The Son Nobody Mentioned
Chapter 05 - The Son Nobody Mentioned
Rosa insisted on telling the story at the kitchen table rather than in the library. “People tell fewer lies when there's bread in front of them,” she said, and brought out a loaf of yesterday's ciabatta.
Vincent's son, Bruno Rinaldi, had been a small, anxious boy who collected stamps. At seventeen he had fallen in with men who stole cars. At twenty-three he served eighteen months for fraud, and by thirty he was the sort of man people stopped introducing at weddings. Dominic remembered him vaguely from summer cookouts, always smoking at the edge of the lawn.
“Vincent told me Bruno moved to Arizona,” Rosa said. “I gave him the ring when he was twelve. It belonged to my father. I never asked for it back.”
“That doesn't prove it's Bruno,” Dominic said.
“I know what it proves. I also know how he held his shoulders when he was frightened.”
Emma stared at the photograph. “He visited us three times. The first time he said he'd come to fix the heater. The second time he waited outside Sophie's preschool. The third time he left a card under our door.”
“Why didn't you tell the school?” Dominic asked.
“I did. They changed the pickup rules. Then the director told me a lawyer had called, saying Sophie was part of a family custody dispute.”
Dominic looked toward the breakfast room. The boy in the family photograph had become a man accused of theft. The little girl cutting strawberries at his kitchen counter had become a bargaining chip without knowing it.
“There's no custody dispute,” he said.
“Not yet.” Emma's voice sharpened. “I've spent five years keeping her away from it.”
Rosa pressed a slice of bread into Emma's hand. Emma did not eat it.
Dominic wanted to promise that no one would ever touch Sophie. He had made promises like that before, to people who later asked why he hadn't been present when it mattered. This time he asked what Emma wanted.
“A lawyer I choose,” she said. “A safe place for us to live. And the right to decide what Sophie is told.”
“You have all three.”
“We'll see.”
By afternoon Judith Vale had come to the mansion carrying a canvas tote and an expression of mild impatience. She reviewed the title records at the dining table while Sophie made another appointment book for the spa. Judith glanced at the pink bows littering the mantelpiece but made no comment.
“Lakepoint Holdings,” she said at last, “was incorporated by Vincent's attorney three weeks after Matteo died. The trust deed required consent from at least two independent trustees before a sale. Yet the county filing includes only Dominic's signature and that of a trustee who had resigned the previous year.”
“A forgery?” Dominic asked.
“Perhaps. More importantly, the notary's journal has been reported lost. That doesn't happen quite as often as people would like you to think.”
Emma had brought a thin notebook from her apartment. Its cover was cracked, its pages filled with ordinary numbers in her tidy handwriting. She laid it beside the lawyer's papers.
“These are the payments the Harbor House women made,” she explained. “I copied them when I realized the office computer had been wiped.”
Judith turned a few pages, pausing at the dates. “Do you have bank statements to match?”
“Not all of them. Mrs. Ortiz kept receipts. She's still at Harbor House.”
“Then we'd better speak with her.”
Before leaving, Emma asked Rosa to keep Sophie away from the front windows. Rosa offered to tell the child they were going shopping. Emma shook her head.
“Tell her we're checking old records,” she said. “She won't understand all of it, but I don't want to teach her that everybody lies when something is frightening.”
Rosa accepted the correction. It was a small moment, easily missed, and Emma later remembered it as the first time the older woman had stopped trying to manage the truth for everyone else.
Dominic offered his car. Emma refused it. She wanted to see the building without arriving like an official inspection, and Judith agreed. They left in the lawyer's old blue sedan with one unobtrusive security car following a block behind.
Harbor House stood near the river between a tire shop and a vacant lot. The front brick had darkened over decades of Chicago winters. A rosebush grew stubbornly through a crack in the fence. On the door hung a notice announcing a redevelopment information session for residents.
Inside, the common room smelled of coffee and furniture polish. Three older women sat sorting donated sweaters into cardboard boxes. One of them rose when Emma entered.
“Sweetheart,” Elena Ortiz said, taking Emma's face in both hands. She was seventy-three, her white hair pinned beneath a scarf. “I heard you lost your job.”
“I didn't,” Emma said. “Not exactly.”
“That's what people say when they don't want you to worry.”
Elena looked at Judith, then at Dominic, who had followed them despite Emma's objections. Her eyes narrowed. “I know that family.”
“Mrs. Ortiz,” Dominic began.
“Don't start with an apology unless you know what you're apologizing for.”
He stopped. Something in her bluntness reminded him of his grandmother.
Elena had pressed shirts in a laundry for thirty-two years. After her husband died, she set aside twenty dollars from each paycheck for Harbor House. Some months she skipped buying a winter coat. Emma remembered her saying that the greatest luxury in old age was closing a door and knowing she would never have to ask a landlord for permission to stay.
Elena spread a series of receipts across the table. Each showed a monthly payment into the Harbor House Resident Equity Fund. For twenty years, women had contributed a little at a time in exchange for lifetime occupancy rights. Some had paid with checks. Some had saved cash in envelopes from pension payments.
“Your brother came here,” Elena told Dominic. “He sat where you're sitting and listened. He said someone was making our names disappear from the official book.”
“Did he show you proof?”
“He brought a copy of the first ledger. I put it someplace safe.”
“Where?”
Elena glanced toward the building's stairwell. A door at the far end had been painted shut years ago. “Behind the sewing-room wall. But last Tuesday some men came from the redevelopment company. Said there was mold. They sealed the whole floor.”
Emma got up too quickly, knocking her chair against the table.
Elena caught her wrist. “Wait. There's something else. Matteo made me promise I'd give you this if you ever came asking questions.”
From her cardigan pocket she drew a narrow strip of paper, folded into eighths. It contained a bank routing number and three initials: R.R., V.R., and D.R.
May you like
Dominic recognized his own initials last.
Then Elena said, “The money was moved before the fire, dear. And someone used your account to do it.”
