Chapter 6 - THE CEDAR ARMOIRE
Vanessa’s gasp cut through the quiet living room.
“That’s not Elena’s wardrobe!” Vanessa protested immediately, though her voice cracked on the last word. “My father bought that antique cedar armoire at an estate auction in Oak Park four years ago and had it moved into Luca’s house last month for my linens!”
“An estate auction,” Luca repeated softly, his dark eyes locking onto her with lethal clarity, “after Elena’s mother’s house burned down.”
Why would Victor Bellini buy a smoke-damaged cedar armoire from the estate of a woman whose daughter he was trying to erase? Unless he was looking for something Elena’s family had kept hidden inside it—and hadn’t been able to find the keyhole.
“Sal,” Luca said, turning toward the old driver. “Stay here with Gio and Mrs. Gable. Lock the doors and do not open them for anyone until I get back.”
“You can’t leave me here without a car, kid,” Sal objected, standing up. “And you shouldn’t walk back into that house alone while Victor’s men are still downstairs drinking your scotch.”
“They’re drinking champagne in the dining room while thirty witnesses watch,” Luca replied evenly, tossing the Mercedes keys onto the small coffee table in front of Sal. “Keep the sedan here in case you need to move Gio fast. Emma and I will take a cab back to Lincoln Park.”
“What about me?” Vanessa demanded as Luca reached for the doorknob.
“You’re coming with us,” Luca said coldly. “Because the moment your father realizes we didn’t come back from the garage, he’s going to start making phone calls. You’re going to walk back into that dining room, pick up your champagne glass, and tell him you and I went for a drive around the block to cool off after an argument about the household staff.”
Twenty minutes later, our yellow cab pulled up to the wrought-iron side gate of the Moretti mansion in Lincoln Park. Through the tall, arched windows of the main floor, the chandeliers were still blazing. Shadows of dinner guests moved across the silk draperies, completely unaware that their host’s entire world had been torn apart four miles north on West Addison.
We didn’t use the front portico. Irony wasn’t lost on me as Luca led Vanessa and me through the narrow brick courtyard and unlocked the service entrance—the very door Vanessa had ordered me to push Sal through an hour earlier.
“Go straight into the dining room, Vanessa,” Luca instructed in the dim back hallway near the butler’s pantry. “Sit down next to your father. If you say one word to him about West Addison or Elena, or if he gets up from that table before I come downstairs, I’ll walk out there with Elena’s bracelet and call the state prosecutor from the head of the table.”
Vanessa swallowed hard. For the first time, she looked more afraid of Luca than she was of her father. Nodding once, she smoothed the skirt of her red evening gown, checked her lipstick in the pantry mirror, and walked out through the swinging door toward the music and laughter of the dining room.
“Come on, Emma,” Luca whispered, gesturing toward the narrow back servant stairs. “Show me the wardrobe.”
We climbed the three flights of carpeted back stairs in near silence. My heart was hammering against my ribs. I had worked in this house for ten months, dusting the baseboards, polishing the silver, and changing the linens, never imagining the quiet, brooding man who signed my paychecks had been living inside a cage built by his own family and his fiancée’s father.
On the third floor, the hallway was cool and smelled faintly of lavender sachets. I opened the door to the corner suite overlooking the carriage house and flipped the wall switch.
Stacked near the bay windows were three silver-trimmed steamer trunks filled with Vanessa’s trousseau. And standing against the far plaster wall was a massive, six-foot-tall wardrobe made of dark red cedar, its front panels carved with intricate grapevine reliefs.
“The main doors aren’t locked,” I told Luca as I crossed the rug and pulled open the two heavy wooden doors. Inside, a dozen padded satin hangers held Vanessa’s winter coats. “When I cleaned the inside with lemon oil yesterday, I noticed the bottom drawer wouldn’t pull out all the way, like there was a false back behind it. Look right here under the carved cluster of grapes on the center post.”
Luca knelt in front of the open wardrobe, pulling the small brass key on the faded blue ribbon from his pocket. Beneath the carved wooden grapes, almost invisible against the dark grain of the cedar, was a tiny brass keyhole.
He slid the key inside. It turned with a sharp, metallic click.
Instead of the drawer opening, the entire cedar floor panel inside the bottom of the wardrobe popped upward half an inch.
Luca lifted the wooden panel out and set it aside on the carpet. Underneath, resting inside a shallow compartment lined with velvet, was a flat metal strongbox covered in soot from the Oak Park fire four years ago—which meant Elena had gone back to the ruins of her mother’s house, rescued the box, and hidden it back inside the wardrobe after discovering where the piece of furniture had ended up.
Wait—how had Elena gotten inside this wardrobe if Victor Bellini owned it?
“Victor didn’t buy this wardrobe at an auction,” Luca said softly, reading the faded brass shipping plate screwed into the inside of the wooden panel he had just removed. Moretti Lake House — Pier 4, Lake Geneva. “This wardrobe came from my family’s boat house in Wisconsin. Elena hid this strongbox inside it the night she went to Lake Geneva three years ago, right before someone came through the door.”
Luca lifted the latch on the soot-stained metal box—it wasn’t locked—and raised the lid.
Inside lay a child’s birth certificate with Giovanni Salvatore Moretti typed across the top, a gold pocket watch with a cracked crystal, and a small blue velvet notebook filled with Elena’s handwriting.
Luca didn’t pick up the birth certificate or the notebook first. His hand went straight to the gold pocket watch. When he lifted it out of the box, his fingers shook so violently the brass chain rattled against his cufflink.
The watch had stopped at 11:42. And tangled around the winding stem was a torn piece of gray silk fabric with a silver monogrammed button still attached.
“This was my father’s pocket watch,” Luca whispered, staring at the cracked glass face in horror. “He was buried with this watch five years ago.”
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“No, he wasn’t,” I said softly, picking up the blue velvet notebook and opening to the last page, where Elena had written a frantic entry dated October 14, 2023, at 11:15 PM. “Because your father didn’t give that watch to the undertaker. Look at who Elena says she was waiting for at the Lake Geneva boat house that night.”
Before Luca could read the page I held out to him, the heavy brass doorknob of the third-floor guest suite turned slowly from the outside.
