Chapter 3 - THE BOOKKEEPER'S SON
The bus station smelled of rain, diesel, and burnt coffee.
Luca wanted me to remain at the mansion while his security team found Claire. My injured ankle was swollen, my right palm stitched, and I had slept fewer than three hours. He was not unreasonable to suggest it.
I still told him no.
"Claire called me," I said. "She won't trust a convoy of strangers arriving without me. And I need to know she's safe."
Luca studied my face. "If you come, I want a medical clearance for travel and a car that can accommodate your ankle. I won't make you run anywhere."
"I wasn't planning on sprinting."
His mouth twitched, though the grief in his eyes remained. "Good. Because I wasn't planning to carry you through downtown Chicago in front of every television camera."
A nurse practitioner checked my leg again before we left. I was permitted a short trip with my ankle elevated, provided I rested afterward. Luca accepted those instructions with an obedient seriousness that would have amused me if the reason for them had not been so painful.
We met Claire in a private waiting room arranged through station management. She was thinner than I remembered, her auburn hair cut short, a gray suitcase resting beside her knees. The moment she saw me, she stood and started to cry.
"I didn't know whether you would answer."
I hugged her carefully with my left arm. "Why wouldn't I?"
"Because I vanished. I left you with warnings and no proof. I thought if I stayed away they'd leave you alone."
Luca waited by the door until she nodded that he could enter.
"Miss Walsh," he said, "I'm sorry I believed the accusations that ended your employment."
Claire stared at him. "You were never told the whole story."
"I allowed myself to be told only one part. That's still my responsibility."
She sat down slowly. "I kept copies because Mara told me never to depend on one person's memory when rich men started arguing about the past."
From her suitcase she withdrew a plastic folder. Inside were letters, two photographs, and a list of names. The top photograph showed a young woman standing beside a boy outside a theater. The boy had a gap-toothed smile and held a cardboard rocket in one hand.
"That's Samuel Ortiz," Claire said. "He was ten. His mother, Elena Ortiz, kept books for a subcontractor on the Larkspur renovation."
My stomach clenched. "He died in the fire?"
"He was waiting in the rehearsal annex while his mother worked overtime. She thought the building was safe. The doors should have opened automatically during an alarm. They didn't."
Luca sat down opposite her. For once he had nothing ready to say.
"Elena found entries before the fire," Claire continued. "Charges for emergency exit systems that had never been installed. She asked her supervisor. He told her to stop asking. She went to Mara because Mara designed the backstage circulation plan and knew what the building should have had."
"Mara reported it," Luca said.
"Yes. Then the report disappeared. Two weeks later the fire happened."
"Why would Richard Bellini cover up missing equipment?" I asked.
Claire touched Samuel's photograph. "He was under pressure to open the theater before the end of the quarter. There was a financing deadline. If the building failed inspection, the entire development deal would collapse."
The words landed like stones. A financing deadline. A woman's report. Four dead people. An expensive dinner twelve years later where Vanessa acted as though hurting me was a small inconvenience.
Claire continued. "The original bookkeeper's file exists. Elena kept it all these years. She tried telling the police after the fire, but the investigator assigned to her complaint said the records were duplicates and couldn't be authenticated. Later she received threats. She moved twice."
Luca's voice was low. "Where is she now?"
"She runs a little stationery shop on the South Side. She doesn't want publicity. She barely agreed to let me give you her number."
"Then we won't surprise her," Luca said. "Our attorney can contact her privately. She can bring her own counsel."
Claire looked at him for a long moment, as though evaluating whether the man before her was the same young man who had turned away from Mara twelve years ago.
"Your mother came to see Elena," she said. "Once. After the fire. She brought money for the funeral. Elena refused it. Your mother left crying."
Luca closed his eyes. "She never told me."
"She tried to tell you other things. Richard made sure the important ones sounded like grief talking."
I thought about the handwritten letter hidden behind the portrait. "Do you know where Mara went?"
Claire nodded. "She lives in Milwaukee. Her name is still Mara Sullivan. She never changed it. She said she hadn't done anything that required her to hide her name forever. She did change her phone numbers. Repeatedly."
"Can I speak to her?" Luca asked.
"That's her decision," Claire replied. "She's not a clue you get to collect."
Luca absorbed the rebuke without flinching. "You're right. Tell her I would like to listen if she ever wants to talk. Nothing more."
I liked him better in that moment than I wanted to admit.
Our meeting was interrupted when Daniel entered with a concerned expression. "The station has identified someone trying to photograph this room through a service window. We have a description. The person left before security could approach."
Claire's face drained. "I told you I was followed."
Luca stood. "We don't chase them. We document the footage and make sure you reach someplace you choose safely."
"I have a sister in Madison," Claire said. "I can stay with her."
Daniel nodded. "We'll coordinate with station security and law enforcement if you agree."
On the drive back, Chicago's wet streets glowed beneath a dim afternoon sky. I watched buses move through traffic and thought about Samuel Ortiz. Ten years old. A cardboard rocket. Four people buried. Luca must have been thinking about him, too, because he spoke without looking at me.
"I remembered the Larkspur fire as a business disaster," he said. "There were lawsuits, insurance disputes, newspapers. My father talked about it as something we survived."
"Other people didn't," I said quietly.
"No. They didn't." He looked down at his hands. "I was twenty-six. I could have looked at the records. I let Richard tell me Mara had stolen from us, and I preferred that explanation because it hurt less than imagining she was warning us about something real."
"You didn't start the fire."
"I know. But after it happened, I stopped asking questions. That choice belongs to me."
My mother would have liked that answer. She always said apologies mattered only when the person making them could name what they had actually done.
At the mansion, we found Sarah Calder waiting with a stack of copied court transcripts. She explained that the official Larkspur inquiry had never established a deliberate arson. The fire likely began in an electrical panel behind the stage; the deaths occurred because smoke accumulated in a corridor where exits did not function as the building plans required. The investigation found negligence on the part of an installer that had since gone out of business. Richard's firm escaped major liability after submitting an inspection certificate.
"Can that be revisited?" Luca asked.
"Potentially, with new evidence. We can't promise a prosecution. Some limitation periods may have expired, and some claims will be harder than others. But falsification and subsequent concealment are separate questions."
She spread Claire's documents beside the archived theater program. On one sheet Elena Ortiz had circled three invoices. They were billed for electronic fail-safe exit hardware. Each invoice was marked paid.
On the final page was a handwritten notation: Equipment remained in supplier storage. Delivery postponed by RB.
"Richard Bellini," Luca said.
"Possibly," Sarah cautioned. "We need the supplier's records."
Luca nodded. "Then get them."
A second discovery followed before dinner. Daniel had identified the man seen taking photographs at the station. He was a private investigator working under a subcontract for Bellini Development's legal department. The man claimed he had been assigned to locate Claire over a dispute about missing company materials. He had not yet made a formal statement.
My stomach tightened at the thought of him watching Claire through the service window.
"Who authorized the assignment?" Luca asked.
"The internal billing code links to Richard's executive office."
Sarah wrote it down. "Preserve all correspondence. Don't confront him outside counsel."
That evening my mother called from Aunt June's apartment. She had made soup and was irritated by the attention from two neighborhood police officers who had checked the building after the anonymous threat. She insisted on hearing about the stitches before discussing the portraits.
"Six stitches?" she said. "Emily, you've been telling me all week that you only had a scrape."
"I wasn't trying to worry you."
"Then stop deciding what information I'm allowed to have." Her voice softened. "That's what you said the other people were doing, isn't it?"
I looked at the bandage on my hand. "You're right."
"Good. Now come home when you can, and no more climbing on furniture to solve old crimes."
"I didn't climb on anything."
"A technicality."
When the call ended, I found a message from Claire waiting on my phone.
Elena Ortiz agreed to speak. Only if you come without cameras, and only if Luca promises to look at Samuel's photograph before he looks at the financial records.
I took the message to Luca. He read it twice.
May you like
"Tell her yes," he said. "And tell her she won't have to ask me twice."
That night I lay awake thinking of the child with the cardboard rocket. The hidden painting was no longer about a woman Luca loved or a rich family embarrassed by the past. It was about four people who never made it through a door that should have opened. And our next conversation would be with a mother who had lived twelve years with that fact.
