Chapter 4 - THE ACCOUNT WITH A DEAD WOMAN'S NAME
Rosa Neri had kept her husband's wedding photograph in the same frame for forty-eight years. Its silver backing was cracked, the glass cloudy at the edges. Isabella noticed the photograph first when she arrived at the assisted-living facility with Celia and a lawyer appointed to safeguard Rosa's interests.
The old woman sat by a window overlooking a narrow garden. She was eighty-one, small enough to disappear beneath the blue cardigan on her shoulders, and her eyes were startlingly clear. They had met twice before, both times briefly, after Isabella began reviewing the harbor fund's claims. Rosa had insisted on no photographs and no discussion inside a Moretti building.
“You look tired,” Rosa told her.
“I am.”
“You look less afraid.”
Isabella pulled up a chair. “I'm working on that.”
Rosa smiled faintly. “Good. I didn't spend half a lifetime correcting your husband's father's books so his son could frighten you out of telling the truth.”
In her lap she held a cloth-wrapped notebook. Its corners were soft with age. Each page was numbered by hand, and the entries were written in careful columns. Payments to widows. Funds promised for medical care. Receipts and signatures. What made the book important was not one spectacular figure but the consistency of the details: names, dates, checks, claims that could be compared against bank records and survivors' testimony.
“This is the one?” Isabella asked.
“Pietro gave it to me two days before he died.”
“Why you?”
“Because I wouldn't let his brother or his sons see it. Pietro was an impatient man. By then he'd realized impatience had killed people.”
Isabella kept her hands away from the book. Rosa's lawyer explained how it would be photographed, documented, and delivered to investigators. Only after the old woman nodded did Isabella touch the cover.
“Was Pietro planning to confess?” she asked.
“Not to everything. That would require a courage he discovered very late. But he wanted to disclose the locked exits at Pier Nine, the falsified inspections, and the compensation money that vanished afterward. He had a meeting scheduled with a prosecutor in Boston.”
“Did Nico know?”
Rosa looked out the window. “He collected his father's mail.”
The answer settled between them. Isabella thought about the dozen years during which Dante had praised Nico for taking responsibility while their father lay in a grave. What people called responsibility sometimes meant having uninterrupted access to the truth.
Celia handed over a photograph of the Bellhaven invoice. Rosa read it slowly. Her thumb stopped beside the signature.
“That's the same company,” she said. “It handled security doors at the cold-storage warehouse. They reported replacing the emergency release system two weeks before the fire. They billed for it, and no one did the work.”
“Who approved the contract?”
“Vittorio Russo. Nico witnessed it.”
Isabella felt a familiar nausea. For months she'd looked at spreadsheets while the human reality of those entries pressed at the edges of her mind. Rosa put a face behind each number. A sixteen-year-old whose first summer job became his last. A dockworker with two children who never returned from an overnight shift. A cleaner who called her sister to say the rear stairwell smelled of smoke.
“Why didn't you come forward earlier?” Celia asked gently.
Rosa folded her hands. “I tried. I sent copies to a reporter. He lost his job and stopped answering. I sent them to a prosecutor's office. A man visited my house and repeated things only my late husband had known. When you're old and alone, you learn how easy it is to make yourself disappear.”
There was no accusation in her voice. That made Isabella feel worse.
Before they left, Rosa reached for her hand. “Your husband isn't his father. But don't mistake that for an assurance he's a better man. He has to decide that himself.”
“I know.”
“Do you still love him?”
“Yes.”
“Then keep loving yourself more than his promises.”
On the ride back to Providence, Isabella received a message from the bank. One of her personal accounts had been flagged for unusual activity. The notice was legitimate; Celia verified it through a customer service number printed on Isabella's original statements. There had been a request to change the mailing address on the account.
The address belonged to the Russo group's New Jersey legal office.
Her attorney advised a freeze and preserved the notice. Isabella was more angry than afraid this time. In the Moretti house, she had learned to second-guess her own alarm. An unauthorized banking request no longer required her to ask whether she was overreacting.
At three that afternoon, Naomi Brooks met the women at her office. The notebook was handed over with a record of its possession, and Rosa gave a separate statement by secure video. An analyst began matching the payments against public records. Several of the supposed recipients had died before checks were allegedly issued. One company had received a consulting fee the same month a grieving family was told its claim was incomplete.
But one account caused everyone to stop.
It was listed under the name Anna Bellone, a woman killed with her husband in an unrelated highway accident eight years earlier. Money had continued moving through the account every quarter since her death.
“Could it be a beneficiary trust?” Naomi asked.
Isabella checked the supporting records. “If it is, the documents don't say so. Here, the forms list Anna as personally approving services six years after she died.”
The analyst frowned. “Who's the ultimate recipient?”
“A holding company,” Isabella said. She highlighted the final column. “Larkspur Meridian. Registered to the same agents who formed Bellhaven Systems.”
“And Larkspur is controlled by?”
“It's obscured through several corporate layers. But Nico approved the first payment.”
Naomi sat back. “We will need records from the banks and witnesses with firsthand knowledge. This is a direction to investigate, not proof on its own of a specific person's guilt.”
Isabella nodded. She appreciated being treated as someone capable of bearing uncertainty.
An hour later another detail emerged. On the day Pietro was murdered, three large transfers left an account associated with the relief fund. Two went to familiar consultants. The third went to a private security firm that had closed soon afterward. The bank description read: PIER NINE — SPECIAL EVENT.
Celia leaned over the printout. “That sounds less like compensation than a payment for a meeting.”
“Or security,” Naomi said. “We'll find out.”
Isabella found herself looking at the date. She knew precisely where she had been that night: sitting beside Dante on the floor of his father's hospital room, waiting for an identification that would take hours. Dante had held her hand so tightly that the bones ached. He had not cried until much later, when everyone else was gone.
She remembered loving him then with a certainty that felt like gravity.
That memory had not been false. Neither was the fact that he had betrayed her.
On the way out of the building, Celia said, “You could call him.”
“I know.”
“You don't have to.”
“I know that too.”
Isabella paused at the steps. Rain threatened beyond the downtown roofs. She had spent a hundred and seventeen days planning an escape, but the hardest part was learning that distance didn't automatically make decisions easy.
“Could you send him the bank address through Miriam Cole?” she asked. “Only the information he needs to keep his brother from destroying it.”
Celia nodded. “I'll pass it through counsel.”
Isabella turned toward the street.
A woman in a yellow raincoat stood beside a bus shelter across the road. Isabella recognized her at once. The woman had cleaned rooms in the Russo penthouse, a quiet employee named Jana who had once handed Isabella a lost earring after a fund-raising dinner.
Their eyes met.
Jana looked frightened. She reached into her coat pocket, then stopped when a black car turned the corner. She hurried away without speaking.
“Celia,” Isabella said. “Do you see her?”
Celia turned. “The one in yellow?”
“Yes.”
They didn't follow. They went back inside and asked the building's security officer to preserve the entrance footage. Twenty minutes later a receptionist brought Celia a plain envelope that had been left at the desk.
Inside was a hotel key sleeve marked 814, dated six weeks earlier, and a handwritten note.
THE CAMERAS WEREN'T INSTALLED TO WATCH HIS MISTRESS.
A second sentence had been squeezed beneath it.
THEY WERE INSTALLED TO LEARN WHEN HE WOULD STOP WATCHING HIS WIFE.
Isabella sat down on a bench, unable to move.
She'd thought the affair gave her an explanation for Dante's absence, however painful.
Now she understood someone else might have turned that absence into a schedule.
For the first time, she considered how close she'd come to leaving too late.
That evening she opened the suitcase she had packed in the mansion and found a paperback tucked beneath the lining. Dante had given it to her years ago after she complained that every book in his office was about strategy or war. He'd bought a novel about a woman rebuilding a little seaside inn, then pretended it was a joke. Inside the cover he'd written, For the only person who makes this house feel like a home.
May you like
Isabella read the inscription and cried. She did not call him. Instead she placed the book on the bedside table and wrote in the notebook Celia had given her: A good memory does not cancel a bad decision. A bad decision does not cancel a good memory. I am allowed to carry both without returning.
She slept for six hours that night, longer than she had slept in months. When she woke, the rain had stopped. But on Celia's phone was a message from Naomi: the hotel worker in the yellow coat had contacted a lawyer and wanted protection before providing testimony. She had kept one thing from room 814 that the security technicians had overlooked. Isabella read that sentence twice and felt her pulse quicken. At last, somebody else was ready to tell the truth.
