A Petition in His Name
Chapter 03 - A Petition in His Name
Hannah heard Teresa awake at four that morning. There was a soft knocking from the bedroom, the particular sound of a glass set down carelessly by a hand that had begun to shake with age.
“Did I wake you?” Teresa asked when Hannah entered.
“No, ma'am.”
“That's a kind lie. Catherine used to tell that sort.”
Hannah brought tea without asking whether Teresa wanted it. At seventy-eight, the older woman disliked being questioned about every small appetite, as though appetite itself required permission.
Hannah had learned the difference between concern and supervision after seeing what happened when two nurses visited during Teresa’s winter illness. One had asked what she wanted for breakfast. The other had told her. Teresa had eaten neither meal. When Hannah mentioned the story, Teresa laughed so hard she had to set down her tea. “There comes a day,” she said, “when people mistake your patience for consent. I have never been particularly patient.”
Teresa sat by her dressing table studying a photograph of herself at thirty, holding Luca as a newborn. Her husband stood beside her with one hand on the baby's head and the other in his pocket. Hannah knew the photograph. She had dusted its frame every Thursday for almost a year.
“I've been accused of forgetting things,” Teresa said. “Perhaps I have. Names, certainly. Where I left my glasses. But people confuse an old woman's hesitation with uncertainty about what happened. Those are not the same.”
“Who accused you?”
Teresa handed her a folded document. A petition for guardianship and an emergency medical evaluation, submitted to the probate court, described Teresa as impaired and vulnerable to financial manipulation. The signature on the second page read Luca Moretti.
Hannah had seen Luca sign the household payroll. His L fell almost sideways, followed by an impatient slash. The signature on the petition was neat, almost ceremonial.
“He didn't sign this,” Hannah said.
“No. But somebody wants a judge to think I shouldn't be believed.”
Hannah photographed the document with Teresa's permission and asked whether she could show Luca. Teresa hesitated only long enough to fold the tissue from her tea cup.
“I hired you because you remind me of your mother,” she said. “But I kept you because you don't treat me like a helpless old woman. Take it to him.”
Hannah's mother, Ellen Collins, had cleaned offices and mended dresses to support two children. She had worked for Catherine at a neighborhood legal clinic, a fact Hannah had mentioned at her interview and never discussed afterward. It was easier not to talk about the dead in a house where grief occupied rooms no one acknowledged.
Luca returned from Blue Door House with an old pair of gloves in his pocket and a legal notice folded so tightly the paper had softened along its creases. Hannah met him in the corridor, outside the paintings his father had bought when he was rich enough to pretend he understood them.
He read the guardianship petition without speaking.
“This was filed three weeks ago,” he said.
“Yes.”
“Why didn't my mother tell me?”
“She received it yesterday. Someone delivered it to the old address first.”
“Who was the lawyer?”
“Judith Sloane.”
Luca knew the name. Sloane had drafted property agreements for Bellini Holdings and occasionally for his uncle Renato. He took the petition into his study, called an independent attorney named June Park, and asked her to check the court docket. He spoke to Hannah as she reached the door.
“You said your mother knew Catherine.”
“She repaired coats for her clinic. Sometimes she carried boxes. They were friends.”
“Did she know anything about Blue Door House?”
Hannah took a moment. “She went there after Catherine died. More than once. She said a promise doesn't expire because the person you made it to is gone.”
“Would she speak to me?”
“She died last spring.”
He apologized. She nodded once, accustomed to the way condolences made strangers look past her eyes.
June Park arrived that afternoon, wearing flat shoes and carrying a folder so thin Luca feared it held nothing useful. It held quite enough.
“The petition isn't properly served yet,” June said. “We can contest it. But this isn't an error. Someone has attached fabricated physician notes. One doctor named here hasn't practiced in Illinois in six years.”
“Can you prove the signature isn't mine?”
“I can begin. More important, your mother is entitled to her own representation. Don't make this another conversation where men decide what is best for Teresa Moretti.”
He had the grace to wince. “Can you speak to her?”
“If she asks me to.”
Teresa did. Within an hour she had instructed June more decisively than Luca ever had. She wanted the petition dismissed, the leases preserved, and every beneficiary located. She refused Luca's offer to replace the trust's missing money with a check.
Teresa also insisted on signing her own instructions. June gave her a pen and watched without helping as she wrote the date. Her hand shook enough that the last number strayed below the line, but the words were unmistakable. “I would prefer an ugly signature of my own to a perfect one belonging to somebody else,” Teresa said. Luca kept that sentence with him longer than any of June’s legal advice.
“You keep wanting to pay your way out of knowing,” she told him. “Money may fix a roof. It will not tell you who broke it.”
That evening Vanessa returned to collect clothes. Luca found her upstairs, carefully folding silk blouses into a suitcase. It might have been an ordinary departure after an ordinary quarrel if not for the room's terrible quiet.
“You knew about the petition,” he said.
“No.”
“Judith Sloane is your father's lawyer.”
“She does work for half the city.”
He placed Catherine's folded business card on the bed. Vanessa looked at it with such sudden longing that Luca nearly believed her next words before she spoke them.
“Catherine called me the night she died,” she said. “I tried to get her to wait until morning.”
“For what?”
“To meet someone she trusted.” Vanessa closed the suitcase. “Someone inside your family.”
“Who?”
“I never saw his face. But I heard the arrangement. Eleven o'clock, the service entrance. She thought he was bringing documents.”
Luca tried to imagine which relative Catherine could have trusted when she distrusted everybody else. Renato. Perhaps Marco, who had guarded their house since Luca was twenty-two.
Vanessa opened her handbag, found an old receipt, and pushed it toward him. At the bottom was a handwritten telephone number, labeled G.
“Who is G?” he asked.
“I didn't ask. I was frightened of the answer.”
May you like
Before Luca could press her, his phone lit up. June Park had sent a photograph from the court record: the person who paid the filing fee for Teresa's guardianship petition had used a corporate card issued to Moretti Family Holdings.
And the card belonged to the one man Luca had never thought to question: his own security chief, Marco.
