Chapter 6 - THE HOUSE ON 33RD STREET
The twenty-minute drive down Lake Shore Drive and across to Bridgeport took nine minutes at ninety miles an hour.
Nobody spoke for the first three miles.
I sat on the edge of the leather seat, dialing my home landline over and over with shaking thumbs.
It rang six times, then clicked over to the answering machine—recording my own cheerful voice asking callers to leave a message for Tom and Emma.
I tried Marta’s cell phone next.
Straight to voicemail.
Across from me, Vanessa sat pressed against the door, her diamond bracelet digging into her bare wrist as she dialed her father’s phone.
“Pick up, Dad, please pick up,” she whispered, her voice raw and small.
I watched her in the passing orange glow of the highway streetlights. For eight months, I had seen Vanessa Bellini only as a cold, entitled socialite who sent back soup if it wasn’t piping hot and looked through housekeepers as if we were wallpaper.
Right now, she looked terrified—not just for herself, but like a daughter suddenly realizing the man who had raised her was a monster.
“When did your mother die?” I asked her suddenly.
Vanessa flinched, wiping her cheek with the back of her hand. “Six years ago. Ovarian cancer.”
“Did she ever talk about my mother? Or Clara?”
Vanessa looked down at the olive-leaf bracelet on her wrist.
“Toward the end, when the morphine made her confused, she kept crying and holding this bracelet,” Vanessa said quietly. “She kept saying, ‘We didn’t know the baby was in the back seat, Clara, I swear we only wanted the ledger back.’ My father told the nurses it was hallucinations from the medication. He wouldn’t let anyone visit her alone during the last two weeks.”
Luca went completely rigid beside me.
“What did you just say?” he asked, his voice dangerously low.
Vanessa swallowed hard, looking up at him. “She said they didn’t know the baby was in the back seat.”
I looked at Mr. Petrov.
The old gardener’s face had gone gray beneath his wool cap.
“Wait,” I said, my chest tightening. “Mr. Petrov, you said Clara sent the baby away with Sarah and Tom on October eighteenth—two days before the car went off the bridge.”
“That was the plan,” Mr. Petrov said slowly, his voice shaking. “Sarah was supposed to take little Elena downstate on the morning train on October nineteenth. That’s why Clara gave me the greenhouse key on the afternoon of the eighteenth. I went up to Wisconsin that night to close their summer cabin for the winter. I didn’t come back to Chicago until the morning after the crash.”
“Then why was my father—Tom Reed—in possession of Marco Moretti’s gold cufflink from the night of the crash?” Luca asked.
The silence inside the speeding car was suffocating.
If Marco Moretti was wearing both cufflinks when his car went into the Chicago River on the night of October twentieth… how did Tom Reed get one of them?
Unless Tom and Sarah hadn’t left Chicago yet.
Unless I was in that car.
“Left on Halsted, Dante,” I choked out to the driver. “Then right on 33rd. It’s the gray frame house with the white porch halfway down the block.”
The Maybach tires squealed as we turned onto my quiet residential street of brick bungalows and narrow two-flats.
Fifty yards ahead, parked directly in front of my house with its hazard lights flashing off the wet pavement, was a black Lincoln Town Car.
And standing beside its open driver’s door was Arthur Bellini’s chauffeur, leaning casually against the fender with one hand inside his suit coat.
“Stay in the car, Emma,” Luca ordered, reaching inside his tuxedo jacket and pulling out a matte-black pistol.
“That’s my father in there!” I said, reaching for the handle.
“Dante will handle the driver. You stay behind me.”
The Maybach slid to a halt behind the Town Car. Dante, Luca’s head of security, was out the front door before the brakes stopped groaning, moving with terrifying speed toward Bellini’s driver.
There wasn’t even a shout—just the dull thud of a body hitting the wet side panel of the Lincoln as Dante disarmed the man in two seconds flat.
I didn’t stay in the car.
I kicked off my work flats and ran barefoot up the concrete steps of my front porch, Luca and Vanessa right on my heels.
The front door was unlocked.
I burst into the narrow hallway.
The small living room smelled of peppermint liniment and warm tea. The television was playing an old black-and-white movie on low volume.
And standing beside my father’s hospital bed in a camel-hair overcoat was seventy-one-year-old Arthur Bellini.
He didn’t have a gun in his hand.
He was holding an open checkbook and a silver fountain pen, while my father—sitting upright against his pillows with his oxygen tube over his ears—glared up at him with fierce, defiant eyes.
And sitting at the small kitchen table ten feet away, eating a bowl of vanilla ice cream and swinging her sneakered feet, was a six-year-old girl with curly dark hair and a gap-toothed smile.
My six-year-old daughter, Lily.
“Mommy!” Lily chirped, dropping her spoon into the bowl. “You’re home early! Grandpa’s old friend brought me twenty dollars for my piggy bank!”
Behind me, Luca stopped dead in his tracks.
He stared at the little girl in the pink flannel pajamas—at her dark Moretti eyes and the unmistakable dimple in her left cheek that matched his own.
Arthur Bellini spun around, his silver hair slightly disheveled, his face paling as he saw Luca, Vanessa, Mr. Petrov, and me standing in the doorway.
“Dad?” Vanessa breathed.
Arthur quickly closed the checkbook, forcing a smooth, patrician smile onto his face.
“Luca,” Arthur said calmly. “Thank goodness you’re here. I came to make sure this family was compensated after the terrible misunderstanding at dinner tonight.”
May you like
My father raised his good right hand from the hospital blanket, pointing a trembling finger at the small trash can beside his bed—then at Arthur’s left coat pocket.
“He…” my father rasped out, each word costing him every ounce of strength he had left, “…took… the tape.”
