Chapter 3 - THE LOCKET ON ARCHER AVENUE
The first thing I noticed about my apartment was the smell.
Someone had used my mother's lavender soap.
It was an inexpensive bar I kept in a blue dish above the kitchen sink, more for the memory than for washing. The soap had been moved onto a dry towel. My cupboard stood open. The framed photograph beside my bed faced the wall.
Nothing valuable appeared to be missing.
That frightened me more than an empty jewelry box would have.
I stood in the doorway with my cane and watched two detectives move carefully around my small living room. They had asked me to wait outside while they checked for signs of forced entry. Luca waited beside me. His security chief, Marco, stayed at the bottom of the stairwell, speaking softly into his radio.
“Can you tell whether anything was moved?” Detective Hannah Ortiz asked.
“The photograph,” I said. “And the soap. My mother used that scent.”
Ortiz wrote something down. “Do you keep the locket here?”
I pointed to the bedroom. “On a nail above the dresser.”
The detective disappeared into the room and returned a moment later. “There's no necklace on the nail.”
My stomach dropped.
“Maybe they took it,” Luca said.
I shook my head. “There's another place.”
When the officers said it was safe to enter, I walked to the dresser and crouched with difficulty. Beneath the bottom drawer was a shallow wooden recess I had made years earlier by removing a loose board. I kept my emergency cash there, along with my mother's locket on its narrow chain.
The money was gone.
The locket remained.
I stared at it for a long time. The intruder had searched the room, found enough to steal thirty-seven dollars, and missed the one thing they'd been ordered to find.
Luca crouched a few feet away. “Do you want me to call a locksmith?”
“Yes,” I said. “And then I want to leave.”
“Of course.”
I lifted the chain with two fingers. The silver case was warm from the room. My mother used to fasten it around my neck when we went to church on Easter. I had opened it hundreds of times. The tiny photograph showed me at four, holding a paper crown. It was the only picture from that year that had survived the fire.
I hesitated before touching the glass. “If there's something behind this, I don't want to destroy the picture.”
Ortiz summoned an evidence technician. The woman explained each step as she worked at the kitchen table under a bright portable lamp. Using thin gloves and a small plastic tool, she lifted the backing carefully from behind the photograph.
A narrow strip of yellowed paper appeared.
It was folded three times.
On the front, in my mother's careful handwriting, were four words:
FOR EMMA, WHEN READY.
My throat closed.
The technician photographed the paper and placed it in an evidence sleeve. Ortiz read it aloud at my request.
“‘If anything happens to me, ask Rosa about the green room at Harbor Street. The people who say they are protecting us may be the people we need protection from. Never blame yourself for what adults did. I love you beyond every road that leads home. Mom.’”
For a moment nobody spoke.
I watched the white curtain move in the draft from the old window. I could almost hear my mother humming as she folded laundry on Sunday afternoons. She had carried a secret in my locket, and the last words she had left there were meant to keep me from feeling guilty.
“Why would I blame myself?” I whispered.
Ortiz answered gently. “Children often do, even when nobody tells them to.”
There were numbers on the reverse side: 14-6-2, followed by a drawing of a small green door. Madeline, who had come to the apartment at Luca's request, studied them without making a guess.
“Could be a storage reference,” she said. “Or a date. We need the clinic's records.”
I knew the place immediately. Harbor Street Clinic had closed years ago, but the building stood near the river, a block from an abandoned community center. My mother had taken me there once when I scraped my knee. I remembered green walls, a bowl of hard candy, and a woman who tied my shoe.
“Take me with you,” I said.
Luca glanced at the cane in my hand. “When you're well enough.”
“No. Not again.”
He looked startled.
“For nine months I was paid to disappear whenever you entered a room,” I said. “Now you're asking me to stay home while everyone decides what my mother meant.”
“Emma, that isn't what I—”
“Then say you'll ask me before making decisions about me.”
He held my gaze. “I will.”
It would take more than one promise to teach him that habit. It would take more than one day for me to stop expecting orders. But we had begun.
The police photographed the locket and returned it to me after documenting the paper. Ortiz arranged a report for the break-in and told me not to return alone until the lock was replaced. Luca offered a guest room at the mansion. The thought of sleeping under the same roof as the woman who had hurt me made my skin crawl.
“Not there,” I said.
“She's gone. Her access has been revoked.”
“It's still the place where Rosa was locked up.”
He absorbed that. “All right. Madeline knows a furnished apartment building with a concierge. We can arrange a short-term stay if you want. Or somewhere you choose.”
I accepted the temporary apartment on the condition that the lease was in my name and I could leave whenever I wished. Luca agreed, though it visibly surprised him that the difference mattered.
That evening I sat at a new kitchen table overlooking rain-dark rooftops. The place smelled of fresh paint and coffee instead of lavender. A bowl of oranges sat on the counter, delivered by a woman at the front desk. For the first time in days, nobody was shouting.
I called my former foster mother, Helen Price. She had retired to Wisconsin, but she still remembered my birthday.
“Sweetheart,” she said when she heard my voice. “What happened?”
I told her, stumbling over the words: Antonio Moretti, the photograph, the trust, the locket, a brother I hadn't known existed.
Helen was quiet for a long time.
“I wish I'd known,” she finally said. “I might have helped.”
“You helped me graduate,” I replied. “You bought me shoes for my first job. That was something.”
“Are you safe?”
“I think so.”
“Thinking isn't the same as knowing.”
I promised to keep her updated. Afterward I looked at the photo in the locket again. The paper crown sat crooked on my head. Somewhere outside the frame my mother was laughing. I had spent so long being angry that her voice was gone. Now I was angry that other people had taken the choice of knowing her full story away from me.
A knock sounded at the door.
I opened it after checking the peephole. Luca stood alone, holding a brown paper bag.
“I brought soup,” he said. “I didn't know what you liked.”
“Tomato.”
He looked at the bag. “I brought chicken.”
I couldn't help smiling. “Close enough.”
He came in only when I invited him. We sat at the kitchen table with paper bowls. He told me about being a boy in the mansion, learning to swim in a pool that was always too cold. I told him about the first bicycle I had bought secondhand, with squeaky brakes and one red handlebar. We discovered we both hated olives and loved old mystery movies.
Then he asked the question I'd been dreading.
“What was she like?”
“Who?”
“Your mother.”
I told him about Sofia's crooked singing and the way she'd make pancakes shaped like stars on my birthday. About how she never called herself poor, only temporarily short of money. About the time she took me to see the lake in winter and said the world was beautiful even when it looked empty.
He listened without interrupting.
“I wish he'd told me about her,” Luca said at last.
“So do I.”
He reached into his pocket and placed an old photograph on the table. Antonio, younger and laughing, stood beside a woman in a white nurse's coat. Sofia. A corner of the photograph had been torn away.
“This was in Father's desk,” he said. “I thought she was a clinic employee.”
“She was.” I touched the edge of the picture. “And apparently she was more.”
Luca looked at the locket near my bowl. “We'll find the green room.”
The phone on the counter vibrated.
A message appeared from an unknown sender, this one with no photograph attached.
THE GREEN ROOM WAS SEALED AFTER THE FIRE.
Then a second message arrived.
ASK YOUR BROTHER WHO SIGNED THE ORDER.
I looked up.
Luca's expression told me he recognized the significance before I did.
May you like
Because there had been another fire.
And this time, his family's name was written on the door.
