What Isabella Found
Chapter 05 - What Isabella Found
In the Moretti house, breakfast was the most reliable hour of the day. Toast was burned, cereal spilled, and someone was always offended by the size of a banana. Sarah welcomed the disorder. It left less room for the other things gathering at the edges of the family's life.
She showed Dante the torn letter after the twins went to preschool. He read it twice, then put it on the table beside his watch.
“Victor knows about the letters,” he said. “Charlotte called him last night.”
“Why would she call him?”
“Because she has been calling him for thirty years.”
Dante had discovered that the lawyer who arranged Isabella's adoption later became a partner in a firm used by his father's companies. Victor was a junior employee then. He had handled the paper trail, the donations, the tax work, the sort of small tasks that made a man indispensable if he kept doing them long enough.
“I inherited him,” Dante said. “I thought that meant I knew him.”
Sarah looked at the expensive clock above the stove. “You keep using that word. Inherited. You can inherit a house. You choose the people you let make decisions for you.”
He didn't argue. That was more unnerving than his temper.
That afternoon he brought Sarah to a small office above a bakery in Brooklyn. Ruth Cavanaugh had put them in touch with Ellen Porter, a retired state investigator who had handled financial misconduct cases before an injury ended her field work. Ellen was fifty-nine, broad-shouldered, and more interested in the documents than the man who brought them.
She spent twenty minutes looking at the trust statements and Isabella's photocopies. “Some of these payees are property companies,” she said. “Others are freight brokers. The addresses repeat under different names.”
“That's illegal?” Sarah asked.
“Not by itself. Neither is being wealthy, despite what many people hope. But a charity paying freight fees to companies with no trucks is unusual enough that I'd like a better explanation.”
Dante sat rigidly on the edge of his chair. “The money came from my family's foundation.”
“Some of it. Some came from Harbor House's designated housing fund. That's money given for beds, counseling, safe apartments. If someone diverted it, there are people who paid for that with more than dollars.”
Sarah thought of her mother working late shifts, of the women at the center who had probably believed that the balance in a bank account was the difference between a door they could lock and a night outside.
“Isabella was collecting proof,” she said.
Ellen nodded. “She was trying to make sure that exposing Victor didn't destroy the shelter in the process. That's what these notes suggest.”
“Can we report him now?” Dante asked.
“We can report what we have. But a careful attorney will ask whether Isabella knew about the transactions before they happened. And there are your signatures, Mr. Moretti.”
He leaned forward. “What signatures?”
Ellen slid across a freight-routing authorization from three years earlier. Dante's name was at the bottom in black ink.
“I signed hundreds of those,” he said. “Victor told me they were ordinary transfers.”
“You may have believed him,” Ellen replied. “That isn't the same as being uninvolved.”
Outside, a bell rang as customers entered the bakery. The absurd cheerfulness of it seemed to Sarah almost insulting.
In the car Dante admitted that the Moretti business had not always carried only legal cargo. His father had controlled docks through favors, intimidation, and old debts. The papers called it the Moretti mafia; the family called it business. Dante had been twenty-six when he took over. He'd wanted to convert everything to legitimate shipping, but he had left Victor in charge of existing routes while he negotiated new contracts.
“I told myself there was a clean part and a dirty part,” he said. “As long as I grew the clean part, it would eventually replace the rest.”
“Did you believe that?”
“I wanted to.”
“That's not the same thing.”
He pulled into a parking space and turned off the engine. “I know.”
Sarah's feelings toward him would have been simpler if he were either the monster of the newspaper stories or the wounded widower she sometimes glimpsed over the girls' pancakes. He was neither. He was a man who could be gentle with his children and cowardly with his own conscience. She had known plenty of ordinary men like that. Most simply lacked the money to make their cowardice so expensive.
At home, Bella met them in the hallway with paint on her cheek. She'd made a picture of five people. Two were small and pink, one wore a black suit, one had brown hair, and the fifth floated over the roof on a cloud.
“Who's this?” Dante asked, pointing to the cloud.
“Mommy,” Bella said. “She's not lonely. We're telling her things.”
Dante crouched beside her. “What things?”
“That Sarah makes toast better than you.”
He laughed, then covered his face with his hand. Bella patted his shoulder, satisfied that the matter had been settled.
Later Lucia came to Sarah's room carrying a folded wool blanket. She claimed the heating was unreliable in the servants' wing, although Sarah had been perfectly warm.
“Do you know why the girls were so frightened at night?” Lucia asked.
“They've lost people. And they've had too many different caregivers. They don't always know who's coming back.”
Lucia sat carefully on the edge of the chair. “They used to be calm with Isabella. Then they watched everyone around them fall apart.”
Sarah didn't say that they might have learned their panic from the adults. Lucia seemed to know it already.
“Isabella was going to take them away for a while,” Lucia said. “Just for a few weeks. She asked me to find a house in Maine. I thought she was angry with Dante.”
“Was she?”
“Perhaps. But I think she was afraid of someone else.”
Lucia reached into her handbag and brought out a folded receipt from a roadside motel near Willow Road. It had been paid in cash. On the back was a number and a woman's first name: Lorraine.
“Isabella left this in my coat pocket on the morning she died. I didn't understand why until after the accident.”
“Why didn't you show it to Dante?”
Lucia looked toward the door. “Because Victor told me the police had already spoken to everyone.”
Sarah took the receipt. The paper smelled faintly of Lucia's perfume.
The phone number was disconnected, but Ellen found the name in a retired highway-dispatch employees' directory: Lorraine Beck, who had been on duty during Isabella's crash.
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When Sarah called, an older woman answered after eight rings. She listened to the name Isabella Moretti, and the line became so quiet Sarah thought she'd hung up.
Then Lorraine said, “I've been keeping something for her daughters. I was told I'd be killed if I ever showed it.”
