Chapter 7 - THE ANKLE BRACELET
"Dominic, stop!" I grabbed the sleeve of his shirt with both hands, pulling back with every ounce of strength I had before he could toss the bank key onto the deck. "Don't throw it! Look at her left ankle!"
Dominic's gaze snapped down to the woman in the gray cardigan standing beside Tommy Romano.
Beneath the hem of her dark slacks, a cheap silver charm bracelet with little dangling stars glinted against her bare skin.
"That's not your wife," I said, my voice ringing out across the quiet water of the slip. "That's an actress or one of Clara's friends from the casino wearing a wig. Clara bought matching star anklets for the two of them in Chinatown last month!"
On the deck, the woman in the gray cardigan flinched and stepped back.
Clara let out a strangled whimper.
Dominic's face went cold—not the shock of grief anymore, but the terrifying, focused calm of a predator who had just seen the trap wire.
"Where is Elena, Russo?" Dominic asked, his right hand slipping inside his open coat.
Dr. Russo cursed and shoved Clara hard against the fiberglass railing.
"She died three years ago in the cottage up in Wisconsin, you idiot!" Russo shouted down at Dominic, his voice cracking with panic as the charade collapsed. "Heart failure from the digoxin! We couldn't tell Romano she was already dead or he would have stopped paying me protection money to keep the secret! And today when Marcus started snooping around my medical bag, I needed the bearer bonds in your sister Sofia's bank box to get out of the country!"
Tommy Romano slowly turned his head toward Dr. Russo.
For a second, nobody on the pier breathed.
"What did you just say, Doc?" Romano asked, his voice dropping to a deadly whisper while his revolver began to pivot away from Dominic and toward the doctor. "I've been wiring fifty grand a month to that Wisconsin clinic for three years to keep Valenti's wife on ice."
"Wait, Tommy—" Russo threw up his hands, backing toward the cabin door.
Before Romano could pull the trigger, Dominic moved.
Two sharp reports from Dominic's nine-millimeter echoed across the fog-shrouded harbor, followed immediately by Daniel's fire.
Romano grunted as a bullet shattered his right shoulder, sending his heavy silver revolver spinning across the wet fiberglass deck and splashing into the dark water between the hull and the pier.
Daniel vaulted over the yacht's side rail like a shadow, kicking Russo behind the knees and pinning the doctor face-down against the deck boards while Dominic leaped onto the aft deck.
I limped up the metal gangplank right behind them and tore open the sliding glass cabin door.
Tied to the dinette bench inside was Martha Hale, a strip of duct tape over her mouth, her tortoise-shell glasses askew.
With shaking hands, I gently peeled the tape from her lips and untied the nylon cord around her wrists.
"Oh, thank God," Martha gasped, grabbing my hands as tears spilled down her lined cheeks. "You're Emma. Marcus told me all about you. Did they hurt the little boy?"
"Leo is safe at the mansion eating warm soup," I promised her, helping her stand. "What about the airport photo? Romano had a picture of you walking into O'Hare at six o'clock."
"Clara stole my coat and my boarding pass out of my purse when she and Russo ambushed me in the church parking lot!" Martha said, rubbing her wrists. "She wore my coat and glasses past the terminal cameras so Romano would think Marcus had betrayed him and Russo could start a war between Romano and Dominic while he ran with the bank key!"
I stepped back out onto the deck just as Chicago Police sirens began wailing in the distance near Lake Shore Drive—called in anonymously by Daniel's crew now that Romano and Russo were disarmed on the deck.
Clara was huddled in the corner by the life-raft canister, crying into her hands.
I walked over and stood in front of her.
My ankle throbbed inside my damp bandage, every stitch pulling tight, but it felt like nothing compared to the hollow ache in my chest.
"Why, Clara?" I asked quietly. "When Mom died and your dad left us, I worked two waitressing jobs at sixteen to buy your school clothes. I paid your nursing tuition. And you sold Leo to these people?"
Clara looked up at me, her face blotchy and small under the yellow dock lights.
"I didn't think they'd hurt him, Emma, I swear!" she sobbed, reaching for the hem of my coat before I stepped back out of her reach. "Russo said once Dominic saw the locket, Dominic would take you and Leo into his mansion and give you millions, and I'd be left behind in that freezing apartment in Pilsen with nothing! Because Sofia wasn't my mother! I'm not a Bellini! I was never going to be part of this family!"
I looked down at her—at the sister I had carried on my back for eighteen years—and realized some debts could never be paid, because the person owed had never valued the sacrifice in the first place.
"You were my family, Clara," I said softly. "Until five o'clock this morning."
I turned away from her and walked over to Dominic, who was standing by the cabin door looking down at a waterproof leather ledger Daniel had pulled from Dr. Russo's inside coat pocket.
"I'm so sorry about Elena, Dominic," I said gently, touching his arm. "After four years of hoping..."
Dominic didn't close the ledger.
Instead, his finger traced a column of numbers and dates written in Russo's neat physician's shorthand on the back page.
"Russo lied to Romano just now," Dominic said, his voice shaking with a sudden, fierce intensity as he lifted his eyes to mine. "Look at the delivery address for the digoxin and zolpidem he picked up yesterday. It wasn't for a dead woman in Wisconsin."
I leaned in and read the pharmacy label pasted inside the ledger cover.
The medications were heart-rhythm stabilizers for a sixty-two-year-old patient at St. Mary's Convent in Evanston—listed under the patient alias Sister Mary Joseph.
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Clipped beside the label was a photograph taken last week in a walled courtyard garden.
Sitting on a stone bench in a white novice head-covering, holding a wooden rosary with a missing cross bead—the exact rosary I remembered from our Milwaukee living room twenty-two years ago—was my mother, Sofia Bellini.
