Chapter 5 - THE THIRD KEY
Nobody breathed. Even the two security guards holding Richard’s arms seemed to turn to stone.
Patricia stepped closer, adjusting her bifocals as she took the laminated hospital band from Vincent’s fingers. Her hands trembled so badly the plastic clicked against her fingernails.
“St. Jude’s Hospice Annex, Room 4B,” Patricia read aloud, her voice barely above a whisper. “Discharged October 14th, 2004, at 3:10 AM. Patient signature... Clara V. Moretti. Witnessed by... Margaret Bennett.”
Vincent turned slowly toward Harold. The grief and shock that had been building in the thirty-eight-year-old boss’s eyes all evening suddenly focused into a terrifying, razor-sharp intensity.
“Harold,” Vincent said, each word spaced like a hammer blow. “I stood in the rain at Holy Cross Cemetery on October 12th and watched six men lower my mother’s mahogany casket into the ground. Explain to me how your wife witnessed her hospital discharge forty-eight hours later.”
Harold didn’t flinch. At eighty-two, having already buried the love of his life, there was very little left in the world that could frighten him. Still, he leaned a fraction heavier against my shoulder.
“Your mother wasn’t in that casket on the twelfth, Mr. Vincent,” Harold said softly. “She was buried four days later, in the churchyard at St. Anne’s in the valley, beside my Margaret’s parents. Under her maiden name.”
“You’re lying!” Richard roared, wrenching one arm free from the guard before being pinned back against the wall. “Arthur was at her bedside when she died on the tenth! Dr. Rossi signed the death certificate!”
“Dr. Rossi signed what my wife and Sister Catherine paid him to sign after your brother tried to suffocate Clara with her own pillow on the night of the ninth!” Harold’s voice rang out across the dining room with a sudden, booming power that silenced everyone.
The guests at the far end of the table looked as though they wanted to vanish through the floorboards, yet no one dared move toward the doors.
Vincent’s face went gray. “My father... what?”
“You were sixteen years old, away at boarding school in Connecticut,” Patricia said, her hands pressed over her mouth as the pieces clicked together in her mind. “When you came home for the funeral, Arthur refused to let the funeral director open the casket. He told everyone the medicine had swollen her face too badly.”
“Because she wasn't in it,” Harold said. “In October of 2004, your mother found out that Samuel Keene’s younger brother—Emily’s father, Thomas—was dying of pulmonary fibrosis from the steam chemical inhalation in the ’98 pipe burst. Clara told your father she was going to the district attorney to confess the truth about the padlocked boiler so Thomas and the injured weavers could collect the industrial trust fund before she died.”
Harold pointed at the hollowed-out mahogany board on the table.
“That night, Margaret went to the hospital to bring Clara the finished brass plaque so she could see the fourteen names one last time. When Margaret walked into the room, she caught your father holding a folded towel over Clara’s oxygen mask while Mr. Richard stood watch in the hallway.”
I felt a cold sweat break out on the back of my neck. I looked at the man sitting at the head of this empire—the empire built on my father’s ruined lungs and Samuel’s broken body—and realized how far the rot went.
“Margaret struck your father across the head with the edge of this very brass plaque,” Harold continued, his frail hand resting affectionately on the tarnished metal corner where, sure enough, an old dent marred the beveled rim. “Sister Catherine, who ran the night ward at St. Jude’s, helped Margaret wheel Clara down to the laundry basement. They told your father she had flatlined twenty minutes later, gave him a weighted casket through the hospital morgue, and kept Clara alive for four more days in the convent annex.”
Vincent reached out, gripping the edge of the dining table until his knuckles turned white. For a man who commanded half the city, he suddenly looked like that sixteen-year-old boy who had been lied to at a graveside.
“Four days,” Vincent whispered raggedly. “Why didn't she call me? Why didn't she let me come say goodbye?”
“Because you were sixteen, Vincent,” Harold said, his voice thick with pity. “And your father had made it clear to Sister Catherine that if Clara breathed a word to the police or to you, you would never inherit a dime, and Margaret and Thomas would meet with an accident before Christmas. So your mother used those last ninety-six hours of her life to do the only thing she could.”
Harold reached into the mahogany recess one last time and peeled back the bottom layer of glued oilcloth.
Pressed flat into the wood grain beneath the cloth was a small, flat brass safe-deposit key stamped with the number 714, and a single square Polaroid photograph, yellowed with age.
Vincent picked up the Polaroid.
I leaned in just enough to see it. In the photo, a gaunt, dark-haired woman in a hospital gown sat propped up in a narrow iron bed. Despite the oxygen tubes in her nose, she had a fierce, protective smile on her face. Wrapped in her thin arms was a tiny bundle in a pink hospital blanket—a newborn baby girl. And standing beside the bed, wearing a soot-stained flannel coat with bandages wrapped around both his forearms, was a younger, dark-haired version of my father.
Wait.
I stared at the date stamped in orange digital numbers in the bottom corner of the Polaroid: 10 / 13 / 2004.
2004.
In October of 2004, I was five years old. That wasn't me in the blanket.
“Whose baby is that?” I whispered, my voice shaking as I looked at my father’s face in the photograph.
Before Harold could answer, a quiet sound came from the butler’s pantry door behind the sideboard.
The swinging wooden door pushed open an inch.
Standing there in bulky blue dinosaur pajamas, rubbing her eyes with one fist and holding a tattered pink stuffed rabbit by the ear with the other, was eight-year-old Lily.
Lily was the kitchen maid Maria’s granddaughter—or so we had all been told when Maria brought the quiet little girl to live in the servants' quarters two years ago after her daughter died in a car crash upstate.
Lily blinked under the bright chandelier lights, looking past the frozen billionaires and straight at me.
“Emmy?” Lily’s small, sleepy voice carried clearly through the silent room. “Grandma Maria’s crying in the kitchen. She told me to bring you this before the bad men go upstairs.”
Lily walked across the marble floor in her bare feet, completely ignoring Veronica and the guards, and held out a small, silver locket on a broken chain.
Vincent looked down at the locket in the little girl’s hand, then down at the 2004 Polaroid in his own hand—where the same silver locket was clearly visible hanging around the newborn baby’s wrist like a bracelet.
May you like
Richard’s face went the color of sour milk.
“Maria’s daughter,” Vincent whispered, staring at the eight-year-old child’s dark Moretti eyes—eyes that matched his own down to the amber ring around the pupils. “The girl who died on the interstate two years ago... she was twenty-two. Born in October of 2004.”
