Chapter 7 - The Saint in the Garden
The rain had stopped by 3:00 A.M., replaced by a dense, clinging fog that rolled off Lake Michigan and swallowed the northern suburbs in white silence.
We returned to the Moretti estate in a single, unmarked sedan. No sirens. No headlights. Mateo drove with night-vision goggles, guiding the vehicle through the back service entrance that wound through the estate’s five acres of manicured formal gardens.
The police cars that had been parked out front earlier were gone. The house was dark, its stone turrets rising like black teeth against the gray sky.
Luca, Mateo, and I walked through the boxwood hedges toward the Italian sunken garden at the rear of the property. The ground was soft, our shoes sinking into the damp mulch.
In the center of the garden stood a life-sized marble statue of Saint Michael the Archangel, his stone sword raised high above the head of a defeated serpent. It had stood there since Luca’s grandfather had imported it from Carrara in the 1950s.
"The pedestal," Luca murmured, motioning Mateo forward with a tactical light.
Mateo knelt at the base of the statue, running his gloved fingers along the wet marble trim. The stone was covered in damp moss, but near the rear of the base, the mortar looked fresh, gray, and slightly cracked.
"Here," Mateo whispered.
He pulled a flat crowbar from his belt, wedged the tip into the seam, and leaned his weight into it. With a dull, wet scrape, a square stone panel popped free, revealing a dark, hollow cavity beneath the saint's feet.
Mateo reached inside.
When he pulled his arm out, he was holding a flat, heavy object wrapped in two layers of black oilcloth.
He handed it to Luca.
Luca stripped away the cloth. The pale beam of the flashlight illuminated the cracked brown leather, the heavy brass corners, and the gold lettering stamped across the spine: MORETTI ENTERPRISES - 1994-1999.
"She found it," Luca whispered, his fingers tracing his father's initials embossed on the leather. "She must have moved it from the study safe during the dinner service while everyone was downstairs."
"Look inside," I said, unable to stop myself from stepping closer.
Luca opened the heavy brass latch. The parchment pages were yellowed, covered in neat, handwritten columns of numbers in blue fountain pen ink. But as Luca turned to the middle of the book, he stopped.
A single sheet of modern, high-grade linen paper had been folded into the center spread.
It wasn't an account balance. It was a handwritten letter, dated three days ago, written in Vanessa’s neat, sloping script.
Luca read it in silence, the flashlight beam trembling slightly in Mateo’s grip. As he read, the muscle in his jaw began to tick with a violent, rhythmic intensity.
"What does it say?" I asked, my voice barely audible in the fog.
Luca didn't answer. He turned the letter toward me.
In the white light of the torch, the words looked like slashes on the paper:
Luca,
If you are reading this, you found the saint before my father did. Good. He deserves nothing.
You think this is about money. It was never about money. Look at the entry for October 14, 1997. Look at the name of the girl your father paid forty thousand dollars to adopt out of Cook County Hospital.
Her name wasn't Emma Campbell.
It was Emma Moretti.
May you like
You don't have a maid, Luca.
You have a sister.
