Chapter 12
CHAPTER TWELVE
“We’re really going to break into my ex mother-in-law’s house,” I said, and the fact that this was the sanest sentence I’d spoken all week told me everything I needed to know about my life.
Saturday night. Seven-twenty. Four women in a Subaru parked two streets over from the Ferraro house, making sure the driveway was empty and no one was inside.
Lori was behind the wheel with the engine off and her reading glasses on, looking like someone’s grandmother waiting outside a piano recital.
Tammy was in the passenger seat with a thermos of coffee and her phone set to the neighborhood watch app, monitoring for activity.
Jill and I were in the back seat, and Jill was doing that thing where she breathed in patterns—four counts in, four counts hold, four counts out—that her therapist had taught her for panic attacks.
“I prosecuted people for this,” she said. “Literally. I stood in front of juries and said ‘the defendant knowingly entered a dwelling without authorization’ and now I’m—”
“Jill.”
“Right. Breathing.”
We walked to the house through the side yard.
No streetlights on this stretch—the neighborhood was the kind of wealthy that preferred tasteful darkness to visible security.
Jill and I reached the side door that led into the mudroom, the one the family used when they didn’t want to bother with the front entrance.
I’d come through this door ten thousand times carrying groceries, hauling kids’ sports equipment, sneaking in late from the one book club meeting Sal hadn’t wanted me to attend.
Now I was sneaking in to steal a dead woman’s diary. Life comes at you.
“Can you do the lock?” I whispered.
Jill extended her hand toward the deadbolt. Her fingers trembled. She closed her eyes, did the breathing thing, and I felt it—a shift in the air, subtle, like a change in pressure before a storm. Something clicked inside the door. Then clicked again. Jill’s face contorted.
“It’s a double lock. There’s a—hold on—”
A third click. The handle turned. The door swung open, and Jill’s hands dropped to her sides, shaking.
“I need to sit down,” she whispered.
“You can sit down after. Come on.”
The house was dark and silent. Just the hum of a refrigerator, and the tick of the grandfather clock in the foyer that Rosaria had picked out and everyone hated.
Rosaria materialized in the hallway mirror as I passed it. She looked strange here, in her own house. Diminished somehow, like the walls remembered her differently than she remembered herself.
“Upstairs,” she said. “Second door on the left. My bedroom.”
As if I didn’t know where her bedroom was.
Jill stayed at the bottom of the stairs as lookout.
I went up alone, each step creaking in the dark, Rosaria drifting alongside me in the glass of the framed family photos that lined the stairwell.
In every photo, she stood at the center.
In every photo, everyone else arranged themselves around her.
The bedroom door was closed. I opened it, and the smell hit me—Rosaria’s perfume, faint but still there after fourteen months. Chanel No. 5. She’d worn it every day of her life and the room had absorbed it so deeply it would probably outlast the house.
“The jewelry box,” Rosaria said from the vanity mirror. “On the dresser. The velvet compartment underneath the tray.”
The jewelry box was large, ornate, the kind of thing that cost a fortune and looked it. I lifted the tray—mostly empty now, Claudia and the others having picked through it—and found the velvet compartment underneath. Inside, a small brass key.
“Top drawer,” Rosaria said. Her voice had gone tight. “The lock is on the left side.”
I pulled open the top drawer of the dresser. Silk scarves, gloves, a packet of lavender sachets. And on the left, a small brass lock plate set into the wood—the kind of thing you’d miss if you didn’t know to look.
I fitted the key.
It turned. But the drawer panel that should have slid open was already loose. I pulled it aside and found the hidden compartment behind it.
Empty.
I stared at the space. Maybe eight inches deep, a foot wide. Lined with velvet, same as the jewelry box. And absolutely, completely empty.
Except it wasn’t untouched. The lock plate had scratch marks around the keyhole—fine, shallow scratches, the kind a tool would leave.
Someone had forced this open. Not with a key, not carefully.
They’d pried at it, scratched the brass, and then tried to set everything back the way they’d found it.
The silk scarves were arranged over the compartment.
The sachets were placed just so. Whoever had done this had tried to make it look undisturbed.
But they hadn’t had the key. And they hadn’t been gentle enough.
“No,” Rosaria said.
I turned to the mirror. Her reflection was rigid, her edges flickering.
“No, no, no—” The words came out stacked on top of each other, rapid. “It was there. It was always there. Forty years, I kept it in that drawer, no one knew—”
“Someone knew.”
“No one knew!” Her form blazed bright and then guttered like a candle in wind. “Everything was in there, Gina. Everything I knew about this family. Every secret, every lie, every piece of—” She flickered so violently she nearly disappeared. “Someone took it. Someone took everything.”
“Rosaria. Stay with me.”
She stabilized, but barely. Her face was drawn tight with fury and something worse—fear. I’d never seen Rosaria Ferraro frightened before. Critical, yes. Angry, constantly. But frightened? That was new, and it made the dark bedroom feel darker.
“Whoever took it knows,” she said. “They know what I wrote. They know what I knew about them. And if they killed me to keep one secret—” Her voice dropped. “What will they do to keep all of them?”
I closed the empty compartment. Replaced the scarves. Shut the drawer. Left everything the way I’d found it, or close enough.
Then I went downstairs, grabbed Jill, and walked out through the mudroom door without looking back.
Lori had the engine running. Tammy turned around in the passenger seat as Jill and I climbed in, took one look at my face, and didn’t ask.
I told them anyway. The empty compartment. The scratch marks. The careful rearrangement meant to hide that someone had been there first.
“Gone,” I said. The word sat in the car like something heavy. “The diary’s gone.”
“Who rook it?” Lori asked, pulling away from the curb, headlights off until we reached the main road.
“Anyone could have. They all have access to the house.”
“So the same list of suspects,” Jill said quietly. She had her legal pad on her knees but hadn’t opened it.
“The same list.”
Nobody spoke for a while. Lori drove carefully, both hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. The town slid past in darkness—the harbor, the closed shops on Main Street, the antique stores with their crystals in the windows.
“Whoever has that diary,” Tammy said, “has everything Rosaria had. Every secret, every piece of leverage. They’ve got the whole family in the palm of their hand.”
“And if they’re the same person who killed Rosaria,” Lori added, “then they killed once to protect a secret. Now they have all of them.”
Lori pulled up in front of my cottage and put the car in park. She turned around and looked at me with those sharp blue eyes, clinical and kind in equal measure.
“Lock your door,” she said.
“Everyone keeps telling me that.”
“Because you keep needing to hear it.”
I went inside. Locked the door. Tested it twice. And sat in the kitchen in the dark, thinking about an empty drawer and a killer who now had all the leverage in the world.