Chapter 4 - THE SECRET BEHIND THE SHELVES
I didn’t think. I lunged across the Persian rug, scooped Lily off the leather sofa with both arms, and dove behind the heavy mahogany desk just as the bookshelf swung open with a groan of oiled hinges.
“Claire, don’t scream,” Vanessa’s voice came from the hallway door, still pounding frantically. “Let me in, I have Marco’s spare gun!”
I couldn’t reach the main door without crossing right in front of the hidden passage.
Behind the desk, I pressed Lily down against the knee-space carpet and put one finger to my lips. Nine years old or not, she was Luca Moretti’s daughter; she didn’t make a single whimper. She just squeezed her eyes shut and clutched my wrist.
Heavy footsteps stepped out of the wall passage onto the study carpet.
The smell hit me first.
Sweet, sharp peppermint tobacco.
A tall man in a dark wool overcoat stepped into the green glow of the desk banker’s lamp. Blood was wrapped in a white handkerchief around his left palm—where the glass of the pocket watch must have cut him when the floorboards snapped back on his hand.
I knew his face from the silver-framed photographs Luca kept in the upstairs gallery.
Matteo Moretti.
Luca’s younger brother. The man Luca had banished from Chicago four years ago, the week after Elena’s car went off the bridge.
Matteo looked around the empty room, his eyes landing immediately on the discarded black waitress shirt lying on the sofa.
“Lily-bug?” Matteo called out softly, his voice eerily gentle. “Come on out, sweetheart. Uncle Matt isn’t going to hurt you. I just need what you took from the closet floor.”
My heart hammered against my ribs. Look around the desk. What did I have?
A heavy brass letter opener. A crystal decanter. And the house telephone, still lying off the hook on the blotter above my head.
Luca could hear every word through the open line.
“Come on, maid,” Matteo said, his voice hardening as he took a step toward the desk. “I heard the girl on the stairs earlier. I know she’s in here. Give me the watch, and I’ll walk right back out the tunnel before my brother gets up from the gatehouse.”
Outside in the corridor, the pounding stopped.
Wait. Why had Vanessa stopped knocking?
Before Matteo could round the corner of the desk, the heavy oak door of the study didn’t open—instead, the decorative transom window above the doorframe shattered inward.
A small automatic pistol poked through the broken glass and fired once into the ceiling plaster directly above Matteo’s head.
Matteo cursed and ducked back toward the bookshelf, raising his bleeding hand as white plaster dust rained down over the carpet.
“Get away from the desk, Matteo!” Vanessa’s voice rang out from the top of a hallway chair outside the transom. “I swear to God I’ll shoot through the door next time! Luca is ten seconds behind me!”
Matteo bared his teeth, glancing once more toward the edge of the desk where my black housekeeping shoes were visible. Then survival won out over greed. He backed into the hidden bookcase passage and pulled the panel shut behind him.
Four seconds later, heavy boots thundered down the main hallway.
“Luca, the bookcase!” Vanessa screamed from the corridor.
“Claire, open the door!” Luca roared from outside.
I scrambled up, keeping myself between the bookcase and Lily, ran to the oak door, and threw back the steel security bar and deadbolt.
Luca burst in with his nine-millimeter drawn, Marco right on his heels. Marco didn’t hesitate—he kicked the false bookshelf open and disappeared into the service tunnel with his flashlight beam cutting the dark.
Luca dropped to one knee beside Lily, holstering his weapon only after he had checked her from head to toe with shaking hands.
“Are you hurt?” he breathed against her hair. “Lily, did he touch you?”
“No, Daddy,” Lily said, pointing a trembling finger toward the broken transom window above the door. “Claire hid me under your desk. And… and Vanessa shot the ceiling so Uncle Matt couldn’t get us.”
Luca slowly stood up and turned toward the doorway.
Vanessa was climbing down from a velvet hall chair, her red evening gown torn at the hem, her knuckles bleeding from punching the oak door, and Marco’s backup Beretta held clumsily in both hands.
For the second time that night, everything I thought I knew turned upside down.
The spoiled, vicious socialite who had called me a desperate little maid had just climbed on a chair in heels and fired a gun to keep Matteo away from us.
Luca stared at her. “You knew Matteo was in Chicago.”
Vanessa lowered the gun to her side, her chest heaving. She looked at her father, Arthur, who had just reached the end of the hall, pale and short of breath.
“Tell him, Dad,” Vanessa said bitterly. “Or I will.”
Arthur leaned heavily against the doorframe. “Matteo contacted me four days ago from Milwaukee. He said he finally figured out that Elena’s pocket watch never went into the lake—that Elena hid it under Lily’s dollhouse the day before she died. And he said if I didn’t help him get inside the house tonight during the engagement party, he would take Lily on her walk to school Monday morning and trade her for it.”
Luca’s face darkened like a gathering storm. “And instead of coming to me—”
“If Matteo went down, he threatened to release the audit files from four years ago!” Arthur shouted back, forty years of composure finally shattering. “The ones showing I lost three million of the family’s pension fund before Elena caught me!”
I stood frozen beside the desk.
Elena hadn’t just been a beloved wife. She had been an accountant before she married Luca.
“So you let Matteo onto my grounds,” Luca said, each word dropping like a guillotine blade. “And Vanessa tried to ship my daughter to Switzerland so Matteo couldn’t grab her as leverage.”
“I wasn’t sending her to Switzerland!” Vanessa cried, tears streaking her makeup. “My father forged the Geneva form so Matteo’s spies would think she was leaving at seven tomorrow morning! I bought the midnight tickets to Montreal to take her to my sister’s house myself! And when I found her downstairs at six o’clock tonight after Matteo was already inside the house, I put her in a caterer’s shirt and smeared flour on her apron so if Matteo looked into the kitchen, he’d just see one of the Spanish kitchen girls’ kids!”
My mouth fell open.
I remembered the pantry.
When Vanessa had grabbed my arm and hissed, If you interrupt this dinner over something this ridiculous, don’t bother coming to work tomorrow.
Matteo’s man had been standing right outside the pantry service door disguised as a wine steward.
If I had marched Lily out of the kitchen at six o’clock announcing who she was, the fake steward would have known the little girl in the oversized uniform was Luca’s daughter.
Vanessa had been cruel to make Lily cry—because a terrified child hiding in the kitchen wouldn’t try to run back upstairs to her bedroom where Matteo was waiting.
“Wait,” I said aloud, my voice cutting through the room.
Everyone turned to look at me.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out the battered gold pocket watch—and the tiny blue square of paper I had found inside the gutted gears.
“If Elena caught Mr. Bellini stealing three million dollars,” I said slowly, looking at the blue slip, “why wasn’t this watch holding bank records?”
Luca stepped toward me and looked down at my palm.
It wasn’t a bank slip.
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It was a locker claim ticket from Union Station, dated four days after Elena’s car went off the Lake Shore Drive bridge.
And written across the back in purple crayon—a child’s handwriting—was a single word: CLAIRE.
