Chapter 5 - THE SILVER VIOLIN CHARM
Instinctively, Vanessa slapped her left hand over her right wrist, trying to hide the gold links beneath the cuff of her fur-trimmed wrap.
“My father gave me this bracelet for my twenty-seventh birthday!” she stammered, her eyes darting wildly between Luca and the front door. “Lots of bracelets have music charms on them!”
“Turn the violin charm over, Luca,” Sal said from the doorway before turning to head down the hall toward Gio’s bedroom. “Look at the back of it.”
Luca didn’t hesitate. In two long strides he crossed the small living room and caught Vanessa’s wrist. He didn’t twist it or hurt her, but his grip was iron. With his thumb, he flipped the tiny gold violin over under the living room lamp.
Scratched onto the flat gold back, in tiny block letters, were two initials and a year: E.V. ’18.
“I bought this for her in Prague after her first symphony tour,” Luca said, his voice so devoid of warmth that the temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. He unclasped the bracelet from Vanessa’s wrist and slipped it into his tuxedo pocket alongside the red mitten. “How did your father get a bracelet that Elena never took off her wrist?”
“I don’t know!” Vanessa’s knees buckled slightly, and she leaned against the front door, sobbing openly now without any of her society polish. “I swear to you, Luca, I didn’t know it was hers! My father gave it to me inside a velvet box from Peacock Jewelers three years ago! Then two years ago, I found a ledger in his desk at the shipping office with this West Addison address written inside it and a note saying Moretti boy—$2,000 monthly.”
She grabbed Luca’s coat with both hands, desperate to make him believe her.
“When I drove out here and saw Gio on the porch, I realized immediately who he was! I confronted my father, and he told me Elena had left the boy behind when she ran off with some musician, and that he was paying Mrs. Gable so you wouldn’t call off our engagement! When my father had his stroke six months ago and couldn’t make the drops himself, he made me take over delivering the cash on Tuesday nights!”
I stood by the armchair with Sal’s cardboard box, piecing the timeline together. Vanessa WAS telling the truth about one thing: she was terrified of her father, Victor Bellini, and desperate to secure her marriage to Luca. That was why she had panicked when she realized Sal had driven her to West Addison on Tuesday night. She thought Sal had just stumbled onto Victor’s secret hush-money payments.
She had no idea Sal had been coming to this house every Thursday for four years.
And more importantly, she had no idea Victor Bellini had taken a bracelet off Elena Vance’s wrist three years ago.
Just then, Sal walked back out of the hallway, pulling Gio’s bedroom door mostly shut behind him, leaving only a thin crack of light so the little boy wouldn’t be in the dark.
“He’s asleep,” Sal said softly. “Holding the Saint Christopher medal.”
Luca stood in the center of the braided rug, holding Elena’s three-year-old letter and the small brass key on the blue ribbon. When he looked at Sal now, the anger was gone from his eyes, replaced by a deep, aching shame.
“Sal,” Luca whispered. “Tell me what happened five years ago. All of it.”
Sal walked over to the worn sofa and sat down heavily. For the first time tonight, he looked every bit of his seventy-one years.
“Five years ago, when your father had his second heart attack, he wasn’t running the family business anymore, kid,” Sal began, his voice low so it wouldn’t carry down the hall. “You were twenty-six, trying to turn the construction company into a legitimate enterprise, and you didn’t know half of what your old man owed to Victor Bellini on the south side docks. The only way Victor agreed to forgive three million dollars in port debts was if you married Vanessa and merged the two families.”
Luca closed his eyes briefly. “My father told me the merger was his idea.”
“Your father loved you, Luca, even when he did terrible things to protect you,” Sal said gently. “He tried to pay Elena fifty thousand dollars to walk away quietly. She tore the check in half right in his hospital room. I was standing outside in the corridor when Victor Bellini walked out of that room and told your father, ‘If the girl won’t take the money, I’ll have my boys on the river make sure she never walks down an aisle.’”
A violent tremor ran through Luca’s shoulders.
“That night,” Sal continued, “I went to Elena’s apartment. She was packing a single suitcase, crying so hard she could barely breathe, and that’s when she told me she was eight weeks pregnant. She knew if you found out while your father was dying and Victor had a gun to the family’s head, you would start a war you couldn’t win. She begged me to help her disappear until you were strong enough to stand on your own.”
“So you drove her to Milwaukee,” I murmured, looking down at the clinic receipt.
Sal nodded at me. “I set her up in a small apartment near St. Jude’s under her mother’s maiden name. I paid the rent out of my pension savings for the first year until she could teach violin lessons again. When Gio was a year old, Elena’s old neighbor, Mrs. Gable, moved with them back to this bungalow in Chicago so Elena could be close enough to watch Luca from afar. Three years ago, in October, after your father died and you paid off the last of the port debts, Elena decided it was finally safe to tell you the truth.”
Luca held up the cream stationery. “She wrote this note on October fourteenth. She said if she didn’t come back from the boat house—”
“Your family’s old boat house up on Lake Geneva in Wisconsin,” Sal said, his jaw tightening. “She got a message that afternoon saying you were up there closing it down for the season and wanted to meet her alone. She was afraid it might be a trap set by Victor, so she left Gio here with me and gave me that sealed letter and the brass key, promising to call me by midnight.”
“I wasn’t in Lake Geneva on October fourteenth,” Luca said, his voice hollow. “I was in New York signing the steel contracts with Victor Bellini.”
Wait. If Victor was in New York with Luca on the night of October fourteenth three years ago, who lured Elena to the Lake Geneva boat house? And how did Elena’s bracelet end up in Victor’s hands the very next morning?
“She never called,” Sal whispered, staring at his gloved hands. “I drove up to Lake Geneva at dawn. The boat house was empty, except for her violin case floating under the pier. I knew if I went to the police or told you right then, whoever took her would come straight to this house to finish the job and erase the boy. So I hid Mrs. Gable and Gio right under their noses, paid the mortgage here with my own paycheck every month, and waited until I could find out who sent that message.”
“Wait a minute,” I spoke up suddenly, looking down at the brass key tied to the blue ribbon in Luca’s hand. “Elena’s note says the truth is inside the cedar wardrobe at her mother’s house. Didn’t you go look inside it three years ago, Sal?”
Sal shook his head slowly, a look of bitter frustration crossing his weathered face. “Her mother’s old house in Oak Park burned down four years ago. There was no house left to search. I kept that key for three years trying to figure out where that damned cedar wardrobe went.”
Suddenly, my hands went completely cold around the edges of the cardboard box.
“Mr. Moretti,” I whispered, my heart pounding against my ribs as I looked from the brass key on the blue ribbon to Luca’s face. “I know where that cedar wardrobe is.”
May you like
All three of them stared at me.
“I polished it yesterday morning,” I said, my voice shaking. “It’s up in the third-floor guest suite of your mansion—the room Miss Bellini has been using to store her wedding trunks.”
