Chapter 5 - THE YELLOW LIGHT IN THE RAIN
The detectives found the black sedan before noon, but not where anyone expected.
The North Pier warehouse stood empty when officers entered with a warrant. Its floor carried fresh tire marks, and a mechanic's invoice lay half-burned in a metal bin. The vehicle had apparently been moved the previous evening. A traffic camera, however, showed a flatbed truck heading toward an industrial storage yard south of the river. There the police located vehicle B-14 beneath a canvas cover.
I heard the news while I was helping Sofia choose paintbrushes.
“Is that the bad car?” she asked when Daniel spoke too loudly outside the open door.
I looked at her sketchbook, then at him. He immediately apologized for discussing the investigation within earshot.
“It's a car that investigators need to examine,” I said. “They haven't finished.”
Sofia selected a brush with a wooden handle. “I hope it doesn't come back here.”
“It won't be brought to the house.”
She seemed satisfied. Then she chose turquoise paint and set about painting the green-shuttered house from the photographs Luca had brought home.
The sedan's recovery was an important development, not a conclusion. By the time the police reached it, both rear light assemblies had been replaced. The original windshield was missing. The upholstery had been professionally cleaned. Yet Inez Vega reported finding damage beneath a panel that had not been properly repaired: deformation consistent with a recent glancing impact.
A detective telephoned Luca and spoke to him for nearly an hour. I did not hear the conversation, but afterward he asked whether I would join a meeting the next day with the former roadside assistance driver. Oliver Chen, the man from Mrs. Bassi's café, had agreed to provide a formal statement. He recognized my name from something Sofia had said to Mrs. Bassi during a school trip, and he wanted a familiar adult present for the conversation.
I was unsure whether that was wise. I had never met Oliver. Daniel said the detective thought my presence might help him feel at ease but left the choice to me. I accepted only after being assured I would not conduct the interview.
Oliver waited in the offices of a public library, an unlikely setting for a conversation about a possible crime. He wore a yellow rain jacket, his hair tied into a short ponytail. His hands were stained with engine grease, though he had clearly washed them.
“Everyone thinks tow-truck drivers see accidents all day,” he said when we sat down. “Mostly we see people who forgot where they put their keys.”
The detective smiled and switched on a recorder after obtaining consent.
Oliver remembered the storm vividly. He had been dispatched to a disabled delivery van beyond the bridge, but a private security car blocked the access road. Two men in dark suits claimed it was closed for emergency work.
“Did you see a road sign?” the detective asked.
“No. Just their car parked sideways and some cones. I told them I had a customer waiting. They said the van could wait.”
“What time?”
“About seven twenty. I checked my dispatch app afterward.”
“Can the company provide that record?”
“Yes. They already have.”
Oliver drew a rough map. He placed the security car on the shoulder before the bridge and marked an access track leading toward North Pier.
“Something else bothered me. There was a black sedan waiting behind the cones. Its rear light was busted. A woman in the passenger seat got out and argued with one of the men.”
I felt my hands tighten in my lap.
“Did you recognize her?”
“No. It was dark and raining. But she wore a bright yellow scarf. Not one of those little silk things. A big wool scarf you could see across the road.”
The yellow square Sofia had drawn in the windshield came back to me. Had she seen a scarf dangling from the mirror? A lantern? I didn't know, and I refused to turn the resemblance into certainty.
Oliver continued. “I remember hearing somebody say, ‘The child is in the back.’ Then the woman got into the sedan. I was told to turn around. A few minutes later, sirens came past me.”
“Did you hear a collision?”
“No. I was on the wrong side of the hill. I heard the sirens, and later I heard somebody had gone through the barrier.”
The detective asked him to describe the people, the vehicles, and his route without suggesting names. Oliver did not identify Vanessa or Vittorio. He could confirm only the presence of the cars and the words he remembered hearing.
After the recording ended, Oliver asked to speak to me privately for a moment, with the detective remaining nearby.
“Is the little girl all right?”
“She's receiving care. Some days are easier than others.”
He looked down. “I didn't realize there was a kid involved until the news that night. I spent months thinking I should've forced my way through the cones.”
“You didn't cause the crash,” I told him.
“I know. But regret doesn't care much about logic.”
I understood that too well.
At home, Sofia was practicing scales on the old piano. Not because she was gifted at music—she was enthusiastic and gloriously impatient—but because her mother had once taught her the opening notes of a lullaby. Luca sat beside her, missing every third note on purpose so she could correct him.
“That's not a G,” she scolded.
“It's an adventurous F.”
“No, Daddy. It's wrong.”
She laughed. He looked at me over her head, and for one moment the house felt like a house rather than the center of an investigation.
That afternoon I took my scheduled day off and visited my grandmother in Cicero. Nonna Ada lived above a bakery and kept basil plants on every windowsill, even when the winter light was too weak for them to flourish. She had taught me Italian with recipes, songs, and scoldings that lost half their force when translated.
She noticed my expression before I sat down.
“Your face is saying one thing and your mouth will say another,” she informed me. “Drink coffee first.”
I told her about Sofia, leaving out confidential medical details. When I mentioned a proposed clinic transfer and a rich woman insisting that recovery was dangerous, Nonna shook her head.
“When I came here, a doctor once told me my accent would make people think I was less intelligent,” she said. “He was wrong. But for years I was afraid to speak in front of him. That's the part people forget. Wrong things can make you doubt your own tongue.”
She pushed a plate of almond biscuits across the table.
“I think about quitting,” I admitted. “Not because I don't care about Sofia. Because I feel as though if I leave, no one will listen to her.”
“That is too much weight for one pair of shoulders.”
“What should I do?”
She gave me the look she reserved for questions she knew I could answer myself.
“Remember why you wanted the therapy-assistant course before you took the job.”
I looked at the biscuits. Two years earlier I had started preparing to apply for an occupational therapy assistant program, hoping to work with children. I accepted the Moretti position because it paid enough for rent and my grandmother's medication, and because it had seemed temporary. Eleven months later I had become indispensable to a family I loved and strangely absent from my own plans.
“Things are complicated now,” I said.
“Life is rarely simple when the timing suits you.”
She took my hand. “Helping someone is not the same as giving away all your tomorrows.”
When I returned to the mansion, I found an envelope on my bed. It contained no threat, only a printed screenshot of a photograph from last summer: Sofia with Vanessa at the Bellini estate, both smiling beside a glass greenhouse.
Someone had circled an object in the background.
A yellow scarf hung on a chair near the greenhouse door.
On the back, three words were written in block letters: ASK ABOUT RAFAE.
I brought it straight to Daniel, who preserved the envelope instead of letting me carry it around. He asked whether I recognized the handwriting. I didn't.
“Who is Rafaé?” I asked.
He looked troubled. “Rafe Corrado sometimes used that name. Before joining the Bellini security fleet, he worked in a body shop under a different surname.”
“Could he have sent it?”
“Possibly. Or somebody wants us to think he did.”
Luca joined us. Daniel showed him the photograph, and Luca stared at the greenhouse.
“I know this place,” he said. “Sofia and Vanessa had an art afternoon there. It's where she was before the accident.”
His phone rang. A number he did not recognize. He answered on speaker after the caller identified herself as Ana Vitale.
“Mr. Moretti,” Marco's sister said, sounding breathless, “I think somebody is watching my house.”
“Are you safe?”
“I'm at the police station. But I found a message in my brother's old toolbox before I left. There's a number and a sentence.”
“What sentence?”
Ana drew a ragged breath.
“Tell Sofia I didn't leave her. That's what Marco wrote. And underneath: The yellow light wasn't on the car. It was at the bridge.”
I looked at Sofia's drawing, which Daniel had left on the table in a protective sleeve. The little yellow rectangle above the black car suddenly had another possible meaning.
A signal.
Not a decoration.
May you like
Outside, night settled over the long driveway. I remembered Oliver's cones and the hidden access road. Someone had controlled when traffic was allowed through the bridge.
And for the first time I wondered whether the collision had begun before either car accelerated.
