Chapter 7: What Ricci Had Carried for Seventeen Years
They brought Ricci in forty minutes later.
He came without resistance, which told me he had been expecting the call.
He was a compact man in his late fifties, with the careful movements of someone who had spent decades making himself invisible in crowded rooms.
He sat across from Matteo without being asked.
"You know why you're here," Matteo said.
Ricci's hands were folded on the table.
"I have some idea."
"Then start talking."
Ricci was quiet for a moment.
He looked at me once, briefly, then back at Matteo.
"I want to say first that I never touched the girl's dish tonight.
I plated it.
That's all.
What was in the sauce was already there."
"We know," Matteo said.
"Talk."
Ricci unfolded his hands and set them flat on the table.
"Seventeen years ago, when Isabella Rossi came to work in the household kitchen, I was already there.
I had been there four years." He paused.
"Luca Ferraro came to me two weeks after Isabella arrived.
He told me to watch her.
To report anything she said or noticed.
He told me she was a security risk."
"Did he say why?" I asked.
Ricci glanced at me.
"He said she asked too many questions.
That she paid attention to things that weren't her business." He exhaled slowly.
"I thought it was standard protocol.
These households, there's always watching.
I didn't question it."
"But something changed," Matteo said.
"The night of the fork." Ricci looked at the table.
"I was in the kitchen when Isabella stopped Matteo from eating.
I saw her face when she looked at the silverware.
She wasn't guessing.
She knew.
And I knew she knew because I had seen the same thing she saw — someone had been in the silverware drawer that afternoon, and it wasn't housekeeping."
"Luca," I said.
"I didn't see him do it.
But I saw the drawer afterward.
And then I saw him go back to close it." Ricci's voice dropped.
"I should have spoken that night.
I didn't.
I told myself I wasn't certain.
That I could be wrong.
That it wasn't my place." He looked up at Matteo directly.
"Your mother was still alive then.
She liked Isabella.
She would sit in the kitchen on Sunday mornings and they would talk for an hour.
I thought — if something was truly wrong, Isabella would tell her."
"But Isabella left instead," I said.
"Because Luca went to her first." Ricci said it quietly.
"He offered her money.
She refused.
Then he told her something I wasn't supposed to hear." He stopped.
"Say it," Matteo said.
"He told her that the person who had arranged the attempt on your life was not someone you would believe her over.
That if she spoke, she would simply disappear, and her daughter — you, Elena — would grow up without her." Ricci looked at me with something worn in his eyes.
"Isabella left the next morning.
I never saw her again."
The room was completely silent.
"Ricci," Matteo said carefully.
"The person Luca reported to.
Do you know who it is?"
Ricci's jaw worked.
He looked at the door as though measuring the distance.
"If I say the name," he said, "I need to know that what happened to Isabella will not happen to me."
"You have my word."
"Your word isn't what it was before tonight." Ricci looked at him steadily.
"I need something more than your word."
Matteo reached into his jacket pocket and set a phone on the table, screen facing up.
The recording indicator was running.
"Whatever you say in this room goes to my attorney in sixty seconds.
It becomes his problem to protect, not mine." He held Ricci's gaze.
"That is more than my word."
Ricci looked at the phone.
He looked at the door.
He looked at me.
Then he said a name.
I didn't recognize it.
But Matteo's face went to stone in the space of a single breath, and the hand he rested on the table closed slowly into a fist.
"Say it again," Matteo said.
"Clearly."
Ricci said it again.
And this time I understood why my mother had never told me where we were really running from.
Because the name Ricci spoke was not a stranger's.
It was the name of someone who sat on the charitable board of three Chicago hospitals.
Someone whose family name appeared on a children's wing.
May you like
Someone the city considered a benefactor.
Someone Matteo had called family.
