Chapter 3 - THE SCARF IN THE PANTRY
Roman didn't hesitate. He handed the silver locket to me, barked an order to his head of security, and strode toward the butler's pantry.
"Stay behind me, Elena," Vincent said quietly, shifting Leo onto his left arm and picking up his cane with his right. Despite his frail frame, he positioned himself between the crowd and the boy.
I followed a few paces behind Roman, my heart hammering against my ribs. The nice lady who brings me cinnamon rolls at night.
Since losing my bakery eight months ago, I had only baked cinnamon rolls twice in the Moretti kitchen—both times during the day. I had never brought food to the nursery after midnight.
Roman pushed the swinging pantry door wide open.
The narrow service room smelled of copper and crushed rosemary. The back window, which overlooked the stone courtyard, was shattered inward. Cold October wind blew through the broken glass, rustling the ledger papers on the housekeeper's desk.
Nobody was inside.
Roman knelt beside the white silk scarf on the tile floor. Beside it lay a small, antique brass compass, its glass face cracked right down the middle.
When Vincent limped into the doorway and saw the compass, he stopped dead in his tracks. His cane clattered to the tiles.
"No," Vincent breathed, his scarred face turning gray. "Not her."
Roman picked up the brass compass and turned it over. Engraved on the tarnished back were two initials: C.M.
Clara Moretti.
My breath caught in my throat. I had dusted the framed portraits in the main hall every morning for eight months. Clara Moretti was Vincent's late wife. Leo's mother. The woman who had supposedly died of heart failure in a Philadelphia hospital five years ago.
"Vinny," Roman said, his voice shaking as he stood up and held the compass out to his brother. "This was buried with Clara."
"It wasn't buried with her," Vincent said, his voice cracking with a desperate, terrifying hope. "She kept it in her coat pocket the night Marcus's family doctor told us her heart had given out. They insisted on a closed casket because of the hospital fire that week. Roman... I never saw her body."
Back in the ballroom, a commotion broke out.
We spun around just in time to see Marcus Vane shove an elderly investor into the champagne table. While Roman and the guards had been distracted by the pantry, Marcus had grabbed Cassandra by the wrist and bolted through the terrace French doors into the dark gardens.
"Get the cars!" Roman roared to his men. "Lock the main gates! Don't let them reach the highway!"
Two guards sprinted out the terrace doors, their flashlights cutting frantic beams through the autumn fog.
Roman turned back to Vincent, grabbing his brother's thin shoulders. "Why would Clara be alive? Why would she hide in the shadows for five years, sneak into this estate, and forge your handwriting on a note inside Leo's toy?"
Leo tugged on Vincent's collar. The six-year-old looked pale, his dark eyes wide.
"She told me not to tell," Leo whispered, looking down at his broken horse. "She said if Uncle Roman knew she was awake, the bad men would hurt Uncle Roman too."
I knelt in front of Leo, gently taking his cold little hands in mine. "Leo, sweetheart, look at Elena. When did the lady come see you?"
"When the moon was big," Leo said simply. "She came through the closet wall in the attic. She smelled like flour and apples. Just like you."
I froze. The closet wall in the attic.
Cassandra had screamed at me twenty minutes ago to lock Leo in the attic nursery. I had always avoided that third-floor room because it was drafty and cold, choosing instead to let Leo sleep in the second-floor guest suite next to mine.
"Mr. Moretti," I said, standing up fast. "When I cleaned out the third-floor linen closets last month, the back panels in the old nursery were nailed shut. Cassandra told me there was black mold behind the wood and forbade me from calling a carpenter."
Roman's jaw hardened into stone. "There's no mold in this house. My grandfather built a service staircase behind the third-floor walls during Prohibition. It leads straight down to the old wine cellar under the carriage house."
Vincent grabbed his cane off the floor, adrenaline overriding his limp. "Whoever was in this pantry tonight didn't jump out that broken window, Roman. The glass is on the inside of the room. Someone broke in from the courtyard, attacked her, and dragged her back toward the cellar."
We didn't take the grand staircase. Roman led us through the kitchen service door, down a narrow stone corridor that smelled of damp earth and aged oak.
I carried Leo against my chest so we could move faster, his small arms locked around my neck while Vincent kept pace behind us, his breathing ragged but determined.
When we reached the heavy iron grate at the bottom of the cellar stairs, the padlock had been sheared clean off with bolt cutters.
Roman pulled a sleek black pistol from beneath his tuxedo jacket and pushed the iron grate open.
A single bare bulb hung from the brick ceiling of the wine cellar. Beneath it stood an old wooden table covered in maps, photographs of the Moretti estate, and dozens of half-burned ledger pages matching the one I had found in Marcus's hunting coat.
Sitting in a chair in the center of the room, tied to the wooden armrests with heavy zip-ties, was a woman with dark hair and Leo's exact eyes. Blood trickled from a cut above her eyebrow.
"Clara!" Vincent lunged forward.
"Stop!" the woman screamed, her voice muffled and frantic behind a strip of silver tape they had just ripped half off her mouth. "Vincent, stop! Don't come in here!"
Roman grabbed his brother's coat and yanked him back just in time.
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Stepping out from behind the towering racks of vintage wine bottles was not Marcus Vane.
It was Arthur Moretti—Roman and Vincent's seventy-year-old uncle, the retired family consigliere who had supposedly been living in a nursing home in Florida for the past two years. And he was holding a heavy iron crowbar right over the main gas line valve.
