Chapter 6 - THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECOND VERSE
They returned to the Castaldi estate after dusk, but Mariela no longer saw the house as a maze of locked doors. It was a place where someone had carefully arranged the evidence of a life, hiding some pieces in plain sight and burying others where grief would make them hard to touch.
Raimondo ordered the front gate secured and asked his security chief to identify every person who had entered the property in the previous month. Mariela sat at the study desk, the letter and clipping spread before her, trying to make the dates align.
The blue button from Rosalba rested beside the strip of cloth. She had promised to return it. The promise felt suddenly important.
“Silvio has the other half of the song,” she said.
“Or Lucia believed he did.”
“What could a song possibly contain?”
“Not the melody. The last verse might have been a code.”
“Your wife hid financial records inside a lullaby?”
“Alessia liked music. She also knew people underestimate what they cannot understand.”
Mariela traced the numbers on the cloth. Six digits, then MARE. Sea. A locker near the port seemed likely, but the number could also be an account reference or a date. She wrote down the possibilities in her notebook.
At nine, Mrs. Petrov brought tea and informed them that Rosalba had refused to sleep until Mariela returned. Mariela went upstairs at once.
Rosalba sat under the covers, fully dressed in her nightgown, with Pepe on her lap.
“You came back,” she said.
“I said I would try.”
“You did.”
Mariela handed her the blue button. “I brought it back.”
Rosalba examined it with solemn care before returning it to Pepe's pocket.
“He says you can keep a different thing.”
“What thing?”
Rosalba lifted the rabbit's loose ear and pulled out a narrow strip of paper, folded into a square no bigger than a postage stamp.
Mariela's breath caught. “Where did this come from?”
“Mama put it there. I found it after the music played.”
“Why didn't you tell me?”
“I forgot. Then I remembered. Then I thought maybe it wasn't important.”
Children were often blamed for withholding information when they were simply trying to understand it. Mariela touched her shoulder gently.
“You did nothing wrong.”
The paper contained a line of music notation and a sentence in Italian: Quando il mare tace, conta le luci. When the sea falls silent, count the lights.
Raimondo appeared in the doorway. Mariela showed him the note.
“The harbor,” he said.
“Or the coastline.”
“Count the lights could mean a lighthouse, buoys, windows, or ships.”
“Or the lights in a photograph,” Mariela said. She remembered the image of Lucia at the gate and Alessia by the sea. “Do we have more photographs from that day?”
Raimondo's expression changed. “There was a second picture. I thought it had been lost.”
“Where?”
“In the family archive. Silvio managed it after Alessia disappeared.”
“Then we should look.”
“No.” He glanced at Rosalba. “Not tonight. She needs to sleep, and we need to stop reacting to every clue as if the person who left it is still standing outside the door.”
Mariela wanted to argue, but she recognized the discipline beneath the frustration. For once, his caution was not a command meant to silence her. It was a plan meant to keep them from making the next mistake.
She sat beside Rosalba until the child fell asleep. Then she and Raimondo went to the archive together.
The family archive occupied a room above the old library. Unlike Alessia's room, it was not sealed, but it was almost empty. Cabinets lined the walls, each marked with dates and company names. A desk stood beneath a green-shaded lamp. The second photograph was missing from its labeled folder.
Raimondo opened the cabinet and checked the register.
“Someone removed it six months ago,” he said.
“Who?”
“The record says I did.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Mariela looked at the register. The signature resembled his, but the final stroke of the C was too long. A small difference, easy to overlook if one wanted the entry to be genuine.
“Someone has been learning how to imitate you,” she said.
“Or someone has had access to my old signatures.”
They searched the room without disturbing the folders. Behind a row of ledgers, Mariela found a shallow compartment built into the cabinet. It was empty except for a fleck of blue paint and a faint smell of sea salt.
“The photograph was here,” she said.
Raimondo pressed the panel. It shifted slightly, revealing a narrow cavity. Inside lay a small metal key.
He turned it over in his palm. The number stamped into the head matched the first two digits on Lucia's cloth.
“Locker,” Mariela said.
“Probably.”
“Where?”
Raimondo looked toward the window. Beyond the gardens, the city lights glimmered in the distance.
“There is an old storage building at the port. My father used it for shipping documents before everything went digital. The lockers were never properly decommissioned.”
“Then we go tomorrow.”
“We go with a team.”
“We go without announcing it to everyone who works for you.”
He met her gaze. “Agreed.”
The next morning, they drove to the port in an unmarked car with one trusted security officer. The sea was gray and restless, the wind carrying the smell of diesel, salt, and wet rope. The storage building stood behind a row of shuttered warehouses. Its windows were boarded, its metal door rusted around the edges.
The key opened locker 214.
Inside sat a tin box wrapped in oilcloth.
There was no photograph. Instead, they found copies of invoices, a small cassette recorder, and a letter addressed to Raimondo in Alessia's hand.
He stared at the envelope for a long time before opening it.
My love,
If you are reading this, then the people I feared have either found me or convinced you that I chose to leave. I did not leave because I stopped loving you. I left because I discovered what our family had become, and I could not trust the walls around our daughter.
Silvio has been moving money through the shipping companies. At first I thought he was stealing. Then I realized the money was paying people to make records disappear: cargo manifests, hospital admissions, police reports, and names. He is not only hiding crimes. He is choosing which lives count as real.
I found proof that a woman was taken from the coast after the warehouse fire. The report was changed before it reached the police. I believe that woman was connected to Lucia's family, but I could not confirm it. Lucia helped me hide what we found. She is in danger now because of me.
The final verse of the moon song is not a code for a place. It is a sequence. The notes correspond to dates in the shipping ledger. Follow the invoices marked MARE and you will see where the money went.
If I cannot return, do not let Silvio raise Rosalba in a world where truth belongs to whoever has the strongest men.
I love you. I am sorry I could not find a safer way.
Alessia
Raimondo lowered the letter. His eyes were bright, though no tears fell.
Mariela read the invoices. The company names were unfamiliar, but the payments formed a pattern. Small amounts moved through several accounts, then converged on a private security firm and a medical facility outside Naples. The dates aligned with the months after Alessia disappeared.
“Someone paid to erase records,” Mariela said.
“And someone paid to keep a person alive,” Raimondo replied.
They looked at each other.
The possibility was terrifying. If Alessia had been taken rather than killed, then someone had kept her hidden for two years. The medical payments might be evidence of imprisonment, or of treatment, or of a desperate attempt to protect her. The documents did not say which.
At the bottom of the box lay the cassette recorder. Its label read: PER RAIMONDO — SOLO SE SEI PRONTO. For Raimondo—only if you are ready.
He did not press play.
Not there. Not with the sea roaring outside and the possibility of being watched still hanging over them.
He placed the recorder in the tin box and closed the lid.
“We take this to someone independent,” Mariela said. “A lawyer who has no ties to your family. Someone who can preserve the evidence.”
Raimondo nodded. “I know one.”
“Do you trust him?”
“I trust that he has more to lose by lying than by telling the truth.”
“That isn't the same thing.”
“No,” he said. “But it's a beginning.”
As they left the building, Mariela noticed a man across the street pretending to study his phone. When she looked directly at him, he turned away and walked toward a black car.
Raimondo saw him too.
“Get in,” he said.
This time, Mariela did not argue. The officer drove them out through a different gate, weaving through traffic until the black car was no longer visible.
Back at the estate, Raimondo secured the box in the study. He asked Mariela to wait while he made two calls. She went upstairs to Rosalba, who was drawing a picture of the sea with three lighthouses and a tiny boat.
“Is that your mother?” Mariela asked.
Rosalba nodded toward the boat. “That's her. She knows how to find the lights.”
Mariela sat beside her.
“Do you remember the last verse of the song?”
Rosalba hummed a few notes. The melody was incomplete, but the rhythm matched the line of notation from Pepe's paper.
“Can you sing the words?”
Rosalba shook her head. “Mama said I should only sing it when the house was safe.”
Mariela's chest tightened. “Did she tell you how to know?”
“She said Papa would know when he stopped being afraid of the truth.”
The answer was so simple, so unbearably adult in its wisdom, that Mariela could not speak for a moment.
Downstairs, a phone rang.
Then another.
A minute later, Raimondo appeared in the doorway. His face had gone still in the way it did when he was holding back anger.
“The medical facility closed eighteen months ago,” he said. “The director is missing. And the lawyer I intended to call has just been arrested for fraud.”
“Silvio is clearing the board.”
“Yes.”
“Then we stop playing by his rules.”
Raimondo looked at her. “What do you suggest?”
May you like
Mariela lifted Rosalba's drawing. Three lights. One boat. A sea that looked dark but not empty.
“We find someone who doesn't know the rules yet,” she said. “Someone Silvio hasn't had time to frighten.”
