by Blake Pierce
She decided to ease into the subject and try to introduce it in a nonconfrontational way.
“Do you spend a lot of time in the house? I mean, in Signora’s home office?”
He sighed impatiently.
“Look, it depends on the day. Every day is different. Usually we spend an hour or two here in the mornings, quite often an hour or two in the evenings, and very occasionally we’ll work here the whole day, if Signora has no commitments in the office, or functions to attend.”
“Do you get a chance to interact with the family at all?”
Maurice shrugged.
“I can’t say I have done. You’ve seen what it’s like here. We’re on the go from early till late, as Signora has a very full calendar, and I will say, between you and me, I handle the workload of two people.”
He was evading her line of questioning, Cassie was certain. He was anticipating where it was leading, and was trying to deflect it.
“I’m sure it must be hectic. The reason I’m asking is that I’ve only been here two days, but I’ve been noticing some rather unusual things happening here,” she said. “I wonder if you might have noticed them, too?”
She watched Maurice’s face closely while she spoke, and from the way his eyes widened and he blinked several times before staring determinedly past her, she was sure he understood.
“I can’t say I have,” he insisted.
“I’ve noticed, in particular, that the girls seem to act strangely sometimes. Have you picked up on that at all?”
Maurice shook his head. His chin jutted determinedly.
“I’m afraid I haven’t seen anything. I just do my work and go. If you’re asking me for any input, I’ll be of no use to you.”
Cassie felt exasperated.
“Maurice, I understand you’re way too busy and don’t want this on your plate. But I’m sure you must know how the household works, and which staff are around at what times. Could you point me in the right direction, and tell me if there’s anyone willing to share some more information?”
Maurice shut down. Cassie could see it in his body language. His mouth tightened, his eyes narrowed, and he made as if he was going to shoulder his way right past her.
Then, at the last moment, he leaned toward her.
“Let me give you some advice. You do what Signora says, nothing less and nothing more. Don’t ask questions. Do not interfere. If you try, she will ruin you. I’ve seen it happen before.”
Then he brushed past her and headed through the kitchen and out of sight.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Watching Maurice march away, Cassie felt uneasy inside, as if she’d overstepped a boundary. Maurice had never been her friend, but now that she’d forced him to choose sides, it was clear where his loyalties lay. His warning was disturbing. Cassie didn’t doubt that Signora Rossi wielded enough power to damage anyone who tried to go against her.
On the other hand, what did Cassie care? She was unimportant in Ms. Rossi’s life. She hadn’t even given references. Maurice, on the other hand, was at risk of losing his job, and presumably Signora Rossi could damage his reputation in the industry.
Cassie didn’t have to worry about that. She’d come from nowhere, and could disappear the same way. She didn’t have a career to worry about, and had abandoned the dream of the fashion internship long ago. Most probably, due to Abigail’s mistake, she was the only person who’d come for the interview and Ms. Rossi had used it to incentivize her to take the job.
If the worst happened, she could go back to the hostel and look for another job. Washing dishes, perhaps, or working as a chambermaid.
She heard voices in the hallway, and then the front door creaked and rattled. That meant that Maurice and Ms. Rossi had headed out for the day.
Cassie went up to the girls’ bedrooms, where she was not surprised to find them already awake and dressed.
“Let’s go and get some breakfast,” she said.
While they ate, Cassie asked them what their schedule was for the rest of the day.
“Do you have a riding lesson later on?” she asked, remembering that the children had said they rode on Sunday. To her surprise, Nina shook her head.
“Our lesson this week was canceled,” she explained.
“Why’s that?” Cassie asked.
Nina took another bite of toast without answering, which made Cassie think that canceling the lesson was part of their punishment. If there had been a genuine reason, she was sure the girls would have told her.
“Well, what do you want to do today? Shall we go out somewhere? Do you want to play a game?”
“I would like to stay at home,” Nina said, and Venetia nodded in agreement.
Cassie stared at them, worried. It seemed as if there was no way of getting through to these children. They wouldn’t let her become close, because they were frightened of the consequences. They didn’t want to do any activities that they hadn’t expressly been told to do, for the same reason. They were effectively trapped here, and although it hadn’t been of their making, they were the ones who were refusing to leave.
Cassie couldn’t blame the girls. All they were doing was trying to avoid conflict, and that was quite normal. But it meant her hands were tied. Their silence wasn’t helping her, and it was protecting their abuser.
Cassie wondered again what had happened to their father. Where was he, and what role did he play in all of this? It could be that he had been the root cause of this, and their mother was continuing with what he’d started.
“We have some homework to do,” Venetia said.
She sounded happy to be mentioning it. It seemed that homework was a safe subject in this house. You couldn’t get punished for doing it.
“Let’s go into the small dining room. You can work there,” Cassie said.
The girls went upstairs and returned with their school bags. Cassie took her phone into the dining room. If they were willing to speak up about what was happening, it would be helpful to record what they said.
“Do you get lots of homework?” she asked Nina.
“Not too much. But I practice what I have learned at school. I need to be in the top of the class, so I repeat the exercises at home,” Nina explained.
Cassie felt a pang of sympathy. This seemed to be their life. School work was the only safe activity they had. She watched Nina’s focused efforts and wondered how she’d ever thought that a nine-year-old would choose to spend her entire day studying. She’d been misled, and believed a scenario that was completely false.
Although Nina focused her full attention on repetitive rows of sums, Venetia seemed tired and fractious, which Cassie guessed might be caused by her long day yesterday with no food. She was trying to behave as she should, but didn’t have the energy to do more than go through the motions. She opened her math book and her notepad, but after doing a few exercises, she started drawing patterns in the margin instead.
Glancing at the artwork, Cassie was impressed by the detail shown, and the eye for shape and proportion that Venetia clearly possessed.
“That’s very pretty,” she complimented the younger girl.
“Thank you,”
Venetia gave her usual polite response, but her voice sounded lackluster. Cassie was sure that by now, any other child would be in tears. After lunch, she decided she would put both the children down for a nap. A rest would do them good.
In the meantime, she was interested to see if Venetia might enjoy drawing something else. Art could be a form of therapy, and perhaps while they were happily distracted, she could ask them about their father and they would open up.
“Do you have a sketch pad in your school bags?” Cassie asked. “I would like to see you both draw a picture.”
When the girls shook their heads—clearly, their mother did not regard art as important—Cassie decided to take matters into her own hands, and damn the consequences.
She marched downstairs and headed to Ms. Rossi’s office. In there, she’d see
n a printer, and where there was a printer, there would be paper.
She spotted the box of paper immediately, neatly stacked on a shelf at the back of the office. There was an open ream, and Cassie took a few sheets from it.
Cassie held her breath as she left, because she was sure this counted as disobeying the rules, and she could still remember how furiously Ms. Rossi had fired the intern while sitting in that expensive, leather-upholstered office chair.
Back in the children’s dining room, she placed the paper in front of them. Although the children were short on colored crayons, they had plenty of pencils and blue and black pens, which Cassie hoped would be enough.
“Let’s all draw,” she said, deciding that the activity might go better if she participated, too.
“What are you going to draw?” Nina asked her.
“I’m going to draw my sister, all dressed up for a party,” Cassie said.
She imagined Jacqui, stylishly garbed in one of the outfits from Mirabella’s where she had worked. Drawing her would keep her hopes alive. It was a way of proving to herself that her sister had not died.
“I don’t want to draw you!” Venetia snapped at Nina, and Cassie had to stop herself from letting out a surprised laugh at the younger girl’s honest response, and her assumption that everyone had to draw their sister. She was glad that Venetia was showing some spirit, and that it hadn’t all been crushed out of her.
“You don’t have to. You can draw anything you want.”
“I’m going to draw a flower,” Nina said.
She still sounded reserved. Cassie guessed she was playing it safe.
“All right,” Venetia decided. “I will draw my horse. I miss him. I was looking forward to riding him today.”
The horse you keep falling off, Cassie wanted to say.
For a while she focused on her own drawing, sketching Jacqui’s face and imagining her hair—now brown, as Tim had described, but he hadn’t said what length. Cassie guessed a few inches below her shoulders, and penciled in the cascading waves. Wishing she had more artistic talent, she detailed Jacqui’s features, remembering the kindness in her blue eyes, and how her sister had always loved to wear thick mascara and eyeliner to enhance them.
She drew Jacqui’s mouth, curved in a smile, praying as she did so that her sister was alive and happy.
Seeing that the children were engrossed in their drawings, she decided to make a start on the casual chitchat.
“Do you ever speak to your dad?” she asked.
Nina glanced up from her drawing.
“We have not spoken to Papa for a long time,” she said.
“Since when?” Cassie asked. “I understand that he and your mama split up?”
Seeing Nina’s frown, she tried to explain better.
“Your parents didn’t want to be married anymore, so your papa moved out?”
Nina’s frown only deepened.
It was Venetia who spoke.
“Papa went to prison. He was always kind to us, but Mama told us that he’s a bad man who did bad things, and that we will go to prison also, if we do not try hard to be good.”
Cassie stared at her in horror, feeling chills prickle her spine. Was this seriously what the children had been told?
Nina nodded in confirmation.
“Mama said he will be in prison for the rest of his life because he did terrible things, and we are to blame for much of what he did. She said the prison does not allow visitors, and that if we go there, they would lock us in and make us stay. So we have to be very careful.”
Cassie closed her eyes as she absorbed this shocking revelation. Could some of it be true? Had the children’s father gone to prison—for white-collar crime, or perhaps he’d harmed someone in a fit of rage? But Ms. Rossi hadn’t mentioned it when she hired Cassie, so more probably this whole story was an elaborate lie which was being used to poison the children’s minds against their father, while also justifying why he was no longer a part of their lives.
She was appalled by how Ms. Rossi had twisted the supposed facts, to point the finger of blame at the children. No wonder they were so cautious and reserved. With an absent father, and this dreadful scenario hanging over them, they were entirely in their mother’s power.
Cassie wished she could tell the children that the prison was right here, within the high, stone walls of this elegant home. They were incarcerated inside it, and she had no idea how she could free them.
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
After Nina and Venetia had innocently repeated the story about their father, Cassie decided to abandon her line of questioning. There was nothing they could tell her about his identity or whereabouts.
Cassie wondered how visitation rights worked in Italy. Assuming the children’s father was not in prison, was he legally allowed to have access to his children and spend time with them? Perhaps he had chosen not to stay in touch, or else, more likely, Ms. Rossi was preventing it.
Cassie finished drawing in silence, but her thoughts were in overdrive. Maurice might have been unwilling to speak up, but perhaps their father felt differently. If she was able to contact him he might know more, or else, be willing to investigate.
She put down her pen with a sigh. The children’s drawings were complete now, and it was time for lunch.
“Let me see.” She peered at Nina’s paper.
The flower was drawn with care and accuracy, and Cassie wished that there were crayons available so that Nina could have the fun of coloring the petals.
“It’s beautiful. What a gorgeous flower, I’d be so pleased if it was growing in my garden,” she praised her.
All Nina offered was a polite, “Thank you.”
“Let’s see your horse, Venetia.” Cassie got up and walked round the table.
She caught her breath as she stared down. The horse, cantering out of the page, was drawn in perfect proportion and Venetia’s bold pen strokes had brought its body and movement to life. Cassie recognized that this was serious talent, blazing from the paper. Venetia should be taking art lessons, not focusing on pointless sums.
“Wow, that’s magnificent,” Cassie said. “That is a very special piece of magic, right there. You should do more of this, Venetia. Can I keep the drawing?”
Venetia stared down at her work.
“I don’t want it,” she said dispassionately.
She picked the drawing up.
Cassie expected that she would hand it over to her. Instead, Venetia took hold of the edges of the page.
“No!” Cassie shouted as she realized what the young girl was about to do, but she was too late.
Venetia ripped the drawing in half, and then ripped each of the halves again. Then she crumpled them up and tossed them neatly into the dustbin in the corner of the room.
Cassie fought to hold back her tears. She was devastated, not only for the loss of the drawing, but for what it represented about Venetia’s emotional state. What had it taken for her to create such a masterpiece, and then tear it up? What did it say about the negative experiences she’d endured, and her own sense of self-worth?
This young girl needed to visit a therapist, but Cassie knew there was no hope of that happening.
Venetia showed no signs of being upset. Her calm mask was back in place, as if destroying the beautiful creation had been a way for her to vent her anger without any unwanted consequences.
Cassie took a few minutes to compose herself, until she was sure she could speak without starting to cry.
“Let’s go and get some lunch,” she said eventually. “And after that, I think you two need a rest. I’ll read you a story and then you can have a nap.”
Cassie resolved that she wasn’t going to spend their nap time sitting idly by. She’d already trespassed in Ms. Rossi’s office once, looking for paper, and now she was going to do so again.
She was going to search the house and try to find out about the girls’ father—who he was, where he was, and most importantly, what he knew.
As soon as the girls were asleep, Cassie made a start.
Before checking the study, she did a quick walk through the house, making sure that the cook and the housemaids were not on duty, because she didn’t want to be surprised by anybody while she searched. To her relief, it looked as if nobody else was home.
Walking into the office to look for information on the girls’ father felt different from going in to get paper. Technically, this was now snooping, and she hoped that Maurice had meant it when he’d told her that he and Ms. Rossi would be out all day.
Even though Ms. Rossi was not in the office, her presence felt tangible. That high-backed leather chair, the shiny white expanse of the desk, the colorful fashion prints on the walls. Walking around the desk, Cassie noticed a framed map of Italy with tiny gold shoes demarcating some of the major cities. She guessed these must be where Rossi Shoes had offices.
Cassie wondered how Ms. Rossi could sit in that chair and focus on her business, while knowing that her children were cold, hungry, locked up in darkness. Did she have the slightest twinge of conscience about these dreadful punishments?
She guessed Ms. Rossi didn’t have any qualms about doing what she did, and her power was so great that it steamrollered over everyone else who might notice something was wrong.
Perhaps the woman was mad, Cassie thought, as she began her search.
She looked methodically through the office, opening desk drawers and rifling through folders. She wasn’t sure what she was looking for, so tried to keep her eyes open for any information, even though she didn’t even know his name. She hoped to unearth an old business card, a phone book, the legal papers for the divorce, or any proof that he might have been in trouble with the law. Something must lead to him.
The desk was neatly organized and Cassie wondered if it was part of Maurice’s job to keep it tidy. Everything was in place. There was a cash box in the top drawer, but the key was in the lock. Cassie felt nervous when she saw it, because she didn’t want anyone to know that she’d been searching in a place where money was kept. It made her feel guilty by association.