Chapter 3 - THE GREENHOUSE POLAROID
Every fork in the dining hall froze above its plate.
Councilman Arthur Sterling’s paternal smile vanished like chalk wiped off a slate. He reached down to take the iPad from Leo’s hands, trying to laugh it off.
“Now, Leo, buddy, you know adults talk fast on business calls—”
“Don’t touch him, Arthur,” Luca said.
Luca didn’t raise his voice, yet two of his household security men stepped away from the mahogany doors instantly. Luca held out his hand, and seven-year-old Leo trotted right past Councilman Sterling and climbed halfway onto Luca’s knee, handing his uncle the tablet.
“Good boy, Leo,” Luca murmured, resting a steady hand on the back of the child’s neck. “What else did you hear while you were hiding behind the curtain?”
Leo looked at the apple pie on the table, then pointed a small finger at Vanessa.
“I was only hiding because I wanted to get a piece of pie before bedtime,” Leo said honestly. “And Miss Vanessa came over to her dad by the window and said, ‘That old maid took the 409 key out of my fur coat, Dad. If Luca opens that box at LaSalle Trust before the wedding on Saturday, we’re going to prison.’”
A collective gasp rippled across the banquet table. Two city aldermen at the far end looked as if they wanted to sink through the floorboards.
Vanessa went white to her lips. “He’s seven, Luca! He’s making up spy stories because he’s never liked me!”
I stood frozen behind Rosa’s chair, my palm pressed flat over the butcher paper hiding the 1998 Polaroid of my mother and the brass 409 key.
Why was Vanessa carrying a safe-deposit key from LaSalle Trust inside her fur coat—wrapped around Elena Moretti’s stolen rosary?
Luca stood up, lifting Leo onto his hip with one arm while his eyes locked onto Arthur Sterling.
“The party is over,” Luca told the room. “Everyone except Councilman Sterling and his daughter may leave through the front foyer. Now.”
Never in my life had I seen twenty-eight wealthy Chicagoans clear a room in ninety seconds. Chairs scraped, furs were grabbed without waiting for the coat check, and within two minutes, the heavy double doors clicked shut, leaving only Luca, Leo, Rosa, Vanessa, her father, and me under the blazing crystal chandeliers.
Councilman Sterling didn’t cower. Now that the voters were gone, his posture shifted into something cold and transactional.
“Put the boy upstairs, Luca,” Sterling said, pouring himself another two fingers of Scotch from the decanter. “Before you do something hotheaded over an old housekeeper’s theatrics.”
“Emma,” Luca said without turning his head. “Take Leo up to the nursery and lock the door from the inside. Stay with him.”
“Wait,” Rosa spoke up, her hand closing firmly over my apron pocket where I had just slipped the butcher paper and the brass key. “Emma needs to take me to the powder room on the second floor first, Luca. My knees are stiff from the bus, and I need my blood pressure pills before I tell you the rest.”
Vanessa stepped forward sharply. “Check her coat before she goes upstairs, Dad! She’s got the bank key!”
“Nobody touches Mama Rosa in my house,” Luca said, stepping straight into Sterling’s path when the older man moved toward us. “Go on, Emma. Take Rosa and Leo upstairs. Bring them back down in ten minutes.”
My heart hammered against my ribs as I guided Rosa out the side servant’s door and into the small brass elevator at the back of the pantry, with little Leo holding tight to my other hand.
As soon as the brass grate slid shut and the elevator began its slow hum toward the third floor, I pulled the 1998 Polaroid and the 409 key from my apron.
“Mrs. Alvarez,” I breathed, my voice trembling. “Why is my mother in this picture with Luca’s mother? My dad swore to me we never knew the Moretti family. Why did I get hired here six months ago?”
Rosa leaned against the oak wall of the elevator, her dark eyes shining with twenty-six years of kept secrets.
“You didn’t get hired by accident, Emma,” Rosa said quietly. “I’m the one who sent the employment agency to your father’s house in Cicero last spring. Because your father, Thomas Reed, used to be Don Lorenzo Moretti’s private driver—until the night Elena Moretti died in October 2000.”
The elevator lurched to a stop on the third floor.
“My dad drove for Luca’s father?” I whispered. “And what happened to my mom?”
“Your mother Clara was Elena’s personal nurse,” Rosa said as we stepped out into the quiet carpeted hallway near the nursery. “Elena had a congenital heart condition, yes, and Arthur Sterling was the family’s trusted estate lawyer back then. The night Elena died, your mother walked into Elena’s bedroom and caught Arthur Sterling switching her digitalis prescription with empty saline capsules while Elena was having heart failure—because Elena had just discovered Sterling and Don Lorenzo’s brother were skimming millions from the port authority pension fund.”
My stomach dropped. “Sterling murdered Luca’s mother?”
“He let her die while holding the real medicine in his hand,” Rosa corrected grimly. “Your mother screamed and grabbed the pill bottle and the bank ledger. Your father got you and Clara into a car that night to run to the FBI in Milwaukee. Sterling’s men ran their car off the road on I-94. Your mother died in the crash. Your father survived, and he spent the last twenty-six years hiding you under your mother’s maiden name so Sterling wouldn’t finish the job.”
I stared at the faded Polaroid of my mother holding two-year-old me in the greenhouse.
All those years my father had lived in a tiny two-bedroom bungalow in Cicero, working night shifts at a machine shop, refusing to ever drive north of downtown. And when he had his stroke seven months ago and I took this job in the Gold Coast to pay his bills, he hadn’t known I was working for the son of the woman my mother died trying to save—because I had told my dad I was working at the Drake Hotel so he wouldn’t worry about my long hours.
“Wait,” I said, looking down at the brass 409 key in my hand. “If my mother took the pill bottle and the ledger twenty-six years ago, why did Vanessa have this safe-deposit key in her coat pocket tonight?”
“Because Box 409 at LaSalle Trust was opened in 2000 under two signatures—Elena Moretti’s and Clara Reed’s,” Rosa said. “Sterling found the key in Luca’s third-floor safe two days ago when he was snooping for the port deeds. Without that key, neither of us could open the box. Now you have the key, Emma—and you have your mother’s birth certificate and ID.”
Suddenly, seven-year-old Leo tugged hard on my apron strings.
“Emma,” Leo whispered, pointing down the dimly lit third-floor hallway toward Luca’s open study door. “Somebody’s in Uncle Luca’s office.”
I froze.
Luca, Vanessa, and Arthur Sterling were still downstairs in the dining hall. The security guards were by the front foyer.
Then who was upstairs?
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Through the half-open oak door of the study, a beam of a penlight swept across the open wall safe.
A tall man in a grey Lakeshore Rehab medical courier jacket stepped out of the shadows, holding a heavy manila folder stamped with the logo of my father’s nursing facility—and standing right beside him, holding a silver automatic pistol with a suppressor attached to the barrel, was Luca’s head of household security, Dante.
