Chapter 5 - THE GRAVEYARD KEY
For the first time that night, Vanessa didn’t have a story ready.
She stood pinned against the porch railing of the tiny bungalow, the wind whipping strands of dark hair across her face. The streetlights turned the red silk of her engagement gown the color of dried blood.
“What was in the box, Vanessa?” Luca asked.
He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t step closer. He just stood there with his brother’s watch in one pocket and a child’s red mitten in the other, waiting.
When she didn’t answer, Elena Gatti made a small, sharp sound in the back of her throat. We all looked at the older woman. Elena’s eyes were wide, fixed on the gold chain around Vanessa’s neck—a delicate piece of jewelry that had slipped out from beneath the neckline of her gown when she backed against the rail.
“Madonna mia,” Elena whispered, her hand flying to her chest. “You have it on you.”
Vanessa’s hand shot up to her throat, her manicured fingers closing over the chain, trying to shove it back down into the bodice of her dress.
Luca moved faster than I had ever seen a man move. In two strides, he was across the porch. He didn’t strike her, and he didn’t choke her, but his big hand closed like an iron vise around her wrist, pulling her fingers away from her collarbone. With his other hand, he hooked a single finger under the thin gold chain and drew it out into the light.
Dangling from the chain wasn’t a diamond pendant.
It was a small, flat brass key with the numbers 409 stamped into the metal, hanging right beside a worn, silver miraculous medal of the Virgin Mary—the kind sold in church gift shops for five dollars, scratched and dull from years of being held in anxious fingers.
Elena burst into tears. “That’s Clara’s medal! Marco put it around her neck in the hospital the night Leo was born! She never took it off—not even when she slept!”
Luca stared at the cheap silver medal resting against Vanessa’s fifty-thousand-dollar diamond collar. Slowly, with a single sharp jerk of his hand, he snapped the thin gold chain from Vanessa’s neck.
Vanessa gasped, stumbling back a half-step as he let go of her wrist.
“If your father locked Clara in Lake Geneva three weeks ago,” Luca said, holding the medal and the small brass key up between them, “how did you get this off her neck four weeks ago at my brother’s grave?”
Vanessa’s shoulders slumped. The aristocratic posture she had been drilled in since birth seemed to dissolve right there on the peeling wooden porch. When she looked up at Luca, the tears were gone, replaced by something hard, bitter, and terrifyingly cold.
“Because she wasn’t at the grave when I took the box,” Vanessa said, her voice flat. “She dropped the box behind your father’s crypt at seven in the morning and called the house to tell Sal where to find it. I picked up the kitchen extension before Sal came in from polishing the car. I heard every word she said.”
My stomach turned over. I remembered that morning four weeks ago. I had been making coffee in the butler’s pantry when I saw Vanessa hurry down the main stairs in a tracksuit before anyone else was awake.
“I drove straight to Hillside,” Vanessa continued, almost conversationally now that the mask was off. “I got the metal box out from behind the crypt. Inside was that brass key, her St. Jude rosary, and a letter addressed to Sal. She didn’t trust you, Luca. She thought you were just another ruthless boss who would use her son as a weapon against our father. Look at who she trusted! The driver!”
She spat the word out, glaring at Sal with pure venom.
“Marco had told her that if anything ever happened to him, Sal was the only man in Chicago with a clean soul. She wrote in the letter that she was waiting at the diner across the street from the cemetery gates until Sal got the box. So I didn’t go home. I drove across the street. And when she walked out to the parking lot, she saw my face through the windshield, thought I was there to help her, and got right into the passenger seat of my car.”
Elena took a step toward Vanessa, her hands curling into fists. “Where is she, you monster? What did you do to your own sister?”
Sal stepped between Elena and Vanessa, holding a protective arm out to keep the older woman back, though his own face was gray with horror.
“I didn’t kill her, if that’s what you’re thinking,” Vanessa said coldly. “I’m not an animal. I drove her up to Lake Geneva myself. Our father doesn’t even know she’s there. The caretakers at the lodge work for me—I pay them out of the trust fund my grandmother left me. Clara has food, she has a bed, and she’s alive.”
“Why?” Luca’s voice was barely audible over the wind. “Your own blood, Vanessa. For a wedding?”
“For my life!” Vanessa cried out, her voice rising in furious justification. “Do you have any idea what it was like growing up as the older daughter in that house? While Clara ran off to paint pictures and fall in love with the enemy, I was the one who sat through the dinners! I was the one my father paraded around like a prize mare to keep the peace after Marco died! For five years, my entire existence has been about becoming Mrs. Luca Moretti so our families wouldn’t slaughter each other in the streets!”
She pointed a shaking finger toward the front door of the bungalow, where little Leo was inside.
“And then four weeks ago, I opened that box in the cemetery and read Clara’s letter to Sal! If Sal had given you what that key unlocks, you wouldn’t have just called off the wedding, Luca. You would have burned my house to the ground with my father inside it. And I would have been left with nothing—no husband, no name, no future!”
“Wait,” I said, stepping out from behind Sal’s shoulder. My mind was snagged on the contradiction in her confession. “If you locked Clara up four weeks ago to hide the boy and the key… why did you come here Tuesday night? Why give Elena ten thousand dollars and tell her to take Leo to Mexico?”
Vanessa looked at me, and for a split second, the coldness in her eyes fractured into genuine fear again.
“Because on Tuesday morning, I went up to Lake Geneva to bring Clara fresh clothes,” Vanessa whispered. “And she told me why she finally decided to come out of hiding after five years. It wasn’t because of our engagement announcement in the newspaper.”
Luca stepped closer, the brass key biting into his palm. “Why did she come back, Vanessa?”
“Because two months ago, somebody recognized her and Leo at a grocery store in Milwaukee,” Vanessa said, her voice trembling. “A man who used to work for your father, Luca. Not mine. Clara caught him taking pictures of Leo from a parked car. That’s why she moved Leo back here with Elena and went to the cemetery to find Sal. She realized the person she was hiding from wasn’t my father at all.”
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Vanessa looked down at the brass key in Luca’s hand.
“That key opens a locker at the old Union Station baggage claim, where Marco hid a leather briefcase the afternoon before his car went into the river. Clara told me that if I didn’t get Leo out of the country by Friday, the man who cut Marco’s brakes five years ago was going to finish the job. And Luca… she swore on her son’s life that the man who killed Marco wasn’t a Bellini. He’s sitting in your dining room right now.”
