Chapter 3 - THE CUFFLINK
By noon, the mansion no longer felt like a home.
It had never felt like one to Alessia — she had always understood that she was a guest in someone else’s monument — but by noon it had stopped pretending. Doors that were usually propped open were shut. The kitchen staff moved in pairs. Two of the security men stood at the foot of the stairs and did not talk to each other, which in a house like this was its own kind of alarm.
Matteo Greco had arrived at eleven.
Alessia had seen him only twice before — a broad man in his forties with a boxer’s shoulders and a quiet way of entering a room that made you want to check your pockets. He was Dante’s security chief, and he had worked for the family for nine years, and he did not look at Alessia the way the rest of the staff did. He looked at her the way a man looks at a door he is deciding whether to open.
By noon he had collected the phones of every employee who had been in the house after ten o’clock.
The staff were moved into separate rooms — the dining room, the breakfast room, the small parlor off the east hall — and told to wait. Mrs. Conte stood in the corridor outside the dining room with her arms folded and her face very still, and Alessia, walking past with Matteo, saw her look away.
Bellini was in the study.
He had been in there since Dante called him in at half past eleven, and even through the closed door Alessia could hear the shape of his voice: clipped, reasonable, rising slightly at the ends. The voice of a man explaining something he was certain he was right about.
Alessia sat in the hallway outside the library in her maid’s uniform, because her other clothes were still inside the suitcase, and nobody was allowed to touch it.
At one o’clock, Matteo came for her.
Dante was standing in front of the paneled wall behind his desk.
The room was large and cold and smelled of the cedar from the fire in the library, which had followed her in somehow, or which her mind had put there. Bellini was not in the room.
“Come here,” Dante said.
Alessia came.
“Show me.”
She looked at the wall. The paneling ran in three vertical sections between two bookcases. She had seen it a hundred times, from the doorway, when she came to collect the tray. It looked like wood. It looked like nothing.
She reached out and ran her fingers along the molding beneath the center panel, the way she had watched the man do it in the dark.
Nothing.
She tried again, lower, where the molding met the baseboard.
There.
A small, precise click.
A narrow section of the paneling swung inward, three inches wide, silent on well-oiled hinges. It was not a door. It was a seam — a panel designed to look like part of the wall.
Behind it was a steel safe.
Matteo stepped forward and looked inside.
It was empty.
Dante’s face became cold. Not angry. Cold, the way a window is cold in winter.
“My father built this room,” he said.
Matteo glanced at him. “You didn’t know about it?”
“No.”
“Did Bellini?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t sound convinced.”
“I’m not.”
Matteo looked at Alessia. “You trust her?”
“No.” Dante looked into the empty safe. “But I trust what she didn’t do.”
“What?”
“She didn’t accuse him. It would have been the easiest thing in the world, and she didn’t.”
Matteo nodded slowly.
Dante reached into the safe and came out with something between two fingers: a strip of red paper, torn at one edge, caught near the hinge. He held it up to the light.
The missing folder had been real.
“Matteo.”
“Sir.”
“Bring Bellini back in.”
Bellini came in with his hands in his pockets and his chin up. He looked at the safe — at the open seam, the exposed steel, the fact of it — and something crossed his face for less than a second. Then it was gone, and he was smooth again.
He looked at Alessia.
“This is ridiculous.”
Dante placed the cufflink on the desk.
Bellini’s expression changed for less than a second.
He recovered. He always recovered. But Alessia saw it, and Dante saw it, and Matteo, standing by the bookcase, saw it too.
“Enough,” Dante said. “Yours?”
Bellini picked it up. Examined it. Set it down.
“Yes.”
“How did it get beneath my desk?”
“I’ve been in this study hundreds of times.”
“Not since I replaced the carpet three weeks ago.”
Bellini paused.
Dante continued, evenly. “And you haven’t worn these cufflinks since my father’s funeral.”
Alessia looked at Dante. She had not known that. She had not been in this house when Dante’s father died. But she saw the way Bellini’s shoulders changed, a fraction of an inch, and she understood that Dante had just cut something loose.
Bellini recovered.
“Then someone planted it.”
“Possible.”
He glanced toward Alessia. “She found it.”
Dante’s eyes cooled.
“Careful.”
“Why?”
“Because you’re trying very hard to make her guilty before I know what happened.”
Bellini’s mouth tightened. “I’ve protected this family for twelve years. She has cleaned your house for seven months. Exactly.”
Dante looked at him.
“That makes your fear of her interesting.”
Bellini said nothing.
Dante placed the photograph beside the cufflink.
“Recognize this?”
Bellini stared at it. “Your mother.”
“Turn it over.”
He did. His face changed.
Ask about Lorenzo.
He set it down carefully, and for a moment he did not speak, and the room filled with the sound of the clock in the hall.
“I don’t know who wrote that.”
“Neither do I.” Dante watched him. “But apparently someone thinks I should ask.”
Bellini looked at Alessia.
“You think she wrote it.”
“No,” Dante said.
“How can you know?”
“Because she had the photograph before the message appeared.”
Bellini’s eyes flickered. Alessia saw it. Dante saw it too.
Bellini knew more than he was saying. But not, Alessia thought, about the message. About something else. Something older.
Dante dismissed him.
Bellini reached the door and stopped.
“Dante.”
He turned.
“You’re making a mistake.”
“Which one?”
“Trusting someone you know nothing about.”
Dante looked toward Alessia. Then back to Bellini.
“I haven’t decided whether I trust her,” he said. “I’ve decided I don’t trust you.”
Bellini left.
Alessia exhaled.
“You enjoy making rooms uncomfortable,” she said.
Dante looked at her. “You noticed. It may be your greatest talent.”
He sat down behind the desk.
“Tell me about your father.”
The question caught her off guard. “What?”
“Giovani Romano.”
Alessia went still.
“You investigated me.”
“I investigate everyone in this house.”
“My father died nine years ago.”
“I know.”
“Then why ask?”
“Because he worked for Moretti Construction.”
Her face changed. Dante saw it.
“You knew,” he said.
“Yes.”
“You didn’t include it on your employment application.”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I needed the job.”
“That isn’t the whole answer.”
Alessia looked toward the window. Outside, the lawn ran down toward the trees, and beyond the trees the road, and beyond the road the city she had grown up in.
“My father hated your family,” she said.
Dante leaned back. “That narrows nothing down.”
Despite herself, Alessia smiled. Then it vanished.
“He was an accountant for one of your father’s companies.”
“Yes.”
“He left six months before he died.”
“Yes.”
“Why?”
“I don’t know.”
Dante watched her. “You’re lying again.”
Alessia’s eyes flashed. “Stop saying that.”
“Stop doing it.”
She turned away.
Dante waited.
“My father came home one night terrified,” she said finally. “He burned documents in our kitchen sink. He told my mother we were leaving Chicago.”
“When?”
“Eleven years ago.”
The same year Bianca Moretti died.
Dante’s expression hardened. “What happened?”
“We didn’t leave. Two days later he changed his mind. He never explained why.” She looked at him. “Two years after that, he died. Car accident on the Ryan.”
Dante was quiet.
“Did he know Lorenzo Bellini?”
Alessia looked at him.
“I don’t know,” she said.
And that time, he believed her.
The door opened without a knock. Matteo came in, and he was carrying a tablet, and his face was the face of a man who had found something he wished he hadn’t.
May you like
He set it on the desk.
“Security footage from last night,” he said. “You need to see this.”
