Chapter 8 - ROOM 12
Dante’s eyes traveled across the foyer.
Housekeepers. Security men. Mrs. Conte. Matteo. Allesia.
Every familiar face suddenly looked different — not changed, exactly, but rearranged. As if a room he had walked through for years had been turned one degree, and now he could see the door he had never noticed.
Then Matteo handed him a small plastic evidence bag.
Inside was a silver housekeeping key.
The same kind Allesia had surrendered when she was fired — the small one, the one that opened the staff corridors and the linen room. But this one had a number engraved into the face.
Twelve.
Alessia stared at it.
“That’s impossible.”
Dante looked at her. “Why?”
She pointed at the key.
“There is no room twelve.”
Mrs. Conte went pale.
Dante saw it. “You know something.”
The older woman shook her head. “No—”
“Mrs. Conte.”
Her eyes moved — involuntarily, the way eyes do — toward the west corridor.
“The oldest part of the mansion,” she said. “There used to be.”
Dante’s voice became quiet. “Used to be what?”
“A room twelve.”
“What happened to it?”
“It was sealed.”
“When?”
Mrs. Conte looked at Allesia. Then at Dante.
“The night your mother died.”
The foyer became perfectly silent.
Dante turned toward the west corridor.
Allesia stood beside him now. Neither of them had noticed her move — she had simply arrived there, the way people arrive at the side of someone they have decided to stand with.
Yesterday morning, she had entered this room expecting to lose a job. Someone had already packed her suitcase. Someone had already decided she needed to disappear from the Moretti house.
Now Dante understood why.
They hadn’t been trying to remove a maid.
They had been trying to remove the one person in the mansion whose father had helped Bianca Moretti hide the truth.
Dante looked at Allesia.
“You still want to stay?”
Fear moved across her face. Real fear — the kind that has nothing to do with performance.
Then she looked toward the sealed corridor.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
Allesia tightened her hand around the handle of her suitcase.
“Because yesterday someone decided I should leave before I knew why.” She looked at him. “I don’t like other people deciding my life.”
Dante held her gaze.
Neither did he. Not anymore.
He turned toward Matteo.
“Seal the estate.”
Matteo nodded.
“No one leaves.”
Dante looked toward room twelve. Then at the woman who had nearly been thrown out of his house for seeing too much.
“No one.”
Allesia raised an eyebrow. “We’ve discussed the gate thing.”
Dante looked at her.
Despite everything, the corner of his mouth moved.
“Fine,” he corrected himself. “Anyone who wants to leave can leave.”
His gaze moved across the staff.
“But anyone who stays tells me the truth.”
Nobody spoke.
Dante looked at Allesia. She looked toward the west corridor.
Somewhere beyond that wall was a room that had been sealed the night Bianca Moretti died. Somewhere in Chicago, Lorenzo Bellini was alive in a hospital bed with a story he would not tell. And somewhere, a man believed dead for fourteen years knew exactly who Allesia Romano was.
Yesterday, she had been the maid nobody thought important enough to question before firing.
Today, every secret in the Moretti mansion seemed to know her name.
Dante took the key from the evidence bag and held it up.
“Matteo,” he said. “Bring the bolt cutters.”
The west corridor was colder than the rest of the house. It ran behind the ballroom, narrow and high-ceilinged, lit by a single row of sconces that had been converted to electric sometime in the sixties. The carpet was old and worn thin in a track down the center, and the doors along it were unnumbered.
At the end, where the corridor turned, there was a wall.
It looked like a wall. It had been papered in the same faded damask as the rest of the corridor, and the seam where it met the ceiling had been painted over.
But the baseboard did not match. It had been replaced — newer wood, stained to look old, and poorly.
Dante ran his hand along it.
“There,” Allesia said.
She had found the seam before he did, at the level of the lock. A thin vertical line, almost invisible in the sconce light.
The key went in.
It did not turn.
“Frozen,” Matteo said. “Give me a minute.”
He worked at it with a can of graphite and a small tool, patient as a man picking a lock, though there was no lock to pick — only eleven years of paint and rust and the particular stubbornness of a door that had been told never to open again.
Then, with a sound like a knuckle cracking, it turned.
Dante pushed.
The wall swung inward on silent hinges, and cold air came out of the dark — old air, dry, smelling of dust and paper and something faintly floral, the ghost of a perfume.
Matteo found the switch. Nothing happened. He clicked it again.
“The power’s been cut to this wing,” he said. “Give me a minute.”
But Dante was already through the door.
Allesia followed him.
The room was small and high, with one tall window on the far wall, covered by a shutter that had been painted shut. Dust lay over everything in a gray fur. There was a desk. A chair. A small sofa. A bookcase, half full, the rest of the shelves bare.
And on the desk, undisturbed, were three objects.
A lamp, unplugged.
A teacup, with tea still dried at the bottom.
And a photograph in a silver frame — Bianca Moretti, young, holding a baby.
Dante picked it up.
The baby was him.
He stood there in the dark with his mother’s face in his hands, and Allesia stood a few feet away and did not speak, because there was nothing to say that would not have been worse than silence.
Matteo’s light swept the room.
“Sir,” he said.
He had found the wall behind the bookcase.
A section of it had been moved — recently. The dust around it was disturbed, swept into little arcs where something had been pushed aside and pushed back. And behind it, where the paneling had been slid away, there was a passage.
A narrow passage, dark, that ran into the wall.
Dante looked at it.
“It connects to the west corridor,” Matteo said. “The old service stairs. Somebody’s been using this room.”
“Recently?”
“Look at the dust.”
Dante looked.
May you like
Somebody had.
Someone had been coming into this room, through the wall, for years.
