Chapter 3 - The Three Missing Days
Arthur read the sentence twice.
Elena is getting worse.
The handwriting was narrow and slanted, the ink faded from black to brown. Nothing about the page looked dramatic enough to destroy thirty-six years of certainty.
Yet the date did.
January 19.
His mother's crash had been reported on January 16.
Arthur remembered the newspaper on his father's desk.
HEIRESS WIFE OF CHICAGO BUSINESSMAN KILLED IN LAKE SHORE DRIVE COLLISION.
He remembered black suits, winter flowers, whispered condolences.
He remembered his father gripping his shoulder during the funeral and saying, "A man does not fall apart because a woman is gone."
He remembered hating him for that.
But he did not remember January 17.
Or the eighteenth.
Or the nineteenth.
"Where did this come from?" Arthur asked.
Nora looked as shaken as he felt.
"I don't know. Someone left the box at the gate."
Dominic took the broken spoon from the cardboard package and examined it.
"This mean anything to you?"
Nora nodded slowly.
"It was my grandmother's. She used it for tomato sauce. I kept it after she died."
"Where?"
"In a cedar chest at my mother's apartment."
Arthur looked up.
"Someone entered your mother's home."
Nora's face changed instantly.
She grabbed her phone.
Her mother answered on the fourth ring.
"Mom?"
Arthur could hear only Nora's side of the conversation.
"Are you home? ... Did anyone come by? ... No, listen to me. Check the bedroom closet. The cedar box Grandma left me. Is it there?"
A pause.
Nora's eyes widened.
"Don't touch anything. Lock the door. I'm sending someone."
She ended the call.
"It's gone."
Arthur was already speaking to Dominic.
"Two men to Queens. Plain clothes. No Vale vehicles. Her mother doesn't leave the apartment alone."
Nora bristled.
"You don't get to order guards around my mother without asking."
"Someone stole from her home and mailed evidence to my house. We passed asking five minutes ago."
"And what if your people are the reason this is happening?"
The room went still.
Dominic looked away.
Arthur did not.
Nora's accusation was fair.
He hated that too.
"Then my people will answer for it," he said.
Nora studied his face as if deciding whether she believed him.
Arthur lifted the torn page.
"You said your grandmother left you a cedar box. What was in it?"
"Old photographs. Recipe cards. Some letters. A small notebook wrapped in blue cloth."
"Did you read it?"
"No."
"Why not?"
Nora swallowed.
"Because she asked me not to."
Arthur's patience cracked.
"Your dead grandmother knew my mother was alive three days after the world was told she was dead, and you never opened the notebook?"
Nora's eyes flashed.
"My dead grandmother raised me while my mother worked two jobs. When she asked me for one promise, I kept it."
That stopped him.
Arthur had spent most of his life around people who broke promises whenever the price was high enough.
Nora had kept one because love made it expensive to break.
"What exactly did she say?" he asked.
Nora looked at the torn page.
"She told me, 'If trouble ever comes because of Chicago, open the blue notebook. If a Vale asks you for the truth, make sure he is hungry enough to hear it.'"
Dominic frowned.
"Hungry?"
Nora gave a humorless laugh.
"I thought she was delirious."
Arthur did not.
He stared at the empty pasta bowl still sitting on the side counter from last night.
Hungry enough to hear it.
Rosa had known something about him that he did not know about himself.
Arthur turned to Dominic.
"Find the rest of the notebook."
"I'm already trying."
"Try harder."
Dominic left.
Nora remained.
Arthur picked up the photograph again.
His mother looked different from the woman he remembered in formal portraits. Her hair was loose. No diamonds. No carefully composed smile.
And the boy in her arms looked terrified.
Arthur looked closer.
His fourteen-year-old self was gripping Elena's coat in one fist.
There was blood on his sleeve.
He nearly dropped the photograph.
The kitchen disappeared.
For half a second, he was somewhere else.
A narrow room.
A kettle screaming.
His mother's voice.
Arthur, don't look at the floor.
Then darkness slammed back over the image.
He grabbed the edge of the counter.
Nora stepped toward him.
"Arthur?"
It was the first time she had used his name without "sir."
He would have corrected anyone else.
He did not correct her.
"I was there," he said.
"In the photograph?"
"No. After the crash."
Nora's expression softened.
"You remember?"
"Pieces."
"What pieces?"
Arthur shut his eyes.
Burned garlic.
Rain against glass.
A woman's hand covered in blood.
Someone pounding on a door.
His father shouting his name from outside.
Arthur opened his eyes.
"Nothing useful."
"Maybe your body remembers more than your mind does."
He gave her a hard look.
"Are you a psychologist now?"
"No. I'm a woman who watched her grandmother wake up screaming for twenty years."
That answer silenced him.
Nora leaned against the opposite counter.
"She hated thunderstorms. Wouldn't drive on Lake Shore Drive. Couldn't stand the smell of expensive men's cologne. None of those things made sense to me. She'd say the body keeps receipts even when the mind tears up the bill."
Arthur almost smiled at the phrase.
"That sounds like her?"
"Exactly like her."
For the first time, he wondered what Rosa Bellini had been like beyond the fragment of a face in old photographs.
"Cook something," he said.
Nora blinked.
"Now?"
"Something she made when someone was sick."
"You think food is going to restore your memory?"
"I think six doctors failed. Your spaghetti didn't."
Nora considered that.
Then she opened a cabinet.
"Chicken soup. But not the fancy kind."
"I would be disappointed if it were."
She found onions, carrots, celery, garlic, chicken thighs, and rice. Pascal would later complain that the stock had not simmered long enough and the vegetables were cut inconsistently.
Arthur would later threaten to fire him for saying so.
But while Nora cooked, Arthur sat at the plain kitchen table and watched steam rise from the pot.
The smell changed slowly.
Onion first.
Then garlic.
Then chicken and pepper.
Nora added a little lemon at the end.
Arthur's throat closed.
Another image came.
His mother at a small table.
Pale.
A blanket around her shoulders.
Rosa pressing a bowl into Arthur's hands.
Eat, bambino. You have to eat.
His mother smiling weakly.
Do what Rosa says.
Arthur's breathing became shallow.
Nora turned from the stove.
"What is it?"
He stared at her.
"She fed me soup."
"Rosa?"
"After the crash."
Nora lowered the ladle.
Arthur's memory sharpened.
He saw a clock above the stove.
He saw his mother's bare feet under a blanket.
He saw a bruise around her throat.
Not from a car crash.
From fingers.
And he heard her whispering to Rosa.
Vincent thinks the ledger burned.
Arthur opened his eyes.
"Ledger."
Nora frowned.
"What?"
"My mother said something about a ledger."
Before either could speak again, Dominic rushed into the kitchen.
His face told Arthur the news was bad.
"Ferraro's gone. His South Boston office was cleared out before dawn."
"What about Danny?"
Nora stepped forward.
Dominic looked at her.
"We found his apartment door open. Blood in the hallway. No body."
Nora went white.
Arthur caught her before her knees hit the floor.
For one strange second, she was in his arms, trembling, and the smell of chicken soup wrapped around them both.
Then Nora pulled away.
"We have to find him."
"We will."
"Don't say that unless you mean it."
Arthur looked at her.
"I don't say things I don't mean."
Dominic's phone buzzed.
He checked the screen.
"Arthur."
The message contained one photograph.
Danny was tied to a chair in a dark room, blood running from his eyebrow.
Across his chest someone had placed the missing blue notebook.
Below the photograph was a single line.
BRING ARTHUR VALE TO THE OLD BELLINI HOUSE ALONE, OR THE BOY DIES WITH THE TRUTH.
Nora stared at the image.
Arthur stared at the notebook.
Then another memory ripped through him.
A front door painted green.
His mother screaming from inside.
A man outside saying, "Conrad, get the boy."
Arthur's head snapped up.
The voice in the memory belonged to his father.
And suddenly he understood the most terrifying part of the missing three days.
May you like
His mother had not been hiding from strangers.
She had been hiding from the Vale family.
