Chapter 2 - The Cold Bench on Sheridan Road
The rain had tapered into a biting, misting chill that clung to the rusted iron girders of the Sheridan Road bus shelter.
Inside the narrow shelter, the streetlamp flickered in dull, sickly yellow pulses. Luca Moretti didn’t notice the cold seeping through his handmade Italian wool trousers as he sat beside the elderly woman. His thumb rested on the edge of the printed funeral program, tracing the small, grainy photograph of the girl with the birthmark above her left eyebrow.
Vanessa Bellini. Born May 14, 1996. Died October 22, 2018.
Eight years.
For eight years, a phantom had been walking the earth. For two years, that phantom had slept in his sheets, worn fifty-thousand-dollar diamond bracelets charged to his black accounts, and planned a society wedding that was supposed to unite the western Chicago shipping docks under a single bloodline.
Luca’s voice didn’t rise. When Luca Moretti was merely irritated, he was sharp, cutting men down with sarcasm that left room for survival. When he was truly lethal, his voice became as quiet as deep water turning to ice.
“Margaret,” he said softly. “Look at me.”
The old woman lifted her head. Her eyes were red-rimmed, bloodshot from four hours on an unheated Greyhound bus and two miles walked in leaking shoes. She was shivering so violently that the cardboard lining of her cardboard suitcase rattled against the bench.
“Who is the woman inside my house?” Luca asked.
Margaret swallowed, her throat clicking with dryness. “Her name is Camilla. Camilla Thorne. Her mother was my sister, Evelyn.”
Luca’s gray eyes narrowed, calculating the bloodline in a fraction of a second. “Her cousin.”
“Evelyn was an addict,” Margaret whispered, her breath forming small clouds in the damp air. “She owed money to loan sharks from Kenosha to Gary. When Evelyn died in an alley behind a casino, Camilla was sixteen. She came to live with us in Milwaukee. But she hated our life, Mr. Moretti. She hated that we lived in a wood-frame bungalow near the rail yards. She hated that my Vanessa worked forty hours a week as a dental hygienist and took night classes at the community college.”
Margaret reached into her coat, pulling out an inhaler with shaking fingers, taking a ragged puff before continuing.
“Camilla was obsessed with Vanessa. She practiced my daughter’s laugh in the bathroom mirror. She tried on Vanessa’s clothes when we went to church. And then... the fire.”
A heavy tremor ran through the old woman’s chest, so violent that Luca instinctively reached out, placing his gloved hand over hers to steady her.
“The fire?” Luca prompted, his tone low and even.
“A gas explosion at the lakeside cabin Vanessa had rented for her twenty-second birthday,” Margaret wept, the tears carving clean lines through the road grit on her cheeks. “The police found the cabin burned to the foundation. Dental records... they said the body in the bedroom was Vanessa. Her wallet, her rings, her watch were on the nightstand. Camilla disappeared that exact same night. We thought she had run away in panic, or that she’d died in the lake. But three months later, my daughter’s social security number began pinging credit checks in Miami. Then in New York. Then in Chicago.”
Margaret looked up at Luca, her eyes wide with an ancient, incurable agony.
“That girl had plastic surgery, Mr. Moretti. She had the birthmark cut from her skin, she fixed her teeth, and she bought herself a voice coach in Manhattan. She buried my baby under sixty pounds of charcoal so she could steal her birth certificate and crawl into your world.”
The silence that followed was suffocating.
Ten feet away, the idling engine of Luca’s armored black Mercedes hummed in the mist. Daniel, his head of security, stood beside the open driver’s door, his trench coat unbuttoned, his hand resting casually inside his lapel where his custom Sig Sauer was holstered. Daniel had served Luca’s father for twenty years; he knew the look on his boss’s face. It was the look that preceded mass graves.
Luca didn’t curse. He slowly folded the funeral program and slipped it into his inner breast pocket, directly over his heart. Then he took Margaret’s paper-thin hand between his own.
“Why did you come today, Margaret? Why not two years ago when the society pages announced our courtship?”
“Because I didn’t know until last Tuesday,” Margaret cried softly. “I don’t read fashion magazines, Mr. Moretti. I live in a subsidized flat for church seniors. One of the volunteers brought in an old copy of Town & Country for the library. I saw the headline: Mafia Scion Luca Moretti to Wed Vanessa Bellini. I saw her face beneath that veil. And I knew... I knew my sister’s daughter was about to take everything my child never had.”
Luca stood up from the wooden bench, his tall frame blocking the glare of the streetlamp. He looked down the empty, wet ribbon of Sheridan Road toward the distant, blazing glow of his Gold Coast mansion.
He thought of the dining room.
He thought of the twenty-eight guests drinking six-hundred-dollar champagne. He thought of the woman in the crimson silk gown holding up a toast to their "eternal union."
And then, with a sudden, sharp ache that surprised him in its physical intensity, he thought of Lucy Bennett.
He thought of the young woman in the black housekeeping uniform, trembling beside the fireplace, biting her lip until it bled, her skirt torn and her leg mangled in the iron teeth of his gate—all because she had looked at an old woman in the rain and refused to let her be thrown like garbage into the dark.
“Daniel,” Luca said, his voice flat as slate.
Daniel stepped forward instantly. “Yes, boss?”
“Put Mrs. Bellini in the car. Take her to the private guest cottage on the north perimeter. Have Mrs. Carter bring her dry clothes, hot soup, and an extra heater. If anyone asks—including the domestic staff—she is an old friend of my mother’s from Palermo.”
“Understood, sir. And you?”
May you like
Luca pulled his phone from his pocket, his eyes turning to flint.
“I’m going upstairs,” Luca whispered. “I need to see how much blood my housemaid lost for a ghost.”
