place?"
Vanessa shook her head frantically, tears smearing her makeup across her cheeks. "If I tell you, he’ll kill me! He’s sitting right in your drawing room right now!"
The air in the dining room seemed to freeze solid.
Daniel’s hand went instinctively inside his suit jacket. "Who is in the drawing room, Vanessa?"
"I was working as a paralegal in Boston two years ago, drowning in gambling debts!" Vanessa sobbed, grabbing the cuff of Luca’s trousers. "A man paid off my markers—seventy thousand dollars—and told me all I had to do was go to the St. Jude’s fundraiser, meet Daniel Moretti, and pretend to be Clara Sterling’s daughter using the hospital files he gave me! When I told him the real Clara Sterling’s daughter was a potter’s girl right there at the booth, he said he’d handle it! Three days later, he handed me the pearl rosary and told me the studio burned down and the potter and his daughter had moved out of state!"
"Who?!" Enzo roared from the table, his cane trembling violently against the floor.
"Wait," I said suddenly, my eyes falling on the white beaded evening clutch Vanessa had dropped beside her chair when she stood up.
The gold clasp had popped open on the carpet, and sticking halfway out of the silk lining wasn't a tube of lipstick.
It was an antique silver luggage tag attached to a small brass key—the exact brass key to the private temperature-controlled wine vault in the sub-basement of the Moretti mansion, where I had seen Luca’s uncle, Donato Moretti, go down with two unlabeled wooden crates twenty minutes before dinner started.
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And tucked right behind the brass key inside Vanessa’s purse was my mother’s pearl-and-silver rosary—with one of the silver decade beads missing, and a fresh smear of gray potter’s clay on the crucifix.
"Mr. Moretti," I whispered, pointing at the gray clay smeared on the silver cross in Vanessa’s purse. "That’s fresh Hawthorne reduction clay on my mother’s rosary. There’s only one place in New England that uses that clay—my father’s private storage locker in Dorchester. Whoever gave her that rosary tonight just came from my father’s apartment!"
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