Chapter 3 - SUMMER HOUSE SEVENTEEN
Detective Brooks arrived at Norah’s apartment with two uniformed officers and the deliberate calm of somebody refusing to add fear to a frightened room. The first officer checked the street. The second examined the window. Brooks asked Norah to describe the message before looking at the phone.
“Whoever sent it knows the apartment,” Norah said. “They know what I was doing. They knew you had the notebook.”
“Or they were guessing about the notebook and got lucky,” Brooks replied. “We need to separate what they can prove from what they want you to believe.”
“I don’t think they guessed where I sit.”
“No. The photograph worries me too.”
Brooks took her statement and arranged a patrol check. She would not promise permanent protection. She would not pretend a threatening text guaranteed that a suspect would be arrested by sunrise. Norah found the honesty strangely comforting.
Camille insisted Norah sleep at her apartment. It was a walk-up over a bakery, warm even at midnight, with a couch that sagged in the middle and an old dog named Pickles who regarded strangers as inconvenient furniture. Norah lay awake listening to the heating pipes and thinking about the photograph of the two young women beside the lake.
At six she finally slept. At seven-thirty Camille woke her with coffee and the expression she wore when delivering unwelcome medical advice.
“You’re taking the day off.”
“The diner won’t pay me for a day off.”
“Then I’ll buy your groceries this week.”
“I don’t want charity.”
“Then consider it payment for all the times you babysat my niece while I took overtime.”
Norah accepted that because gratitude was easier when it was allowed to look like an invoice.
At nine Sebastian called. She let the phone ring twice before answering.
“Brooks told me you reported a threat,” he said.
“She told you?”
“She asked whether my security team could provide relevant logs. I gave them.”
“Good.”
“I can send a driver.”
“No.”
“An armored vehicle?”
“No.”
“An exceedingly boring accountant?”
Norah stared at the wall. “Are you trying to make a joke?”
“Badly.”
She did laugh then, although she hated giving him the satisfaction. “I want a copy of the foundation’s independent audit, the name of its outside counsel, and a written job description. I also want to meet your mother’s former attorney.”
“My mother’s attorney died last year.”
“Then whoever inherited his files.”
“I’ll see what I can do.”
“Do not call it helping me. This matters to you too.”
“It does.”
She hung up and sent Camille a photograph of the lake house sign. Camille recognized the area: a chain of old resort properties across the Wisconsin line, once popular with Chicago’s industrial families. Summer House 17 had been sold after a fire in an adjacent boathouse, and a conservancy now maintained the shoreline.
Norah forwarded the information to Brooks. The detective returned her call within an hour.
“There are records of a property called Summer House Seventeen,” Brooks said. “It used to belong to a trust involving Marianne Gallow. That doesn’t make it a crime scene. We can ask the current owner for access.”
“I don’t want to trespass.”
“Good. Keep having that instinct.”
They drove north two days later, once the threats had been documented and the property manager agreed to meet them. Norah traveled in Camille’s car. Brooks followed in an unmarked sedan, accompanied by an investigator from the district attorney’s financial crimes unit named Erin Cho. Sebastian came separately and, to Norah’s relief, kept his distance.
The lake looked like dark hammered metal beneath a cold sky. Summer House 17 stood at the end of a narrow road bordered by bare maples. The building was smaller than Norah expected: white clapboard, a wraparound porch, a blue door that had faded nearly gray.
For a moment she imagined her mother there, laughing by the dock. The thought hurt more than she could explain. Teresa had spent the final year of her life making lists of medicines, arranging rides to chemotherapy, and insisting Norah not waste money on flowers. The young woman in the photograph had never learned to speak to her daughter about the time before illness.
The property manager, Mrs. Halpern, unlocked the house and warned them about loose floorboards. Norah remained beside Camille while the officers documented the rooms. Sebastian stood in the kitchen, studying a pale rectangle where a refrigerator had once been.
“My mother came here after the annex fire,” he said quietly.
“How do you know?”
“She left a calendar. I found it after she died. She wrote one word beside the date: Teresa.”
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I didn’t know whether the place still existed. And I didn’t want you to think I was directing you toward a trap.”
“You were right to worry.”
He gave a rueful nod. “I’m beginning to understand how frequently I should worry about what you think.”
In the back bedroom, Erin Cho found a built-in cabinet with a brass lock. The key from Vincent’s lunchbox fit. Before anyone opened it, Cho photographed the untouched cabinet and the key. Norah watched from the doorway as Brooks turned the lock.
Inside lay a tin of photographs, three unopened envelopes, and a reel of narrow magnetic tape in a cardboard sleeve. The sleeve was marked in Teresa’s handwriting: FOR VINCENT IF I DO NOT COME BACK.
Norah had not expected the sight of her mother’s handwriting to feel physical. Her knees weakened. Camille gripped her elbow.
Brooks did not break the envelopes open in front of everyone. She documented them and explained that the family could request supervised access once the evidence had been secured. Norah was angry for half a second, then grateful that someone was treating the contents as evidence rather than entertainment.
Sebastian had gone very pale. He was staring at a photograph near the top of the tin. It showed Marianne Gallow, Teresa Hayes, and a third woman standing beside a man in a suit.
“Who is he?” Norah asked.
Sebastian took a breath. “My father.”
“And the woman?”
“My aunt, Celia.”
Norah looked closer. Celia wore a badge from the West Canal employee welfare office. Under her arm was a file folder labeled MEDICAL RESERVE.
“Your aunt still alive?”
“Yes. She runs my foundation.”
The air seemed to tighten around them.
“The foundation whose records were searched,” Norah said.
Sebastian nodded, a grim acknowledgment. “The same one.”
On the porch afterward, he told her about Celia Gallow. She was his father’s younger sister, a formidable woman who had managed charitable accounts for decades. She had raised money for hospitals, arranged scholarships, and appeared at every memorial service the family could afford to sponsor. Sebastian said he trusted her more than almost anyone.
“Then this is going to be difficult,” Norah said.
“Yes.”
“You can’t investigate your own aunt privately and call it justice.”
“I know.”
“Do you?”
He looked at the lake. “My father spent his life telling me that family was the only thing worth protecting. My mother spent hers asking why that never included the families who worked for us.”
Norah considered the distance between those sentences. “Maybe your mother was asking the right question.”
“I think so.”
At lunch, they learned that someone had entered the current property manager’s office the previous night and asked whether the house still had its original cabinetry. The visitor had signed the guest log with a false name but had been captured by a security camera in the parking lot. Erin Cho circulated the image to Brooks, who showed it to Norah privately.
She recognized him immediately. The scar near his ear. The older robber who had pointed a pistol at her in the diner.
“He came here,” she whispered. “Before we did.”
“Possibly. We’ll confirm identification.”
“Why didn’t he take the things in the cabinet?”
“Maybe he didn’t have the key. Maybe he didn’t find the cabinet. Maybe he was looking for something else.”
Norah looked across the dining room toward Sebastian. He was speaking to the property manager, asking about her insurance and whether her staff had been frightened. She had expected the mafia boss to demand answers. Instead he was asking permission to help repair a broken porch step.
People were rarely one thing, she reminded herself. That did not make their dangerous parts disappear.
On the drive back, Camille asked why Sebastian had offered Norah a job instead of turning everything over to police from the beginning.
“He says he needs someone honest to review his books.”
“And what do you say?”
“I say he wants me close enough to watch.”
“Does he?”
“Probably.”
“Do you want him close enough to watch you?”
Norah looked out at the gray highway. “I want to know whether my father was part of something terrible. And I want to know whether my mother died without telling us because she was afraid.”
“That’s not an answer.”
“I know.”
That evening Detective Brooks called. The tape had been inventoried, and a specialist would examine whether it could be played without damage. The first envelope contained a letter from Teresa to Marianne. Its opening lines had been transcribed.
Norah listened carefully while Brooks read:
“If Celia tells you the workers agreed to surrender the medical reserve, do not believe her. I have the original signatures. I know what happened after the fire. And I know who was paid to keep the families quiet.”
Norah closed her eyes.
May you like
The blue lunchbox had not been a relic of a frightened old man’s past. It had been the beginning of a record that somebody had spent twenty-three years trying to erase.
And the woman Sebastian trusted most was now at the center of it.
