Chapter 5 - The Missing Housekeeper
Mrs. Alvarez returned to the mansion with a second notebook.
She had kept it in a kitchen drawer at her daughter's apartment, wrapped in a plastic grocery bag. It contained copies of messages Vanessa had sent to the staff, including instructions to record certain employees as absent when they had actually worked full shifts.
There were also invoices from the temporary staffing company.
The company had been registered to a man named Victor Bellini.
Vanessa's cousin.
Luca read the documents twice.
“Did you know the money was being diverted?” he asked.
Mrs. Alvarez shook her head. “I knew the numbers were strange. I didn't know where they went.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I tried. Your assistant said you were unavailable. Then Vanessa told me you were tired of hearing complaints.”
Luca looked down.
“I should have checked.”
“Yes,” Mrs. Alvarez said. “You should have.”
Her honesty was not disrespectful. It was a reminder of what his position had allowed him to ignore.
Dana Brooks examined the invoices. “This is enough to request a formal audit. It may also be enough to show that employees were underpaid.”
Luca nodded. “Make sure everyone receives what they're owed.”
Marco entered with another report. The contractor who had created the temporary administrator account had been identified. He admitted that Vanessa paid him to disable cameras during selected periods and to send anonymous messages to Hannah.
“Did she tell him to threaten the child?” Luca asked.
“He says she told him to make Hannah afraid enough to resign. He claims he didn't expect the message to be taken literally.”
Luca's face darkened.
“Find the original message records. Preserve everything.”
The contractor had also supplied a statement that Vanessa feared Hannah had overheard a conversation about the staffing company. The maid had been in the pantry the night Vanessa discussed an upcoming transfer with her cousin.
Hannah remembered that evening. She had been putting away clean glasses when Vanessa came into the kitchen and told someone on the phone that “the old arrangement” needed to be finished before Luca reviewed the accounts.
At the time, Hannah had thought it was about an event.
Now she understood why Vanessa had watched her so closely.
Luca asked Hannah to meet Dana and the investigators. Hannah agreed, but only after arranging for her mother to stay with Noah.
She described what she had heard, carefully separating the words she remembered from what she had assumed.
The investigator thanked her.
“You did the right thing by reporting it,” he said.
Hannah looked toward Luca. “Will this make things worse?”
“It may make the investigation more complicated,” he replied. “But it gives us something real to examine.”
That evening, Vanessa called Hannah from an unknown number.
“You have no idea what you're doing,” she said.
Hannah's heart began to race.
“I don't want trouble.”
“Then stop talking.”
“I told the truth.”
“You have a child to think about.”
Hannah gripped the phone. “Don't mention my son.”
Vanessa laughed softly. “Then you should have thought about that before you decided to become important.”
The line went dead.
Hannah immediately saved the call details and sent them to Marco.
At the mansion, Luca received the recording. He listened once, then asked the legal team to contact the authorities.
He had spent years believing that loyalty meant keeping private matters inside the family.
May you like
Now he understood that secrecy had given Vanessa room to hurt people.
And he was done protecting the wrong person.
