🕯️ WHAT CATHERINE KNEW

Chapter 06 - A Signature After Death

There were moments when the world corrected itself slowly, one reasonable explanation at a time. Luca kept looking for such an explanation now. Perhaps the date was an error. Perhaps Catherine had signed a different document and someone had attached the wrong page. Perhaps there had been a mistake so ordinary it could be repaired before he was forced to consider anything worse.

June laid the release beside the original death certificate. “The signature is suspicious. The notarial date is suspicious. Neither tells us who prepared it. We need the notary's journal, the transaction file, and the bank's records.”

Vanessa sat opposite them. She wore no diamonds and an ordinary navy coat. Luca noticed how much younger she looked without her careful makeup, and was irritated with himself for noticing.

“I know it looks as though I kept that document to protect my father,” she said. “I kept it because he told me it was proof he had made Catherine's problem go away. I thought if I held it, I might someday make him answer for something.”

“Why didn't you show anyone before now?” Teresa asked.

They were in her sitting room, at her insistence. Hannah had brought an extra chair for June and pulled the curtains half-open against the afternoon glare.

Vanessa rubbed the edge of her coat. “I was a coward. Then I was ashamed to admit it. The longer I waited, the more frightened I became of what I'd already done.”

Teresa considered her. “That is a description, not an excuse.”

“I know.”

A quiet settled over the room. It was not forgiveness. Luca had mistaken silence for forgiveness often enough to know the difference now.

June examined the original ledger page Catherine had left. Luca's signature, dated 2020, was genuine. On a later sheet, his name appeared again as approval for a loan guarantee supporting an acquisition by Bellini Property Recovery.

“You signed the guarantee,” June said.

“I remember the meeting. Renato told me a charitable group needed refinancing. My signature would give them a lower rate.”

“Did you read the terms?”

He gave a dry little laugh that made Teresa shut her eyes. “No.”

“Then we're not dealing only with a forgery. Your company participated in a financial arrangement that created the opportunity for the transfer.”

Luca thought of Catherine standing in his study one rainy afternoon with papers in her hand. She had asked him to examine a deed. He'd said it could wait until Monday. Later he had found her crying in the laundry room and assumed she was exhausted from work. He remembered kissing her hair and offering to take her somewhere for the weekend.

She had asked him for attention. He had offered her a vacation.

“I'm going to disclose my part,” he said.

“That may have consequences,” June replied. “You need your own counsel as well as the trust's independent counsel.”

“I know.”

“Do you?” Teresa asked, not cruelly. “You have never been as frightened of consequences as you should be.”

He looked at her. She smiled sadly. “Your father raised you to think protection meant that nobody could touch you. Catherine wanted you to understand that protection begins with what you refuse to touch.”

Later that day, Hannah found Teresa at the window watching the gardener cover the rosebushes against frost. Teresa was turning a brass key between her fingers.

“Eighteen Wentworth,” Hannah said.

“It doesn't open the front door,” Teresa replied. “I tried it when Catherine gave it to me. I thought she must have given me the wrong key.”

“Perhaps she wanted you to ask Rosa.”

“Perhaps she wanted me to use my brain.” Teresa gave a wry smile. “I haven't always obliged her.”

They returned to Blue Door House with the key and a notebook. Rosa took them to the sewing room. Its shelves held pattern books, tea tins, an old radio, and a narrow oak cabinet built into the wall beside a boarded-up fireplace.

“There was a cabinet there?” Teresa asked.

“Long before I moved in,” Rosa said. “Catherine had the lock replaced. Told me not to let the contractors touch it.”

The key turned with a little resistance. Inside lay a bundle of documents wrapped in oilcloth, a photograph of Teresa's mother standing on the house steps, and a letter in Catherine's hand marked NOT FOR LUCA YET.

Teresa sat at the sewing machine table. She had enough sense left to be afraid of that letter. She had been afraid of many things in her seventy-eight years; this was the first time she had allowed Hannah to see it plainly.

“Read the documents first,” she told June.

The papers contained the original trust deed, bearing the sale restriction omitted from Renato's certified copy. The property could be transferred only with the written approval of the resident board and the independent trustees. There was no such approval. Rosa's signature appeared on a blank voting record as though she had agreed to sell, though she insisted she had never been asked.

“Now the letter,” Teresa said.

June handed it to her. Catherine had written only two pages. The first described what she had found and the names of people she believed should be questioned. The second was personal.

Teresa read silently at first, then aloud: “I love Luca. But if he will not hear the people harmed by his business, I may have to leave the life we built. I can't stand beside him as decoration while women lose their homes.”

The room seemed to move a little around Luca. Catherine had considered leaving him. He could not blame her, and that made the knowledge no easier.

He remembered one argument in particular. She had come home after visiting a woman whose husband had died, a woman being asked to clear out an apartment where she had lived for thirty years. Catherine had told him the eviction was tied to one of his company’s subcontractors. Luca said he would have his office look at it. She had answered, “Your office has been looking at it for six months.” He had accused her of thinking everyone with money was wicked. She had replied, “No. I think some of them are too comfortable to notice what they pay for.”

He had walked out of that argument believing himself the injured party. The thought made him close his eyes.

Teresa continued. “Please don't give him this until the truth can stand on its own. He'll make my grief into an excuse to protect our name. Tell him I was not perfect, or brave every day. Tell him that I wanted him to be better than what he inherited.”

There was one more paragraph, a postscript written in darker ink. Teresa stopped reading. Hannah waited until the older woman could breathe.

“What's there?” Luca asked.