Chapter 25
Chapter 25
THEME: FONT SIZE: 18px“Vittorio,” he said finally.
“Your uncle.”
“Yes.”
“He’s alive.”
“Yes.”
“He took the money. He killed your mother.”
“I don’t know that he killed her.” Dante’s voice was flat. “I know he profited from her death. I know she was afraid of him. I know she hid in a room at the end of a corridor and wrote a letter to a son who was twelve years old.”
Allesia looked at the ledger.
“Why does he need it?” she asked. “If he’s been taking the money all this time, why does he need this book now?”
Dante turned pages.
“Because this is the record,” he said. “Every transfer, every shell company, every account. This is the only thing that proves the money went to him. Without it, there’s nothing to prove anything. With it—”
“With it, he loses everything.”
“Yes.”
“And the folder from the safe?”
Dante looked up.
“That was the copy Bianca made for the family,” he said slowly. “The one Giovani gave back. Someone knew it was there. Someone had access to this house.”
He looked toward the west corridor.
“Someone who knew about the small room at the end of it.”
Allesia understood before he said it.
“Mrs. Conte,” she said.
Dante did not answer.
“Yesterday morning,” Allesia went on, her voice quickening, “she packed my suitcase before I was questioned. She knew about room twelve — she told us about it. She was the one who had the letter ready. She was standing in the foyer holding my apron like she’d been waiting there for an hour.”
“She’s been in this house thirty years,” Dante said.
“She was your mother’s housekeeper.”
“Yes.”
Allesia looked at the page in his hand.
“Dante. Your mother wrote that she made that room her own. That no one used it.” She swallowed. “If Mrs. Conte was the one who sealed it the night your mother died — who told her to?”
The room was very quiet.
Dante reached for his phone.
“Matteo.”
“Sir.”
“Where is Mrs. Conte?”
A pause.
“Sir, she’s not in the house.”
“What do you mean she’s not in the house?”
“Her room’s empty. Her things are gone. The service gate log shows a vehicle leaving forty minutes ago.”
Dante closed his eyes.
“Authorization code?”
Another pause.
“Bianca Moretti’s.”
He hung up.
Allesia looked at him.
May you like
“She was the one,” she said. “All along.”
Dante looked toward the window. Outside, the morning had turned to afternoon, and the light on the lawn had gone long and yellow, and somewhere in the city a man he had been told was dead for fourteen years was waiting for a phone to ring.
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