Chapter 2 - THE MAN WHO WAS NOT DEAD
By nine the next morning, I had learned three things about the Moretti family: they could find an optometrist faster than I could find a bus timetable, they were terrible at making ordinary breakfast conversation, and someone had taken a photograph of my mother's building during the night.
The photograph arrived on my telephone without a message. It showed the blue awning above our apartment entrance, a delivery bicycle chained to the fence, and the window where my mother kept her plants. The time stamp said 6:12 a.m.
I was sitting in the rear kitchen when it arrived. I called her immediately.
"I'm fine," she said. "Why are you calling me before work?"
"Please lock the downstairs door and don't open it to anyone you don't recognize."
"Megan, what's happened?"
I told her enough to keep her safe. It was easier than I expected to say aloud that someone was trying to frighten me. Harder to explain why.
Daniel examined the picture when I showed him. "Save the message. Don't delete anything. Would you like us to contact the police officer who took your statement?"
"Yes. And my mother gets to decide whether she wants an officer at the apartment."
"Agreed."
Luca heard about it ten minutes later. His jaw tightened, but he did not summon an army of men or order my mother moved into a mansion. He asked for my permission before passing the photograph to the detective investigating Vanessa's assault. I gave it.
At the optometrist's office, the doctor confirmed that my left eye had escaped injury. I would need a new pair of lenses, and the bruising on my nose would take time to settle. For the first time since Vanessa broke my glasses, I could look straight ahead without a crack running through the world. I chose a simple dark frame and asked for an itemized receipt.
When I returned, Margaret was waiting in the staff sitting room with a cup of tea and a photograph of Matteo Rossi.
"Twenty years ago," she said. "Before Briar Street."
Matteo was a broad-faced man with dark curls and an uncertain smile. He stood beside a younger Luca, both of them holding fishing rods. Behind them, a thin woman in a summer dress watched with a look of patient amusement. Elena Moretti. I recognized her from the portrait above the upstairs staircase.
"He was your employer's godfather," Margaret explained. "Not by blood. By choice. Matteo taught Luca to swim. When Luca broke his ankle at eleven, Matteo carried him three blocks to the clinic."
I examined the picture. "Then why would Luca's father accuse him?"
"That's what we need to understand."
She had already spoken to a retired shipping clerk, Nora Diaz, who once handled records at the South Annex. Nora had told Margaret the annex contents were moved to Lakefront Records Storage and listed in numbered crates, rather than destroyed.
"Nineteen?" I asked.
"Perhaps. But the facility won't hand us anything without proof of ownership and a formal inventory request."
"Good," I said. "We shouldn't be sneaking through somebody else's archive in the middle of the night."
Margaret smiled for the first time that morning. "No, we should not."
By lunch, Luca had retained an independent attorney named Dana Brooks to represent the family in the document search. Dana was a middle-aged woman with silver-rimmed glasses and an expression that suggested she had no patience for theatrical threats. She made clear that representing Luca did not mean representing me or Margaret.
"You both need your own advice if criminal or employment issues arise," she told us. "You may be witnesses whose interests don't always match his."
I appreciated that. Luca looked uncomfortable, which somehow made me trust the advice more.
We met in the small drawing room, not the dining hall where Vanessa had humiliated me. Dana spread an old floor plan on the table.
"South Annex, shelf nineteen," she said. "I have a preliminary inventory listing eighteen containers of business correspondence and one sealed metal document case. If the key found in the jewelry box belongs to the case, our first job is to establish who may lawfully open it."
"What if Richard tries to block it?" Luca asked.
"He may. That doesn't give us permission to damage the facility or hide what we find."
Benny, the long-serving groundsman, knocked and entered with news of a visitor: Patricia Wells.
I knew the name. My stomach clenched.
Patricia appeared in a gray coat, carrying a cardboard file folder. She looked at me first.
"Miss Foster. I'm sorry I left you alone in that library yesterday. I heard the glasses break after I went into the corridor. I should have come back."
"You didn't break them," I said. "Vanessa did. But you can help tell the truth now."
She nodded. "I intend to."
Patricia showed Dana a letter Vanessa had sent to her placement agency two weeks earlier. It requested a replacement for Margaret Carter effective immediately after the engagement dinner. In the margin, Vanessa had written, confidentially, 'Do not seek a reference from current head housekeeper; investigation pending.'
"There was no investigation," Margaret said.
"I know," Patricia answered. "That's why I kept it. When she asked me to help plant a brooch, I refused. She threatened to ruin my agency if I wouldn't cooperate."
"Can we keep the original?" Dana asked.
"I'll make a copy and provide it to an investigator on request. I want a receipt."
Dana looked delighted by that answer.
After Patricia left, Luca received a reply to the mysterious message. It contained an address in Cicero and the words, 'If you want to know why Matteo vanished, go alone.'
"You're not going alone," Margaret said immediately.
"Then I'm not going," Luca replied. "Whoever sent this can identify themselves properly."
He passed the message to Dana and Daniel. I was beginning to recognize the difference between courage and the kind of recklessness that made other people pay for your mistakes.
The source eventually called through Dana's office. Her name was Elise Rossi. She was Matteo's daughter, now thirty-two, and worked as a legal-aid attorney on the city's west side.
"My father is alive," she told us over a speakerphone, "and he doesn't want to meet any Moretti. He saw your mother's funeral announcement years ago and cried for three days. That is all I owe you."
Luca stared at the receiver. "I understand."
"No, you don't," Elise answered. "Your father's accusation drove us from our home. People spat at my mother when she bought groceries. I changed schools twice. My father was never charged with anything, but his name was treated as a conviction."
The room went silent.
"Why contact us?" Dana asked.
"Because someone called my office yesterday asking whether my father still has his old dispatch notebooks. He was frightened. I wondered if those calls were connected to the Bellinis."
"Did your father keep the notebooks?" Luca asked.
"That's a conversation for another day."
Elise ended the call.
I looked at Luca, expecting anger. Instead he sat down hard beside the window.
"I told Matteo to leave," he said. "I was nineteen and wanted my father to respect me. I never asked for evidence."
"You can't undo that sentence," Margaret replied. "You can stop repeating it."
In the afternoon, I visited my mother after her physical therapy appointment. Her name was Teresa Foster. She had spent years cleaning office buildings at night while I studied, and now arthritis and a recent operation had changed the pace of her life. She listened while I described the broken glasses and Vanessa's threat.
"I know how badly you need that job," she said. "But don't give up your testimony for a paycheck. We can find a different way."
"You're saying that because you think I'm made of steel."
"I'm saying it because you are my daughter. And I don't want anybody buying your silence with money that is already yours."
We ate sandwiches at her little kitchen table. She asked about Margaret, whom she'd met once at a staff picnic. When I told her Margaret had practically raised Luca, my mother nodded.
"Then he owes her something more useful than gratitude," she said. "He owes her the truth."
Back at the estate that evening, Dana had obtained a court-authorized preservation request for the South Annex records. No one could quietly dispose of the crates while ownership and relevance were being reviewed. It was not a dramatic victory. There were no arrests or confessions. But a door we had assumed locked had opened an inch.
Luca showed me a copy of the inventory.
I traced the entries with my finger until I reached case nineteen.
There, beneath 'Correspondence, October 2006,' someone had written an additional notation in red pencil: R. BELLINI — DELIVERY OVERRIDE.
"Could mean anything," I said.
"Yes," Luca answered. "But it wasn't on any inventory my father ever showed me."
Then Daniel brought in the latest message from Elise. She had reconsidered one thing.
She would meet Margaret and Dana the following afternoon, with Luca present only if Matteo later agreed.
"One condition," the message read. "Do not ask my father to forgive before you have learned what he lost."
May you like
Margaret read it twice. Then she looked toward the photograph of Elena Moretti above the mantel.
"That," she said, "sounds exactly like something your mother would have wanted."
