Chapter 3 - THE BOY IN THE YELLOW ROOM
The yellow birds had been painted by Clara's mother on a winter afternoon when the house still permitted laughter. Their wings were uneven. One had three feet, and her little brother Nico had delighted in finding it whenever he climbed into bed. Clara remembered his voice at five, announcing that this bird could run faster than it could fly.
She stared at the photograph until the yellow shapes swam together.
“Nico died,” she said. “I went to his funeral.”
Dominic remained on the far side of the table. “Who told you how he died?”
“My father. He said Nico had a fever. I was away at school when it happened.”
“Did you see him?”
Clara shook her head. “The coffin was closed.”
She hated how quickly hope became another instrument of cruelty. Arturo had taught her that uncertainty was something he could feed whenever he wanted obedience. Her older brother, Mateo, had once tried to leave. Arturo sent Clara a photograph of Mateo tied to a chair. For two weeks, Clara obeyed every instruction until she learned the photograph had been staged years earlier. Mateo was never found. Whether he had escaped or died remained a question nobody in the household could safely ask.
“It's meant to make me go to him,” Clara said. “He knows Nico is the one thing I still dream about.”
Helen called the police liaison and arranged to turn over the envelope. Mara suggested placing Clara in an independent shelter run by a witness-support organization, beyond Dominic's security. Clara agreed to speak with the program's director. The decision did not please Dominic, but he stayed silent while she made it.
At the appointment, the director, Jo Alvarez, asked Clara three questions: whether she had a safe contact, whether she could access money in her own name, and whether she wished to speak with law enforcement. Clara had practiced stories for all three. Instead she answered truthfully: no, barely, and possibly, after speaking with counsel.
“Then we'll start there,” Jo said. “You don't have to offer anyone your whole life just because they open a door.”
The sentence stayed with Clara through the day.
Dominic and Leo drove to meet Alexei Volkov at a neutral law office. Clara was not invited, and she did not ask to be. She had enough danger without sitting across from a man whose guards had brought weapons into a room where an attack began. Later Helen brought her a written summary. Alexei admitted that Arturo Morelli had used a serpent-and-crown mark on documents and occasionally on people connected to his household. He denied recognizing Clara personally. He also admitted that his companies had rented shipping containers to Greystone, despite repeatedly assuring Dominic that they had no dealings with Morelli interests.
“Did he explain why he lied?” Clara asked.
“He called it a misunderstanding between subsidiaries,” Helen said.
“That's what my father called a lie when he needed someone else to sign it.”
A courier from the state investigator's office delivered a certified copy of Elena Park's original Delancey report that evening. Page seven contained the photograph she had mentioned. The background was grainy, and rain obscured part of the loading yard. But a man wearing two badges stood near the warehouse door, his face turned sideways. Beneath the photograph, Park had written a time: 10:42 p.m., forty-eight minutes before the fire.
Dominic knew the man.
“Dennis Varga,” he said.
Leo leaned closer. “He was with us back then?”
“Temporary contractor,” Dominic answered. “My late father recommended him. I didn't hire him permanently until three years later.”
“Is that his Morelli badge?” Clara asked.
“No. Look at the name strip.”
The photo showed the first letters of a name beneath the silver clip: CA—. The rest disappeared under the man's jacket.
“Could be contractor access,” Helen said. “We need the original negative or a higher-resolution scan.”
Clara recognized the badge shape. Her father issued white cards to employees and dark red ones to people who could enter the financial archive. The badge in the photograph was dark red. Dennis had not simply been a contractor. He had been entrusted with something important on both sides of a business feud that had cost seven lives.
At nine, Jo called Clara with a possible location. She could move that night, but the shelter could not guarantee that its address would remain private if she continued attending Dominic's meetings. Clara asked whether she could return to gather personal effects from the rented apartment she had used as Vivienne Hale. Jo offered to send a trained advocate and a police officer. Clara agreed.
Her apartment occupied the third floor of an old building above a bakery. The landlady kept orchids on the landing. Nothing about it looked like a place from which a hunted daughter had built a second identity. Clara found her work shoes by the door, two library books, and a half-written letter to a woman she had believed was her aunt. The envelope was unstamped. She had been too frightened to send it.
On the back of the closet door hung an inexpensive coat with a missing button. Clara had bought it on her first payday. As she folded it, she noticed a thin strip of paper tucked into the pocket. It was not hers. Someone had entered the apartment and left it without disturbing anything else.
The paper bore a child's drawing of a three-footed bird.
Clara sat on the bed.
“Is that familiar?” Jo asked.
“Nico drew these after Mother died,” Clara whispered. “He thought the birds could find her.”
On the reverse was a telephone number and a date three days in the future. No name. No instructions.
Jo photographed it before putting it into an evidence bag. She did not call the number. Clara was grateful that somebody else understood what patience could protect.
On the ride to her new lodging, Clara considered three possibilities. Nico was alive and had learned how to reach her. Arturo had kept his drawings and was using them to pull her close. Or a third person was watching both of them, collecting fragments of her childhood with the same care that Greystone had collected security permissions.
The final possibility made her uneasy in a new way. Her father had never permitted anyone else to control a story about his children. If another person held the drawings, that person had either taken a great risk or gained his trust.
At the shelter, she called Helen. “I want to give a statement to the investigator,” she said. “Not to Dominic's people. To someone who can act even if Dominic or Alexei turns out to be involved.”
“That is a sound distinction,” Helen replied.
“I also want them to check whether any child matching Nico's age was admitted to a hospital after his supposed death.”
“Those records will take lawful process and time.”
“I know. I want it done correctly.”
She set down the phone. Outside, the city went about its ordinary evening, a bus sighing at the curb and neighbors calling to each other across a courtyard. She had imagined safety would feel like a locked door. Here it felt more like a room where no one demanded the key to her thoughts.
At midnight, Dominic received a message from an unknown number. It contained a silent twelve-second video of a boy standing beside a window. The boy looked about fifteen. He held up a folded newspaper from that morning and then a card with a word printed on it.
MORETTI.
Dominic called Helen instead of forwarding the video directly to Clara. He asked whether showing it would help or hurt. Helen advised preserving it and letting Clara decide.
When Clara watched the recording the next day, she recognized the boy's eyes. He had her mother's eyes, dark and steady, with one brow higher than the other.
But recognition was not proof.
“Whoever made this video,” she said, “knows exactly how to make me stop thinking.”
Then she noticed the window behind him. Across its glass was the reflection of a familiar stone serpent, coiled around a broken crown.
Her father had not sent the video from hiding.
May you like
The prospect that Nico might be alive brought back memories Clara had trained herself to ignore. He had once refused to eat dinner unless she sat beside him, and Arturo had punished her for encouraging weakness. She had stolen bread from the kitchen and left it outside Nico's door, telling herself that the theft was invisible because the bread was so small. Years later she understood that the important part of the act had not been the food. It had been the message that one person in the house would notice his hunger. When Jo asked what kind of sister she hoped to be if the boy was found, Clara had no elaborate answer. She wanted to ask about his friends, learn what music he liked, and believe him when he said he was afraid. She wanted to know whether he still drew birds. She did not want to become another adult who treated his childhood as a debt owed to her. The wishes sounded painfully ordinary. She wrote them on the back of an appointment card and kept it in her pocket for the drive north.
He had sent it from the house where he supposedly died.
