Chapter 6 - THE GIRL IN THE SECOND ROOM
Grace sat with the recording for almost an hour before allowing Detective Ellis to play it again.
Rachel stayed nearby without asking her to hurry. The recording was evidence, but it was also a memory of a child Grace had once tried to protect. Neither woman wanted the investigation to turn that child into another anonymous entry on a ledger.
Helen's voice was tired but steady. She spoke of the Moretti mansion eleven years earlier, of a private gathering held the night before the fire, and of a girl who had been brought into the estate under the name Anna. The girl was about fourteen, frightened, and wearing a hospital bracelet. Anthony had introduced her as a distant relative who needed a place to rest.
“Grace saw her,” Helen said on the recording. “They talked in the upstairs hallway. The next morning, the girl was gone. Then the fire began.”
Grace pressed her fingers to her temples.
“I remember a girl,” she whispered. “She had a cut on her lip. She asked whether my father was kind.”
Margaret looked at her. “What did you say?”
“I said he brought me books. I said he could be angry, but that he loved us.” Grace's face crumpled. “I think she wanted me to help her leave.”
The detective paused the recording. “Do you remember her real name?”
“Anna was the name they gave me. She told me her name was Sophie.”
Rachel looked up sharply. Helen had mentioned Sophie in the margin of an old household ledger. A line Rachel once assumed was a shopping reminder read: Sophie — north stair — do not forget.
“Could she still be alive?” Rachel asked.
Ellis answered carefully. “We don't know. The recording gives us another person to locate.”
***
The Bellini ledger made more sense once investigators compared it with the account records. Anthony had used charity and medical companies to conceal payments tied to illegal trafficking and coercion, including money paid to facilities where vulnerable people were held against their will. The investigators could not yet determine how many people had been harmed, but the records named several supposed patients who had never received legitimate treatment.
The girl called Sophie was one of them.
Daniel's testimony filled in another piece. He admitted that Anthony had ordered the transfer of a teenager to a secure property the night before the fire. Daniel claimed he had believed she was a witness who needed protection. He had not asked why she was terrified.
“Did Grace see her?” Ellis asked him.
“Yes. She was in the hallway. She tried to take the girl outside.”
“What happened?”
“Anthony found them. He was furious. Later he said Grace had become a problem.”
“And then he staged the fire.”
Daniel stared at the table. “Yes.”
The detective waited.
“Did you help move Grace?”
He closed his eyes. “I told Rebecca when Grace would be alone. I was supposed to keep Mother downstairs until they got her out. I didn't know the house would burn while Grace was still in it.”
“You knew your sister was being taken.”
“Yes.”
“And you did nothing to stop it.”
Daniel covered his face.
His lawyer asked for a break. The interview continued later with more details, each answer exposing another choice Daniel had made in exchange for Anthony's approval.
***
Rachel could not bear to sit through another discussion of names and accounts. She asked to return to college for one afternoon. Miriam Hale arranged transportation and informed the school about the protective measures without disclosing the sensitive details.
Rachel entered her classroom halfway through a lecture on accounting ethics. The professor looked surprised but welcomed her without asking questions. For fifty minutes she listened to ordinary examples of internal controls, expense reports, and audit trails. It was strange how the language resembled the Moretti records, minus the guns and missing people.
After class, her friend Leah caught her by the lockers.
“Where have you been? There are stories about you everywhere.”
Rachel gave a tired laugh. “Some of them are wrong.”
“Are you okay?”
“No.”
Leah hugged her. “Do you need me to do anything?”
“Tell me about your awful statistics exam.”
Leah did. Rachel listened while they walked toward the security office, grateful for the simple fact that someone could care about her without wanting a ledger, a signature, or a name.
That evening she returned to the hotel to find Grace sitting with a sketchbook. Grace had drawn the walled garden from memory, then crossed out the gate and replaced it with a wide open road.
“It's better this way,” Rachel said.
Grace nodded. “I'm trying to remember that I can decide what happens in the picture.”
They spoke for an hour about the girl named Sophie. Grace remembered fragments: a thin blue sweater, a song hummed under her breath, and a small silver necklace shaped like a bird. She could not remember a last name.
Rachel opened Helen's letter and found a phrase she'd never understood. The bird flew north before the flames.
“Mom knew she escaped,” Rachel said.
“Or she hoped.”
The distinction mattered, but hope was still enough to begin looking.
***
Rachel also asked to speak with Sophie only if Sophie wanted the conversation. Detective Ellis relayed the request through the victim-support team, and Sophie declined for the moment. Rachel understood. Sophie had already given a statement that required her to revisit years of fear. She did not owe another stranger a personal account simply because their histories crossed.
Instead, Rachel wrote a short letter thanking Sophie for telling the truth and explaining that Helen had always wanted people to be able to leave unsafe places. She gave the sealed letter to the advocate with permission to deliver it or discard it according to Sophie's wishes.
Grace watched Rachel seal the envelope. “I thought you would want to meet her.”
“I do. But wanting something doesn't mean I get to decide for someone else.”
Grace looked thoughtful. “Rebecca used to tell me she was helping because she knew what was best. She never asked what I wanted.”
“Then let's not become her.”
They sat for a while longer, each considering how hard it was to stop seeing danger as a reason to control another person.
Investigators found a record of a transfer from the Pennsylvania property to a facility in northern New York. A woman named Sophie Grant had been admitted there under a false history of severe psychiatric illness. The facility had since closed, but the records included a later discharge address.
Detective Ellis worked with local authorities to locate her. Sophie was now in her late twenties, living under her legal name in a small coastal town. She agreed to meet investigators, provided they did not disclose her address to the Morettis.
Her statement was clear. Anthony's people had abducted her after she witnessed a violent crime committed by one of his associates. She was moved between controlled properties, threatened, and told nobody would believe her. The night before the fire, Grace had seen her and tried to help. Helen had secretly arranged her transfer out of the mansion and passed a warning to an independent advocate. That advocate eventually helped Sophie disappear from Anthony's network.
“Did Helen save you?” Ellis asked.
“Yes. She told me I wasn't a patient, and I wasn't property. I was a person.”
Rachel read the statement later with tears in her eyes. Her mother had spent years frightened, but she had used the access she had to help at least one girl escape.
Sophie also remembered something about Anthony's supposed death. She had heard two men discussing a body that would be placed in the fire after the household staff were removed. She never saw the body, but the conversation supported investigators' concerns that the death had been staged with falsified identification.
Margaret read the statement in silence.
“Your father let me grieve him,” she said to Grace. “He watched us bury someone else.”
Grace looked out at the city. “He wanted us to spend our lives believing the story he wrote.”
“Not anymore.”
***
Late that night, Detective Ellis received the first confirmed location for Helen. A traffic camera showed her entering a medical clinic near the harbor in the company of a man with a bandaged hand. She was walking independently, but her posture was tense. Investigators recognized the man as an associate of Anthony's.
The clinic's records showed no appointment under her name. The building had been emptied by the time officers arrived.
Inside the examination room, police found a white flower resting on a chair and a note written on the back of a prescription slip.
Tell Rachel that I am still trying to come home.
Rachel pressed the note against her chest.
Grace stood beside her. “She hasn't given up.”
“No,” Rachel whispered. “And neither have we.”
May you like
The detective entered with one more detail. The clinic belonged to a company in the Bellini ledger. Its last recorded owner was Isabel Reed, Vanessa's mother.
For the first time, the search for Helen and the mystery of Vanessa's family were the same investigation.
