Chapter 5 - THE BOOTLEGGER'S TUNNEL
Down in the damp, echoing brick stairwell, eighty-six-year-old Eleanor Castellano stopped on the third step. Under the flickering yellow glow of a single bare lightbulb, the frail grandmother who had spent the entire evening looking like a helpless victim suddenly looked ancient, cold, and immovable.
Above them, bullets splintered the walnut paneling of the pantry door as Salvatore Moretti’s men tried to force their way past the wine rack barricade.
"Grandma?" Hannah’s voice trembled as she held up the thirty-two-year-old chemical receipt. "You told me last week that rivals set that fire! You told me you only found out I was alive a month ago! Why did Grandpa Vincenzo buy twenty gallons of industrial accelerant two days before my mother’s house burned down?"
Richard froze on the landing, his revolver hanging loosely at his side as he stared down at his mother. "Ma... what is she talking about?"
Eleanor didn't flinch. She adjusted the worn wool cardigan over her floral dress, keeping one wrinkled hand resting calmly on ten-year-old Daniel’s shoulder.
"Your father didn't set that fire to kill Caroline, Richard," Eleanor said, her voice steady even as dust rained down from the ceiling above. "He set it to fake her death—because I begged him to."
Frank let out a ragged, wheezing laugh from the floor of the pantry, blood flecking his lips as he leaned against the dumbwaiter shaft. "Tell him all of it, Eleanor. Don't stop now. I’ve carried this cross for thirty-two years while you wore that saintly apron."
"What did you do, Ma?" Richard’s voice broke, the betrayal cutting deeper than anything Patricia or Frank had done. "You watched me bury two empty caskets! You held me while I tore my hands bloody on the gravestone!"
"Because if you had known Caroline was alive, you would have hunted her to the ends of the earth!" Eleanor cried out, fierce tears finally spilling over her wrinkled cheeks. "Thirty-two years ago, Caroline didn't want your blood money anymore, Richard! After you took over the docks and put three men in the ground in a single night, she realized what you had become! When she gave birth to Hannah, she told me she was going to the FBI with your father's shipping ledgers to put this whole family in federal prison—just so her daughter wouldn't grow up a gangster's princess!"
Richard staggered back against the damp brick wall. "Caroline... was going to turn state's evidence against me?"
"Your father was going to execute her in her hospital bed," Eleanor whispered. "I got on my knees and swore to Vincenzo that if he spared her and the baby, Frank and I would burn the house down, stage their deaths, and make sure Caroline never came near Boston—or her children—ever again. Frank took Hannah to a quiet family in New Hampshire to keep her off Vincenzo's radar, and Caroline disappeared under a witness alias we bought for her."
Hannah looked down at her grandmother, the woman who had brought her into the mansion five years ago and treated her with such tender kindness. "Then why did you bring me back here five years ago to work as a maid?! Why did you bring that lunchbox tonight?"
"Because Frank found out two weeks ago that his heart was failing, and he wanted to leave half the Castellano shipping trust to Julian!" Patricia shouted from the stairs, clutching the railing in fury. "Eleanor knew that if Julian got control of the company, my family would take over everything! She didn't open that lunchbox tonight to reunite you with your daughter, Richard—she did it to blow up Julian and me before you signed the new inheritance papers tomorrow morning!"
Julian stared at the eighty-six-year-old grandmother at the bottom of the stairs, the blood from his grazed temple dripping onto his white collar. "You used Daniel's birthday... you threw every secret we had onto the table... just to protect Richard's throne from me?"
"I protected the Castellano bloodline!" Eleanor snapped back without an ounce of remorse. "And right now, if we don't move through this tunnel, Salvatore Moretti is going to end that bloodline tonight!"
Above them, the oak wine rack finally gave way with a deafening crash. Boots thundered into the butler’s pantry.
"Go!" Frank roared with the last of his strength. Before Julian or Richard could reach up to grab him, the seventy-four-year-old slammed the secret walnut cabinet door shut from the outside and wedged the heavy iron fireplace poker through the external latch handle, locking himself inside the pantry with the gunmen.
"No! Dad, don't!" Julian screamed, throwing his shoulder against the inside of the hidden door just as three muffled gunshots echoed through the thick wood, followed by the heavy thud of a body hitting the pantry floor.
Julian pressed his forehead against the rough timber, a silent, agonizing sob tearing through his chest for the father he had only known for twenty minutes.
"Julian, come on!" Marcus grabbed his brother’s arm with his good hand, dragging him down the brick steps while pressing his other hand against the bleeding bullet wound in his own side. "He bought us time! Don't waste it!"
They hurried down the narrow, winding tunnel beneath the estate grounds, the air smelling of wet earth and salt water. At the front of the line, Catherine held Daniel’s hand tightly as the boy stumbled over the uneven cobblestones.
"Mommy?" Daniel whispered suddenly in the dark.
Catherine stopped for a fraction of a second, her breath catching in her throat. For ten years, she had waited to hear that word, never daring to dream she would. She knelt quickly, kissing his forehead. "I'm right here, Daniel. I've got you."
"Is Uncle Marcus still going to be my dad too?" the ten-year-old asked in a small, frightened voice, looking back at Marcus, who was limping heavily against the brick wall.
Marcus managed a tight, pained smile through the sweat beading on his pale face, ruffling Daniel’s hair with his clean hand. "Always, buddy. Nothing in the world changes that."
Ten yards ahead, Richard pushed open a rusted iron grate disguised behind overgrown ivy near the estate’s private boathouse on the Charles River inlet. The cold October night air hit their faces. Moored at the wooden dock was Richard’s forty-foot cabin cruiser—and parked along the gravel service road beside it was Hannah’s battered 2012 Honda Civic.
"Put Daniel, Catherine, and my mother on the boat and take them downriver to the coast guard station," Richard ordered Marcus, checking the cylinder of his revolver. "I’m taking Hannah’s car to Dry Dock Four. I’m getting Caroline back."
"You can't go to Dry Dock Four alone, Richard," Patricia said, stepping out of the tunnel into the moonlight, her face pale and set. "Salvatore will have thirty men waiting."
"Then I'll die forty-six years too late," Richard said coldly.
"Wait," Julian said, wiping the blood from his eyes as he stepped onto the gravel beside Richard. He checked the magazine of his nine-millimeter pistol and shoved it back in. "Caroline is my mother too. And my father just died back there to give us that key. I’m driving."
Hannah stepped forward, clutching the rusted iron sluice-gate key Frank had given her. "And I'm coming with you. She called me this morning. I'm the only one who knows what her voice sounds like."
She reached into her pocket to pull out her car keys—and froze.
Resting in the bottom of her apron pocket, where Frank had shoved his bloodstained wallet, was a small, laminated magnetic keycard from the Boston Harbor Authority, stamped with tonight's date and a cargo berth number.
May you like
Hannah held it up in the moonlight, her eyes going wide.
"Dad... this isn't for Dry Dock Four," Hannah breathed, looking up at Patricia in sudden horror. "This is a boarding pass for a Panamanian freighter leaving Pier Eleven at 11:30 PM. And it's booked under two names: Patricia Castellano... and Daniel Castellano."
