Chapter 8 - THE TURRET SAFE
Vincent stared at me for half a second, saw the absolute refusal in my eyes, and nodded once.
“Stay three steps behind me on the stairs,” he ordered.
We took the main marble staircase two steps at a time. Behind us, in the dining room, Patricia had already locked the main doors from the inside while Marco zip-tied Frank Castellano and his men to the heavy mahogany chairs.
As we reached the third-floor landing, the cold night wind howled through a shattered transom window at the end of the corridor. Above the roof, the distant thump-thump-thump of a private Bell helicopter’s rotors was already cutting through the November air over the river valley.
The heavy oak-and-iron door to the turret study stood shut. From inside came the frantic metallic clanking of steel drawers being yanked open and the smell of burning paper from the hearth.
Vincent didn't bother knocking. He ran his fingers over the bronze lion crest mounted on the stone wall beside the doorframe, pressed the lion’s left eye inward, and slid the bronze plate aside to reveal a keyhole covered in spiderwebs.
He slid Harold’s flat steel calibration key into the slot and twisted counterclockwise twice.
With a heavy, oiled clunk inside the wall, the four-inch steel deadbolt dropped out of the frame.
Vincent kicked the heavy oak door open.
The circular turret study was lit only by the orange glow of the fireplace, where Richard was frantically shoving manila folders onto the grate with a brass poker. The round steel vault door in the stone wall stood wide open behind the desk, and stacked on the leather blotter were four thick bricks of thousand-dollar bearer bonds and a black metal cash box.
Richard spun around, the heavy brass fireplace poker raised in his fist like a club.
When he saw Vincent standing in the doorway with the pistol leveled at his chest—and me standing right behind him—Richard backed up until his legs hit the mahogany desk.
“Put the poker down, Uncle,” Vincent said, his voice echoing off the stone walls as the helicopter blades grew louder outside the tall French windows leading to the roof terrace.
Richard didn't drop the poker. Instead, his eyes darted to the hearth, where the corner of a blue hospital folder and a stack of glossy eight-by-ten photographs were curling at the edges in the flames.
“If you pull that trigger, Vincent, you’ll spend the rest of your life in state prison,” Richard rasped, his chest heaving as the wind blew soot across the carpet. “And if you let me walk out onto that terrace, you keep the company, you keep the centennial merger, and none of the banks ever have to know what your father and I did in ’98!”
“The banks?” Vincent took a slow step into the room. “My mother died in a charity hospice basement hiding my newborn sister from you. And twenty-two years later, you ran that girl off a mountain road while her daughter sat in the backseat.”
“Elena was going to blow the whole trust apart!” Richard shouted, his voice cracking with the ugly, self-righteous fury of a man who had spent forty years convincing himself his crimes were sacrifices. “Your grandfather built this company out of nothing! Arthur and I kept it alive when the foreign mills were bankrupting every textile town in New England! If Elena had gone to the courts with Clara’s secret hospital papers, the state would have seized the mill for the ’98 fraud and auctioned off a hundred years of Moretti blood!”
While Richard kept his eyes locked on Vincent’s gun, I didn't look at the bearer bonds on the desk.
I lunged toward the fireplace.
“Emily, back!” Richard swung the heavy brass poker toward my shoulder.
Before the iron could touch me, Vincent crossed the ten feet between them in a blur, catching Richard’s wrist in mid-air and driving the butt of his pistol across the older man’s jaw.
Richard collapsed onto the floorboards beside the desk with a wet groan, the brass poker clattering harmlessly across the stones.
I dropped to my knees on the hearthstone, wrapped my white maid’s apron around my hands, and snatched the burning blue folder and the glossy photographs right out of the flames, slapping them against the stone floor to smother the embers.
The edges were charred black, creating a bitter smell of burnt paper and chemical toner, but the center of the pages remained intact.
I coughed through the smoke and held the top page up to the firelight.
It was the original January 15, 1998 State Labor & Insurance Inspection Ledger—the one Samuel Keene had refused to sign—stapled to the toxicology and pulmonary records for Employee #409: Thomas Keene (Parker).
And clipped beneath it was a black-and-white mechanic’s invoice from a salvage yard in Red Hook, signed by Richard Moretti, detailing the severed rear brake line on a 2014 blue Honda Civic belonging to Elena Moretti-Rossi.
Outside the French windows, the helicopter’s landing skids touched down on the copper roof terrace, its searchlight sweeping across the turret glass.
Vincent didn't look at the helicopter. He pulled a pair of heavy brass curtain cords from the window frame, yanked Richard’s hands behind his back, and tied his uncle’s wrists with brutal precision before walking out onto the terrace and waving the stunned pilot off into the night sky.
As the roar of the rotors faded back over the river, the turret room fell quiet save for the crackling fireplace.
Vincent walked back inside and knelt beside me on the hearthstone. My hands were covered in black soot, and a red blister was already forming across my right palm where an ember had caught the thin fabric of my apron.
Vincent gently took my soot-stained wrist, looking down at the burn on my palm, and then at the saved medical file for my father clutched in my other hand.
“Your father burned his hands saving the people in this house twenty-eight years ago,” Vincent said quietly, his thumb brushing the soot from my knuckles. “And tonight you burned yours saving the truth for my sister.”
I looked into his dark eyes, feeling my heart beat against my ribs in a way that had nothing to do with fear.
Then I looked down at the last scorched envelope that had fallen out of the blue hospital folder—an unsealed cream envelope addressed in Clara Moretti’s looping, elegant handwriting, dated October 13, 2004.
It wasn't addressed to the district attorney, or to Harold, or to Patricia.
May you like
Written across the front, right above the St. Jude Hospice seal, were four words that made my breath catch in my throat:
For Thomas Keene’s Daughter — When Vincent Is Ready To Know The Whole Truth.
