Chapter 5 - WHAT ELENA MORETTI LEFT BEHIND
The gold star belonged to a coat that should have been destroyed twenty-six years earlier.
Alessandro learned that from a woman who had once worked for his mother, a woman he hadn't seen since he was twelve. Her name was Teresa Bellini. She lived in a narrow brick house in New Rochelle, cultivated roses in coffee tins, and answered the door holding a dish towel and a look of absolute disbelief.
“Little Sandro?” she whispered.
He had been taller than Teresa by the time he turned sixteen. At thirty-eight, with the weight of the Moretti family on his shoulders, he hardly resembled the boy who used to hide behind her skirts when his parents argued. But she knew him at once.
“Teresa,” he said, “I need to ask about my mother.”
He had gone without guards at Rosa's suggestion, although Marco waited in an ordinary car a block away. Rosa had wanted to come, too, but Lily had developed a fever overnight. Dr. Park thought it was a routine childhood infection, and Rosa stayed at the inn with a thermometer and a bowl of ice chips. Alessandro felt guilty about being relieved that she wasn't there to hear whatever his mother had hidden.
Teresa led him into a kitchen lined with faded family photographs. She poured coffee he didn't want and settled across from him. He showed her the image of the star pinned to the photographer's sleeve.
Her face lost its color.
“Where did you find that?”
“Someone used it to threaten my daughter.”
Teresa stared at him. “Your daughter?”
“Her name is Lily. She's three.”
The older woman's eyes filled. She turned away and gripped the edge of the sink. “Your mother would have loved that.”
Alessandro waited until she could face him again. “What do you know about the star?”
“Your mother had six coats made with those buttons. She gave one to your aunt, one to your grandmother, and kept the rest. After the accident, your father ordered everything packed. He said the coats would be burned.”
“But they weren't.”
“Not all of them.” Teresa sat again, slowly. “Your mother believed someone was taking money from the family foundation. She kept copies of documents in the lining of a gray wool coat. She told me if anything happened, I should remember where she hid them.”
Alessandro's mind went back to the flood in the basement records room, Lorenzo's convenient explanation, the letter Rosa's mother had written. “Did she say who was stealing?”
“She suspected your father and his accountant. But she also suspected the money was being used to pay people who threatened witnesses in a shipping investigation. I was a housekeeper, Sandro. I didn't know what was true.”
“Why didn't you come to me when I was older?”
“I tried. When you turned twenty-one, I sent a letter through the office. Lorenzo answered that you wanted no contact.”
The same technique. The same gatekeeper. The same silence created with paper.
“Do you still have the reply?” he asked.
“Of course. Your mother taught me never to throw away a letter that tells you to stop asking questions.”
Teresa returned with a shoebox. Inside were folded photographs, birthday cards, a small silver cross, and a typed letter bearing Lorenzo's name. Alessandro photographed it with her permission.
At the bottom of the box lay a star button, still attached to a piece of gray fabric.
“Your mother cut it off herself,” Teresa said. “She told me the other coat was in a trunk, marked with a blue ribbon.”
“Where is the trunk?”
“It was at the estate when I left. But your father died before anyone told me what happened to it.”
Alessandro felt his old grief press against the new. His mother had been an affectionate, impatient woman who argued with everyone about everything. As a boy, he had believed her death was a random accident. Now he was being asked to consider that she had expected danger.
He did not ask Teresa whether he should avenge her. He asked instead if she would speak to Detective Reyes. She agreed, provided someone could drive her because her eyesight had deteriorated.
While Alessandro was away, Rosa sat beside Lily and read the same short story three times. The fever made the child's cheeks red. She refused lunch, accepted a little water, then fell asleep with her hand curled around Rosa's thumb.
Mrs. Bell arrived with soup. “Mr. Moretti called. He wanted to know the temperature.”
“Ninety-nine point eight,” Rosa said. “It's going down.”
“He sounds as though he'd trade half the estate for a cool washcloth.”
Rosa smiled. “He doesn't know what to do with something he can't buy.”
“He's learning.”
Mrs. Bell poured soup into mismatched bowls. “May I say something without being mistaken for a meddling old woman?”
“You can say anything.”
“Lily has spent three years with a good mother. If she gains a father, she should not have to lose the way she's lived. That includes the right to be ordinary.”
Rosa looked through the window at the parking lot, now watched by a patrol car at intervals. “I want to take her to the park without counting strangers.”
“Then tell him exactly that.”
When Alessandro returned, Rosa noticed his expression before he spoke. He had the look of a man walking out of a house where someone had opened every locked drawer.
He showed her Teresa's letter and explained the coat. Rosa listened, then asked the question he had been avoiding.
“Do you think your mother's accident wasn't an accident?”
“I think there's a reason to ask. I don't know the answer.”
“Then let the detective ask.”
“Yes.”
He looked toward Lily, asleep under a quilt. “How is she?”
“Much better. She wants to know if you can read the fox book without sounding like you're crying.”
A brief, surprised laugh escaped him. “I'll practice.”
That night they talked about how to tell Lily the truth. Dr. Park had recommended simple language without a dramatic revelation. Rosa suggested explaining that families could grow, and Alessandro was someone who had learned he was her dad. There would be no demand to call him Daddy immediately. No staged photograph for a newspaper. No sudden change in Lily's last name.
“Can I at least buy her a bicycle?” Alessandro asked.
“She can't ride a bicycle yet.”
“A very small bicycle?”
“Alessandro.”
“A helmet?”
Rosa laughed. It surprised both of them.
The following day, when Lily's fever had passed, they sat together on a rug. Rosa told her that sometimes adults learned something important later than they should. She explained that Alessandro was her father and that he wanted to know her, but she could still call him Button Man if she liked.
Lily stared at him for a long moment. “Like the dads in books?”
“Yes,” Rosa said. “But real dads have to learn things too.”
“Can you make pancakes?” Lily asked him.
“I can learn.”
“Then you're Dad Button Man.”
Alessandro's eyes shone. He didn't reach for her. Instead, he waited until she crawled across the rug and sat beside him.
The moment lasted perhaps half a minute. Rosa would remember it for the rest of her life.
Then Marco called with news from the estate.
Workers had located the blue-ribbon trunk in a locked storage closet behind the west-wing chapel. It was empty except for a gray coat with its lining cut open. Every button had been removed.
Marco sent photographs. Alessandro enlarged one and noticed a small stitch remaining beneath the collar, a white thread arranged in a shape his mother used to embroider into his school clothes. Beside the stitch was a faint series of numbers written in ink.
Teresa, contacted by phone, recognized them as the last digits of an account number Elena had written in her address book. Not enough to access money. Enough, perhaps, to identify records if a bank complied with lawful requests.
“We should give this to Reyes,” Rosa said.
“We will.”
Alessandro's phone buzzed again. This time the message came from an unknown sender using an old photograph as its profile picture. It showed Elena Moretti smiling beside a young Lorenzo Varela at a charity event.
The accompanying words were short:
YOUR MOTHER DID NOT DIE WITH HER SECRET. ASK TERESA WHAT SHE DID WITH THE SECOND COAT.
Alessandro turned the screen toward Rosa. She stared at the message, then at the sleeping face of their daughter.
“Someone wants us searching,” she said.
“Or wants us searching in the wrong place.”
From the doorway, Mrs. Bell interrupted. “There's a woman downstairs asking for Rosa. She says she's Isabella Romano.”
Rosa stood. “Did she come alone?”
“Yes. And she's crying.”
For the first time since the morning in the marble hallway, Isabella had come without the protection of her father's men.
Alessandro moved toward the door, but Rosa stopped him with one hand. “I'll speak with her first. She threatened me, not you.”
“That's exactly why I don't want you alone.”
“Alone isn't the same as unprotected. Mrs. Bell can stay in the hall. Detective Reyes can be called if Isabella has information.”
May you like
He hesitated, then nodded. Rosa could see him struggling against instincts older than either of them. He wanted to stand between her and every harm, yet the morning had already taught him that standing in front of someone could also block their view. Rosa checked that Lily was asleep, smoothed her blouse, and descended the narrow stairs. Whatever Isabella had come to confess, Rosa intended to hear it as the mother of the little girl she had insulted, not as a servant waiting for permission to speak.
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