Chương 8
The photographs showed blue paint on the Livia’s rail.
Anna’s rented boat had been blue.
Captain Sarti cautioned Emilia that physical evidence from stored photographs would require verification. The original negatives, dates, and chain of custody mattered. Memories from eight years earlier could be wrong. The reopened inquiry would be handled with prosecutors and investigators from the jurisdiction of the original case.
“What happens now?” Emilia asked.
“Now we confirm what can be confirmed.”
“And the Bellandis?”
“They have attorneys.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the answer that affects everything else.”
Before hanging up, Captain Sarti said Matteo had confirmed moving the boat and seeing damage. He had not identified who was driving.
“Did he refuse?”
“He said he did not see the driver return.”
Emilia almost laughed again.
Matteo had spent years learning how to tell the truth in pieces small enough to resemble honesty.
By noon, the first photograph from the wedding appeared online. It showed Emilia and Matteo leaving the ceremony beneath white petals, his hand at her waist, her face lifted toward him.
The caption called them radiant.
Two hours later, a guest posted that the bride had left the villa before breakfast.
By evening, a financial gossip account reported “an unexpected family medical situation.” Vittorio’s office released a statement asking for privacy.
No one mentioned the police.
Emilia flew to Boston two days later with Ruth. Giulia advised her to remain reachable and avoid public comment. Investigators copied her files, including years of notes she had made about the Bellandi family. The notes were methodical at first: boat registrations, foundation reports, names from the original accident file. Then they stopped abruptly three weeks after she met Matteo.
Months later, they resumed with a single entry.
He knows about Anna. I still did not tell him why I came.
Reading the line in the presence of investigators made Emilia feel as though she were watching someone else make a mistake in slow motion.
Her parents met her at Logan Airport.
Her father, Daniel Hart, had aged noticeably since the wedding. He had bought a new suit for the ceremony and worn it badly, tugging at the cuffs throughout the reception. Now he stood near baggage claim in an old windbreaker, his hands deep in the pockets.
Her mother hugged Emilia first.
Daniel did not.
“Is it true?” he asked.
Emilia knew he was not asking about the locked door.
“Yes.”
“You suspected them before you met him?”
“Yes.”
“And you said nothing to us?”
“I didn’t have proof.”
“That never stopped you from talking about Anna before.”
“Daniel,” her mother said.
He stepped away from them.
At home, the wedding gifts filled half the dining room. Boxes arrived for days after Emilia returned. Crystal bowls, silver frames, embroidered linens, handwritten cards congratulating her on a future that no longer existed.
Her mother began stacking the gifts by sender.
“We should return them,” Emilia said.
“Not today.”
“They don’t belong here.”
“Neither does your suitcase, but we are not throwing it into the street.”
Daniel stayed in his workshop behind the house. He restored old violins for a living and had always needed long periods of silence, even before Anna died. As a child, Emilia believed the workshop was where broken objects went to be forgiven.
That evening, she found him sanding a maple bridge beneath a bright lamp.
“You should wear a mask,” she said.
He did not look up. “You should have told me.”
“I know.”
“I spent eight years thinking the police failed us because they had no lead.”
“They did have no lead.”
“You had one.”
“A photograph of a boat at a café.”
“You thought it mattered enough to cross an ocean and enter those people’s house.”
“I thought it might matter.”
“But not enough to tell your father?”
Emilia leaned against the workbench.
“I was afraid you would stop me.”
“I would have.”
“That is why.”
Daniel set down the sanding block.
The anger in his face did not resemble Vittorio’s. Vittorio used anger to control a room. Daniel’s anger made him look lost inside it.
“You married him.”
“I loved him.”
“You married the son of the people you suspected killed your sister.”
“I did not know what they had done.”
“You knew enough to search.”
“I stopped searching.”
“That does not make it better.”
“No.”
He turned away and adjusted a clamp that did not need adjusting.
“Did he hurt you?”
“He locked the door.”
“That is not what I asked.”
“He did not hit me.”
“Did he hurt you?”
Emilia looked at the floor scattered with pale curls of wood.
“Yes.”
Daniel nodded once.
He did not hug her. She did not ask him to.
For the next three weeks, the investigation moved in brief calls separated by long silences. The photographs from Teresa’s brother were authenticated as having been developed within days of Anna’s death. Bank records showed a large cash withdrawal from a Bellandi family account the morning after the collision. Marina logs had been altered, though investigators could not yet prove who altered them.
The cassette contained only twelve seconds of useful audio.
A man, believed to be Vittorio, said, “No police. Move it before daylight.”
The rest was static and a child’s television program recorded over the message.
It was not enough by itself.
Matteo returned to Milan and stopped attending the Bellandi Group offices. The company announced he was taking personal leave. Photographers waited outside his apartment. Someone leaked that his American wife had accused him of unlawful confinement and his family of concealing evidence in a fatal boating collision.
Public opinion formed before facts did.
Emilia became, depending on the source, a grieving sister, a calculating bride, a blackmailer, a trapped woman, or an ambitious conservator who seduced an heir to investigate his family.
May you like
One article published photographs from her professional website beside photographs of the Bellandi villa. The headline called her “The Restoration Bride.”
Ruth sent her a message: Never read comments.
