Chapter 6 - THE BLACK STONE
The newspapers got the story wrong almost immediately.
By Saturday morning, a local website claimed the Caruso family had discovered a missing heiress with a fortune waiting for her. Another described Nora as a woman emerging from poverty to claim a throne. Someone used a photograph from her library's staff directory without permission.
Nora sent me a message with a picture of her coffee and three words: NOT A PRINCESS.
I wrote back: THANK GOD. I DON'T OWN A TIARA.
She replied with a laughing face, then asked whether she could borrow one of Elena's lemon-cookie recipes. It was the most normal conversation either of us had managed all week.
Normal didn't last long.
A photographer appeared outside my mother's hospital. A stranger called Romano's asking for my schedule. Nora's library received angry messages from people who believed her story was a scheme to take money from a respected family. Dominic's attorney released a statement denying wrongdoing and warning against “irresponsible allegations.”
Detective Mercer reminded us that a public accusation was not a criminal charge, and that preserving evidence mattered more than winning an argument online.
I wanted to print that sentence and tape it to every window in Philadelphia.
Anthony did not ask me to disappear while his family handled things. Instead, he asked whether I'd speak to a lawyer who represented witnesses and people caught in public disputes. The consultation would be independent, he said, and he would have no access to what I told her.
“Is this your way of offering help without trying to own the result?” I asked.
“I'm learning.”
“Slowly.”
“I've been told that.”
I went to the consultation. The attorney explained my employment rights, the value of keeping records, and why I should not respond to strangers who tried to lure me into public arguments. I felt better leaving her office than I had in days. Knowledge was less dramatic than a bodyguard, but more useful.
Then Mercer called and said Frank wanted to talk.
He had contacted his own lawyer after learning Dominic's attorney was distancing the family company from him. Frank was willing to speak to investigators, but he had insisted that I be told he was coming forward. I asked Mercer why.
“He says you reminded him of someone,” she replied. “That doesn't mean you need to see him.”
I thought about his smile at Romano's, the way he'd called me sweetheart while threatening me. “I want to hear what he says,” I answered. “But I want you in the room.”
Mercer arranged the interview at a police facility. Frank sat on the other side of a table in an ordinary brown coat. Without the tailored suit and polished shoes, he looked like a tired man approaching seventy. His black stone ring was gone.
He noticed my gaze. “I gave it to my attorney.”
“Good,” I said. “It never looked like something you deserved.”
Mercer sat beside me. Frank's attorney sat beside him. The recorder was on. No one pretended this was a private family conversation.
“I frightened you,” Frank said.
“Yes.”
“I'm sorry.”
“You can apologize to the detective. I don't need one.”
He blinked. Then he nodded.
Frank told us he had served Vincent for almost three decades. He had been a driver, a guard, an errand runner. He had delivered envelopes and collected favors without asking what they meant. He insisted that he had believed he was protecting the family. By the time he realized who was being harmed, he no longer knew how to leave.
Mercer asked him to focus on Anna.
“Dominic told me to pick her up from the house,” Frank said. “He said she was going somewhere safe while they settled a dispute over Marco's papers. I was supposed to take her to a private residence and then tell Vincent that she'd been taken by strangers.”
“Why would you do that?” I asked.
“Because Dominic said Vincent had approved it.”
“Did you ask Vincent?”
Frank looked down. “No.”
The familiar answer made my stomach turn. People had been obeying Dominic for years because nobody wanted to ask the obvious question.
“When I got to the residence, I heard Dominic talking about the trust,” Frank continued. “He wanted the child gone long enough for the company shares to move out of her name. He said the other people involved would make sure she never became a problem again.”
Mercer leaned forward. “Who were those people?”
Frank named a former company accountant and a legal adviser, both of whom had since died. He did not claim to know every part of the plan.
“I took the girl away,” he said. “I brought her to the hospital because she was sick. I found Teresa. She knew a nurse who could help. I told her we had to get the child out of the city.”
“Then why did Elena believe Anna was dead?”
Frank shut his eyes. “Because I told her.”
The room seemed to contract around those words.
“You went to a mother's home,” I said, my voice shaking, “and told her that her child had died?”
“Dominic was watching her. If she kept searching, he'd know Anna was alive.”
“You could have told her privately.”
“I thought someone would follow her to the girl.”
“You thought you had the right to decide what she could survive.”
Frank didn't answer. Perhaps he had no answer.
Mercer asked about the ring. Vincent had given it to Frank at the hospital on the night of Anna's disappearance, after Frank claimed to have saved Vincent from an unrelated attack. Frank admitted the story had been staged to explain his absence from the house and secure Vincent's trust. He later wore the ring to Elena's apartment because he wanted her to recognize that the warning came from a person close to Vincent, someone she couldn't escape by calling for family help.
“You took a child from her mother,” I said. “And then you made yourself the last person she ever wanted to see.”
Frank stared at the table. “Yes.”
He had hidden evidence, he said. A series of payment records showing money transferred from Dominic's companies to people involved in the false death investigation. He also kept a copy of a letter Marco had written shortly before the fatal accident, warning that certain property sales would harm workers and leave the family exposed to criminal charges.
“Why keep it?” Mercer asked.
“At first? Insurance.” His mouth twisted. “Later, because it was all I had left that told me what really happened.”
His lawyer intervened when questions turned toward possible crimes Frank had committed. Mercer accepted the boundary and said any agreement would have to be reviewed by prosecutors. I was glad she did. I didn't want a confession turned into a favor among men who knew one another.
On the way out, Frank spoke again.
“Miss Bennett.”
I stopped at the door.
“I heard you answered Vincent in Neapolitan. The way Elena speaks.”
“Yes.”
“Marco spoke that way too. Especially when he was angry.”
“Then he would have had plenty to say to you.”
Frank winced. I left without waiting for a response.
Outside, Anthony was waiting beside a vending machine. He had brought two coffees. This time he'd paid with cash.
“How did it go?” he asked.
“I learned that a man can do one decent thing and spend twenty years using it to excuse terrible things.”
Anthony considered that. “That sounds like Frank.”
“It could sound like a lot of people.”
“Including my father?”
“Including your father. Maybe including you, if you aren't careful.”
He nodded. I liked that he didn't ask me to explain.
We walked toward the street. It was sunny, a rare bright afternoon after days of rain. For a moment I forgot that anything was wrong. Then Anthony reached toward my hand and stopped himself.
“Can I?” he asked.
My pulse did something deeply inconvenient.
“You can hold my hand,” I said. “It doesn't mean we're agreeing about your family.”
“I'd be worried if it did.”
His hand was warm. We walked one block in silence before I pulled away to answer a call from Nora.
She sounded breathless. “Claire, I found something in Helen's box.”
“What?”
“A photograph of me when I was about six. There's a man standing behind me. I never knew who he was.”
“Frank?”
“No. I looked up his picture.”
“Then who?”
“Dominic Caruso.”
I stopped walking.
“He knew exactly where I was,” Nora whispered. “Even after Frank hid me.”
Mercer took the photograph within the hour. Dominic stood at the edge of a school picnic, smiling toward the camera. Nora was in the foreground, balancing a paper plate. The image had a handwritten date on the back, two years after Anna vanished.
Anthony stared at it for a long time.
“Frank wasn't the only one keeping secrets,” he said.
“No,” I answered. “But that's not the part that frightens me.”
He looked up.
“What frightens you?”
“Dominic knew Nora was alive. And he let her grow up.”
May you like
Anthony's expression darkened as he understood.
“Which means,” he said, “he may have been waiting for something.”
