Chapter 8 - THE SISTER AT THE WAKE
Teresa was still at the family house when Giovanni found her.
She sat in Elena's favorite chair surrounded by condolence flowers and half-empty coffee cups.
Giovanni threw the ledger onto the table.
"Tell me why your name is here."
Teresa looked at the numbers and began to cry before she denied anything.
"I never hurt Elena."
"That was not my question."
She admitted the shell company had paid her for twenty years.
Their father had called it a family trust and ordered her never to ask where the money came from.
After his death, another person continued the payments.
"Who?"
Teresa shook her head.
"I never saw him."
Emilio accused her of lying.
Clarissa noticed something else.
Teresa wore a thin gold bracelet Elena had lost on Cayo Lucero six weeks earlier.
"Where did you get that?" Clarissa asked.
Teresa covered the bracelet with her sleeve.
Too late.
Giovanni removed it and found dried salt trapped beneath the clasp.
Teresa finally admitted she had also traveled to Cayo Lucero.
She followed Elena because an anonymous caller warned that Elena planned to expose a Moretti secret that would send Giovanni to prison.
"What secret?"
Teresa whispered, "The truth about Marco."
Before she could explain, a rifle shot shattered the window.
Luca pulled Giovanni to the floor.
A second shot struck the chair where Teresa had been sitting.
Teresa insisted she had never understood the deposits because their father controlled the family's money even after his death through old trustees.
Giovanni remembered how often Elena warned him that inherited loyalty could become inherited guilt.
He had always thought she was criticizing his temper.
Now he wondered whether she had been warning him about the entire Moretti system.
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When the guards reached the hillside, the shooter was gone.
But Teresa had disappeared too.
