Chapter 9 – THE COAT IN THE ATTIC

I stared at the heavy winter coat.

It wasn’t Sloane’s cashmere. It was a man’s coat. Dark wool, frayed at the cuffs.

“Mrs. Davis?” I called out down the hallway.

The housekeeper appeared from Lauren’s room, holding a stack of linens. “Yes, ma’am?”

I still wasn’t used to her calling me that.

“Whose box is this?” I asked, pointing to the carton.

Mrs. Davis frowned. “I believe it belonged to Mr. Mancini’s brother, Thomas. The one who passed away.”

Gabriel rarely spoke of his younger brother, Thomas. He had died in a car accident five years before I started working here. From what little the staff whispered, Thomas had been the reckless one, deeply in debt to the wrong people.

“I was going to donate it,” Mrs. Davis said.

“I’ll take care of it,” I said.

She nodded and went back to her work.

I picked up the coat. It was heavy, smelling faintly of old cedar and stale tobacco. I went to fold it, but a hard lump in the lining caught my attention.

I reached my hand into the deep side pocket.

My fingers brushed against a cold, metal object.

I pulled it out.

It was a silver watch.

But it wasn’t Eric’s modern chronograph. It was an old, mechanical pocket watch. The crystal was shattered, the hands frozen precisely at 11:42.

I turned it over.

Engraved on the back were three initials: T. R. M.

Thomas Richard Mancini.

I stared at the broken watch, a sudden chill creeping into the warm hallway. If Thomas had died in a fiery car crash, how had this watch survived perfectly intact inside his winter coat in the attic?

I squeezed the watch tightly.

Suddenly, a small, hidden latch on the side of the casing popped open with a quiet click.

The back plate of the watch swung open like a locket.

Inside was a tightly folded piece of paper.

I carefully pulled it out and unfolded it in the dim light of the hallway.

It was a handwritten ledger. Dates. Names. Amounts of money transferred into offshore accounts.

And at the very bottom, written in Thomas’s frantic scrawl, was a single sentence:

If Gabriel finds out I sold the shipping routes to Victor, he will kill me.

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