Chapter 3 - THE VOICE ON THE CASSETTE
The first sound on Lucia Mendes's cassette was a long hiss.
Rosa leaned forward in Karen Liu's small office, watching the audio specialist adjust a dial. Across the table, Alessandro Moretti sat without a bodyguard. Karen had insisted upon that condition, and he had agreed. Lily was spending the morning with a trusted childcare worker in a nearby playroom, well away from the adults' questions.
A click sounded. Then Rosa heard her mother's voice.
“If this reaches you, my darling girl, it means the story didn't stay buried.”
Rosa shut her eyes. Lucia had been gone two years, but the familiarity of that soft, tired voice made the loss feel suddenly new.
“I was working at Saint Anne's Clinic when Elena Moretti came to see me,” the recording continued. “She wasn't sick in the way her husband said. She was frightened. She wanted a place for a young woman and her son to hide. She said Giovanni had taken a child from someone and intended to use the boy as a bargaining piece.”
Alessandro straightened. His fingers closed around the edge of the chair.
“Please pause,” Karen said.
Rosa shook her head. “Let it play.”
The specialist looked to Karen, who nodded.
“Teresa Marino was the only one Elena trusted. They asked me to keep some records under another name. I did it, and I hated myself afterward. I thought I was helping a mother. Then Giovanni came to the clinic and asked for the files. I told him they'd been destroyed. He said he could make my daughter's future very difficult if he learned otherwise.”
A rustle filled the tape. Lucia cleared her throat.
“I saved one copy. It isn't in this box. It's where Elena told me no Moretti would ever search: beneath the seventh step of the old ferry chapel. I never went back. I was afraid. Rosa, I'm sorry I taught you courage and then lived so long without it.”
The tape clicked off.
Rosa kept both hands flat on her knees. For several seconds she could not look at Alessandro. In the recording, her mother had sounded scared and brave at once. The combination made Rosa furious with the dead men who had frightened her and furious with the living for discovering the truth so late.
“Who was the child?” she asked.
“I don't know,” Alessandro said. “I swear I don't.”
Karen glanced at him. “If the recording is genuine, your father's activities extended beyond ordinary family misconduct. We should preserve this and approach investigators through counsel.”
“Agreed.”
Rosa turned sharply. “You agree so quickly now. What happens when those investigators ask about the shipments and the deals you inherited?”
“Then I'll answer for what I know.”
“Will you?”
He let the question stand. “I can't demand your trust, Rosa. I can give you records and let you decide whether I'm earning any.”
She looked away. In the adjacent room she could hear Lily laughing at something. It was a wonderfully ordinary sound. Rosa wondered how to keep that ordinary life from being consumed by the Moretti past.
By afternoon, Karen arranged for an independent attorney to accompany the police as they examined the former ferry chapel. The building stood near a neglected stretch of waterfront where weeds grew through broken pavement. An elderly caretaker, Father Benedict, unlocked the door with a key that resisted in the lock.
“Seventh step,” he repeated when Karen explained the request. “Elena helped us rebuild this staircase after the flood. She insisted on choosing the timber.”
The narrow stairs led to a balcony beneath a dusty stained-glass window. Investigators numbered the steps, photographed them, and carefully lifted the board beneath the seventh. Inside the cavity was a sealed metal cylinder wrapped in oilcloth. Its contents were taken into custody for forensic examination.
Rosa watched from the doorway beside Karen. Alessandro remained behind the police tape, his hands visible, asking no one to bend the rules for him. Perhaps this small restraint was nothing. But it was a kind of change Rosa could recognize.
When the cylinder was opened at the lab, it contained copies of birth records, a handwritten letter from Elena, and a list of financial transfers. The records described a boy born in Naples in 1988, taken from his mother and brought to New York under another surname. The boy's first name was Matteo.
Alessandro was stunned. He had known a Matteo as a child: a quiet boy two years younger who slept in the guest wing for one summer before disappearing. Giovanni had called him a distant cousin. The boy had loved sketching ships. Alessandro remembered giving him a blue pencil case and being told a week later that he had gone to relatives overseas.
“Where is he now?” Rosa asked.
“I don't know,” Alessandro admitted. “But I can give the investigators the names of the people who managed my father's properties that year.”
Elena's letter was harder to read. Written in Italian and translated by a certified interpreter, it described Giovanni's scheme to control a rival family's inheritance through the child's custody. Elena had intended to bring the boy back to his mother. She believed Teresa knew how to reach her. The letter ended with an unfinished line: If Giovanni knows I have hidden this, then the road to Naples may be my last.
“Your mother knew she was in danger,” Karen said.
Alessandro stared at the signature. He had spent most of his life believing Elena's death was the result of terrible luck. Now he wondered whether he'd been trained to call a crime an accident.
That evening Vincent Romano called Alessandro and demanded a meeting. His voice was smooth, cultured, and cold.
“You've embarrassed Isabella. A truce rests on public respect, Alessandro.”
“A truce that requires hurting a child isn't worth keeping.”
“No one wants to hurt a child.”
“Then why did someone photograph Lily and send me a threat?”
Vincent paused. “I wouldn't know.”
“Perhaps you'll answer when the police ask.”
Vincent laughed once. “You think the police are going to untangle your father's history and somehow leave yours untouched?”
“I don't expect them to leave mine untouched.”
“Careful. Your father's enemies would enjoy that answer.”
After the call, Alessandro received a message from Daniel. The anonymous invitation to the ferry terminal had come from a burner device purchased near the Romano family's Manhattan office. It proved little by itself, but there was also a visitor log placing Isabella's assistant at the restoration room on the morning of the missing portrait.
“Don't confront them yet,” Karen advised. “We need the record itself.”
Alessandro wanted to do exactly the opposite. He wanted to pull Vincent out of his expensive office and demand every answer at once. Instead he returned to the east apartment with a bag of groceries Mr. Bruno had suggested for Lily: strawberries, pasta, and a small carton of vanilla ice cream.
Rosa opened the door only halfway. “You could have sent these with Bruno.”
“I could have. I wanted to tell you what we found, in person. May I?”
She considered, then stepped aside. Lily emerged from behind the sofa carrying Bun by one ear.
“Mr. Alessandro!” she cried. “We made a house.”
Her house was made from couch cushions, a sheet, and two dining chairs. Alessandro crouched to inspect it.
“Who lives there?”
“Me. Mama. Bun. Maybe a duck.”
“Good neighborhood.”
She frowned at him. “No mean ladies.”
His throat tightened. “Then it's a very good neighborhood.”
At dinner Rosa listened to the new evidence while Lily colored beside them. She was relieved about the recovered records, frightened by what they meant, and unable to forget that Alessandro was still the man whose employees could alter her life with a word.
“There is something we haven't discussed,” she said when Lily had gone to wash her hands. “What happens if the test says she's yours?”
“I'd like to know her. I would like to help raise her. But I don't want to take her away from you.”
“That's a beginning, not a plan.”
“Then we write a plan with lawyers. A real one. Not promises made because I'm scared.”
Rosa nodded slowly. “I could live with that.”
In the playroom, Lily came back holding a picture. It showed three people beneath a yellow sun, drawn as circles with long stick legs. Rosa was on the left. Lily stood in the middle. The third figure had black hair and a dark blue shirt.
“Who's that?” Alessandro asked.
Lily considered the drawing. “The tall man who gave me my sun back.”
He looked at Rosa. She looked at the paper. Neither said what they were thinking.
Near midnight, police contacted Karen. The birth documents had included a second, previously unnoticed notation in Elena's handwriting. Next to the name Matteo was a later date and a single word: ROMANO.
May you like
Alessandro remembered Vincent's laughter on the telephone and felt the pieces of a terrible picture beginning to align.
If Matteo had grown up inside the Romano family, the impending marriage might not merely have been a truce. It might have been a way to bring two old secrets under one roof and lock the door.
