Chapter 7 #2
“There’s something I’ve been thinking about,” she said. “Since the family get-together, actually. Seeing everyone together, seeing Claudia playing lady of the manor—it reminded me.”
I waited, keeping my face neutral. Interested but not too interested.
“Rosaria kept a diary.”
The kitchen went very quiet. Even the radiator seemed to pause.
“A locked one,” Paula continued. “Leather-bound, brass lock, old-fashioned. She’d had it for decades.
I saw it once when I was sixteen—snooping in her bedroom, yes, I know.
She caught me and nearly disowned me on the spot.
Grabbed it and said if I ever touched it again, she’d cut me from the will.
” Paula’s mouth twisted. “Which she tried to do anyway, but that’s beside the point. ”
“Where did she keep it?”
“Top drawer of her dresser. But here’s the thing—nobody’s found or mentioned it.
Not George, not Sal, not Claudia. And I looked all for it.
The past few months of picking over that estate, every piece of jewelry and china cataloged and fought over.
But the diary? Not a word. Either someone found it and isn’t talking, or someone made it disappear. ”
I turned my wine glass. A diary. Decades of entries from a woman who knew everything about everyone.
“Did you ever see what was in it?”
“Not a chance. Locked down like state secrets. Whatever’s in there, it’s everything. Every grudge, every secret, every piece of leverage she held over this family for fifty years. Even that old business with my first art mentor.”
I wanted to tell her. The pressure was physical—to say Rosaria’s here, she was murdered, she’s been talking to me. Paula was being honest and I was holding back.
But the timing nagged at me. Paula showing up unannounced, volunteering information. She’d said at the gathering she was “glad the old witch was dead,” and now here she was being helpful and admitting Rosaria had secrets on her.
And if I told her about Rosaria—still here, still critical, still hadn’t said a kind word about her daughter—I’d have to watch Paula’s face crack open. She’d grieved the relationship they never fixed. That would be cruel in a way I wasn’t willing to be.
“You wouldn’t happen to know anything about it, would you?” Paula looked at me hopefully. Almost too hopefully.
“I didn’t know about the diary,” I said. “But you’re right—it’s strange no one’s found it.”
Paula studied me. I held her gaze.
“Be careful, Gina. This family has more buried than Rosaria.”
She finished her wine, hugged me at the door—hard, genuine, the kind that made me feel guilty for not trusting her completely—and drove away.
I stood on the porch breathing cold air until my head cleared.
My phone buzzed. Carmen. Just so you know. Josie’s been asking me things. About the divorce. About what it was really like before you left. She won’t ask you — she’s too proud and too scared of Dad — but she’s asking. I think she knows the story she’s been telling herself doesn’t hold up anymore.
I read it twice. Set the phone down. Picked it back up. What about Nick?
Three dots. A long pause. Then: Nick misses you, I can tell. He’ll come around.
Another knock came at seven-fifteen. Boy, I sure was getting popular.
I opened the door expecting Paula again, or maybe Lori. Instead, Detective Tony Caruso was on my porch holding a manila folder.
He looked different outside the station. Still rumpled—coffee stain on his cuff, tie loosened—but the porch light caught the silver at his temples and the lines around his eyes, and I noticed he had the kind of face that got more interesting the longer you looked at it.
I realized I’d been looking for several seconds without speaking.
“Ms. Ferraro.”
“Detective.”
“Can I come in?”
I stepped aside. He ducked through the doorway—unnecessary, standard height frame, but he did it anyway. He glanced around with cop’s eyes: the books, the herbs, the covered mirrors.
“Nice place,” he said, the way people say things they feel obligated to say.
“What’s in the folder?”
He set it on the kitchen table, next to my abandoned soup. His fingers stayed on it for a moment, like he was deciding something. Then he opened it.
“Toxicology came back.”
The kitchen went very still. I gripped the back of a chair.
“I called in a favor with the ME’s office.
Got them to pull the original bloodwork and run additional panels.
” He slid a sheet toward me—rows of numbers and chemical names I couldn’t parse.
“They found traces of a methanol-based compound. Subtle. Easy to miss on a standard tox screen, especially when nobody’s looking. ”
“Methanol,” I repeated.
“Industrial. Shows up in solvents, paint strippers, certain adhesives. Hobby supplies. Art materials.” He tapped the paper.
“Not hard to get your hands on—hardware store, craft shops, online. You’d need to modify the concentration to make it lethal, though and that takes specialized knowledge. Chemistry or medicine.”
I pulled the chair out and sat down because my legs had made the decision for me. So Rosaria was right.
“Is it conclusive?”
“No.” Tony sat down across from me, the chair creaking under him. “It’s consistent with poisoning, but a defense attorney would argue it could’ve been environmental exposure, accidental ingestion, half a dozen other things. It’s not enough for a case.” He paused. “But it’s not nothing.”
Not nothing. The phrase hung in the air between us.
“You believed me,” I said.
“I followed the evidence.” He held up a hand. “Different thing.”
“But you’re here. At my house. At seven o’clock, with a file you could’ve called about.”
Something shifted in his expression—a crack in the professional mask. He’d come here thinking I was a grieving ex with a grudge and a theory. The toxicology had changed the math.
“The tea detail checked out,” he said. “The dish-washing. The timing. And now this.” He closed the folder. “You said you couldn’t tell me how you knew. That still bothers me. But your information’s been accurate, and people who make things up don’t usually get the small details right.”
His eyes held mine. Brown, deep-set, tired. Not suspicious anymore—or not only. Something else in that look. Curiosity. The beginning of something he hadn’t decided to trust yet.
“I need more, though. This opens a door. Doesn’t walk through it. If there’s anything else you ‘know’—“ The slightest emphasis on the word. “—now’s the time.”
“I’m working on it.”
“Work faster.” He stood, collected the folder, paused in the doorway. “I’ll be in touch. Lock your door.”
“Was that concern, Detective?”
He gave me a look—annoyed or amused, impossible to tell with that face—and walked to his car. I watched from the window as his taillights pulled away, and realized my hand was resting against the glass where his reflection had been.
I pulled it back.
Rosaria was in the kitchen window, watching me with an expression I’d never seen from her before. Not critical. Not demanding. Something closer to contemplation.
“I was wondering when you were going to show up,” I said. She’d left me alone for most of the day.
“Paula was right,” she said. “I kept a diary. Top drawer of my dresser—it is locked. The key is in my jewelry box, the velvet compartment underneath the tray.”
I sank into the chair Tony had just vacated. It was still warm.
“There are things in that diary, Gina.” Rosaria’s voice was quiet, stripped of its usual imperiousness. “Secrets. About everyone.”
“Everyone,” I repeated.
“Everyone.” She met my eyes in the dark window glass.
“Things I wrote down because I knew someday they would matter. Things people thought I did not notice. Things people thought they had hidden.” Her jaw set—that stubborn Ferraro line.
“I was not a fool, whatever my children thought. I saw everything. And I wrote it all down.”
The soup on the table had gone cold. Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the windows. Somewhere in the Ferraro family home, a locked diary sat in a drawer—or didn’t, depending on who’d gotten to it first.
Tony was starting to believe me. Paula was either an ally or a very good actress. And somewhere in that family, someone had turned an industrial chemical into a murder weapon and served it in a teacup.