Chapter 6 - THE VOICE IN THE PARKING LOT
Nobody in the hallway breathed.
Lily took two small steps away from Luca’s side and stared up at the battered smartphone in my trembling hand.
“Mommy?” Lily whispered.
Through the phone speaker came the sound of heavy rain hitting a car windshield, followed by a sharp, ragged intake of breath that sounded like someone who had waited four years to exhale.
“Lily-bug,” a woman’s voice whispered back. It was raspy, slightly uneven, as if her vocal cords had once been damaged by smoke or cold water, yet so full of fierce tenderness that my own throat closed up. “My brave, big girl. You kept Mr. Barnaby safe?”
Lily clapped both hands over her mouth, tears spilling instantly down her cheeks. She nodded frantically even though the woman on the phone couldn’t see her.
“I’m nine now, Mommy,” Lily sobbed out in a tiny, breathless rush. “And I didn’t tell anybody about the purple crayon until tonight, I promise!”
Luca dropped to both knees on the hallway carpet in front of me. The powerful Chicago boss who had thirty millionaires afraid to clink their wineglasses twenty minutes ago looked like a man watching the sun rise after four years of pitch darkness.
His hand shook as he reached out to touch the edge of my phone, as if afraid that if he pressed a button, the voice would vanish back into Lake Michigan.
“Elena?” Luca choked out.
Silence fell over the car in Joliet for three heartbeats.
“Luca,” Elena said. Her voice hardened with sudden urgency. “Luca, listen to me right now. Do not trust Arthur, and check the brake lines on your SUV before you leave that house. Matteo didn’t come to Joliet alone—he had one of your own garage mechanics driving him!”
Luca’s eyes snapped up to Marco.
Marco was already pulling his walkie-talkie from his belt, barking orders to the two guards still stationed by the garage to detain the night mechanic immediately.
“Elena, where are you?” Luca demanded, rising to his feet while keeping one arm locked around Lily. “I’m bringing Lily to you right now.”
“No! Don’t come to Joliet,” Elena said sharply. “Claire’s mother is driving us north toward the city on the old county road so we stay off the tollway cameras. Meet us at Union Station. The Great Hall, beneath the big clock. Claire has the blue claim ticket from the watch?”
“Yes,” I answered, holding the tiny blue square tight against my chest. “I have it right here, Mrs. Moretti. Locker 418.”
“That locker isn’t a standard day-locker,” Elena said over the hum of my mother’s old Honda engine. “It’s in the private long-term baggage vault behind the Amtrak ticket counter. Claire’s mother has paid the annual rental fee on it in cash every November for four years so they wouldn’t drill the lock.”
I stared at the phone in stunned disbelief.
For four years, while I was folding hospital sheets and scrubbing staircases to help pay my mother’s mortgage, my mother had been hiding Luca Moretti’s supposedly dead wife—and paying cash to keep a secret vault locked at Union Station.
“Mom?” I said into the speaker. “Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you let me take a job in this house?”
“Because Elena’s lungs collapsed twice this winter from the scar tissue after the river,” my mother’s steady voice answered from the driver’s seat. “She thought she wasn’t going to make it through the spring, Claire. And when we saw the announcement in the Tribune last year that Luca was getting engaged to Arthur Bellini’s daughter, Elena needed someone inside that house whom she trusted with her life to watch over Lily.”
The room seemed to spin around me.
I hadn’t ended up in Luca Moretti’s mansion by coincidence.
My mother hadn’t needed my paycheck for her thirty-year mortgage. She had invented the overdue mortgage notices to make me desperate enough to take the high-paying live-in housekeeper position at the Moretti estate—and to keep me from quitting when Vanessa made my life miserable.
I had been Elena’s eyes and ears for eleven months without ever knowing it.
“Wait,” Vanessa spoke up suddenly from beside the hall table. Her face was pale, the dried blood on her knuckles stark against her red silk dress. “If you thought I was going to hurt Lily because of my father… you were wrong, Elena. I swear to God you were wrong.”
“Is that Vanessa?” Elena’s voice came through the speaker, surprisingly devoid of hatred. “Vanessa, look inside your father’s breast pocket right now.”
Arthur Bellini lunged toward me to knock the phone out of my hand, moving faster than a sixty-five-year-old man had any right to move.
Luca caught him by the throat with one hand and slammed him back against the mahogany paneling hard enough to rattle the oil paintings down the hall.
“Marco,” Luca said coldly. “Search his coat.”
Marco reached inside Arthur’s tailored tuxedo jacket and pulled out a slim leather passport wallet—and a silver antique rosary with black onyx beads.
Vanessa gasped, both hands flying to her mouth. “That’s… that’s my brother’s rosary. Julian’s rosary. He died in the boating accident in Miami four years ago!”
“Julian didn’t die in Miami, Vanessa,” Elena said softly through the phone speaker. “Your brother Julian was in my car on the Lake Shore Drive bridge four years ago. He was the one who came to me with the pension books showing that Matteo and your father were laundering fentanyl money through Luca’s legitimate shipping companies—knowing Luca would take the federal life sentence if they got caught.”
Vanessa looked at her father as if she were looking at a monster rising out of the floorboards.
“Dad?” Vanessa whispered, her voice breaking like a child’s. “You told me Julian drowned in Florida. You told me for four years that if Luca ever audited the 2022 books, our whole family would go to prison because of a mistake Julian made before he died! That’s why I agreed to marry Luca—to keep him away from the old shipping ledgers!”
Arthur couldn’t speak around Luca’s forearm pressed against his collarbones, his eyes bulging with guilt and terror.
“Matteo shot Julian in the passenger seat of my car while we were crossing the bridge,” Elena said, her voice cracking with four-year-old grief. “I jerked the wheel into the guardrail so Matteo’s car behind us couldn’t finish me off. The car went into the water. I tried to pull Julian out, Vanessa, I swear I tried, until the current tore me away and my coat caught on a barge line downriver.”
Vanessa sank to her knees on the carpet, clutching her brother’s black onyx rosary to her chest as raw, ugly sobs tore out of her throat.
Every cruel thing she had done over the past year suddenly clicked into terrible, tragic focus. She had agreed to marry a man who didn’t love her to protect the memory of a brother her own father had helped murder—and tonight, when she realized Matteo was coming for Lily, she had tried to save the little girl the only way she knew how, even if it meant making Lily hate her so the child would stay hidden in the kitchen.
“Marco,” Luca said, releasing Arthur only once Marco had snapped steel zip-ties around the old man’s wrists. “Lock Arthur in the wine cellar until we get back. Bring the armored sedan around to the front door—the one from my personal garage that the night mechanic doesn’t have keys to.”
Luca turned to me, took the nursery throw blanket off the floor, and wrapped it around Lily’s shoulders over the oversized black catering shirt she was still wearing.
Then he looked at Vanessa, who was still kneeling on the floor holding her dead brother’s rosary.
“Get up, Vanessa,” Luca said quietly. “If you want to know what is inside Locker 418, you’re coming with us.”
We ran out into the pouring Chicago rain and climbed into the armored Mercedes.
Twenty minutes later, as Luca’s tires screeched onto the slick pavement outside the Canal Street entrance of Union Station, my mother’s dented silver Honda Civic pulled up fifty feet ahead of us under the yellow streetlights.
The passenger door of the Honda opened.
A woman in a faded blue wool coat stepped out into the rain, her dark hair silvered at the temples, a deep pale scar running along her left jawline.
Lily didn’t wait for Marco. She threw open the heavy door of the Mercedes and sprinted across the wet stone plaza in her small black shoes.
“Mommy!”
May you like
Elena dropped to her knees on the wet pavement just before the brass doors of the station.
And just as Lily reached the brightest pool of streetlight, a dark green transit van jumped the curb from the taxi lane, engine roaring straight toward them.
