Chapter 4 - THE CLAY ON THE CROSS AND THE SIX-YEAR-OLD BOY
My heart stopped beating.
My father wasn't alone in Dorchester tonight.
Six months ago, when my cousin Emily—a single mother who worked as a flight attendant—was killed in a highway pileup on I-95 during an ice storm, my dad and I had taken in her six-year-old son, Leo. Because my live-in maid’s quarters at the Moretti estate in Providence didn't allow children, I drove back and forth across the Massachusetts state line every single Sunday and Wednesday night so I could tuck Leo in, while my father watched him during the week with the help of our retired downstairs neighbor, Mrs. Gable.
Wait—if someone had been inside my father’s storage locker or apartment in Dorchester within the last few hours, while fresh reduction clay was still damp on that silver crucifix...
I didn't ask Luca for permission to leave the room.
I lunged across the carpet, snatched my phone off the dining table and my mother’s pearl-and-silver rosary out of Vanessa’s spilled clutch, and dialed my father’s landline with shaking fingers while backing toward the kitchen service door.
"Sophie, wait," Luca said sharply, stepping after me.
"I can't wait!" I cried out, the servant’s deference I had practiced for over a year shattering completely as the phone rang once, twice, three times in my ear without an answer. My dad never let the phone ring past two after eight o'clock because he didn't want it to wake Leo. "My sixty-four-year-old father is in our apartment in Dorchester right now with my six-year-old nephew, Leo! And my father keeps the only backup ledger of his 1998 studio commissions buried at the bottom of a barrel of wet Hawthorne clay in his pantry!"
Luca’s face changed instantly.
"A backup ledger from 1998?" Enzo asked from the table, stepping forward so quickly he nearly dropped his cane. "What was in your father’s 1998 commission ledger besides my wife’s bowl?"
Then the fifth ring clicked—and a tiny, whispered voice came through my phone speaker.
"Aunt Sophie?"
It was six-year-old Leo. He was whispering so softly I could barely hear him over the rain outside the dining room windows.
"Leo!" I pressed the phone against my ear, my knees nearly buckling as Luca stepped right beside me, leaning his head close enough to hear the speaker. "Leo, baby, why are you whispering? Where is Grandpa Robert?"
"We’re playing the quiet hiding game in Mrs. Gable’s pantry downstairs," Leo whispered, his little six-year-old voice trembling as he tried to sound brave. "Grandpa said I get two quarters if I don't make a peep while he keeps the door locked. Two men in shiny black coats came up the stairs twenty minutes ago and knocked on our door asking for the blue book from the mud barrel. Grandpa saw them through the peephole and carried me down the back laundry chute stairs to Mrs. Gable’s kitchen."
I looked up into Luca’s dark eyes. The terrifying mafia boss who made grown men sweat in boardrooms looked down at the phone in my hand, and something fierce and protective locked into place across his features.
"Put me on, Sophie," Luca whispered.
I held the phone between us.
"Leo," Luca said, his deep voice dropping into a remarkably calm, steady warmth that didn't sound scary at all. "My name is Luca. I’m your Aunt Sophie’s boss, and I’m a friend of your Grandpa Robert’s. Are you holding Grandpa’s hand right now?"
"Yes," Leo whispered back. "His hands hurt when he carries me because of the old fire, so I’m holding his wrist."
"You’re a good boy, Leo. Put Grandpa’s ear right next to the phone so he doesn't have to let go of the chair under the doorknob."
There was a faint rustle of cloth, and then my father’s hoarse, strained breathing came over the line. "Sophie? Bear, don't come home tonight. Stay in Providence."
"Mr. Keller, this is Luca Moretti," Luca cut in quietly. "My people in Boston are six minutes from your street in Dorchester. Do not open Mrs. Gable’s back door for anyone until you hear three short knocks followed by the word Hanover. Tell me right now—who sent those men for your 1998 ledger, and how did Vanessa get your wife’s rosary with wet clay on it tonight?"
"The rosary wasn't in the mud barrel, Mr. Moretti," my father whispered back, his voice tight with pain from bracing his scarred shoulder against the pantry door. "Four hours ago, around four o'clock this afternoon, a tall gentleman in his sixties with silver hair and a gold signet ring came to my apartment with a priest from St. Leonard’s. He said he was your uncle, Donato Moretti. He gave me five thousand dollars for Leo’s school clothes and asked if he could borrow Clara’s pearl rosary from our memorial shelf just for tonight—so he could bless your engagement table in her memory! He had wet clay on his sleeve because he asked to see the barrel where I kept the leftover clay from Elena’s 1998 bowl!"
Enzo Moretti let out a sound like a wounded lion.
"Donato!" Enzo roared, spinning toward the closed mahogany double doors of the dining room that led toward the front hall and the drawing room. "My own brother!"
"Wait, Mr. Moretti!" my father’s urgent whisper came through the phone before Luca could move. "When Donato looked inside my clay barrel at four o'clock today, he saw the waterproof oilskin pouch at the bottom where I kept the 1998 customer delivery receipts—and he saw that Elena didn't just commission one blue bowl in 1998! She commissioned TWO bowls that week—and she had me hollow out a false ceramic base inside the second bowl to hide the original safety-deposit key and witness affidavit from the night the St. Jude’s oxygen lines were sabotaged during the 1998 truce!"
Enzo’s cane clattered onto the hardwood floor.
"The oxygen lines..." Enzo’s face went gray as stone. "During the 1998 war, when six-year-old Luca was in the oxygen tent with scarlet fever and my wife Elena was staying beside him... someone cut the backup oxygen manifold in the basement of the east wing. Three patients died that night, and Elena inhaled so much smoke helping Clara carry the children out that her lungs failed four years later! For twenty-eight years, Donato told me the Russo family sabotaged that hospital—that’s why we went to war!"
"It wasn't the Russos," Luca said, his voice dropping to a lethal whisper as he looked down at the silver luggage tag and brass wine-cellar key in Vanessa’s purse. "Donato cut the oxygen lines in 1998 to wipe out you and me in one night so he could take over the family—and my mother and Clara Sterling caught his man in the hospital basement and hid the signed confession inside the second Keller bowl!"
Daniel was already pulling a compact black 9mm Beretta from beneath his dinner jacket as he ran to the double doors and yanked them open.
The drawing room across the marble foyer was still full of the twenty chattering engagement guests—except the heavy front door of the mansion stood wide open to the rainy driveway, and Luca’s sixty-eight-year-old uncle, Donato Moretti, was nowhere in sight.
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Instead, the elderly family butler, Thomas, was lying unconscious on the cellar stairs behind the coatroom, blood trickling from a cut on his forehead.
And down in the sub-basement wine vault—where Donato had carried those two wooden crates twenty minutes before dinner—the heavy steel fire door was bolted from the inside, and the smell of kerosene was already rising up the stone stairwell!
