Chapter 2 - THE THING ELENA BURIED
Giovanni read the sentence twice before the letters stopped making sense.
Around him, the funeral guests had gone silent enough to hear the candles crackle.
"Where did you get this?"
Clarissa looked at Emilio.
Emilio stared at the floor.
"Mom mailed us a key before she died."
Giovanni's jaw tightened.
"She mailed you a key and told me nothing?"
"She told us not to tell you until we reached Cayo Lucero."
Aunt Teresa whispered a prayer near the coffin.
Giovanni ignored her.
He opened the music box.
The familiar melody did not play.
Instead, a hidden compartment clicked beneath the velvet lining.
Inside was a hotel key card, a photograph of Elena standing beside a man Giovanni did not recognize, and a memory card wrapped in plastic.
On the back of the photograph, Elena had written one date.
Three days before her death.
Giovanni looked at his children.
"You saw this man?"
Clarissa nodded.
"He was waiting for us on the island."
"Who is he?"
Emilio finally looked up.
"Mom called him the only person left who knew what happened in 2004."
Giovanni felt the blood drain from his face.
In 2004, Elena's younger brother Marco had disappeared and the Moretti family had spent a fortune trying to find him.
The police said Marco drowned.
Elena never believed it.
Giovanni remembered Elena standing at their bedroom window six weeks earlier, asking whether he believed a person could disappear without being dead.
He had told her grief made people imagine impossible things.
Now he hated himself for how quickly he had dismissed her.
Clarissa said Elena had cried when she wrote the instructions, but had refused to explain why.
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Then Clarissa whispered the detail that made Giovanni grip the coffin rail.
"Dad, the man in that picture says Marco is alive."
