Chapter 1 - The Child in the Study
“Mr. DeLuca… I think your dead wife is hiding behind the old train station.”
Lorenzo DeLuca had heard grown men beg for their lives without blinking. He had watched powerful businessmen forget their prepared speeches when he walked into a room. At thirty-nine, he controlled enough money, property, favors, and frightened loyalty to make most problems disappear before breakfast.
But the little girl standing in front of his mahogany desk was three years old. And she had just said the only sentence in the English language capable of frightening him.
Lorenzo slowly lifted his eyes. Emma Walker stood on the other side of the enormous study, wearing a faded yellow cardigan and clutching a stuffed gray rabbit against her chest. Her mother, Sophia, had worked as a housekeeper at the DeLuca estate for four years. Emma occasionally waited in the servants’ kitchen when Sophia worked late, but she knew better than to enter Lorenzo’s private study. Everyone did. Yet there she was, so small that the desk almost hid her completely.
Lorenzo set down the crystal whiskey glass in his hand. “My wife died two months ago, Emma.”
“I know, sir.” Her voice was barely louder than the fire crackling behind him.
Everyone knew. Isabella DeLuca’s car had gone through a guardrail on a rain-slicked road north of Manhattan. By the time emergency crews reached the ravine, the vehicle had burned badly enough that identification had depended on several pieces of evidence taken together: her wedding ring, a bracelet Lorenzo had given her, dental records, the license plate, and security footage showing Isabella leaving the estate alone. Lorenzo had buried a sealed casket. He had stood beside it while two hundred people watched the most feared man in their world discover there were still things power could not control.
Since then, the mansion had become a museum of everything he had lost. Her piano remained closed. Her favorite coffee mug still sat on the upper shelf. Her coat remained in the downstairs closet. No one had touched the perfume bottles in her dressing room. And the silver-framed photograph on Lorenzo’s desk had not moved by so much as an inch.
He looked at that photograph now—Isabella laughing at something outside the frame, dark hair, green eyes, one hand shielding her face from the sun. Then he looked back at Emma.
“You saw someone who looked like her.”
Emma shook her head. “I saw her.”
“Where?”
“Behind the warehouse by the train tracks.”
Lorenzo’s fingers tightened against the edge of the desk. Sophia usually took Emma to visit her sister on Thursday afternoons. The old freight district was several blocks from their normal bus stop.
“Why were you there?”
“The bus was late.” Emma’s eyes dropped. “Mama said we could walk to Aunt Jenny’s because I was crying.”
Lorenzo filed away the detail. Children invented things. Children confused strangers with faces they had seen in photographs. Children built entire realities from shadows and overheard conversations. He repeated those facts silently.
Emma continued. “The lady was skinny.”
Lorenzo said nothing.
“Her hair was shorter.”
Nothing.
“She had a big dark coat. One sleeve was ripped.” Emma swallowed. “She kept looking behind her like somebody bad was coming.”
A cold sensation moved through Lorenzo’s chest. “You only saw her for a moment.”
“Yes, sir.”
“There are millions of people in New York.”
“I know.”
“Some people look alike.”
“I know.”
“And you’ve seen photographs of Isabella in this house.”
Emma lowered her gaze. “Yes.”
Relief began to move through him. Then she said: “But Bruno was with her.”
Everything inside Lorenzo stopped. “What did you say?”
“The black dog.” Emma hugged the rabbit tighter. “He was really skinny too.”
Lorenzo stood so abruptly that his chair rolled backward and struck the bookcase. Emma flinched. He immediately lowered his voice. “What did Bruno look like?”
“Black.”
“What else?”
“Big.”
“That could be many dogs.”
Emma thought. Then: “He had the brown collar with the funny metal ring.”
Lorenzo stared at her. “What funny metal ring?”
She lifted one tiny index finger, bent it into a crooked hook. “Like this.”
Lorenzo forgot how to breathe. Six years earlier, when Bruno had still been a clumsy puppy, he caught his collar on the wrought-iron fence while chasing a squirrel. The leash ring bent almost double. Lorenzo wanted to replace the collar, but Isabella laughed and took it from him. “He earned that scar,” she had said. “Let him keep it.”
Bruno wore that same damaged collar for six years. And Bruno disappeared the morning Isabella died. The official assumption was that he had been in the car and escaped before the fire spread. Search teams spent almost two weeks looking. No dog. No collar. No body. Nothing.
Lorenzo came around the desk. He stopped several feet away from Emma and lowered himself until they were eye level.
“Emma.”
“Yes, sir?”
“I need you to think very carefully.”
She nodded.
“Did your mother ever tell you about Bruno’s collar?”
“No.”
“Did anyone in this house?”
“No, sir.”
“Have you seen Bruno before?”
“In pictures.”
“Could you see the bent ring in the pictures?”
She shook her head. Lorenzo knew she was probably right; most photographs showed Bruno from the front, and the damaged leash ring usually hung beneath his neck. He stared at the little girl. Then asked:
“Can you show me exactly where you saw them?”
May you like
Emma nodded. “Yes.”
Lorenzo stood. And for the first time in two months, something more dangerous than grief entered his chest: Hope.
