Chapter 6 - The Shadows on Racine Avenue
The tea became the routine.
By the fourth day, Emma had learned the strange, silent geography of the Moretti compound. The house had forty-two rooms, but Isabella lived in only three: the light-filled morning room that looked out over the gray expanse of Lake Geneva, the small bedroom with the plain iron-framed bed she had insisted on bringing from her first bungalow in Cicero, and the gravel terrace where seven fat gray squirrels waited every afternoon at three for the cracked walnuts she kept in a silver candy bowl.
The nurses didn't like Emma. They treated her with the frosty, clipped politeness reserved for an interloper who had bypassed the professional hierarchy through sheer luck. But they didn't dare interfere; Vincent Moretti had fired the head nurse on Tuesday morning because she had tried to prevent Isabella from walking down to the dock with Emma without a leather transfer belt.
"She doesn't need a belt," Vincent had said from the breakfast table, not looking up from his copy of the Wall Street Journal. "She needs someone who won't drop her if her left ankle rolls. Miss Carter won't drop her. Pack your bags, Miss Finch."
Now, it was Thursday evening. Emma’s first night off.
The black Mercedes dropped her at the corner of 31st and Racine at six o'clock sharp. The driver, an older man named Frank who had two fingers missing from his left hand and never spoke unless spoken to, kept the engine idling while Emma walked up the three wooden steps of the porch.
The house was a two-story worker’s cottage built in 1904, the cedar siding painted the same dull yellow it had been since the Carter family moved in during the late seventies. The screen door had a small tear near the handle where Emma’s childhood dog had scratched at it, mended with three inches of green florist’s wire.
As Emma reached for the handle, the door opened.
Lily was standing there, still wearing her pale blue student scrubs, her dark hair piled into an untidy bun held together by two ballpoint pens. Her face was pale, her brown eyes wide behind her wire frames.
"Emma," Lily breathed, pulling her sister inside before the screen door could slam. "Where have you been? Who was that in the car?"
"I told you on the phone," Emma said, setting her tote bag down on the linoleum near the radiator. The kitchen smelled of fried cabbage and the cheap pine floor cleaner her father used to hide the smell of his medical supplies. "I’m working for a family in Wisconsin. Personal attendant."
"You didn't say it was Vincent Moretti," Lily hissed, her voice dropping to an urgent whisper as she pointed toward the front window. "Emma, do you know who was here yesterday? Two men in gray coats from the state licensing board. They came to the hospital during my clinical rotation. They asked my supervisor if I had ever been cited for 'unauthorized possession of controlled substances' during my rounds."
Emma’s heart went ice cold. "What?"
"They were trying to pull my clinical clearance," Lily said, her hands shaking as she pulled a crumpled yellow carbon slip from her pocket. "My director told them they were out of their minds—she’s known Dad since the union strikes in ninety-six—but they had a formal complaint. Signed by an attorney from a firm in the loop. Langford, Vance & Sterling."
The name hung in the tiny, yellow-lit kitchen like poison gas.
"They're going after you," Lily said, her voice cracking. "Emma, what did you do at that party? The girls at school were talking about it on Monday. They said some server tackled a woman at the Drake and Vincent Moretti had half the police department down there."
"I didn't tackle anyone," Emma said, her jaw tightening until her molars ached. "I stopped a bully from hitting an old woman."
"Well, that bully’s father owns the building where our clinicals are held!" Lily’s voice rose, the tears finally spilling over her lashes. "Emma, if I lose my clearance, I don't get the degree. I’ve worked four years for this. I worked sixty hours a week at the pharmacy to pay for the books—"
"You’re not losing your clearance," a new voice said from the hallway.
Thomas Carter walked into the kitchen, his gait slow and heavy, leaning heavily on a four-pronged aluminum cane. He was sixty-one, but the thirty years in the rail car shops and the four years of dialysis had hollowed his cheeks and turned his skin the color of an old cement sidewalk.
He was holding a long white envelope in his right hand.
"Dad," Emma said, moving toward him, but he held up his palm to stop her.
"Sit down, Emma," Thomas said.
He pulled out the chrome-legged kitchen chair—the one with the red vinyl split across the seat—and sat down with a low, whistling grunt. He set the envelope on the table between the salt shaker and the sugar bowl.
"This came by courier at noon," Thomas said. His voice was gravelly, ruined by decades of breathing welding fumes and coal dust, but it was steady. "It’s from the First National Bank of Chicago. It says the mortgage on this house—the seventy-two thousand dollars we took out to pay for your mother’s hospice care—has been satisfied in full."
Emma stayed quiet. She could hear the old refrigerator shuddering through its cycle in the corner.
"There was no note," Thomas continued, his gray eyes fixing on Emma’s face with the terrible, piercing clarity of an old foreman who knew when someone was lying about a broken tool. "Just a receipt. And a copy of a deed release signed by a trustee named Mark Gable."
"Dad—"
"Did you sell yourself, Emma?"
The question wasn't loud. It was worse than loud. It was the sound of a man who had spent his entire life proud of having nothing because at least the nothing was clean.
"No," Emma said, her voice ringing clear against the yellow walls. "I didn't sell anything. I took a job."
"A job that pays off a house in seventy-two hours?" Thomas leaned forward, his knuckles white on the crook of his cane. "Men like Vincent Moretti don't pay seventy thousand dollars for tea and company, Emma. I worked on his docks. I know how the Moretti family operates. When they give you a dollar with their right hand, they're measuring your neck for the collar with their left."
"He’s protecting us, Dad," Emma said.
"From what?" Thomas barked.
Before Emma could answer, the glass in the front bay window shattered.
The sound was explosive—the sharp, violent crack of safety glass giving way to a heavy brick wrapped in electrical tape, followed immediately by the dull, thudding thump of the object hitting the worn floral carpet of the living room.
Lily screamed, dropping to the linoleum behind the kitchen table.
Thomas tried to stand, his cane slipping on the linoleum, but Emma was already moving. She didn't think; the instincts of twenty-four years on the South Side took over before the dust had even settled. She grabbed the heavy cast-iron skillet from the cold burner on the stove, stepped into the short hallway, and reached the living room in three strides.
The room was cold. The November wind from Racine Avenue was already pouring through the jagged hole in the glass, fluttering the lace curtains that had belonged to Emma’s mother.
On the floor, nestled among the shards of glass, lay an ordinary red paving brick.
Around it, secured by four thick strips of black tape, was a full-page glossy printout from the Chicago Tribune society archives. It was a photograph of Victoria Langford at a charity gala three years earlier, her smile brilliant, her diamonds flashing.
Written across the face of the photograph in thick, black permanent marker were four words:
BACK TO THE DIRT.
From the street outside came the sharp, rising screech of tires as a dark sedan accelerated away from the curb, its taillights disappearing south toward 35th Street before the blue light of the corner streetlight could catch the plate.
Emma stood in the draft, the cold iron of the skillet heavy in her hand, her breath rising in faint white plumes against the dim light of the hallway.
Behind her, her father was struggling to his feet in the kitchen, his voice rough and broken as he called her name.
Emma didn't answer. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the heavy gold-rimmed business card Mark Gable had slipped into her coat two days ago, and tapped the ten-digit private number into her phone.
The line didn't even ring once.
May you like
"Gable," the voice said.
"They just threw a brick through my father’s window," Emma said. Her voice didn't shake. It was cold, clear, and steady as an iron rail. "Tell Mr. Moretti I’m coming back to Wisconsin tonight."
