Fifty Empty Places
Chapter 03 - Fifty Empty Places
At one in the morning, the chandeliers were dark. The mansion looked less imposing without its visitors, its silence full of the ordinary sounds of plumbing and rain. Emma stood by the kitchen sink, holding a cup of tea she could no longer drink.
Luca came in without his jacket. The tattoos on his hands were visible now, dark marks above an expensive wristwatch. He found a clean cup and poured coffee from a pot that had been sitting too long. Neither of them mentioned its smell.
“Your grandmother taught you Italian?” he asked.
“Yes. My mother's mother. She called it the language for things you didn't want the neighbors to hear.”
“She sounds formidable.”
“She was. She once argued a parking ticket down to a warning while holding a birthday cake.”
He smiled for an instant. Emma hadn't expected that.
“Marco told Helen the June meeting was supposed to satisfy a clause in the Bell House charter,” he said. “Fifty founding members, present in person, before the property can be sold. He signed the catering record so there'd be independent proof they were all there.”
“And no one was?”
“No meeting took place. Helen is checking the records. At least nineteen names on that list belong to people who have died.”
Emma set her cup down. Her mother had not only been remembered incorrectly. Someone had borrowed her name for a lie, confident that no one would come to defend it.
“What happens to the sale?” she asked.
“It may be void. It depends on the original charter and what's already been recorded.”
“Do you own Bell House?”
“My family's foundation does. I am its chairman on paper.” He stared at the black surface of his coffee. “I haven't attended a meeting in years. My uncle Dominic handles it.”
Emma had met Dominic Moretti twice. He was sixty, charming in the practiced manner of men who make other people laugh before asking for favors. He sent Christmas baskets to the staff and never remembered anyone's name. At Luca's engagement announcement, he had described Vanessa as 'the sensible match' within Emma's hearing.
“Would your uncle know about the sale?” she asked.
“He signed the authorization as trustee.”
Luca's phone rang. A car had arrived at Marco's restaurant in New Haven. There was no threat written on the note left under its windshield wiper, only a photograph of Marco's daughter Nora leading her sons through a school gate.
Marco was seated in the breakfast room when Luca and Emma found him. He had changed into the gray sweater he kept in his car, which made him look suddenly older.
“I don't want anyone hurt,” he said before Luca could speak.
“Neither do I.” Luca sat across from him. “Tell me who gave you the form.”
Marco rubbed a thumb over an old burn on his wrist. “Vanessa brought it to Cielo. She told me it had already been approved. I said I couldn't sign for food I hadn't served. Two days later, Nora's landlord told her the rent was going up eight hundred dollars. Then the boys lost their spots at the after-school program. Every time I refused, something else happened.”
“You think Vanessa arranged all that?”
“I thought she did.”
“Thought?”
Marco took a breath. “The last warning came from Dominic's office. A man called and told me I should be grateful this was only a paperwork problem.”
Luca went still. He was quiet for so long that Emma heard the little kitchen clock on the other side of the wall.
“My uncle?” he said at last.
“I didn't want to believe it.”
“Neither did I.”
By morning Helen had contacted an outside forensic accountant, an attorney who handled charitable trusts, and Nora herself. She advised Luca not to confront Dominic without securing the documents first. Luca obeyed her, though Emma could tell obedience cost him.
There were also calls to be made to people Luca had once depended on for less respectable work. Emma heard only fragments as she carried laundry through the hallway: a warehouse, a debt, a man who should be left alone. Her stomach tightened. She had no illusions about the Moretti name. This was not merely a family with expensive rooms and terrible manners.
At nine, Nora Santori arrived at the servants' entrance with a canvas bag and the hollow-eyed look of a mother who had hardly slept. She was thirty-two, dark-haired like her father, her nails bitten close. Luca sent security to sit in the driveway while Helen spoke to her privately. Emma made scrambled eggs because the woman said she had forgotten breakfast.
“I brought something,” Nora said after a few bites. “Dad told me not to. But there's a limit to how frightened you can be before you get angry.”
From her bag she took a photograph of an old woman holding a baby on the steps of a brick building with a blue door.
Emma recognized the woman first. “That's Mrs. Moretti.”
Nora nodded. “The baby is me. She helped my father when he opened Cielo. My mother was sick, and we had nowhere to live. Bell House took us in for two months.”
Luca reached for the photograph, then stopped himself. “I was nine when she did that. I remember her being out every Wednesday.”
“She wasn't shopping,” Nora said.
Emma saw the shame in his face. As a child he had believed his mother preferred strangers to him. Perhaps adults had let him believe it because explaining would have been inconvenient.
Nora unzipped a smaller pocket and took out a brass key threaded with a narrow white ribbon. The number eight was engraved near its teeth.
“Dad kept this after Mrs. Moretti died. She gave it to him with instructions he never understood. He thought it opened something at Bell House. He tried every door.”
“Why bring it now?” Luca asked.
“Because the man who warned Dad about the paperwork came into Cielo last week. He told him to get rid of anything Sofia Moretti had left behind. He didn't mention the key, but my father went pale.”
Emma turned it in her hand. The ribbon had once been white, but age had yellowed it to the color of old cream. Sofia had tied a tiny square knot, the same neat knot shown in a photo on the mantel of Luca's study.
Nora looked at Emma. “There's one more thing. After Mom died, my father told me that Mrs. Moretti made him promise to give the key to Bianca Reed if the foundation ever stopped helping women.”
“Bianca died in 2020,” Emma said.
“I know.” Nora's voice broke. “Dad has been trying to find her daughter.”
Emma stared down at the key, unable to make her fingers close around it.
“Why didn't he give it to me at the dinner?”
“Because he was afraid Vanessa would see.”
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At the end of the corridor, a door opened. Dominic Moretti stepped into the kitchen, his coat still wet from the rain, and fixed his eyes on the brass key in Emma's hand.
“I wondered,” he said, “where Sofia had hidden that.”
