Chapter 4 - THE THIRD-FLOOR STUDY
I pulled Rosa and seven-year-old Leo backward into the linen alcove beside the nursery door before the beam of Dante’s penlight could sweep into the hallway.
My hand clamped gently over Leo’s mouth. The little boy didn’t make a sound; he just pressed his face into my apron and went completely still.
Dante.
Dante had been Luca’s personal bodyguard for eight years. He sat at the kitchen counter every morning drinking espresso and doing the crossword puzzle while I ironed Luca’s shirts. Luca trusted him with his life—and with Leo’s.
Through the crack in the linen closet door, I heard the low murmur of Dante’s voice inside the study.
“Sterling just texted me from the dining room,” Dante said to the man in the Lakeshore Rehab courier jacket. “The old housekeeper lifted the 409 key out of Vanessa’s coat, and the maid is bringing her upstairs right now. Take the back service stairs down to the alley and keep the van running.”
“What about the girl’s father at the rehab clinic?” the courier asked, tapping the manila medical folder against his thigh. “Dr. Sterling signed the transfer order an hour ago. We moved old man Reed out of Room 214 at seven o’clock and put him in the private psych wing on the fourth floor under a John Doe chart. If the maid doesn’t hand over the 409 key tonight, one dose of insulin in his IV line and the stroke takes the blame.”
My knees nearly gave out beneath me.
Rosa caught my elbow in the dark, her seventy-eight-year-old grip like iron, keeping me upright.
They had my dad.
Vanessa hadn’t been making an idle threat when she mentioned her uncle’s hospital network downstairs. While I was serving champagne in the dining hall at seven o’clock, Arthur Sterling’s brother had already moved my stroke-paralyzed father out of his room so they could hold his life hostage for Box 409.
Wait.
Why would Dante—whom Luca paid two hundred thousand dollars a year—betray the Moretti family to Arthur Sterling?
In the study, the man in the courier jacket unzipped a black leather portfolio and handed Dante a laminated document with a gold Coast Guard seal at the top.
“Here’s the cleared manifest for Pier 14,” the courier said. “Once Luca signs the marital power of attorney on Saturday and Sterling takes control of the shipping terminals, your brother comes off the federal indictment list in Tampa and you get twenty percent of the dock leases.”
Dante tucked the folder inside his suit jacket. “Just get to the van. I’ll take the key off the old lady and the maid before they reach the nursery, and tell Luca they slipped out the back service door during the commotion.”
Footsteps moved across the study rug toward the hallway.
We were trapped. The brass elevator was too slow—its motor whined loudly the second you pushed the button—and the main staircase was thirty feet past the study door.
Beside me, Leo tugged my wrist twice and pointed down at the base of the cedar linen shelves.
There was a square brass laundry chute door built into the wall, wide enough for bulk hotel linens—and directly below it on the second floor was the master dressing room, which had a heavy oak bolt on the inside and a private house phone wired straight to the kitchen pantries.
No—Rosa couldn’t go down a laundry chute.
Instead, Rosa reached behind the stacked towels on the third shelf and pulled a recessed brass lever I had never noticed in six months of working here.
With a soft click, the entire cedar shelving unit swung inward three inches on oiled hinges, revealing a narrow brick chimney passage between the nursery wall and the old coal flue.
“Get in, both of you,” Rosa whispered without a sound of breath.
We squeezed behind the cedar shelves just as Dante stepped out of the study into the hallway, the suppressed pistol held low against his leg.
Rosa pulled the shelf shut until the latch clicked.
In the pitch dark behind the wall, smelling of dry mortar and century-old cedar, we listened as Dante opened the nursery door next to us, cursed under his breath when he saw the room was empty, and then hurried toward the main staircase to cut us off on the second floor.
“How did you know this was here?” I breathed in the dark.
“Don Lorenzo’s grandfather built this house during Prohibition, child,” Rosa whispered, feeling along the brick wall until her fingers found a narrow wooden stair leading down to the first-floor butler’s pantry. “Every room on the east wing connects to the wine cellar. Who do you think hid Luca and his brother Marco in here when the federal marshals raided the house in 1994?”
“Mama Rosa hid me in here last Easter too,” Leo whispered proudly. “Nobody ever finds me.”
We crept down the narrow wooden steps inside the wall. My mind was spinning so fast I could barely see the gloom ahead of me.
Dante was working for Sterling. The guards at the front door answered to Dante. If we went back into the dining hall right now and told Luca, Dante and his men had guns—and Luca was unarmed in a tuxedo with a seven-year-old boy in the house.
Even worse, if Luca arrested or attacked Arthur Sterling in the dining room, the courier waiting in the alley—or Dr. Sterling at Lakeshore Rehab—would murder my father in the fourth-floor psych wing within ten minutes.
We reached the bottom of the hidden stair behind the wine racks in the basement pantry.
Rosa stopped and reached into the lining of her blue wool coat. She pulled out an old flip phone and handed it to me, along with a small silver key attached to a red ribbon.
“What is this?” I asked.
“That key opens the drawer of the mahogany desk in the greenhouse out back,” Rosa said. “Before I came through the front gate tonight, I left a steel lockbox in that drawer. Inside it is the original amber prescription bottle your mother Clara died protecting in 2000—with Arthur Sterling’s thumbprint still sealed under court evidence tape from the private coroner Elena’s brother hired twenty-six years ago.”
I stared at her in the dim basement light.
“Wait,” I whispered. “If you already had the pill bottle with Sterling’s fingerprint on it in the greenhouse, what is inside Box 409 at LaSalle Trust?”
Rosa’s face grew solemn.
“Something much more dangerous to Dante and Vanessa than a twenty-six-year-old murder, Emma,” Rosa said. “Two years ago, when Leo’s father Marco died in that boat explosion on Lake Michigan, the Coast Guard ruled it an accidental fuel-line fire. Only your father Thomas saw who worked on that boat engine at the marina the night before—because your father was working night security at the Belmont Harbor boatyard two days before he had his stroke.”
The breath left my lungs in a rush.
My father’s stroke seven months ago hadn’t happened at home.
He had been found unconscious inside the guard shack at Belmont Harbor—the exact week the insurance settlement on Marco Moretti’s boat was paid out.
I looked down at seven-year-old Leo, who was holding tightly to Rosa’s blue coat.
Marco Moretti—Leo’s father and Luca’s beloved little brother—hadn’t died in an accident.
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And before I could ask Rosa another question, the heavy oak door at the top of the wine cellar stairs swung open, and Luca Moretti’s voice echoed down the stone steps:
“Dante just told me Rosa and the girl took my nephew out the alley door, Arthur. Why don’t we check the wine cellar camera monitor down here and see who’s lying?”
