✉️ THE LETTERS VANESSA HID

Chapter 03 - Mercy House

I expected Luca to call his lawyers and forget the people who lived in the building. Powerful men were very good at turning human problems into conference calls.

Instead he took off his jacket, asked Rosa if she had eaten, and drove us to Mercy House himself.

It was close to midnight when we reached the South Side. The river smelled of wet iron, and the windows of the old brick building glowed above a crooked row of shrubs. A plastic Christmas wreath hung from the entrance although it was October. Somebody had forgotten to take it down the previous winter, and nobody had had the heart to remind them.

Rosa pressed a hand to the car window.

“I told them I would be back by ten.”

“Who?” Luca asked.

“Everyone.”

He parked beside the curb. There were no reporters, no drivers, no bodyguards. Just a man who owned enough of Chicago to make other men nervous and an elderly woman worried about being late for tea.

Inside, the hall smelled of boiled vegetables and lavender floor cleaner. A bulletin board was covered with birthday cards, grocery lists, and a handwritten notice asking whoever had borrowed the good scissors to return them.

Mrs. Phelps, the night supervisor, looked from Luca to Rosa and nearly dropped her keys.

“Is something wrong?”

“Quite a few things,” Rosa said. “But I brought somebody who needs to see them.”

The twenty-three residents weren't asleep. Several had packed boxes in their rooms. Cardboard stood beside walkers and family photographs. A man named Walter kept his hearing aids in a jam jar so he wouldn't lose them in the confusion.

I followed Luca through the small common room. He stopped before a shelf of chipped mugs. Each had a name written underneath in black marker.

“My father bought this building?” he asked.

“He paid for the roof and the boilers,” Rosa answered. “The people paid for everything that made it a home.”

A woman in a green sweater came out of the kitchenette. She recognized Luca immediately but didn't smile.

“My husband worked thirty-eight years at your docks,” she said. “I don't want money. I want the room I was promised.”

“What is your name?” he asked.

“Eileen Hart.”

“Mrs. Hart, I did not approve your removal.”

“I've heard that sort of thing before.”

He took the rebuke without protesting. Later, I would remember that as the moment I began to think he might be different from his father.

The residents showed us their notices. They were printed on Bellini Capital letterhead, signed by Edward Baines, giving seventy-two hours to accept relocation to an unfamiliar facility outside the city. Luca read one twice.

“There's a paragraph saying refusal forfeits benefits,” he said.

Eileen nodded. “That's why I've been packing. I can't afford to lose my medicine.”

Luca put the paper down. “No one will lose benefits because they refuse to leave this weekend. I'll put that in writing.”

“And if your people don't listen?” she asked.

“Then you'll call me.”

He wrote his private number on the back of her notice. Walter wanted the same number. Then three other people did. By the time he'd finished, there was a small queue of elderly men and women holding pieces of paper before the head of a criminal empire. Luca signed each one with a black pen borrowed from the supervisor's desk.

Rosa watched with wet eyes.

In the kitchen, I found the old blue cabinet where my mother had kept recipe cards. The door still stuck in damp weather. A handwritten label said JUNE'S THINGS. I touched it, and for a moment I couldn't make my fingers move.

“Emma?” Luca stood behind me.

“My mother used to complain nobody sharpened the knives.”

“Did she?”

“She kept a whetstone in the bottom drawer. Said dull knives were more dangerous because they taught careless habits.”

I opened the drawer. The whetstone was still there, wrapped in a faded dish towel.

For five years I had avoided this kitchen. I was afraid there would be nothing of her left in it. Finding that ridiculous stone almost undid me.

Luca stepped back to give me space.

“Take your time.”

We found her recipes tied with string, along with a thin envelope addressed in her small angular script: For Emma, when someone finally asks the right question.

I had never seen it before.

Mrs. Phelps came to the door. “Your mother gave me that just before she went into the hospital. She said you'd know when to open it. I thought she meant when you turned thirty, so I kept it safe.”

I held the envelope against my chest. “Why didn't you tell me?”

“She said not to, sweetheart. Your mother could be stubborn.”

“Yes,” I said. “She could.”

I couldn't open it with Luca watching. I asked him to wait outside and read it alone beneath the kitchen's yellow fluorescent light.

There was a single sheet and a photograph. The photograph showed my father outside the docks on a rainy night, standing beside Carlo Moretti and Edward Baines. All three wore coats. Nobody was smiling. A date on the back was six days after the Ash Wharf fire.

My mother's note was brief.

Emma, if the truth ever finds you, please don't mistake my silence for cowardice. Your father took the blame to keep someone alive. I wanted to tell you, but he begged me not to. There's proof in the place where Carlo kept the red account books. Rosa knows the place. And be careful of the man who says he is protecting the Moretti boy. He has been protecting himself for years.

I read it four times.

When I looked up, Rosa was standing in the doorway, holding her cardigan closed at the throat.

“You found June's letter,” she said.

“Where did Carlo keep the red account books?”

Rosa looked toward the hall where Luca was talking to Eileen.

“In the house your father helped build. The one nobody uses now.”

“What house?”

“The old watchman's cottage on Ash Wharf.”

I turned over the photograph again. A fourth person stood in the background beneath an umbrella, too indistinct to identify. There was something strange about the coat, the posture, the familiar way one hand held the umbrella handle.

Rosa touched the picture and began to cry.

“June was right,” she whispered. “But she didn't know the worst of it.”

“What didn't she know?”