For twenty-two years, I had lived with the medical verdict that Katarina Moretti died at thirty-one from a sudden congenital arrhythmia at Cedar Lane Medical Clinic. Swallowing hard, I reached for the fifth and final letter at the bottom of the tin, only to find that the lower half of the page had been cleanly sheared off with a blade.
Only one intact sentence remained above the jagged cut, underlined twice in dark ink: “Never trust the man who wears the silver ring with the serpent”—the exact ring currently sitting on the right hand of Richard Bellini, my father’s lifelong consigliere and the man who had held my shoulder beside my mother’s grave.
I stared at that single underlined sentence until the black ink blurred against the cream paper. Richard Bellini had been the closest thing I had to a second father after my parents died—the soft-spoken strategist who taught me how to read shipping ledgers at eighteen, stood behind my chair when the Chicago commission ratified my succession at twenty-four, and dined at my table every Sunday night. On his right ring finger, never removed in forty years, gleamed a heavy band of antique Sicilian silver cast in the shape of a coiled viper.
“Daniel,” I said, my voice so quiet it barely carried across the marble floor, “I want every archived admission log, toxicology sheet, and duty roster connected to my mother’s death twenty-two years ago pulled from storage before nightfall.”
Daniel closed the metal box carefully and slipped the capillary moisture tube into an evidence bag. “And when Richard calls to check on the afternoon port meeting?” he asked, his jaw set tight.
“Don’t tell him a damn thing,” I replied. “Lock down the east wing cameras and erase the last hour from the central server so his tech people can’t see we took the frame off the wall.”
By two o’clock that afternoon, I had locked myself inside my mahogany-paneled study on the second floor, the five letters spread across my blotter beside the brass K key and the torn family photograph. The photo showed my mother standing on the steps of our Lake Forest conservatory in 2004, holding twelve-year-old me by the shoulders, while my father stood to her left. Whoever had stood on the far right had been ripped out of the print—and judging by the crisp white fibers along the tear, it had been torn within the last few days.
A soft knock sounded at the study door before Olivia Carter stepped inside carrying a silver tray with black coffee and a roast beef sandwich. Behind her skirts, three-year-old Lily sat cross-legged on the hallway runner outside the threshold, humming a lopsided nursery tune to her velveteen rabbit.