Chapter 4 - THREE MOLES BEHIND THE EAR
“Emma?” Luca’s voice sounded like it was coming from the far end of a dark tunnel.
I shook my head, my back hitting a wooden rack of empty seed trays.
“No,” I said, my voice barely a rasp. “No, that’s impossible. My father is Thomas Reed. I grew up in a two-bedroom house in Bridgeport. I have pictures of myself in his arms when I was a toddler.”
Mr. Petrov took a slow step toward me, squinting in the amber light.
“Your father’s name is Thomas Reed?” the old gardener asked softly.
“Yes.”
“Did he walk with a slight limp in his left leg? From an old shipyard injury?”
I froze. “How do you know that?”
Mr. Petrov’s hand went to his mouth. For a long moment, the eighty-year-old man looked as if his knees might buckle.
“Tom Reed was Sarah’s older brother,” Mr. Petrov whispered. “Wait—no. Sarah told me her brother Tom and his wife lost a little girl to pneumonia in 1999. They lived down by the canal.”
“Stop it!” I said, tears blurring the greenhouse lights. “My dad is my dad. I’ve been paying his hospital bills since I was twenty-five. He taught me how to ride a bike. He walked me to school every day!”
Luca hadn’t taken his eyes off me. Slowly, he set the beaded hospital bracelet down and walked across the cracked stone floor.
He stopped two feet in front of me.
For a man who towered over everyone in a room, he suddenly looked completely lost.
“Emma,” he said quietly. “Turn your head.”
“Don’t,” Vanessa snapped from the table. Her voice was shrill now, stripped of all its Gold Coast polish. “Luca, are you out of your mind? Any girl who cleaned this house could have found a way into this greenhouse months ago, read that file, and dotted her skin with a marker! Look at how conveniently she’s crying!”
I whipped my head toward Vanessa, fury burning away my shock.
With one sharp motion, I yanked the black velvet clip from my hair and pulled my dark hair forward over my right shoulder, exposing the bare skin behind my left ear.
Luca stepped closer.
He reached out—his fingers warm and slightly calloused—and gently brushed his thumb hard across the skin behind my ear.
Nothing smudged.
Three tiny brown moles formed a neat, unmistakable crescent.
Luca’s hand dropped to his side. His breathing was shallow.
“When I was ten,” he whispered, staring at my face as if seeing a ghost, “after the funeral, I went into my mother’s dressing room. I found a yellow cashmere baby blanket hidden in the bottom of her cedar chest. When I asked Arthur Bellini whose it was, he told me my mother had been buying charity gifts for the parish orphanage.”
He turned slowly toward Vanessa.
“Your father was the executor of my parents’ estate until I turned twenty-one,” Luca said, his voice deadly calm. “Your mother was my mother’s best friend. And tonight, you tried to throw Mr. Petrov out of my house before he could hand me this key.”
Vanessa backed toward the greenhouse door, shaking her head. “I didn’t know about a baby! I swear to God, Luca, I didn’t know!”
“Then why did you go to Mr. Petrov’s house this afternoon?” Luca demanded, advancing on her. “Why did you ask him what my mother told him to destroy?”
“Because of the bracelet!” Vanessa cried out.
She held up her right wrist, where the diamond-set olive-leaf links sparkled under the work lights.
“Three weeks ago, my father had too much scotch after dinner,” she said, her chest heaving. “He looked at this bracelet—the one my mother gave me for my twenty-fifth birthday—and he laughed. He said Clara Moretti used to own the matching one, and that if you ever got inside this greenhouse and found the green ledger from the year 2000, the Bellini family would lose every cent we have!”
She pointed a shaking finger at the cedar box.
“He told me the old gardener had the key! He made me swear that if Viktor Petrov ever showed up at the estate, I had to keep him away from you!”
Luca turned back to the table and pulled the top notebook from the stack.
It wasn’t a soil ledger at all. Inside the green canvas cover were columns of dates, bank wire numbers, and handwritten notes in Clara Moretti’s script.
September 4, 2000: $400,000 missing from the harbor trust. Arthur forged Marco’s signature.
October 2, 2000: Confronted Evelyn. She begged me not to tell Marco. She swore Arthur would pay it back.
October 18, 2000: Marco found the second set of books tonight. We are going to the district attorney on Monday. I am sending Elena away with Sarah and Tom until the storm passes.
Two days later, Marco and Clara Moretti’s town car went through the guardrail of the LaSalle Street Bridge in the pouring rain.
The room went dead silent.
“Your parents didn’t just steal from mine,” Luca whispered, looking up from the page at the woman he had planned to marry. “They killed them.”
Vanessa’s face was white as chalk. “No! My mother died six years ago, and my father told me it was just a business dispute! He swore he didn’t know about the crash!”
Mr. Petrov suddenly frowned, picking up the white-strung bakery box from the corner of the table.
“Wait,” the old man said. “Something is wrong.”
We all looked at him.
Mr. Petrov untied the white string and lifted the cardboard lid.
Inside sat the square dark prune cake.
Except someone had already cut a neat square out of the center, lifted the top layer of cake, and pressed a small red velvet ring box directly into the dark fruit filling before placing the top back on.
“I didn’t put that there,” Mr. Petrov whispered, staring in shock. “I left this cake at my niece’s counter for twenty minutes this afternoon while Miss Bellini was talking to me in the parlor.”
Luca reached in, pulled the sticky velvet box from the cake, and snapped it open.
Inside wasn’t a ring.
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It was a heavy gold signet cufflink stamped with the crest of the Moretti family—and smeared across the white satin lining in fresh blue ink were three shaky capital letters:
RUN.
