“Upstairs,” she said. “Second door on the left. My bedroom.”
As if I didn’t know where her bedroom was.
Jill stayed at the bottom of the stairs as lookout. I went up alone, each step creaking in the dark, Rosaria drifting alongsideme in the glass of the framed family photos that lined the stairwell. In every photo, she stood at the center. In every photo, everyone else arranged themselves around her.
The bedroom door was closed. I opened it, and the smell hit me—Rosaria’s perfume, faint but still there after fourteen months. Chanel No. 5. She’d worn it every day of her life and the room had absorbed it so deeply it would probably outlast the house.
“The jewelry box,” Rosaria said from the vanity mirror. “On the dresser. The velvet compartment underneath the tray.”
The jewelry box was large, ornate, the kind of thing that cost a fortune and looked it. I lifted the tray—mostly empty now, Claudia and the others having picked through it—and found the velvet compartment underneath. Inside, a small brass key.
“Top drawer,” Rosaria said. Her voice had gone tight. “The lock is on the left side.”
I pulled open the top drawer of the dresser. Silk scarves, gloves, a packet of lavender sachets. And on the left, a small brass lock plate set into the wood—the kind of thing you’d miss if you didn’t know to look.
I fitted the key.
It turned. But the drawer panel that should have slid open was already loose. I pulled it aside and found the hidden compartment behind it.
Empty.
I stared at the space. Maybe eight inches deep, a foot wide. Lined with velvet, same as the jewelry box. And absolutely, completely empty.
Except it wasn’t untouched. The lock plate had scratch marks around the keyhole—fine, shallow scratches, the kind a tool would leave. Someone had forced this open. Not with a key, not carefully. They’d pried at it, scratched the brass, and then tried to set everything back the way they’d found it. The silkscarves were arranged over the compartment. The sachets were placed just so. Whoever had done this had tried to make it look undisturbed.
But they hadn’t had the key. And they hadn’t been gentle enough.
“No,” Rosaria said.
I turned to the mirror. Her reflection was rigid, her edges flickering.
“No, no, no—” The words came out stacked on top of each other, rapid. “It was there. It was always there. Forty years, I kept it in that drawer, no one knew?—”
“Someone knew.”
“No one knew!” Her form blazed bright and then guttered like a candle in wind. “Everything was in there, Gina. Everything I knew about this family. Every secret, every lie, every piece of—” She flickered so violently she nearly disappeared. “Someone took it. Someone took everything.”
“Rosaria. Stay with me.”
She stabilized, but barely. Her face was drawn tight with fury and something worse—fear. I’d never seen Rosaria Ferraro frightened before. Critical, yes. Angry, constantly. But frightened? That was new, and it made the dark bedroom feel darker.
“Whoever took it knows,” she said. “They know what I wrote. They know what I knew about them. And if they killed me to keep one secret—” Her voice dropped. “What will they do to keep all of them?”
I closed the empty compartment. Replaced the scarves. Shut the drawer. Left everything the way I’d found it, or close enough.
Then I went downstairs, grabbed Jill, and walked out through the mudroom door without looking back.
Lori had the engine running. Tammy turned around in the passenger seat as Jill and I climbed in, took one look at my face, and didn’t ask.
I told them anyway. The empty compartment. The scratch marks. The careful rearrangement meant to hide that someone had been there first.
“Gone,” I said. The word sat in the car like something heavy. “The diary’s gone.”
“Who rook it?” Lori asked, pulling away from the curb, headlights off until we reached the main road.
“Anyone could have. They all have access to the house.”
“So the same list of suspects,” Jill said quietly. She had her legal pad on her knees but hadn’t opened it.
