Chapter 5 - A SIGNATURE IS NOT INNOCENCE
“Convenient,” Nell said.
Carmine didn’t argue.
“That signature authorized a warehouse sale. Vittorio handled the papers.”
“And I’m supposed to believe you?”
“No.”
The answer stopped her.
“You should check.”
He placed the copy on the kitchen counter.
Nell remembered her mother doing the same thing years earlier in a rented apartment in Mississippi.
Look at it, baby. This is why we can never go back.
Rose had believed it.
So had Nell.
“What happened after you left?” Carmine asked.
“We changed names.”
“Where?”
“Several places.”
“And Rose?”
Nell folded the letter carefully.
“She cleaned motel rooms. Worked bakery shifts. Lied about why I didn’t have school records.”
Carmine stared at the floor.
“When I got sick, she paid a woman cash to see me in her kitchen.”
“I would have—”
“Don’t.”
He stopped.
For a moment, she heard nothing but the refrigerator clicking in the next room.
“She died three years ago,” Nell said. “Her car went off a levee road outside Baton Rouge.”
Carmine closed his eyes.
“The report said she lost control.”
“And you don’t believe that.”
“Two days before it happened, she told me she’d found someone who could help us come home.”
“Who?”
“She wouldn’t say.”
Nell opened the blue notebook.
Among recipes and grocery lists, Rose had written a license plate number.
Beneath it was the name Bellwether.
“I found this after the funeral.”
“So you came here.”
“I came to find out who killed her.”
He absorbed that without moving.
“All those mornings,” he said quietly. “You were right here.”
“And you never looked at me.”
There it was.
The thing neither of them could explain away.
Carmine sat at the little kitchen table.
“No,” he said. “I didn’t.”
Nell had prepared for denial.
Threats.
A performance.
She hadn’t prepared for that.
Tomas appeared in the doorway.
“Bastian’s gone.”
Carmine rose.
“You let him leave?”
“Vittorio told the gate staff you’d cleared it. Before I changed their instructions.”
Tomas held up a tablet.
They had pulled the company registration for Bellwether Freight.
Its current director was a man named Simon Creel.
Nell knew the name.
She had heard it at the funeral.
Carmine watched her expression change.
May you like
“Who is he?”
“The investigator who ruled my mother’s death an accident.”
