Chapter 3 - The Night Nurse
By 2:00 AM, the mansion was dead silent.
The guests had long since departed. Vanessa had locked herself in the master suite on the second floor after a quiet, furious argument with Luca through the closed door.
I lay in the massive velvet bed of the east guest suite, staring up at the intricate plaster ceiling. The room was four times the size of my small apartment, but I couldn't sleep. My hand was wrapped in a thick, cooling medical dressing provided by Dr. Harris, Luca's private doctor, but the throbbing pain was nothing compared to the anxiety gnawing at my stomach.
A soft knock sounded at the door.
I sat up immediately, pulling my cardigan around my shoulders. “Who is it?”
“It's Luca.”
I opened the door. Luca had taken off his suit jacket and rolled his white shirt sleeves up to his elbows. In his hand, he held a thick black file folder.
“Can I come in?” he asked.
“Of course, sir.”
He stepped inside, sitting on the armchair near the window. He set the black file on the small tea table. “I had my security team pull the medical records and staff shift logs from St. Anthony’s Hospital for the night my mother died.”
I walked over, standing near the table. “Did you find something?”
“My mother passed away at 3:14 AM on August 12th,” Luca said, his voice flat and focused. “The cause of death was listed as cardiac arrest secondary to terminal respiratory failure. Standard for her condition.”
He opened the folder, pointing to a copy of a handwritten log sheet.
“Except for one detail,” Luca continued. “At 11:00 PM on August 11th, the primary night nurse assigned to my mother’s room was abruptly reassigned to another floor. A private nurse—hired directly by the Bellini family—took over the remainder of the shift.”
My stomach dropped. “A private nurse?”
“Her name is Nurse Clara Higgins,” Luca said, pulling out a printout of a woman's driver's license photo. “She left Chicago forty-eight hours after my mother’s funeral. She currently lives in a small town outside Milwaukee.”
I looked at the photograph of the tired-looking, middle-aged woman. “Vanessa paid her?”
“According to bank statements my team just uncovered, Arthur Bellini—Vanessa's father—transferred fifty thousand dollars to an offshore account registered under Higgins' mother’s name three days after the funeral.”
Luca leaned back, his hazel eyes dark and lethal. “My mother’s last sentence in that letter said: ‘What she did the night before I died is something you must know.’”
“She didn't die of natural causes,” I realized out loud, my hand flying to my mouth. “Luca... they killed her.”
Luca didn't answer right away. He stared out the window into the black sky. When he spoke, his voice was chillingly calm. “My father left fifty-one percent of the Moretti Shipping Enterprises to my mother. Upon her death, that share was inherited entirely by me. But if my mother had lived another month, she was scheduled to sign an amendment to her will.”
“An amendment?”
“She was going to place those shares into a charitable trust, stripping the Bellini family of their minority voting rights,” Luca revealed. “Vanessa knew that. If my mother died before signing that amendment, I inherited everything—and Vanessa’s marriage to me would give her family complete control over the Chicago docks.”
I gasped. The entire terrifying puzzle was piecing itself together. The isolated hospital room, the turned-away visits, the intercepted letters, and finally... the night nurse.
“We have to find Nurse Higgins,” I said.
“Daniel is already on his way to Milwaukee,” Luca said, referring to his head of security. “He will bring her back to Chicago before sunrise.”
Suddenly, a quiet beep sounded from Luca's phone. He picked it up, scrolling through a text message. His jaw tightened.
“What is it?” I asked.
“Vanessa just placed a satellite phone call from her bedroom,” Luca said quietly. “To her father.”
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“What did she say?”
Luca looked up at me, his face grim. “She told him that the maid survived the fire with a piece of the letter... and that I know about Milwaukee.”
