A House Full of Witnesses
Chapter 05 - A House Full of Witnesses
I slept in a chair outside Mia's room that night. I told Rosa it was because the child might wake up afraid. The truth was that I could not bear the thought of closing a door between myself and the last person who had seen Hannah.
At six in the morning, Mia emerged in her little socks, dragging the rabbit by one ear. She found me with my head tipped against the wall.
“You snore like a truck,” she informed me.
“Your mother used to say I sounded like a lawn mower.”
“That's worse.”
We went downstairs together. I made moon pancakes. They came out shaped like potatoes, exactly as promised, and Mia ate two while sitting on a stack of old cookbooks. She asked for more syrup and then for less syrup, and for a few precious minutes the world gave me a problem I knew how to solve.
Damian walked into the kitchen at seven wearing the same shirt as the day before. He took a pancake from the plate and ate it standing. Rosa looked appalled. Nobody in that house ate the children's breakfast standing, and certainly not the master of the house.
“Did you call the police?” I asked.
“Not Anthony's friends. I called a lawyer who owes me a favor, and she suggested an investigator who has never worked for my family.”
“Her name?”
“Rebecca Dunn.”
I recognized it. Rebecca had represented tenants facing eviction in the Bronx, and had annoyed the Romano Trust for years. I was impressed despite myself.
Damian looked at Mia. “She'll want to ask some questions.”
Mia held up her sticky hands. “Can she ask after I wash?”
“Yes,” he said solemnly. “That seems fair.”
Rebecca arrived in sensible shoes, carrying a canvas bag instead of a briefcase. She was fifty-five, with untidy brown hair and reading glasses on a cord. She asked for tea, listened without interrupting, and wrote everything down with a fountain pen whose cap had been repaired with tape.
She did not call Damian boss or sir. I liked her immediately.
When I described the watch, she asked to see it. Damian laid it on the table. Rebecca turned it over in her hand and noticed a faint line along the inner rim.
“Looks as though the back has a false plate,” she said. “Don't pry it open. Have somebody photograph it first.”
“Anthony wants it,” I told her.
“That,” Rebecca said, “makes me want it even more.”
She asked me how the trust operated. I confessed that I'd never learned the details. Every autumn, the estate sent baskets to elderly residents, and I helped arrange the deliveries. There were checks for school supplies and coal bills when winters were bad. I had assumed those were the charitable works Vittorio intended.
Rebecca asked whether I had ever signed a trust document.
“Not to my knowledge.”
“Your name appears in the old charter as a community trustee.”
I stared at her. “That's impossible.”
She unfolded a photocopy. There it was: June Mercer, my name typed in an ordinary serif font beneath three other names. Beside it was a signature that looked almost exactly like mine.
“Did you write that?” Damian asked.
“No.”
I examined the J. My real signature bent backward because I broke my wrist at twenty and found certain movements awkward afterward. This J went straight up. Somebody had studied my writing but hadn't known the history of my hand.
Rebecca nodded. “That's useful. It isn't proof by itself, but it's a place to start.”
The Saint Agnes Trust, she explained, couldn't sell occupied homes without approval by its community trustees and a majority of eligible residents. Yet the records showed votes taken at meetings nobody remembered attending.
For twenty years, somebody had signed my name to decisions I had never made.
I thought of the holiday baskets. I thought of the handwritten thank-you cards Bernice made me deliver to the trust office every January. I had believed we were doing good, and our small acts of goodness had helped disguise the rest.
At noon, Luca asked me to join him by the laundry room. It was the only room Anthony never entered because he thought linen folded itself.
“I turned off the south gate cameras yesterday,” Luca said.
I had suspected it. Hearing him admit it made my hands go cold.
“Why?”
“Hannah called me. She said someone was following her and that Mia needed a safe place. I agreed to open the garden entrance for six minutes.”
“You told Damian no guard saw her come in.”
“That was true. I came alone.”
“Don't get clever with me, Luca.”
He looked down. “I should have told him. But she made me promise not to tell anyone until the watch was in his hands.”
“Where was Hannah going?”
“To meet someone near the station. She wouldn't say who.”
“A fake detective.”
Luca nodded. “I know that now.”
He took a folded sheet from his pocket. It was a receipt from a parking garage, stamped two hours after Hannah left the estate. The car that followed her had paid for two spaces. One was registered to an LLC owned by Anthony Sarto. The other was registered to a company called Briar Holdings.
“Briar?” I asked.
“Damian's cousin Vincent runs it.”
Vincent Romano had been at my table every Easter since he was six. He never remembered the names of the women who served him dinner. The year Rosa's husband died, he asked her to clear his plate while she was crying.
I had always thought him vain. I had not understood how dangerous that could become when paired with money.
Damian was in his study when I brought the receipt. He stared at the name Briar Holdings and called Vincent on speaker.
“Tell me about the parking garage,” Damian said.
Vincent replied with immediate warmth. “Cousin. You sound terrible. Long night?”
“Why did one of your cars follow Hannah Mercer yesterday?”
Silence.
Then Vincent said, “If you're talking about the woman who's been stealing trust records, your father ought to have told you what kind of trouble she is.”
Damian leaned forward. “My father?”
“I wouldn't trust a word from him. You remember what happened in 2008.”
“No,” Damian said. “I'm beginning to realize I don't.”
The line went dead.
Rebecca called moments later. She had obtained a court-certified copy of the original trust charter. My name was indeed on it, but another name appeared beside mine, crossed out with a thick black line.
Rebecca read it aloud: “John Weaver.”
The dead driver had been a community trustee too.
May you like
Then she told me the part that made me sit down: according to the official record, John Weaver had attended a trust meeting and signed his approval for the sale of Saint Agnes Row last month.
Eighteen years after his death.
