Chapter 3 - SIX EMPTY PLACES
By morning, the photographs of the engagement dinner were already circulating among the staff.
Someone had captured Vanessa standing beside the ruined piano, her white comb held between two fingers, and Luca facing her with a look nobody at the estate had seen before. One caption called the scene a broken engagement. Another called it a lovers' quarrel. Neither mentioned the woman locked in the storage building.
I switched off my phone and went to my mother's small apartment.
Nora Sullivan stood at the kitchen sink with a mug of coffee and her old work apron tied around her waist. She was sixty, with a stubborn strand of silver hair that always escaped its clip. For thirty years she had tuned and repaired instruments until arthritis made the finest adjustments too painful. She still knew the exact sound of a hammer hitting a string a fraction too hard.
When she saw the sling, the coffee mug stopped halfway to her mouth.
"Oh, Emma."
"The doctor says it's bruised. I'm supposed to rest it."
She pulled out a chair for me. "Tell me the part you're afraid to tell."
So I did. I told her about Isabella, the locked building, the message hidden under the piano keys and the comb made from six pieces of ivory.
Mom listened without interrupting. Only when I finished did she ask, "Was it a Steinway?"
"A restored nineteenth-century concert grand. The action was rebuilt around twelve years ago."
"Then don't let anybody pull the keyboard apart without a qualified technician. The old materials are fragile. And tell the police not to put the ivory pieces back themselves. There are conservation rules, never mind laws governing ivory."
"I know."
She covered my hand with hers. "You sound like the little girl who once refused to let me throw away a cracked tuning fork."
"You said it was too damaged to fix."
"And you said damaged things still had histories."
I looked at the sling. "Some of them have bills."
She sighed. "I'm not asking you to keep that job."
"I can't stop paying my share of rent."
"There are other jobs, Emma. Not simple ones, but other ones. We need to think about your future, not just next Friday."
Her words stayed with me as a car from the estate arrived to collect me for a scheduled police interview. I had asked for an independent attorney, and Miriam Cole had put me in touch with Lena Ortiz, a labor lawyer who agreed to represent me. Lena met me at the estate gate and greeted me not as Luca's employee but as her client.
"Your employer has offered to cover reasonable medical bills and paid recovery time," she told me. "We'll put that in writing. It doesn't buy silence. You can report the assault and discuss the conditions at work."
"Can they fire me for bringing the piano into dinner?"
"They can raise legitimate employment issues, but retaliation for reporting violence or cooperating with police is another matter. We'll handle any dispute if one arises."
At the west sitting room, Detective Navarro waited with a photographer and a piano conservator named Mabel Cho. The grand instrument had been moved back on padded dollies. It looked smaller without the glittering ballroom and the crowd of angry guests, but the six exposed key surfaces made it seem wounded.
A technician had already isolated the area for documentation. Nothing would be removed without a record of its original position. The police had seized Vanessa's comb separately. Mabel examined its photographs and pointed out the blue ink on one of the pieces.
"If the grain and old glue traces line up," she said, "we may be able to establish that these came from this keyboard. A visual resemblance by itself is not enough."
I appreciated the care. I had recognized the comb, but recognition was not the same as proof.
"Miss Sullivan," Navarro asked, "where do you believe the access rail is?"
I showed Mabel the concealed screw heads at the front edge of the keyboard. She nodded. "That's right. With the action secured, we can inspect the cavity without disturbing the strings."
The screws yielded slowly. Behind the rail lay dust, felt, and old pencil marks left by several generations of technicians. Mabel photographed a strip of paper wedged beside the key bed. It had six numbers handwritten in blue ink, each corresponding to one of the damaged keys.
One. Four. Nine. Twelve. Sixteen. Twenty-one.
"Those aren't adjacent," I said. "Someone chose them."
"Maybe serial positions," Mabel said. "Maybe a cue. We won't know until we find the matching notes."
Beneath the fourth marked position was a narrow metal sleeve. It could have been mistaken for part of the frame. Mabel showed it to the detective, who documented it before opening it with fine tweezers.
Inside was a folded page, protected by waxed paper.
The writing was in dark blue ink. On one side was a list of six account references. On the other, a note signed E. Moretti.
I leaned closer but kept my hands behind my back.
Mabel read aloud only the sentence Navarro permitted her to examine: "A promise made for the Calder families must not be reduced to a line in the company books. The original list is in the blue audit ledger."
Navarro secured the page. "We need to verify who wrote it and when. Do either of you recognize the handwriting?"
Luca, who had arrived quietly during the inspection, stared at the photograph on the camera screen. "It looks like my mother's," he said. "I can't be certain from that."
He had brought a slim leather music case with him. He opened it to reveal two handwritten scores, which the detective photographed as comparison material without treating his identification as conclusive.
"She wrote this on the back of a lullaby," he said. "She used music paper when she ran out of stationery."
I looked at the six numbers again. "Could they be account references in a piano maintenance system?"
"The note suggests bookkeeping," Navarro said. "We'll have the records examiner look at them."
At the same moment Mabel found an older service record taped beneath the lid. Its final entry was seventeen years old. The tuner had noted that six keytops were marked in blue for an inspection Elena had requested, with no indication they were to be removed. The exact sentence was mundane, even dull. That made it more persuasive than any dramatic secret map.
Vanessa had pried off six pieces that could identify where Elena hid a page. She had not found the page itself.
"She searched the wrong side," I said.
Mabel glanced at me. "Apparently so."
Luca stood away from the piano, his hands at his sides. "My mother asked me to practice this instrument every morning. I haven't opened it properly in years."
"You didn't cause someone to dismantle it," I said.
"No. But I let Vanessa make decisions about it because she said the room looked like a memorial. I told myself she was trying to make the house feel alive."
He looked down. "I didn't ask Isabella what the piano meant to her."
I thought of my mother at the kitchen sink and understood that the same object could carry different histories for everyone who touched it.
After the inspection, Lena accompanied me to my interview. I described Vanessa's grip on my wrist, the impact against the piano, and the threat that I'd never work in Chicago again. The detective recorded where I had stood, what I had seen and what I could not remember. She did not ask me to guess whether Vanessa knew about the hidden page.
Before I left, an assistant from the records division called Navarro with preliminary information about the six numbers. The references pointed to restricted employee-benefit accounts at Calder Yard, the industrial riverfront company the Moretti family had operated decades earlier.
Luca rubbed his forehead. "Calder was mostly warehouses. Why were employee accounts attached to the land?"
"That," Navarro replied, "is a question for whoever kept the books."
"My father trusted Richard Bellini with them," Luca said. "He was the outside financier."
The detective paused. "Then we'd like the original ledgers, not simply Richard's explanation."
Outside the sitting room, two employees stood whispering near a trolley. When they saw me, they stopped. I expected the usual silence. Instead, one of them, a young porter named Elias, raised his head.
"Miss Sullivan? They said you're being fired for destroying the piano. Is that true?"
"I haven't been fired," I answered. "I was trying to keep it from being taken away."
He glanced toward the door. "Mrs. Bellini told us to burn the packing material. There were papers inside one crate."
"What papers?"
"I don't know. But I kept the shipping label because the crate was going to the wrong address."
He produced a folded carbon copy. The destination was Bellini Restoration Logistics, a warehouse on the river. The pickup time was entered for the morning after the engagement party, when Isabella was supposed to be in Boston and the grand piano should already have left the house.
I asked Elias to show the label directly to Navarro, and he did. She photographed it and took his contact information.
"You don't have to lose your job for telling the truth," Luca told him.
Elias gave a cautious nod. "With respect, sir, that's easy to say today. It wasn't easy last week."
Nobody corrected him.
On our way out, Luca asked whether I'd ever considered training in piano restoration. I laughed because my shoulder hurt and because the question was almost painfully poorly timed.
"When I can afford lessons and time off," I said, "maybe."
"I could help."
"Then first help make sure the staff can tell you what is happening without risking their rent. The rest is my problem to solve."
He looked surprised, then nodded. "Fair."
I reached home to find Mom listening to an old recording of Chopin while she sorted repair tools in a biscuit tin. I told her what Mabel had found under the keys. She turned down the volume.
"An old instrument keeps fingerprints in unexpected places," she said.
"And secrets?"
"Sometimes. But the secret isn't the important part. What matters is what people do when they hear it."
May you like
On the kitchen table lay my pay statement. Beside it was a handwritten list of the training programs I'd searched for months earlier and never dared apply to. Mom had circled one in red.
I studied it while the music played, wondering how a woman could spend eleven months in a house without anyone recognizing what she knew, and then change the direction of her whole life by noticing six broken keys.
