The Room With No Windows
Chapter 03 - The Room With No Windows
The room was beneath the east wing, beyond a pantry no one used and a narrow staircase that smelled of furniture polish and cold stone. Luca had been forbidden to play there as a child.
His father called it the records room, although for years it held little besides old account books and the elaborate lies of men who believed paper could make anything legitimate. There were no windows. There was, however, a small brass hook on the door where Olivia used to leave the blue scarf she wore in winter.
Michael kept his hand on the rail as they descended. “Olivia came down here about four months before the accident,” he said. “She was auditing the education trust. Voss told her the expenses had been approved by the trustees. She didn't believe him.” Luca remembered a week when Olivia scarcely spoke to him. He had assumed she was angry that he'd missed a school recital. He had been right about the anger and wrong about nearly everything else.
Ella waited upstairs with Noah and a cup of warm milk. She had refused the hot chocolate Claudia sent through a servant. “He doesn't need a reward for being frightened,” she'd said quietly. Luca found himself repeating the sentence while Michael searched through a box of keys. The thought that a young employee understood Noah better than his own father made him want to defend himself. He was beginning to recognize that impulse as an alarm, not an argument.
The records room was still furnished with a table, two filing cabinets, and a desk lamp with a green glass shade. The electrical outlet had been painted over. Dust lay along the cabinets, except for one drawer where someone had recently wiped the handle. Michael saw it too. “Voss told me these files were moved to his office,” he said. The drawer contained only a folder for architectural permits and a small yellow envelope with no name.
Inside the envelope was a photograph of Olivia in front of a brick building on the South Side. Beside her stood a group of women, some signing, some smiling toward a camera. One of them was a younger Francesca Moretti, Luca's mother. Francesca had moved to Arizona five years earlier after a bitter argument with Luca's father. Luca had not called her in eighteen months. He looked at the back of the picture, where Olivia had written: THE WINDOWS WE PROMISED THEM.
“I thought that was the community center,” Luca said. Michael nodded. “St. Agnes Annex. Olivia wanted to turn it into a bilingual center for Deaf children and their families. Not a residential school. She said children needed people around them who would learn their language, not people who would take them away for speaking it.” The difference made Luca feel ill. A school that took Noah from home was being paid from a fund created to make families closer.
Michael unlocked the second cabinet. Someone had cleared it in a hurry. A broken red seal clung to one hinge, and an inventory page remained caught behind a shelf. Luca read the list aloud: lease agreements, donor correspondence, special education planning, and an audit memorandum. Under the date of the last meeting appeared an initialed notation: H.V. TO REVIEW WITH C.B. Claudia Bellini. Luca read it twice. Claudia had insisted she never knew Olivia, that they'd entered his life on opposite sides of an unbridgeable grief.
The photograph bothered Luca. St. Agnes had stood on a street he used to drive past without looking at the boarded windows, an old parish building abandoned after its school closed. Olivia had once asked him to come inside with her. He'd said he would after an appointment, and by the time he finished she had already gone home.
She had told him later about a mother who took two buses to reach a class where she could learn to talk with her daughter. Luca had nodded from the other side of a newspaper. Now those people existed in the room with him, not as figures on a grant request but as families who had waited for doors that never opened.
They heard footsteps overhead. Ben's voice, then another man's: Howard Voss. The lawyer had arrived without being summoned. “I brought the documents you asked for,” he called down the stairwell. His polished shoes remained visible at the landing. Luca looked at Michael. Nobody had told Voss about the records room. “Set them on the table upstairs,” Luca answered. “And don't leave.” Voss's shoes remained still for a moment too long.
In the lowest drawer Michael found a notebook in Olivia's handwriting. It was a domestic object, its pages dotted with grocery lists and the little drawings she used to teach Luca signs. On one page she'd drawn Noah, then four hands around a dinner table. Underneath she'd written: EVERYONE GETS A VOICE HERE, EVEN IF NOBODY HEARS IT.
Between the pages lay a folded bank letter with three canceled payments, each made to a company called Alder Educational Services. One payment was dated before the school had allegedly opened.
“Why didn't you give this to me?” Luca asked. Michael looked at him with something close to anger. “She did. Olivia put a package on your desk. You returned it to Voss and told her to stop turning your home into a board meeting.” Luca remembered the package: a blue folder, a rainy Thursday, Olivia in his doorway wearing an old cardigan.
He had been on the phone with a man who could make or break a port contract. He had not even looked up.
Luca folded the letter carefully. “I want an independent auditor here tomorrow. I want Voss's access canceled tonight.” Michael said that revoking the lawyer's authority could trigger the company's governance provisions. “Then let it trigger them.” Outside the basement door, a soft noise interrupted them: the click of a camera shutter. Ben called out, and footsteps retreated up the stairs. Someone had been standing where they could hear every word.
They caught no one in the passage. The kitchen was full of staff clearing plates; Claudia's guests had been quietly escorted out. Voss stood beside the coat closet, speaking into a phone he ended when he saw Luca. “There is one thing you need to understand,” he said. “Not every document in that room was meant for you.” Luca held up the photograph. “Who authorized the transfer from Olivia's trust?”
Voss's eyes moved to the picture of the women. “Ask your mother,” he said. “Her signature is on the first authorization.”
May you like
Luca's mother had not been involved in the trust for years. He knew that much. But when he called Francesca, an unfamiliar woman answered her phone and said, in a brisk voice, “Mrs. Moretti is on her way to Chicago.
She was told her grandson is being sent away.”
