Chapter 5 - THE THIRD KEY
“Who had the keys?” Luca demanded in a low whisper, stepping between the hallway and the kitchen door while pulling his cell phone from his breast pocket.
“Me, Camilla, and Miss Vanessa,” Clara whispered, trembling as she held Leo against her neck.
The little boy didn’t cry. He buried his face in Clara’s cardigan, his small hands fisted in the wool. Apparently, growing up in hiding had taught him when to be quiet.
In the dark living room, Luca looked straight at Vanessa.
“I still have mine in my purse,” Vanessa whispered urgently. “And Camilla’s key was buried with her belongings downstate—”
She stopped dead.
Even in the faint orange glow filtering through the window blinds from the streetlamp outside, I saw the realization hit her face.
“Your handbag,” I whispered, remembering my morning shift at the mansion. “When you came to the house at noon today to check the floral arrangements in the dining room, you left your leather tote in the upstairs sitting room for an hour.”
“My father was in the upstairs sitting room,” Vanessa breathed. “He told me he was making a private call to his broker.”
Outside the kitchen, a shoe scraped lightly against the back porch steps.
Not one set of footsteps. Two.
“Out the front,” Luca ordered instantly.
“No,” Sal said, catching Luca’s coat sleeve. “The black sedan is blocking the mouth of the alley at the front curb. If we walk down those front porch steps under the streetlight carrying the boy, we’re out in the open.”
Sal moved with a speed that made me forget he was seventy-one years old. He crossed to the narrow door beneath the hallway stairs, turned the knob, and smelled the cool, damp air coming up from below.
“Coal chute?” Sal asked Clara.
“Old laundry bulkhead,” Clara whispered. “It opens into the neighbor’s side yard behind their garage. Mrs. Kowalski’s house. The fence between the yards is solid wood.”
“Go,” Luca said, taking Leo directly into his own arms.
As soon as Luca lifted him, Leo wrapped both arms tightly around Luca’s neck. For a man who had never held a child in the ten months I’d worked for him, Luca tucked the boy’s head beneath his chin with fierce, instinctive care.
“Put this on him,” I said quickly, pulling Sal’s folded spare wool scarf from the bottom of the cardboard box and wrapping it around Leo’s bare ankles where his pajama pants rode up. Then I slipped the red mitten onto the boy’s left hand.
Leo looked at me over Luca’s shoulder. “You found it,” he whispered.
“Mr. Sal saved it for you,” I whispered back.
We went down the narrow wooden basement stairs in pitch darkness, Sal leading the way with the penlight from his keychain held between his fingers.
Above us, the back kitchen door latch snapped under heavy pressure. Heavy boots stepped onto the kitchen linoleum.
“Check the bedrooms,” a man’s low voice echoed above the floorboards.
Sal unbolted the rusted iron bulkhead doors at the back of the cellar, easing them open an inch at a time so the hinges wouldn’t screech. Cold night air rushed in.
One by one, we climbed up the concrete steps into the shadowed gap beside the neighbor’s brick garage. Sal went first, pulling Clara up, then Vanessa, then me, and finally Luca carrying Leo.
We pressed along the wooden privacy fence, moving through the wet grass toward the parallel street one block over, where the El train tracks ran above the neighborhood on heavy steel pillars.
Only when we were inside an all-night diner underneath the roar of a passing train six blocks away did Luca set Leo down inside a corner vinyl booth.
Waitresses in pink aprons barely glanced at us, even with Vanessa in a ruined silk gown and Luca in a bespoke suit streaked with cellar dust.
I slid into the booth beside Leo and Clara. When the waitress set down mugs of hot coffee and a cup of warm milk for the boy, I looked at the wooden cigar box Luca had carried clamped beneath his arm the entire time.
Luca opened it again on the Formica table.
Earlier, we had looked at the letter and the Union Station key. We hadn’t touched the olive-wood rosary resting on the blue baby blanket.
I picked up the rosary gently so it wouldn’t slide into the spilled milk.
It was heavier than wood should have been.
Turning the centerpiece medal over in my palm, I saw why. Linked onto the silver ring above the crucifix wasn’t a saint’s medallion. It was a small gold signet ring, worn smooth around the band, with a tiny chip missing from the onyx stone on top.
Sal’s coffee mug froze halfway to his mouth.
“Where did you get that?” Sal whispered, his voice hoarse.
“It was inside the box on the blanket,” I said.
Luca leaned across the table, staring at the ring in my hand. “That isn’t Matteo’s ring. That’s my father’s signet ring. He told us he lost it in Lake Michigan five years before Matteo died.”
Sal reached across the table, his old fingers shaking so badly the ring chimed against his saucer when he touched it.
“Your father didn’t lose it in the lake,” Sal said slowly. “He gave it to the man who ran the family’s private dockyard warehouse on the South Branch. The man who kept the off-the-books cash safe.”
Vanessa looked between Sal and Luca. “Who was that?”
“Marcus Vance,” Luca said, his voice turning to ice. “My father’s head of security. The man sitting at the right hand of my dining table tonight.”
My blood ran cold.
Marcus Vance wasn’t a Bellini. He was sixty years old, soft-spoken, silver-haired, and had worked for Luca’s father nearly as long as Sal had. Whenever I vacuumed the hallway outside Luca’s study, Marcus was the one standing guard, always polite, always offering to carry heavy laundry baskets for the maids.
“Wait,” I said, my mind racing back to the letter from Camilla. “Camilla wrote that the person who broke Matteo’s car was inside your house. Not Hector Bellini’s house. Yours.”
Vanessa stared at Luca. “Then those men at the bungalow tonight—”
“Wait,” Luca said, holding up a hand. He looked at Vanessa carefully. “If Marcus Vance cut the brakes six years ago, how did he know to go to West Addison tonight? He wasn’t in the upstairs sitting room with your purse today. Your father was.”
Vanessa’s face went white.
Slowly, she reached into her beaded evening clutch to check for her house key—the one she had sworn was still inside.
She pulled out her leather key ring.
The brass key to the West Addison bungalow was gone.
In its place, clipped neatly onto her gold ring, was a valet tag from the Moretti mansion’s private parking garage—written in the cramped, block handwriting of Marcus Vance.
“My father didn’t take my key in the sitting room today,” Vanessa whispered, her hands shaking on the diner table. “Marcus took my coat and my bag at the front door when I arrived at six o’clock. And my father and Marcus Vance were talking on the back terrace before dinner.”
May you like
Luca stood up from the booth.
“Hector and Marcus have been working together since before Matteo died,” Luca said softly. “And right now, my Aunt Teresa and your entire staff are back in that mansion with both of them.”
