Chapter 7 - THE VOICE IN THE RAIN
Arthur Bellini’s hand instinctively twitched against the left pocket of his camel-hair coat.
Luca saw it immediately.
Before Arthur could take a single step backward, Luca crossed the small living room and gripped the older man’s wrist.
Wait—he didn’t strike him, and he didn’t pull his gun. Not with a six-year-old child watching from the kitchen table.
Instead, Luca spoke in a calm, pleasant voice that somehow made the hairs on my arms stand up.
“Emma,” Luca said, never taking his eyes off Arthur’s face. “Why don’t you take your daughter upstairs to pick out a bedtime story?”
I was already at the kitchen table, scooping Lily up into my arms. She wrapped her legs around my waist and rested her chin on my shoulder.
“Who is the tall man in the fancy suit, Mommy?” Lily whispered near my ear. “Is he from the hotel you work at?”
“Something like that, baby,” I murmured, kissing the top of her dark curls. “Wait in my room for five minutes and put your headphones on with your tablet, okay? Mommy has to finish talking to Grandpa’s visitors.”
“Okay! Can I watch the puppy show?”
“Yes, sweetie. Anything you want.”
I carried her up the first six steps of the narrow staircase, watching until she scurried into my bedroom and shut the door behind her.
Then I came back down to the bottom step and stopped beside my father’s bed, taking his warm, trembling right hand in both of mine.
“Where is Marta, Dad?” I asked softly.
“Sent… home,” my father rasped, squeezing my fingers. “Safe.”
In the center of the room, Luca reached into the left pocket of Arthur Bellini’s coat and pulled out two items.
One was a tarnished brass key on a keyring—the key to my father’s locked nightstand drawer, which was now standing open.
The second was an old black Panasonic microcassette recorder, the kind reporters and doctors used in the late nineties.
“What is this, Arthur?” Vanessa asked, her voice shaking as she stared at her father. “Why did you come here and steal from a sick man?”
“Vanessa, stay quiet,” Arthur snapped, his smooth mask finally slipping. “You have no idea what I’ve spent twenty-six years protecting you from!”
“Protecting me?” she cried. “Luca found Clara’s green ledger in the greenhouse! We saw the entries about the four hundred thousand dollars you stole from the harbor trust! We saw the note saying you paid the mechanic in Cicero to tamper with the brakes on Marco’s town car!”
Arthur’s jaw dropped. He stared at Luca, then let out a bitter, barking laugh.
“The brakes?” Arthur said, looking around the room as if we were all fools. “You think I cut the brakes on Marco Moretti’s car?”
“Clara wrote it on the back of the photograph on October nineteenth,” Luca said coldly. “‘If anything happens to me this week, Evelyn knows who paid for the brakes.’ And we found the cash voucher from your shipping company to a salvage yard in Cicero.”
“That voucher was to crush Evelyn’s Mercedes after she hit a drunk pedestrian in Cicero that September!” Arthur shouted, his face turning mottled purple. “Clara helped Evelyn cover it up so Evelyn wouldn’t go to prison! That was the secret Evelyn was terrified Marco would find out—not the damn harbor trust!”
Every person in the living room went still.
Even Mr. Petrov blinked in astonishment.
“Wait,” Vanessa whispered, her hand covering her mouth. “My mother hit someone?”
“A dockworker who stepped off a curb in the dark,” Arthur said hoarsely. “He survived, and I paid him two hundred thousand dollars out of the harbor trust to keep quiet, then another two hundred thousand to the mechanic who dismantled the car. Clara knew! Clara went with your mother to the hospital in Cicero under a false name to make sure the man lived!”
Luca’s grip on the microcassette recorder tightened.
“If you didn’t touch my father’s car,” Luca said slowly, “then why did my parents go off the LaSalle Street Bridge on October twentieth? And why did you come here tonight to steal this tape?”
My father tapped the wooden rail of his hospital bed twice with his knuckles.
“Play… it,” Tom Reed whispered, looking straight at Luca.
Luca looked down at the black microcassette recorder in his palm.
He pressed PLAY.
For three seconds, there was only the hiss of magnetic tape and the loud, rhythmic thumping of windshield wipers against heavy rain.
Then a woman’s voice came through the tiny speaker, breathless and terrified.
“Marco, slow down, the bridge is slick—please, you’re scaring the baby!”
Luca flinched as if he had been shot.
It was his mother’s voice.
From the back seat of the car on the tape, a two-year-old child whimpered softly, and another woman—my mother, Sarah—murmured, “Shh, little bird, I’ve got you.”
Then a man’s voice spoke from the front seat, right beside Clara.
Wait.
It wasn’t Marco Moretti’s voice.
“Your husband is already at the bottom of the river near the warehouse, Clara,” the voice on the tape said calmly over the sound of the rain. “All you have to do is sign the transfer papers for the East Side piers before we reach Union Station, and Sarah can take the little girl onto the train.”
Beside me, Mr. Petrov gasped, grabbing the post at the foot of my father’s bed to keep from falling.
Luca stared at the recorder in horror.
Because I had heard that deep, gravelly voice in the foyer of the mansion less than two hours ago, toasting Luca and Vanessa with a glass of champagne.
It was Uncle Corrado Moretti—Luca’s father’s younger brother, the man who had taken over the family empire the morning after the crash and raised Luca like a son.
“Corrado was in the car,” Luca whispered, his voice hollow.
May you like
Arthur Bellini nodded grimly, all the fight draining out of his old frame.
“Corrado killed Marco at the harbor piers at ten o’clock that night,” Arthur said quietly. “And I helped him falsify the police timeline afterward—because Corrado had the Cicero mechanic’s receipt and swore he would send my wife Evelyn to prison for twenty years if I didn’t help him bury the truth.”
