Chapter 4 - What Clara Had Been Afraid Of
Cesare did not confront Julian immediately.
For once, anger was less useful than silence.
He asked Margaret to conduct a discreet review of every trust notice and internal transfer Julian had handled during the previous two years.
He also asked the mansion’s security director to preserve all camera footage from the week.
Then he returned to Clara’s workroom.
There were no dramatic hidden safes.
No mysterious locked drawers.
Just fabric samples, sketches, invoices, old notebooks, and the objects of a woman whose life had ended before she could finish putting things away.
Cesare spent two hours looking.
Near the bottom of one cabinet he found a small cardboard box labeled with Elsie’s initials.
Inside were crayons.
Twine.
Wax pencils.
And three unfinished paper petals.
All were cut from old financial sheets.
One carried part of the same blue stamp.
Another showed only several numbers.
The third had the lower edge of a vendor code.
Cesare photographed everything without unfolding or damaging it.
Margaret called that night.
The vendor code belonged to Cole Scenic Logistics.
Cesare had never heard of the company.
Margaret had.
Romano Stageworks had paid it repeatedly.
The first payment appeared fourteen months earlier.
$148,000.
Then $211,000.
Then $96,500.
The descriptions referred to emergency transport, scenery storage, overseas customs fees, and specialized rigging.
Margaret began comparing the payments against touring schedules.
Several made no sense.
One invoice billed Romano Stageworks for transporting scenery to Denver during a week when the production was performing in Boston.
Another charged for storage of a set that had already been destroyed after a water leak.
Every payment had been approved through Julian’s office.
The ownership records for Cole Scenic Logistics led to a holding company.
The holding company led to another LLC.
Margaret had not yet reached the person behind it.
Cesare already suspected the answer.
He remembered Ethan’s face when he saw the stamp.
Not anger.
Not confusion.
Recognition.
Panic.
Then Rosa remembered something else.
A week before Clara entered the hospital for the final time, Vanessa had come to the mansion when Julian was away.
She spent nearly forty minutes in Clara’s workroom.
Clara discovered her there.
The two women argued.
Rosa never heard every word.
But afterward Clara gathered the paper flowers into a box and asked Rosa to keep them somewhere safe for Elsie.
Clara had not been making toys from meaningless office scraps.
At least not by the end.
May you like
She had been hiding pieces of something.
And Vanessa had known she was looking.
