Chapter 7 - The Last Audit
Three weeks later, the snow came—not the wet, grey slush that Chicago usually suffered through during the first week of December, but the dry, powdery kind that drifted across Lake Michigan in white squalls and turned the limestone cornices of the Valente estate into a picture postcard from a nineteenth-century novel.
Inside the library, the fire was roaring.
It was a real fire—oak logs seasoned for three years, crackling behind a brass screen in a hearth that hadn't seen actual wood since the old man died of a stroke in his armchair back in ninety-four.
Elena sat at the mahogany desk, her fingers flying across the keys of an old Remington typewriter that had been hauled out of the basement archives after she proved to Matteo that she could audit three decades of dock receipts in forty-eight hours without missing a single discrepancy.
She wore a dark green wool sweater she’d bought with her first real paycheck—not her housekeeping wages, but her consultant’s fee as the new estate archivist.
The secret door behind the lower bookcase was gone.
Rocco had spent two days with a crew of masons pouring three feet of reinforced concrete into the inspection shaft until the wall behind the shelves was as solid and dumb as the rest of the foundation. The crawlspace was dead space now—just another forgotten pocket of old Chicago history buried beneath twenty tons of stone and timber.
The heavy walnut doors swung open without a knock.
Matteo walked in, his overcoat dusted with white flakes of snow, carrying a brown paper bag from a bakery on Taylor Street that smelled overwhelmingly of powdered sugar and hot lard.
He didn't say anything. He walked straight over to the desk, dropped the bag beside the typewriter, and pulled out a warm, greasy cannoli stuffed with sweet ricotta and candied peel.
Elena stopped typing, looked down at the pastry, and then up at him, her eyebrows raised.
“What’s this?”
“Audit incentive,” Matteo said, pulling up a leather armchair and sitting down across from her with a heavy, satisfied sigh, stretching his long legs out toward the fire. “Rocco tells me you found another three thousand dollars in uncollected port fees from the nineteen-eighty-six grain shipments.”
“It wasn't uncollected,” Elena said, taking a cautious bite of the cannoli while a flake of powdered sugar landed neatly on the lapel of her green sweater. “Your father’s bookkeeper misallocated the storage tariffs to the municipal grain elevator account to avoid paying the state tax. I’ve already drafted the correction for the district attorney’s office.”
Matteo watched her chew. There was a small, infuriating smile playing at the corners of his mouth—the same crooked half-smile he’d worn in the ballroom the night he caught her singing into a wooden spoon.
“You’re going to put me out of business, Elena,” he said softly.
“Good,” she swallowed the bite of pastry, wiped her fingers on a napkin, and pulled a fresh sheet of bond paper into the carriage of the typewriter with a sharp zing. “Then you’ll finally have to get a real job.”
“Like what?”
“I hear the sanitation department is looking for someone to manage their logistics.”
May you like
Matteo laughed—a deep, resonant sound that chased the last of the old ghosts out of the rafters and sent the sparks dancing behind the brass screen.
Outside, the snow fell harder against the leaded glass, burying the gravel drive, the old iron gates, and the traces of every name that had ever been carved into the stone of the city. But inside the library, the fire was warm, the ledgers were balanced to the last penny, and Elena Moretti wasn't hiding anymore.
