Chapter 7 - THE TROPHY IN THE MUSIC BOX
I stared down at the expired EpiPen resting against the toe of my sensible black shoe.
The silence in the room was absolute, broken only by the tinny, distant voice of the 911 dispatcher leaking from Carmine’s cell phone.
“Sir? Sir, police are in route. Can you confirm the suspect is still on the premises?”
Carmine slowly lowered the phone. He looked at the plastic cylinder on the floor. Then he looked at Vanessa, who was sprawled awkwardly on the expensive Persian rug, clutching her twisted ankle, her eyes wide with a terror so profound it almost looked like madness.
She had kept it.
For three years, she hadn't thrown the murder weapon into a river. She hadn't buried it in the woods. She had kept the very object that could have saved Elena’s life, hiding it inside a false bottom of a music box designed to play a twisted version of Elena’s own lullaby. She had literally gifted Carmine the instrument of his wife’s death, disguised as a token of her love. It was the ultimate, sick trophy of a woman who wanted not just to replace Elena, but to completely devour her.
“You kept it,” Carmine whispered, the words scraping out of his throat like crushed glass. “You brought the thing that killed her into the house where her daughter sleeps.”
Vanessa scrambled backward on the floor like a crab, pushing herself away from the shattered music box and the pen. Her manicured nails tore at the rug.
“I couldn't throw it away!” she babbled, her voice high and erratic, completely unhinged now. “It was my good luck charm! It was the key to everything! If I threw it away, it meant it was real! It meant I did it! As long as I kept it, it was just... it was just a secret! Carmine, please! You have to understand! I did it because I loved you before I even met you!”
She was insane. The careful, elegant socialite mask had entirely dissolved, revealing the hollow, desperate void underneath.
Carmine didn't step toward her. He didn't yell. The burning fury that had possessed him moments ago had burned itself out, leaving nothing but cold, absolute resolve. He picked up his phone and spoke clearly to the dispatcher.
“The suspect is still here. She is attempting to flee. Send detectives. We have the murder weapon.”
He hung up the phone and looked at Mrs. Gable, who was still standing in the doorway clutching Lucy’s drawing, paralyzed by shock.
“Mrs. Gable,” Carmine said, his voice terrifyingly calm. “Go back upstairs. Lock the nursery door. If Vanessa takes one step up those stairs before the police arrive, I will handle it.”
He turned his gaze back to Vanessa. It wasn't a threat of violence. It was a promise of annihilation.
“I’m not going to touch you again,” Carmine told her, stepping in front of the hallway arch to block her only exit to the front door. “I’m not going to give your lawyers a single bruise to use in court. You are going to sit on that floor until the police walk through those doors. And then I am going to spend every single dollar of my fortune ensuring you spend the rest of your natural life in a concrete box, remembering what the grass smelled like on the day you watched my wife die.”
Vanessa looked at him, then at the blocked doorway, and finally at me.
Her desperation turned into a feral, cornered rage. If she couldn't escape, she wanted to destroy whatever she could reach.
She pushed herself up on her good ankle, her eyes locking onto the grand piano. Elena’s piano. The instrument she had paid me to teach her so she could steal a dead woman’s melody.
“If I can’t have this life,” Vanessa hissed, grabbing a heavy, solid-brass candlestick from the dining table, “she doesn't get to leave anything behind either!”
She swung her arm back and lunged wildly toward the piano, aiming the heavy brass base directly at the delicate ivory keys.
I didn't think. I just reacted.
I threw myself between Vanessa and the piano bench.
The heavy brass candlestick came crashing down, but not on the piano keys. It slammed directly into my left shoulder.
A blinding crack of pain shot down my arm, radiating through my collarbone. I gasped, stumbling backward against the piano lid, the breath knocked completely out of my lungs.
Before Vanessa could raise the candlestick for a second strike, Carmine was there. He grabbed her wrist with one hand and ripped the heavy brass weapon out of her grip with the other, throwing it clattering across the floor. He didn't hit her, but he twisted her arm behind her back and shoved her face-down onto the rug, placing his knee firmly between her shoulder blades to hold her down.
“Don't move,” Carmine growled, his breathing heavy as Vanessa thrashed uselessly beneath him, screaming obscenities into the carpet.
I slumped against the side of the piano, clutching my left shoulder. The pain was sickening, a deep, throbbing ache that made black spots dance in my vision, but I could still move my fingers. It wasn't broken, just badly bruised.
Through the massive front windows of the dining room, the flashing red and blue strobe lights of three police cruisers suddenly illuminated the darkness outside, painting the walls of the mansion in chaotic, spinning colors.
The heavy oak front doors burst open. I heard the stomping of heavy boots and the crackle of police radios in the foyer.
“In here!” Carmine shouted.
Four uniformed officers and a plainclothes detective rushed into the dining room. They took one look at Carmine restraining Vanessa on the floor, the shattered music box, and me clutching my shoulder against the piano.
“Get her off my floor,” Carmine told the officers, stepping back and raising his hands to show he was unarmed. “She has confessed to the murder of my wife, Elena Orsini. The murder weapon is the plastic EpiPen by the table.”
Two officers hauled a screaming, thrashing Vanessa to her feet, wrenching her arms behind her back to snap heavy steel handcuffs around her wrists.
“You’re nothing without me!” Vanessa shrieked at Carmine as they dragged her backward toward the door. Her hair was a tangled mess, her expensive red gown torn at the hem. “I loved you! I gave you back your life! You’ll be alone forever, Carmine! You hear me?! Alone!”
Her screams faded as they dragged her out the front doors and shoved her into the back of a cruiser.
The plainclothes detective stayed behind, pulling out a notepad and looking between me and Carmine.
“Mr. Orsini?” the detective asked gently. “I’m Detective Miller. We’re going to need a full statement from both of you, and an evidence team needs to bag that EpiPen and the locket. Do you need a paramedic for the young woman?”
“I’m fine,” I managed to say, wincing as I pushed myself off the piano. “Just a bruise.”
Carmine walked over to me. For the first time in four years, he didn't look at me like a maid. He didn't look right past me to the silver trays or the coffee pots. He looked at me with profound, agonizing gratitude, and a deep, heavy shame.
“I am so sorry, Nell,” Carmine whispered, reaching out to gently support my uninjured arm. “I was so blind. You protected my wife’s memory. You protected my daughter. You protected me. And I let that monster treat you like dirt.”
“You didn't know, Mr. Orsini,” I said quietly, the adrenaline finally leaving my body, leaving me exhausted and shaking.
“I should have known,” he said, looking down at the floor.
As he spoke, he noticed something resting on the polished hardwood beneath the piano pedals. When I had thrown myself against the piano to block Vanessa’s strike, the impact had jostled the hidden compartment beneath the sheet music stand—a small wooden slot Elena used to keep her spare pencils.
The slot had popped open, and a single, yellowed piece of folded sheet music had fallen to the floor.
Carmine leaned down and picked it up. He unfolded the thick parchment.
He stared at the musical notes drawn on the page, and then at the handwritten dedication inked in the top right corner. A single tear escaped his eye and rolled down his cheek.
May you like
He slowly handed the paper to me.
“She didn't just ask you to help her practice, Nell,” Carmine said softly. “She finished it for you.”
