Chapter 4 - THE BROTHER WHO WOULDN'T STAY QUIET
Detective Price would not let us replay the cassette in the church hall.
"This needs to be handled properly," she told Nora. "We'll preserve the original, make a forensic copy, and verify the voices and sequence. Anything we think we hear today is a lead, not a verdict."
Nora looked disappointed, but she handed the recorder over. I understood the detective's caution. I also hated it. Twenty-one years of lies had made patience feel like another kind of punishment.
Outside, Providence was bright after the morning rain. A woman was selling chrysanthemums beside the church steps. I stood watching a little boy tug at his father's coat and felt the strangest grief for a life I couldn't remember clearly enough to miss.
"Did Gabe ever find you afterward?" I asked Nora before she left.
Her eyes shifted toward the sidewalk. "Once. Three nights after the fire. He said men were watching the hospital. He gave me a copy of the payment pages and told me not to use his name."
"Was he hurt?"
"His hands were badly burned. He looked exhausted. He said he'd tried to reach an honest investigator, but everyone kept sending him back to the same people."
"Then where did he go?"
She swallowed. "He said there was one last person who could prove what happened. I don't know who. He walked into the rain, and I never saw him again."
I thanked her, though the words barely touched what she'd given me. As she moved away, she turned back.
"Your father wasn't a saint, Caitlyn. He kept their books for years. He knew some money was dirty before Nico caught the transfers. He was ashamed of that. But when it mattered, he tried to put the money back where it belonged. Remember both things."
I did.
On the drive back, Price asked about my father in the gentlest way a detective can ask questions: calmly, without pretending the answers wouldn't hurt. I admitted that I had spent years being angry at a man for disappearing. I admitted that I wanted his name cleared and that I was frightened of discovering he had done terrible things before he tried to repair them.
"Those can both be true," she said. "People are rarely as simple as the file labels we give them."
When we returned to Newport, I found six missed calls from the housekeeper, Mrs. Ortega. She had supervised me since my first morning at the Ferraro estate, when I accidentally polished an antique tray with the wrong cloth and cried in the laundry room afterward.
I called her from the courthouse steps.
"Caitlyn, are you all right?" she demanded. "I've heard three different versions of what happened at dinner."
"I'm safe. What happened?"
"Alessia came back for her jewelry and told the whole staff you were fired. Walter told her she wasn't authorized to give orders. She threw a vase."
Despite everything, I nearly laughed.
"There's more," Mrs. Ortega said. "She demanded your personnel folder. Walter stopped her. But an envelope arrived for you this morning, and I think you should know it was opened before it got to me."
"Who sent it?"
"No return address. There was a piece of newspaper inside. The article about the warehouse fire. Someone circled your father's name in red."
I closed my eyes. "Please give it to Walter for the detective. Don't touch it any more than you have to."
"I already put it in a clean paper bag. And Caitlyn? Don't come back here alone."
Iris arranged another meeting that afternoon, this time with Santino and Walter present. She had spent the morning reviewing corporate records and the old charity's financial filings. The conference table was covered with charts, photocopied invoices, and two thick binders.
"Here's what we can establish without guessing," she said. "The original kidney-treatment fund was created by Nico's mother, Isabella Ferraro, before she died. It later became part of the larger foundation. In 2005, unusual transfers went through a security vendor connected to Roberto Venturi. The ledger page Caitlyn found matches the dates."
Santino was quiet at the mention of his mother.
"I remember her talking about the first treatment room," he said. "She used to say the machines were more important than any building with our name on it."
Iris nodded. "And she left written restrictions on certain donated property. The current management company seems to have treated those restrictions as an inconvenience. Alessia's proposed transfer doesn't disclose them."
"So it's not just a scheme to close the center," I said. "It's another way to take money out."
"Possibly. We need the underlying records to prove intent."
Santino leaned forward. "Find them."
"I am," Iris replied. "But you need to understand this may expose misconduct by your father and your own companies."
He didn't look away. "Then it exposes it."
Walter cleared his throat. "Boss, Roberto wants a private meeting. He says he has something you'll want before the tape reaches investigators."
"Where?"
"The old marina club. Six tonight."
"No," I said immediately.
Everyone looked at me.
My face heated. "Sorry. But he threatened Mom through Alessia. He watched my house. If he wants a private meeting, it's because he doesn't want witnesses."
Santino's eyes settled on mine. "You're not wrong."
He turned to Walter. "Tell Roberto to speak to my lawyer. And forward every message to Detective Price."
Walter nodded.
Iris continued with the paperwork. She showed us a signature on a 2005 authorization bearing Vittorio Ferraro's initials. It approved the security vendor's access to the warehouse. A second document transferred fire-insurance proceeds into a holding company associated with Venturi interests. Neither document proved Vittorio had ordered the fire, but together they undermined everything Santino had been told.
"This was my father's handwriting," Santino said quietly. "I know it."
He stood and walked to the window. I wanted to follow him, but I stayed where I was. There was a difference between caring that someone hurt and imagining I had the right to touch that hurt.
After a minute, he spoke without turning.
"Nico and I fought the morning he died. He told me to stop repeating everything Dad said about loyalty. I told him he was embarrassing our family."
His voice grew rough.
"Those were my last words to him."
Nobody offered a comforting lie. Finally I said, "You were a kid."
"He was trying to change things. I was trying to sound like a man."
During a short break, Iris took a call in another room, and I wandered toward a wall of framed foundation photographs. In the oldest, Isabella Ferraro stood among nurses in plain white uniforms. She had a hand on the shoulder of a young boy. Someone had written NICO, AGE TWELVE on the frame.
Santino came to stand beside me. "Mom used to bring us here after school," he said. "Nico complained about missing baseball practice. Then he'd end up talking to every patient in the waiting room."
"He sounds like someone who asked inconvenient questions."
"He was." A faint smile appeared. "Once he discovered a donor's name on a plaque was spelled wrong. He made Dad call the engraver himself. He said if we couldn't get a person's name right, we had no business accepting their money."
I looked around at the office with its tidy files and expensive furniture. "Would he recognize this place now?"
"The building, maybe. The people in charge? I hope he'd be angry enough to demand answers."
That was the first moment I understood Nico as more than a tragic photograph. He had been a brother who joked and argued and noticed misspelled names, an ordinary person whose absence had been used to justify an extraordinary lie.
Later, while Iris copied another set of documents, I found Santino in the hallway outside the office. He was looking at a photograph of Nico on his phone. Nico stood on a beach, laughing into the wind, his white shirt blown open at the collar.
"I didn't mean to make you relive this," I told him.
"You didn't make it happen."
"Still."
He put away the phone. "Caitlyn, I owe your family more than a sympathetic conversation. My father helped build the machinery that hurt both of us. If there's money that belongs to the patients, I intend to return it. And if the investigation leads into my businesses, I'll cooperate."
"Even if it hurts you?"
"Especially then. Otherwise everything I said at dinner was just another rich man's performance."
I studied his face. He looked tired, older than thirty-five, and strangely less frightening without the certainty he'd worn at the table.
"Can I ask you something personal?" I said.
"Yes."
"Why did you never marry Alessia before now?"
He gave a humorless smile. "Because I kept postponing the part where I admitted we weren't building a life. We were combining two families who trusted property more than people."
"Did you love her?"
"I thought I could. That isn't the same thing."
My cheeks warmed for reasons I didn't want to examine.
We were interrupted by Walter hurrying down the corridor.
"Detective Price called. They're reviewing the cassette copy. The end is damaged, but there's a segment after the fire starts."
Santino went still. "Nico's voice?"
"Yes."
Walter held out his phone. Price had authorized a brief transcript excerpt to be shared with witnesses while the examination continued.
It read:
NICO: THE EAST DOOR IS CHAINED. GABE, DON'T COME BACK FOR THE BOOK. GET THE WOMAN OUT.
UNKNOWN MALE: LET IT BURN. THE TRANSFERS WILL DIE WITH IT.
A second line identified the male voice as unconfirmed.
Santino read it twice. His hand began to tremble.
"Nico knew Gabriel was trying to help," I whispered.
"Yes," Santino said.
He pressed the phone against his chest, breathing unevenly.
Then Walter's own phone rang. He listened, and every bit of color drained from his face.
"Boss," he said, "we have a problem. Someone submitted the hospital property transfer to the title company this afternoon."
"Under whose authority?" Iris demanded.
May you like
Walter looked from the phone to Santino.
"Your father's old power of attorney," he said. "The one everyone believed was destroyed when he died."
