Chapter 3 - The Accountant's Daughter
The retired bookkeeper's name was June Mercer, and she refused to discuss the missing money over the telephone. “They recorded Michael when he called his wife,” she warned. “They'll record us, too.” Roman sent David to bring her to a secure office across the city. Sienna insisted on coming, although she had slept less than an hour and still had dried coffee on the hem of her maid's uniform. She changed into borrowed jeans, folded her apron, and placed the brass key in her pocket. It felt heavier now that someone might kill her for carrying it.
As Roman drove through the rain, Sienna watched Boston's empty streets slide past the window. The city had once belonged to her father. Not in the way it belonged to the Castellions, whose name appeared on warehouses, charity galas, and whispered warnings, but in the small ways that mattered to a child. Michael knew the ferry captains by name. He bought bagels from a woman near the courthouse who slipped extra cream cheese into Sienna's sandwich. Every December, he took his daughter to watch the harbor lights and told her that honest work was the kindest gift a person could leave behind.
“I can't promise he'll be the man you remember,” Roman said, watching her reflection in the windshield.
“I'm not asking you to promise that.”
“What are you asking?”
“Don't bury him twice. If there's something ugly in the ledger, let me see it.”
Roman nodded. “Agreed.” It was the first promise he had made her, and neither knew how difficult keeping it would become.
June Mercer waited in a rented office above a bakery, wrapped in a wool coat despite the heating. She was seventy-one, white-haired, and furious that anyone had located her. When Sienna entered, June rose abruptly and took her face between both hands. “You have your mother's eyes,” she said, and began to cry. Sienna had practiced a hundred questions for this meeting. None survived the simple kindness of being recognized.
June had worked beside Michael for eleven years. In the beginning, the Castellion shipping business operated both legitimate cargo routes and unreported protection payments enforced by Roman's father, Vittorio. June did not pretend otherwise. “Your father hated the illegal side,” she told Sienna. “But he stayed because the shipping workers depended on the honest side, and because he believed he could keep the books from swallowing people.” Over time, Michael found unexplained transfers disguised as harbor repairs. The amounts were too small to attract attention individually but together approached twenty million dollars.
“Why didn't he go to the police?” Sienna asked.
“He was preparing to. Then Vittorio discovered something on his own.” June looked toward Roman. “Your father was not a saint. But when he learned money had been stolen from employee pension reserves and children's medical grants, he demanded that whoever was responsible put it back. Two days later, his car went over a guardrail.”
Roman's chair scraped the floor. His father's death had been ruled an accident during a winter storm. He had never questioned it. “Michael suspected murder?”
“By the end, yes. Elena suspected it before he did. Your mother took copies of every record Michael could safely bring her.”
June opened a leather handbag and removed an old envelope bearing a canceled utility bill. Beneath the bill was a note in Michael's neat handwriting. The ink had faded along the fold. It contained a list of account initials, the words 'two books, one truth,' and a line that made Sienna clutch the edge of the desk: IF THEY FIND ME, TELL SIENNA THE SONG STILL OPENS THE DOOR.
“The song?” Roman asked.
Sienna saw a winter kitchen in Montana, long before the family moved east. Her father played a cheap music box whenever she was sick, a tinny melody they called the lighthouse song because he invented words about finding your way home. She still owned the box. It was packed in her mother's storage unit in Worcester, untouched since the funeral.
June looked relieved. “Then you understand something I never did.”
“Not everything. Just enough to know where we go next.”
Roman wanted to send a security team to fetch it. Sienna refused. “This is the first thing I've had that's mine in this entire investigation. I won't have men I barely know going through my mother's boxes.” She expected an argument. Roman considered her for a long moment before offering to drive, with David providing discreet backup. He did not call it protection. He called it transportation. She appreciated the distinction.
Before they left, June described Michael's last week. Someone had been following him. He took different routes to work and stopped sending Sienna to school alone. Three days before he vanished, he met Elena Castellion beside an abandoned pier. June took the photograph through her apartment window after Michael called to say he needed proof the meeting happened. She later added the inscription on the back, following instructions she did not entirely understand. Roman turned the photograph over again. Six words, written by a witness who had spent years hiding because she knew too much.
“Why didn't you come forward?” he asked June.
“Because I watched an honest man get thrown into a river. And then I watched your mother die after she told me she was going to the police.” June met his eyes. “I was a coward. I stayed alive. Both things can be true.”
Sienna reached across the table and covered the older woman's hands. “You came forward now.”
“Only because I heard you survived the attack last night.” June swallowed. “They aren't afraid of what you know, sweetheart. They're afraid of what Michael taught you to remember.”
The drive toward Worcester began under a pale strip of morning light. For the first time since Roman had met her, Sienna laughed at something he said: his embarrassing admission that he had never assembled a piece of furniture without hiring someone. The laugh came unexpectedly, fragile but real, and made him glance toward her with an expression she didn't want to examine. Whatever else was happening, they were still two people trapped in a car, trying not to talk about their dead parents.
May you like
Then Sienna checked her phone. A new message waited from an unknown number. It contained a photograph of her mother's storage facility taken from across the street, timestamped seven minutes earlier. Beneath it were eight words: THE SONG ENDS BEFORE YOU GET HERE, SIENNA.
She turned the screen toward Roman. Without speaking, he changed lanes and accelerated into the brightening rain.
