Chapter 6 - THE BOY IN THE HALLWAY
“Leo, go back to bed, sweetheart,” my mother said quickly, her teacup clattering against the saucer as she tried to stand up between Luca and the hallway.
Eleven-year-old Leo didn’t move. He stood barefoot on the hardwood floor, clutching a worn plastic toy firetruck to his chest. He had thick dark hair that always fell across his forehead and the exact same solemn, watchful dark eyes as the man standing in the middle of our living room.
“Are you Emily’s boss?” Leo asked quietly.
Luca couldn’t seem to breathe. All the ruthless authority that had cleared forty millionaires out of his dining room two hours ago vanished. He slowly dropped to one knee on the braided rug so he wasn’t towering over the child.
“Yeah,” Luca said, his voice rough and gentle all at once. “I’m Luca. That’s a good truck you’ve got there. Engine 14?”
Leo nodded once, warily. “My Uncle Marco gave it to my mom before I was born. The ladder still goes up.”
Luca closed his eyes for a fraction of a second, a muscle spasming in his jaw. When he stood back up and looked at my mother, there were tears shining in the corners of his dark eyes—not anger, just twelve years of shattered grief.
“Leo, take your truck into the kitchen and pour yourself a glass of milk for me, okay?” I said softly, touching the boy’s shoulder. “Close the swinging door.”
Once the kitchen door swung shut, I turned to my mother. My heart was hammering so loud I could barely hear my own voice. “Mom, you told me Aunt Elena drowned on Lake Michigan with her fiancé. You told me when we adopted Leo that his father died in the same accident.”
“Because that was the only way to keep him alive!” my mother whispered fiercely, gripping the arms of her chair. She looked straight at Luca, her pale, gaunt face hardened by a mother’s ferocious love. “Do you know what the newspapers said the morning after that fire, Mr. Moretti? They said the Moretti crime family was hunting Sofia Rossi across five states for stealing two hundred thousand dollars and letting your brother burn! My sister showed up at my back door at four in the morning, three months pregnant, with second-degree burns on her hands and a bullet graze on her shoulder!”
“I never put a bounty on her,” Luca said hoarsely. “Swear to God, Mrs. Carter. I looked for her, yes. Because Richard Bellini came to my brother’s funeral and showed me bank records proving Sofia had emptied our safe.”
“Your brother gave that money to Bellini!” Mom shot back, her chest heaving as she reached for her oxygen cannula. I rushed over and adjusted the tubing around her ears, begging her to breathe slowly.
Once her breathing steadied, she reached inside the zippered lining of her floral armchair cushion and pulled out a small, waterproof plastic pouch. Inside was a folded child’s drawing on yellowed construction paper—a sketch of a white cabin cruiser named The Sea Glass docked at Burnham Harbor—and a brass boat key.
“On the night of November 12, 2014,” Mom said quietly, “Elena and Marco were at your mansion packing to leave Chicago. Six months earlier, Elena had been working as a waitress at a country club in Lake Forest. Driving home in the rain on Lake Shore Drive, a nineteen-year-old girl in a red Mercedes ran a red light and struck a pedestrian—a young mother crossing the street.”
“Vanessa,” Luca whispered.
“Vanessa was drunk,” Mom confirmed. “Elena stopped her car to help the victim and saw Vanessa behind the wheel before Richard Bellini’s driver pulled up and whisked Vanessa away. The next day, Richard came to Elena and offered her fifty thousand dollars to forget what she saw. Elena refused and went to the police precinct—only to find out the detective taking her statement was on Richard Bellini’s payroll. Instead of arresting Vanessa, Richard planted stolen jewelry in Elena’s locker at the club and threatened to put her in state prison for ten years if she ever spoke Vanessa’s name.”
“Why didn’t Marco tell me?” Luca asked, the agony in his voice raw.
“Because you were trying to take the Moretti businesses legitimate that year, Luca!” Mom said. “Richard Bellini was on the Zoning Board. He told Marco that if you came after Vanessa, he would hand federal prosecutors fabricated evidence tying you to the dockworkers’ racketeering case, and he’d send Elena to prison while she was pregnant. Marco paid him the two hundred thousand dollars to buy back the planted evidence and leave town.”
I looked down at the bloodstained ledger in my hands. “Wait. If Marco paid him off, why did the house burn?”
“Because Vanessa came to the house that night with her father,” Mom said, a tear rolling down her hollow cheek. “Vanessa was terrified Elena would still talk. An argument started in the east wing study. Richard struck Marco in the back of the head with a brass fireplace poker. Thinking Marco was dead, Richard poured whiskey over the curtains and lit a match while Vanessa held a gun on my sister.”
Luca’s hands curled into fists at his sides. “And Sofia?”
“Elena broke free, pulled the Saint Christopher medal off Marco’s neck, and tried to drag him out through the conservatory window,” Mom whispered. “Vanessa tried to grab her through the broken glass and sliced her own wrist open. That’s cuando Richard’s driver, Arthur, stepped in. Arthur couldn’t stomach watching two young people burn alive. While Richard was taking bleeding Vanessa to his car, Arthur pulled Elena out of the smoke, hid her in the trunk of the town car, and helped her fake her death at Burnham Harbor the next morning after they left the box with Abe in Cicero.”
“Wait,” I interrupted, my pulse racing as a massive gap in the story hit me. “Mom, if Aunt Elena survived that night and gave birth to Leo six months later… how did she die?”
My mother stopped speaking. She looked down at her knotted hands in her lap, then slowly looked up at the winter coat hanging on the peg by the front door—the coat that had been returned ten minutes ago by someone driving Luca’s stolen SUV.
“She didn’t die twelve years ago, Emily,” my mother whispered, her voice trembling.
I stared at her in disbelief. “What?”
“Reach into the left pocket of the coat the driver just brought back,” Mom said softly.
With shaking hands, I walked to the coat tree and slid my hand into the wool pocket. My fingers brushed against a freshly printed slip of thermal paper.
May you like
I pulled it out. It was a parking garage stub from Burnham Harbor—time-stamped forty-five minutes ago. Written across the back in the exact same slanted handwriting that was on the ledger in Cicero were five words:
Bring Luca. Before Richard finds me.
