Chapter 17 - The Guest Who Watched Me Leave| The surviving email address belonged to a private investigator who had worked for the Romano family years earlier. His name was Thomas Bell, and he had retired to a coastal town in Maine.
The investigators contacted him first. He agreed to provide a statement and surrendered several boxes of old case files.
One file contained photographs of the road where my mother had died.
Another showed a dark sedan parked near the scene.
The license plate was partially visible.
The vehicle had been registered to a company owned by Isabella Romano.
I stared at the photograph.
“Does that mean Isabella was in the car?”
“Not necessarily,” the investigator said. “The vehicle could have been driven by someone else. We need more evidence.”
Thomas Bell explained that he had been hired to investigate Eleanor after Dominic's death. The original assignment was to determine whether she had taken confidential documents from the Bellweather Trust.
He had found evidence that she was carrying copies of financial records, but no proof that she had stolen money.
Then his employer changed the assignment.
“They told me to watch her movements and report who she met,” he said. “I refused when they asked me to follow her on the night of the accident.”
“Who asked you?” Rachel said.
Thomas looked at me.
“Victor Moretti.”
The room fell silent.
“Did you tell the police?” I asked.
“I tried. The officer who took my statement advised me to stay out of it. A week later, my office was broken into. Nothing valuable was taken, but my case files were gone.”
“Why did you keep copies?”
“Because I knew someone would eventually ask.”
He had hidden duplicate photographs in a safe deposit box under his wife's name. He had not contacted me because he didn't know whether I was involved in the family's business or whether approaching me would put me in danger.
The investigators examined the photographs and compared them with the surviving records. They found no conclusive proof that Isabella had been present during the accident, but the vehicle linked her company to the location.
When confronted with the evidence, Isabella agreed to a formal interview.
She admitted that she had hired Harrow Security to monitor my mother at Victor's request. She said she had believed Eleanor was stealing documents and that the surveillance was intended to recover them.
“I was young,” Isabella said. “I believed Victor when he told me the family would be destroyed if the records became public.”
“Did you know your company car was at the scene of Eleanor's accident?” an investigator asked.
“No.”
“Did you authorize anyone to use it that night?”
“I don't remember.”
Her answer was evasive, but it was not proof of murder.
The investigators continued examining the vehicle records and the identities of the people who had access to it.
When Adrian heard about Isabella's interview, he asked to speak with her.
She refused.
He didn't force the issue.
Instead, he submitted a statement acknowledging that he had benefited from the company's profits and that he had failed to investigate the suspicious transactions when warning signs appeared.
His cooperation did not erase his responsibility, but it strengthened the case against those who had knowingly concealed the fraud.
Then came a development no one expected.
A former driver contacted the investigators and claimed he had transported Eleanor on the day she died. He said she had been frightened and had asked him to take her somewhere safe.
He remembered her exact words.
“Tell Sophia I love her,” she had said. “And tell her not to trust the man who says he's protecting her.”
The driver could not remember whether Eleanor had meant Victor, Adrian, or someone else.
But he remembered one more detail.
She had been carrying a small silver locket.
The locket had never been recovered from the accident scene.
I searched every box of my mother's belongings, but it was nowhere to be found.
Then I remembered the photograph from the old storage unit.
My mother had been wearing the locket when she stood beside Adrian.
And on the back of that photograph, beneath the words about the house remembering, was a tiny handwritten number.
17.
Rachel examined the photograph under magnification.
The number wasn't part of the original message.
It had been written later.
May you like
It was an archive reference.
And it pointed to a file that had been missing from the Bellweather records for fifteen years.
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