The Houses Nobody Could Find
Chapter 05 - The Houses Nobody Could Find
Nicholas had called Luca every Sunday for years, usually to discuss the Bears or an aunt's troublesome hip. Hearing that familiar voice on Catherine's recorder was like discovering a stranger had been living in his childhood home. The voice was patient at first: *You don't understand the arrangements, Cat.* Then lower: *Don't put Grace in the middle of this.*
Luca stopped the playback before the conversation ended. Eleanor was watching him. He had always taken pride in not showing emotion to men who wanted something from him. It turned out showing it to people who loved him was considerably harder.
“Play the rest,” Eleanor said.
Catherine's voice trembled but stayed clear. She said St. Anne's Haven had applied for emergency repairs and been denied, while payments went to Northlake Properties for renovations at buildings that appeared to have no tenants. Nicholas told her there were permits and confidential arrangements. She answered, “I went to the address. It's a parking lot.”
There was a scraping sound and then Catherine said, “If any of this touches Luca, you need to tell me now.”
Nicholas replied, “You've already made it touch him.”
The file ended. Neither threatened the other outright. That made the conversation more frightening. Luca could hear the moment Catherine understood that the people around her had been moving in one direction for a long time, and she had just stepped into their path.
Miriam sent a copy of the recording to an independent forensic examiner and placed the original in secure storage. “Don't confront Nicholas again,” she told Luca. “If the files are real, you need a clean trail. There may be a criminal investigation, and you don't want anything you do to compromise it.”
Luca almost said that in his world men settled things without waiting for investigators. He thought of Grace folding blue circles on the rug and swallowed the sentence. There were different ways of being powerful. Some of them required patience.
Two days later, he visited St. Anne's Haven with Emily. The building stood behind a gas station on the west side, its brick walls dark with winter. A faded sign promised temporary accommodation, counseling and help with employment. Inside, six rooms had been closed because the roof leaked. The director, Ruth Malloy, was a woman of sixty-four who wore sneakers with her wool skirts and had no interest in pretending money could be replaced by apologies.
“Catherine used to bring us groceries herself,” Ruth said, leading them past plastic tubs collecting water. “Not for photographs. Half the time she came in sweatpants. She remembered the kids' names.”
Luca felt that old stab: evidence of a woman who existed beyond the version of her he had kept in his memory.
“How much are you owed?” he asked.
Ruth handed him a folder. “On paper? Nothing. We received notice that the emergency repairs were completed two years ago. The insurance company says we signed the acceptance. I can show you the ceiling if you'd like a second opinion.”
The acceptance bore Ruth's signature. She looked at it with contempt. “I did not sign that.”
Emily asked how the rooms had stayed open. Ruth explained that local churches helped, that a retired electrician came without charging, that the women living there repainted the nursery themselves. None of the people who'd received the public praise had made the journey to inspect the building.
Luca was quiet during the drive back. He had acquired restaurants, warehouses, a shipping company. He had paid architects more than St. Anne's annual budget to choose the right stone for a staircase. Catherine had been asking him to look at a roof.
“What are you thinking?” Emily asked, then colored. “Sorry, sir. That isn't my place.”
“You asked a question,” he said. “I should get used to answering those.”
She glanced out the window. “I think she wanted the money to do something ordinary. Keep water off sleeping children. Sometimes ordinary is the hardest thing to get rich people to notice.”
He looked at her. “You knew about St. Anne's?”
“My mother and I stayed there for eleven nights when I was nine.” Emily's hands folded tightly in her lap. “We had nowhere else. I remember a woman who came in with groceries and read aloud because the lights were out in our room. I didn't know until I saw the photograph in your study that it was Catherine.”
Luca breathed out slowly. He had hired Emily from a staffing agency with good references. Catherine's life had reached into his home again without his knowing.
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“You've never asked me anything about myself,” she replied. There was no malice in it. Only a plain account of the facts.
At home Grace was waiting at the breakfast table with Eleanor. Luca had made the promised breakfasts for three days now. He was beginning to suspect that love was less like an oath and more like setting an alarm you actually obeyed.
Grace showed him a school drawing of four people standing in a garden. Three had names. The fourth was an empty outline labeled *MOMMY*. Luca tried not to stare at it as though a child had handed him the entire measure of his failures.
“I think we should put one of Mommy's pictures in here,” he said.
“You said it made you sad.”
“It does.” He took her hand. “We can be sad together. It's better than pretending.”
That evening Miriam called. The bank records had exposed a connection between Northlake Property Holdings and Nicholas. But the ultimate beneficiary of several transfers had not been Nicholas himself. They led to a trust administered by Martin Bellini, the lawyer who was also Vanessa's uncle.
In the same packet was a recent invoice for legal services: preparation of a private boarding arrangement for a nine-year-old child, and a separate review of the suitability of Eleanor Bennett as an unsupervised caregiver.
May you like
Luca looked toward the dining room where Grace was reading with Eleanor. He had thought the struggle was over money already stolen. The paperwork suggested someone was preparing to steal something else.
Then Miriam read the final line of the invoice aloud: “Client authorized a placement to begin the morning after the Moretti–Bellini wedding.”
