"Aldo wrapped his own money in his own paper," Frank said, "because the men who packed that suitcase never imagined it would be opened by anyone but the police. And the police, boss, would have been looking at Clara. Nobody looks at the wrapping when they have already decided who the criminal is."
Enzo's face, in the lamplight, was very still. "Then we will be the ones who look," he said. "At everything. Follow it further, Frank. If he kept the money, he kept records. Men like Aldo always believe their paper loves them back."
Chapter 10: Tommy's Letters
Clara kept Tommy's letters in a biscuit tin that had belonged to her grandmother, tied with the blue ribbon from the flowers he had brought her the week he asked if he could court her properly, as he put it, standing in her doorway with his cap in his hands and rain still on his shoulders. She had not opened the tin since the funeral. She opened it now at the kitchen table of the guest cottage, with Rosa pretending to mend curtains by the window and Frank Deluca waiting with the patience of a man who understood that what he was about to ask would hurt.
"You asked about proof," Clara said. "About when. About whether the baby — whether anyone could say—" She stopped, colour rising, anger and grief tangled together. "Tommy knew. Tommy always knew. It is all here, in his own hand, dated like he knew someday a room full of men would sit in judgment on a dead man's child."
Frank opened the first letter with care. It was dated the previous March, on Valenti notepaper Tommy had plainly taken from the garden office and then apologised for in the second line. My dearest Clara, it began, in handwriting that leaned forward as if eager. The roses by the east wall are out a month early and Mr. V. pretended not to care and then stood looking at them like a boy. I told him you would say that was his soft heart showing and he told me to get back to work before I got ideas. I have ideas, Clara. I have so many ideas they keep me awake.
Letter after letter laid out a love that had never been grand and had therefore been entirely real. Tommy driving Enzo to a meeting in the city and waiting four hours with a paperback Clara had lent him. Tommy mending the cottage fence. Tommy saving, in a building society account whose statements were folded between the letters, forty dollars a week, then sixty, in a hand that grew steadier with pride. For a ring, one statement was annotated in pencil. For the deposit on the place near the water, another. For the baby, the last one said, in the shakiest writing of all, dated just seven months before the present day: Whatever you need, love. Whatever he or she needs. I am not afraid. I should have written that bigger. I AM NOT AFRAID.
Clara watched Frank read and spoke in the spaces, filling the letters with the voice they had been written in. "He found out the same day I did. I waited by the garden gate because I wanted to tell him outside, among his roses, not in a kitchen. He went white. Then he laughed. Then he went down on one knee right there in the mulch, in his work boots, and Rosa saw from the window and crossed herself because she thought he had been taken ill." A smile broke through her tears and vanished. "He asked me to marry him three times that week because he said the first time didn't count, he was too happy to have done it properly."
The timeline assembled itself without anyone forcing it, which was why Frank trusted it. The letters showed Tommy learning of the pregnancy seven months ago, in the garden, in front of a witness. They showed him accompanying Clara, under his own name, to her first Bayonne appointment, signing the visitors' book Mrs. Kline's counterpart there had already confirmed. They showed his service too: years of driving logs mentioned with pride, the winter Enzo's car had slid on black ice on the expressway and Tommy had held it, the night he had waited outside a hospital while Enzo sat with a dying friend and had brought coffee at dawn without being asked.
At the cottage door, unannounced and unheard until Rosa rose quickly, stood Enzo.
He had come, Frank saw at once, on some errand of protection business, times or guards. What he found was a dead man's handwriting open on his kitchen table and Clara crying without shame, and Enzo Valenti, who could sit unmoved through threats that would empty other rooms, went still in the doorway like a man who had walked into a church mid-prayer.
Clara stood, wiping her face with her sleeve, defiant through grief. "He was yours, Mr. Valenti. Seven years he drove you and tended your house and never asked for a thing above his wages. And he was mine. And this baby was wanted by him, in writing, in joy, before—" Her voice failed.
"Before I let him drive to Albany in bad weather because a supplier would not wait," Enzo said quietly. "Before a lorry crossed a line on a wet road and my house got a telephone call and yours got a coffin. I know the order of it, Clara. I have known it every night since."
He crossed to the table and, asking with a glance she answered with a nod, lifted the last letter himself. He read it twice. Frank watched something old and unspoken move in his employer: guilt, which powerful men usually converted to money because money was easier, settling for once into its true shape.
"Tommy Bennett once told me," Enzo said, "that I employed a hundred men but I only trusted my car to one of them, and that was because every other man I knew drove like the road owed him something, and Tommy drove like people he loved were waiting at the end of it." He laid the letter down with a care Frank had rarely seen in him. "I paid for his funeral and I thought the account was settled. It was not. A man's child does not grow up in my guest cottage as a problem to be managed."
He looked at Clara directly. "When this is finished, the child will have his name honoured in this house properly. There will be a trust, drawn by Frank, in Tommy's name and yours, and it will not be charity and it will not be hush money, and any man who calls it either answers to me. Tommy served the Valentis. The Valentis will serve his son or daughter for as long as I draw breath. That is not generosity. That is a debt, acknowledged late."