Chapter 3 - THE WATCH IN SMALL HANDS
The silver watch swung one more time before Elena Gatti snatched it gently but firmly out of the little boy’s fingers.
“Leo, tesoro, go back to the kitchen and finish your warm milk,” she said in rapid, hushed Italian, stepping squarely in front of the child to block him from Luca’s view.
“Want Mommy,” Leo protested, his small hand pressing flat against the screen mesh toward Vanessa. “Mommy brought the red car?”
“In a minute, sweetheart. Go sit at the table.”
Once the little boy’s flannel-clad legs disappeared down the narrow hallway, Elena stepped out onto the porch and pulled the heavy wooden door shut behind her. Her hands were trembling so badly she had to tuck them under her folded arms, burying the silver watch in the wool of her cardigan.
Luca took a single step toward her. He was a tall man, broad-shouldered in his tailored tuxedo, and in the cramped space of the tiny bungalow porch, he looked overwhelming. Yet Elena didn’t back down. She lifted her chin, glaring past him at Vanessa.
“You told me you wouldn’t bring them here,” Elena whispered fiercely. “You swore to me, Vanessa!”
“I didn’t have a choice,” Vanessa said, her voice thin and ragged. “He found the mitten.”
Luca’s eyes cut from Vanessa back to the older woman. “You’re Elena Gatti. You were my brother Marco’s housekeeper in Lincoln Park before he died.”
“I worked for Marco for six years,” Elena said, her voice thick with an old, unhealed grief. “Right up until the night they pulled his car out of the river.”
My breath caught in my throat. Even I knew the story of Marco Moretti, though nobody in the mansion ever spoke his name above a whisper. Five years ago, Luca’s older brother—the original heir to the Moretti empire—had gone off the Columbus Avenue bridge in the middle of a January blizzard. The brakes had been cut. Everyone in Chicago’s underworld knew the rival Bellini family had ordered it. For three years, the two families had bled each other dry in the streets until Luca and old Don Bellini agreed to a truce—a truce sealed by Luca’s engagement to Vanessa.
I looked down at Sal standing beside me on the sidewalk. The old driver hadn’t put his cap back on. His eyes were fixed on the crack of light under the front door, his jaw clenched tight.
“Give me the watch, Elena,” Luca said. It wasn’t a threat. It sounded like a prayer he was terrified to have answered.
Slowly, Elena pulled her hand from under her cardigan and held it out.
Luca took the timepiece. His thumb traced the deep dent along the bottom edge. “Marco dropped this on the stone steps of St. Ignatius when he was twelve,” Luca murmured, as if talking to himself. “Our grandfather gave it to him for his Confirmation. The police told my father the river current took his coat and everything in his pockets.”
He clicked the tarnished silver casing open.
From the bottom of the steps, I couldn’t see the inside of the lid, but I saw the way Luca’s shoulders caved inward. A sound escaped him—a sharp, broken exhale that made Sal immediately climb the first two steps, his hand reaching out instinctively to steady the younger man’s elbow, just as he must have done when Luca was a boy.
“What’s inside?” I asked quietly, stepping onto the porch behind Sal.
Luca tilted the open watch toward the yellow porch bulb. Pasted inside the silver lid, protected by a thin circle of glass, was a tiny, cut-out photo booth picture. Two faces were pressed cheek to cheek, laughing wildly. One was a handsome young man with Luca’s dark eyes and a softer, wider smile.
The other was a young woman who looked almost identical to Vanessa, except for a small beauty mark just below her left eye and a bright, unguarded warmth that Vanessa had never possessed.
“Clara,” Luca breathed.
He turned slowly to look at his fiancée. The rage that had burned in him back at the mansion was gone, replaced by a stunned, hollow bewilderment. “Marco and your sister? While our fathers were at war?”
Vanessa nodded, tears spilling freely down her cheeks now, ruining the last of her makeup. “They met at a charity gallery opening in River North before the feud started. When our fathers went to war, Marco and Clara refused to stop seeing each other. Elena helped them hide it. By the time Clara realized she was pregnant, Marco was already dead.”
“And the boy?” Luca’s voice cracked on the word. He looked back at the closed wooden door. “Leo?”
“He’s four and a half, Mr. Moretti,” Elena said softly, some of the hostility leaving her face as she saw the raw pain in Luca’s eyes. “He has his father’s laugh. And every single night before he goes to sleep, he asks to hold that watch because Clara told him his papa left it to keep him safe.”
Luca closed his eyes, pressing the cool silver watch against his forehead. His brother wasn’t entirely gone. A piece of Marco was sitting ten feet away at a kitchen table, drinking warm milk in train pajamas.
For a few seconds, the tragedy of it held all four of us in silence. I looked at Vanessa, my chest aching with sudden sympathy. No wonder she had been sneaking across town after midnight. She was caught between two brutal families, trying to shield her sister’s secret child.
Then Luca lowered the watch and looked past Vanessa, straight at Sal.
“Sal,” Luca said quietly. “You drove Marco for two years before my father brought you back to the main house.”
Sal didn’t look up from the wooden floorboards of the porch. “I did, Luca.”
“Did you know about Clara?”
“No, kid. Marco kept her out of the cars. He wanted her safe.” Sal hesitated, his thick gray eyebrows drawing together. He looked at Elena, then at Vanessa. “But there’s something here that still isn’t right.”
Vanessa stiffened. “Leave it alone, old man. Haven’t you done enough tonight?”
“Let him speak,” Luca said sharply.
Sal turned his cap over in his weathered hands. “Mrs. Gatti… Vanessa just told us inside the car that her sister died of pneumonia in an Evanston clinic six months ago. And that she’s been coming here to take care of you and the boy ever since.”
Elena blinked. She looked at Vanessa as if the younger woman had lost her mind.
“Six months ago?” Elena repeated, her voice rising in disbelief. “Is that the lie you told him?”
Vanessa lunged forward, grabbing Elena’s sweater sleeve. “Elena, stop! Don’t say another word, please, you’ll put him in danger!”
Elena wrenched her arm free, her dark eyes blazing with sudden, fierce anger. “Danger from who? Look at him, Vanessa! That’s Marco’s brother! And you’re still lying to his face!”
Elena turned back to Luca, her chest heaving.
“Mr. Moretti, until Tuesday night at midnight, Vanessa hadn’t set foot in this house in over two years. She didn’t pay our rent. She didn’t buy Leo’s clothes. And Clara didn’t die of pneumonia six months ago.”
Luca went dead still, the silver watch gripped tight in his palm. “Then where is Clara?”
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Elena reached into the pocket of her floral cardigan and pulled out a small, crumpled piece of heavy cream stationery—the exact same thick, gold-bordered paper used for Luca and Vanessa’s engagement invitations, which I had seen stacked on the hall table all week.
“Clara didn’t die,” Elena said, handing the folded paper to Luca. “She disappeared three weeks ago—the exact day your engagement was announced in the Chicago Tribune. And on Tuesday night, Vanessa showed up here in the middle of the night with ten thousand dollars in cash, telling me that if I didn’t pack Leo’s things and take him to Mexico by Friday, Clara would never come home alive.”
