Chapter 4 - The Man Edmund Remembered
Her name was Nora Salcedo.
She wore reading glasses on a chain and asked Hannah whether she had eaten before asking about the will.
Hannah liked her immediately.
Over the next week, Nora obtained documents, explained possible costs, and helped Hannah distinguish between things she knew and things she suspected.
That distinction mattered.
Marlene had been cruel.
Cruelty alone would not invalidate a document.
Bram had formed a company.
That alone did not establish what every payment meant.
The answers would come from records, witnesses, and careful work.
Hannah found the restraint frustrating.
She also began sleeping better.
For the first time, she did not have to keep every detail in her own head.
Mr. Pell remained in the hospital several days, then moved temporarily to a rehabilitation facility. His unpaid compensation became a documented estate issue rather than something Marlene could dismiss by refusing to answer the door.
He told Celia what he had seen.
The night Edmund died, Marlene and Bram had entered the study with a black document case.
They had stayed nearly an hour.
Mr. Pell had seen Bram carry boxes to his car.
It was useful information.
It was not proof of what the boxes contained.
Nora said that plainly.
Hannah appreciated it, even when she wished someone would simply declare the world fair.
On Thursday, Rocco asked whether she would have coffee with him.
“A public place,” he added. “You choose.”
She chose a crowded diner near the hospital.
He arrived without the two men who usually stood behind him, although she noticed his driver outside.
Before he sat, Hannah asked, “How did you know my grandfather?”
Rocco looked at the empty booth opposite her.
“May I?”
She nodded.
He sat.
“When I was nineteen, I was working for a man I should have stayed away from.”
“That’s vague.”
“Yes.”
She waited.
Rocco glanced toward the window.
“I thought being useful to dangerous people would make me impossible to hurt. Mostly, it made me useful.”
Edmund had found him behind a repair garage one winter morning.
Rocco was injured, frightened, and refusing medical help because he believed needing it would make him look weak.
“Your grandfather called an ambulance,” Rocco said. “Then he called my mother.”
Hannah smiled despite herself.
“That sounds like him.”
“I was furious.”
“I imagine.”
“Edmund told me I could be furious after someone made sure I wasn’t dying.”
Rocco wrapped both hands around his coffee.
Afterward, Edmund had offered him legitimate work.
Rocco had accepted some of it.
Then he had made other choices.
He did not dress them up.
“I kept visiting him,” he said. “Sometimes because I wanted advice. Sometimes because I knew he’d be disappointed in what I wasn’t telling him.”
“Did he know?”
“Enough.”
“And he still wrote to you.”
“Yes.”
Hannah looked at the man across from her.
“Are you helping me because you owe him?”
“At first, I came because of him.”
“And now?”
“Now I know you.”
She looked away.
The waitress arrived.
Rocco ordered coffee with two creams for Hannah, then stopped himself.
“Is that still what you want?”
Hannah met his eyes.
“Yes.”
The small correction mattered more than she wanted it to.
After coffee, they walked toward the hospital.
Hannah told him about nursing school.
She had completed much of the program before Edmund’s first stroke. She had planned to return after a semester.
Then another semester had passed.
Then another.
“Would you go back?” he asked.
“If I can.”
“What’s in the way?”
“Money. Housing. Clinical placement. The fact that I haven’t slept normally in two years.”
Rocco nodded.
He did not offer to buy a school.
He asked whether she wanted help finding the right office to contact.
“I can make the call,” she said.
“I believe you.”
That evening, Hannah returned to the small room she had rented through a contact of Nora’s.
On the bed lay her duffel bag.
On the desk sat the nursing textbook.
She opened it for the first time since Edmund’s death.
Ten minutes later, her phone rang.
Marlene.
Hannah let it go to voicemail.
Then she listened.
“Your grandfather’s watch is missing. So are several pieces of jewelry. Before this becomes unpleasant, you should think carefully about what you took when you left.”
Hannah stared at the phone.
For a moment, she was back beneath the coat hooks.
Then she forwarded the message to Nora.
Underneath it, she wrote:
I didn’t take anything. Tell me what to preserve.
After sending it, she returned to the book.
May you like
Her hands were shaking.
She kept reading anyway.
