Chapter 2 - THE MAN BEHIND THE MAUSOLEUM DOOR
Nicholas DeLuca did not move.
The entire mausoleum seemed to shrink around us.
Snow hissed against the stone outside. The cassette recorder still sat on the narrow shelf inside the hidden compartment, its reels slowly turning, but nobody was listening to Anthony’s recorded voice anymore.
Because Anthony’s living voice had just come through the door.
“Son, don’t open that door until I tell you who came with me.”
Nicholas stared at the entrance as if twenty-one years of grief were standing on the other side.
One of his guards, Michael Trent, raised his weapon.
“Mr. DeLuca?”
Nicholas lifted one hand.
“Lower it.”
Michael hesitated.
Nicholas turned his head.
“I said lower it.”
The gun dropped.
Margaret Shaw was crying silently beside me.
I could barely breathe.
Nicholas stepped toward the heavy iron door.
“Dad?”
Nothing.
His voice changed when he said it.
Not softer exactly.
Younger.
For one second, Nicholas DeLuca wasn’t the man people feared in Philadelphia.
He was nineteen again.
A son at a funeral.
A boy who had stood beside an expensive coffin and believed his father was inside.
“Dad,” he said again. “Who’s with you?”
A long pause followed.
Then Anthony answered.
“A man you’ve trusted since you were a child.”
Nicholas’s eyes narrowed.
Michael looked toward the other guard, Daniel Ross.
Neither moved.
“Name him,” Nicholas said.
Anthony coughed.
Even through the stone door, it sounded deep and painful.
“Victor Warren.”
Margaret gasped.
I knew the name.
Everybody in Nicholas’s household knew the name.
Victor Warren was Camille’s father.
He had been Anthony DeLuca’s attorney.
Later, he became Nicholas’s attorney.
For twenty years, Victor had handled trusts, property acquisitions, lawsuits, political donations, shipping disputes, and nearly every important legal decision the DeLuca family made.
Nicholas stared at the door.
“Why is he there?”
Anthony answered quietly.
“Because if I came alone, he would have made sure I never reached you.”
A second male voice exploded outside.
“This is insane!”
Victor.
I had heard him at dinner several times.
Polished.
Educated.
Never rattled.
He sounded rattled now.
“Nicholas,” Victor called. “Your father is confused. He’s been sick for years.”
Anthony laughed once.
There was no humor in it.
“I’ve been hidden for years.”
Victor struck the door.
“Open this!”
Nicholas looked at Michael.
“Lock the outer gate.”
Michael pulled out his phone.
Daniel moved toward the side passage.
“No one enters or leaves,” Nicholas said.
Then Nicholas looked at Margaret.
“You knew Victor?”
She shook her head.
“Not by name.”
“But you recognized one of my security men at the party.”
“Yes.”
“Was Victor at your apartment?”
“No.”
Margaret swallowed.
“But Anthony told me years ago there was one person I should never trust.”
Nicholas already knew.
“My father’s lawyer.”
She nodded.
Outside, Victor shouted again.
“Nicholas, listen to me. Your father is not well enough to understand what he’s saying.”
Anthony’s answer came immediately.
“I understand exactly what I’m saying.”
Nicholas stepped closer to the door.
“Why did you let everyone think you were dead?”
Silence.
That silence frightened me more than shouting would have.
Finally Anthony said, “Because twenty-one years ago, someone poisoned me.”
Margaret covered her mouth.
Nicholas went completely still.
Anthony continued.
“I survived. Barely.”
“Who?”
“The person responsible believed I died before I could identify them.”
“Who?”
Another pause.
“I thought it was Victor.”
Victor cursed.
Nicholas’s jaw tightened.
“You thought?”
“Yes.”
“What changed?”
“Three weeks ago, I learned Victor didn’t order it.”
The cold seemed sharper.
Nicholas looked toward the cassette recorder.
“Then who did?”
Anthony spoke a sentence that changed everything.
“Your mother.”
Nicholas backed away from the door.
“No.”
Margaret whispered his name.
He didn’t hear her.
“My mother died six years ago.”
“I know.”
“She worshipped my father.”
Anthony’s voice cracked.
“No, son. She feared me.”
Nicholas turned toward his father’s marble crypt.
For the first time, anger broke through his control.
“This is garbage.”
“Nicholas—”
“No.”
He slammed his palm against the crypt.
“You disappear for twenty-one years, and now you stand outside your own grave telling me my dead mother tried to kill you?”
“I disappeared to keep you alive.”
Nicholas froze.
Anthony continued.
“The night I was poisoned, your mother believed I had discovered what she and Victor were doing.”
Victor shouted, “That is a lie!”
Anthony ignored him.
“They were moving money through DeLuca Maritime.”
Nicholas frowned.
“What money?”
“Not mine.”
“Whose?”
“Federal reconstruction contracts. Union pensions. Shipping insurance funds.”
Nicholas slowly turned.
Even I understood how serious that sounded.
Anthony said, “Millions disappeared through companies that did not exist. I found the accounts. I confronted Evelyn.”
Nicholas’s mother.
The woman whose portrait still hung in the west hallway of the estate.
Anthony kept speaking.
“She begged me not to go to the authorities because she said Victor manipulated her. I believed her.”
Victor’s voice came through the door.
“You’re rewriting history!”
Then we heard a scuffle.
Anthony grunted.
Nicholas lunged toward the lock.
“Dad?”
“I’m all right.”
“Open the door!”
“No.”
“I’m not asking.”
“Then listen before you make the same mistake I made.”
Nicholas’s hand remained on the lock.
Anthony’s breathing was heavy.
“Victor didn’t bring me here willingly.”
“What?”
“I made him.”
Margaret stared toward the door.
Anthony continued.
“I found him outside Margaret’s apartment three weeks ago with Camille.”
Nicholas looked at Margaret’s phone in his hand.
The photograph.
Camille beside Anthony.
That was what we had believed.
But Anthony was correcting us.
“The man beside Camille in that photograph wasn’t me.”
My stomach dropped.
Nicholas stared at the image again.
The silver hair.
The heavy coat.
The resemblance.
“Victor,” Nicholas whispered.
Margaret’s face changed.
“Oh, God.”
Anthony said, “Victor has spent twenty years making himself look more like me whenever he needed someone to think I was still alive.”
Nicholas looked sick.
“Why?”
“To move assets requiring my authorization.”
The reversal hit all of us at once.
Camille had not been photographed beside Anthony.
She had been photographed beside her father, disguised to resemble him.
Nicholas looked toward the hidden compartment.
“So the man Margaret saw…”
“Victor.”
“And you?”
“I was across the street.”
Margaret stared.
“You followed them?”
“Yes.”
“Why didn’t you come to me?”
“Because they were watching you.”
Nicholas whispered, “Camille knew.”
Anthony did not answer quickly enough.
Nicholas struck the door.
“Did Camille know you were alive?”
“Yes.”
I felt cold all over.
Nicholas closed his eyes.
His fiancée knew.
The woman who slept in his home.
The woman planning their wedding.
The woman who tried to throw Margaret into the snow.
She knew Anthony DeLuca was alive.
“Since when?”
“Seven months.”
Nicholas opened his eyes.
“Seven months?”
“She found me.”
“How?”
“Your mother left Camille a file.”
Nicholas looked confused.
“My mother barely knew Camille.”
Anthony’s answer was devastating.
“Your mother knew Camille before you did.”
Nobody spoke.
Even Victor outside had gone quiet.
Nicholas turned slowly toward Margaret.
Then toward me.
He seemed to be rearranging years of memories in his head.
“When did I meet Camille?”
I knew.
Everyone in the house knew the romantic story because Camille loved telling it.
“Six years ago,” I said.
“At the hospital fundraiser.”
Anthony answered from outside.
“No.”
Nicholas looked at the door.
“You met her when you were eleven.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You don’t remember.”
“I remember my childhood.”
“Not all of it.”
Nicholas’s face hardened.
Anthony said, “Evelyn made sure of that.”
Victor suddenly shouted, “Enough!”
A loud metallic sound followed.
Then Daniel yelled from outside the mausoleum.
“Sir!”
Nicholas turned.
A gunshot cracked through the cemetery.
Margaret screamed.
Michael shoved me behind the marble crypt.
Nicholas pulled the mausoleum door open.
Snow blasted inside.
Daniel was down near the gate, clutching his shoulder.
Victor Warren stood twenty feet away with a pistol.
And beside him—
Anthony DeLuca.
Alive.
Older.
Thinner.
His silver hair blew in the snow.
For one stunned second, father and son simply looked at each other.
Anthony’s eyes filled.
“Nick.”
Nicholas’s weapon slipped halfway from his hand.
Victor seized Anthony from behind and pressed the gun beneath his jaw.
“Back up!” Victor screamed.
Nicholas’s face changed.
Whatever son had appeared a moment earlier disappeared.
The boss returned.
“Let him go.”
Victor laughed desperately.
“You have no idea what your family is built on.”
Nicholas stepped into the snow.
“I know what happens to a man holding a gun to my father.”
Victor tightened his grip.
Anthony winced.
“Ask Camille about the red ledger,” Anthony said.
Victor struck him.
“Shut up!”
Nicholas stopped.
“What red ledger?”
Anthony looked straight at his son.
“The one proving Camille’s been preparing to take DeLuca Maritime from you the day after your wedding.”
Victor began dragging Anthony toward a black sedan beyond the gate.
Nicholas raised his gun.
Then Anthony shouted one final thing.
“Rachel knows where it is!”
Every head turned toward me.
I stared at Anthony.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Victor smiled.
That frightened me more than the gun.
“Oh, Rachel,” he said.
“You’ve been sleeping ten feet away from it for nine months.”
May you like
Then the cemetery lights went out.
And in the darkness, someone grabbed me from behind.
