Chapter 2 - THE SECRET INSIDE THE LINING
“Get out.”
Luca didn’t raise his voice, yet forty of Chicago’s wealthiest guests stood up as if a fire alarm had gone off.
Chairs scraped across the marble. Fur coats were snatched from seatbacks. Politicians and investors practically tripped over one another trying to reach the double doors before the silence in the dining room turned into something lethal.
“Not you, Sal,” Luca said quietly. “Not you, Aunt Teresa. And not you, Emma.”
I froze with two spools of red thread in my palm.
My heart hammered against my ribs. I was the housekeeper. I belonged in the laundry room, not in the middle of a twenty-two-year-old family conspiracy.
Within ninety seconds, the heavy oak doors clicked shut.
Only five of us remained among the wilted white roses and spilled champagne: Luca, Vanessa, Aunt Teresa, Uncle Sal, and me, still kneeling on the cold stone floor beside the cracked cassette recorder.
Luca walked straight to Vanessa, his hand held out.
“Give me the key.”
Vanessa pressed her back against the mahogany sideboard, her manicured fingers clutching the thin gold chain at her throat. The diamond engagement necklace looked obscene now, glittering above a tiny piece of blackened brass marked 318.
“Luca, if you take this key without knowing the agreement, you’ll start a war between our families,” she whispered, her mascara smudging at the corners of her eyes.
“We’re already in one,” Luca said. “Take it off, or I take it off for you.”
With shaking hands, Vanessa unclasped the gold chain and dropped it into his palm.
Then I looked down at the cream-colored cassette recorder beside my knee.
It had bothered me for five minutes how a machine with an empty battery compartment could play a voice. I picked it up and turned it over. The cracked plastic seam along the side wasn't damaged from falling today—it had been pried open years ago and glued shut.
“Mr. Moretti,” I said softly.
Luca looked down at me.
I slid my fingernail into the cracked seam and pulled. The fake outer shell popped off.
Taped inside the hollow casing, right behind the old cassette wheels, was a flat silver micro-player wired to a lithium watch battery and a tiny tilt-switch.
“The cassette was just a decoy,” I said, lifting the hidden digital module out of the plastic shell. “Someone built this so it would only trigger if the box was dropped or tilted upside down.”
Uncle Sal let out a long, ragged breath and sank into a chair.
“Enzo,” Sal muttered, rubbing his gray temples. “Your mother’s brother was an electronics technician before he died. We wondered why he visited her bedroom the week before the funeral.”
Luca stared at the tiny silver device in my hand, his jaw clenching.
“If my mother died in 2004, Sal, why was she recording messages about St. Catherine’s Hospital?”
Aunt Teresa walked slowly toward the table, her black silk shawl trembling around her shoulders. She reached down, picked up the walnut sewing box, and ran her thumb over the carved initials—L.M.M.
“Because your father didn’t bury your mother in 2004,” Teresa said, her voice cracking. “He buried an unclaimed Jane Doe from the county morgue and paid the coroner fifty thousand dollars to sign Lucia’s name on the certificate.”
Luca gripped the edge of the table so hard his knuckles turned white.
“Why?”
“Because Lucia found out what your father and Vanessa’s father did at the docks in October of 2004,” Teresa said, looking directly at Vanessa. “She threatened to go to the federal prosecutor. Putting his wife in the ground would have made the captains ask questions. Putting her in a private psychiatric ward in Wisconsin under a false name kept her quiet.”
“And who is in room 318?” Luca demanded, turning back to Vanessa.
Vanessa wiped her cheek with the back of her hand, her expression shifting from panic to cold, cornered desperation.
“You think I’m the monster here, Luca?” she snapped. “I was six years old in 2004! My father gave me that key two years ago when he arranged our engagement. He told me if I ever lost it, or if you ever went to Milwaukee, everything our families built would burn to the ground.”
“Answer the question, Vanessa,” Luca said, taking a step closer. “You said someone in room 318 spent twenty-two years believing I died.”
“Your mother!” Vanessa cried out. “Room 317 was her sleeping room. Room 318 was the adjoining sunroom where they moved her after the stroke!”
“Wait,” I interrupted, standing up slowly with the walnut sewing box in my hands.
Everyone looked at me.
I wasn't looking at them. I was looking inside the wooden lid where Luca had pulled the faded blue cloth loose earlier.
Beneath the glued felt lining, a corner of stiff, yellowed paper was sticking out.
I carefully peeled back the velvet lining.
Inside lay a folded hospital intake photograph and a child’s silver rosary with tiny blue glass beads.
I unfolded the photograph.
It showed a dark-haired woman in a hospital gown sitting on the edge of a narrow bed, her arms wrapped tightly around a little boy who looked no older than four—except the date stamped in orange ink at the bottom corner read NOVEMBER 14, 2019.
Seven years ago.
May you like
My hands went cold as I turned the photograph over and read the neat handwriting on the back.
“Mr. Moretti,” I whispered, holding the photo out to him. “If you were sixteen when your mother was taken in 2004… who is the four-year-old boy sitting in her lap seven years ago with your exact eyes?”
