266.🗝️ WHAT THE MARBLE HID

Chapter 01 - The Place She Was Told to Clean

By the time Luca Moretti came down the staircase, Claire Rowan had been scrubbing the same square of marble for forty-three minutes.

She knew because the grandfather clock had struck seven while she was on her knees, and it was nearly a quarter to eight now. The water in her bucket had gone gray. A damp rag lay twisted in her right hand. Her left leg, tucked beneath her, had swollen so badly that the seam of her stocking pressed into the skin. Dirt from the service courtyard darkened her knuckles.

The stain was the size of a dinner plate. Burgundy wine, Isabella said. Claire had cleaned enough houses to know wine did not leave a dark half-moon beneath marble, and enough of this particular house to know that pointing it out would make matters worse.

Above her, the chandeliers shone on three floors of polished stone. A pianist was playing softly in the drawing room for guests who had not yet arrived. Rain rattled the tall windows. All that money, and still there were drafts beneath the doors.

“What are you doing on the floor?”

Luca's voice came from the foot of the stairs. She had heard him give orders to men twice his size, but never raise it. Now it sounded more tired than stern.

“Cleaning, sir.” She reached for the bucket. Pain shot through her shin, and her hand missed the handle.

He saw that. His gaze went to the leg she was trying to hide. Luca Moretti was thirty-nine, dressed for his engagement dinner in a black suit and tie, the knot a little crooked. The newspapers called him a businessman. Men who worked the river docks used other words, always quietly.

He descended the last two steps and crouched. “Show me.”

“It's nothing.”

“Claire.” He stopped himself from reaching for her. “May I look?”

Before she could answer, heels clicked across the marble.

“She fell in the pantry,” Isabella Vescari said. The red satin of her gown caught the candlelight. Diamonds flashed at her throat. “I've told her to rest, but you know how stubborn the staff can be.”

Luca looked up. “I asked her.”

For one fleeting moment Isabella's smile slipped. Claire noticed because she had spent six weeks learning exactly when that smile was real. It was real for photographers and old women at charity luncheons. It was never real in the servants' corridor.

“Then ask,” Isabella said pleasantly. “We're already late.”

Claire pulled back her stocking. The skin below her knee was purple, the center almost black. She had tried not to look at it herself.

“That isn't a fall,” Luca said.

“It was an accident,” Claire managed.

“Those aren't quite the same thing.” He leaned back on his heels. “What happened in the pantry?”

Claire heard a small noise from Isabella, hardly more than a breath. It was enough to take her back an hour: the pantry door closing, an older woman trying to speak, Isabella's fingers clamped around Claire's arm, a heavy brass flour canister falling hard against her shin.

She could still smell the orange peels in the older woman's coat pocket.

“I wasn't alone,” Claire whispered.

Isabella folded her arms. “Think carefully before you answer.”

Luca stood. He did not move quickly, yet somehow he was between Isabella and Claire before either woman had changed position.

“Go into the drawing room,” he told his fiancée.

“You're humiliating me in front of the servants.”

“Then let's not make it worse.”

Isabella looked at Claire for a long moment. At last she turned away, the long red dress whispering over the marble. At the archway she paused. “Dinner is in twenty minutes, Luca. The Vescari family is expecting us.”

“The Vescari family can wait.”

When she was gone, he called for the housekeeper. Teresa Bellini appeared almost at once, though Claire had not heard her approach. Sixty-three, sturdy, with silver hair pinned so tightly it never came loose, Teresa ran the house by remembering what everyone else preferred to forget.

“Please bring a chair,” Luca said. “And ask Dr. Heller to come.”

Teresa's eyes dropped to Claire's leg. The color left her face, but she said only, “Of course.”

Claire wanted to tell him not to summon a doctor. Doctors wrote things down. Written things brought questions, and questions reached people who had made it clear they could reach her mother.

Instead she said, “I can't afford to lose this job.”

Luca gave her a puzzled look, as if the possibility had not occurred to him. “You're not losing it because you're hurt.”

“That isn't what I meant.”

He understood just enough to be quiet.

Claire studied his hands, broad and carefully kept, a faint white scar over one knuckle. It bothered her that he asked permission before touching an injury. Cruel men were easier to account for when they behaved cruelly all the time.

“Why this spot?” he asked, looking at the stain.

“Miss Vescari said it had to be clean before the guests arrived.”

He ran a finger near the edge of the dark crescent. A thin crack followed the border of the stone, almost invisible beneath the wax. He frowned. “That stain looks old.”

“She said I'd put it there.”

“And did you?”

“No.”

“Then you should have told me.”

Claire stared at him. “When?”

It was a simple question. He had no answer. He had been in Chicago for eleven days, then at the office, then in conference calls. A woman could disappear from this house for a week and he might hear about it only when the flowers weren't changed.

Teresa returned with a chair. Luca helped Claire up without pulling her injured leg. Claire sat with one hand on the velvet armrest, suddenly ashamed of how grateful she felt.

The housekeeper knelt to collect the rag. “I'll finish this,” she said.

“No,” Claire said, much too sharply.

Teresa looked at her. Something wordless passed between them.

Luca noticed. “What is underneath that tile?”

“Nobody has lifted these floors since your grandfather's time,” Teresa replied.

“That wasn't my question.”

She straightened slowly. “I don't know, Mr. Moretti.”

Across the hall, a gust of wind shook rain against the glass. Claire remembered the older woman turning in the pantry, gray hair escaping a wool cap, her face lined and frightened but unmistakably familiar from a photograph in Luca's study. A photograph everyone said showed a dead woman.

“Mr. Moretti,” Claire said, “there's something else.”

Teresa gripped the rag. “Claire, darling—”

“I saw a woman in the pantry. Isabella wouldn't let her leave until she'd given her something.”

Luca's expression hardened. “What woman?”

Claire watched the housekeeper close her eyes. That frightened her more than Isabella's threat.

“She told me to pass on a message,” Claire said. “She said you would think I was lying.”

“What message?”

Claire had traveled a long way to get inside this house, and until tonight she had believed the worst secret she might uncover involved stolen money.

“She said, 'Tell Luca his mother is alive.'”