Chapter 7 - The Second Recipe Book
Dana wanted to take Sofia to a secure location immediately.
Matteo wanted armed protection around every entrance.
Isabella wanted her daughter home.
Sofia wanted none of those things.
She wanted the blue recipe book.
"We find it first," I said, ending the argument.
The tailor shop smelled of dust, old wood, and machine oil.
I found the tin exactly where Grandma had said it would be, behind the lower stair riser.
Inside sat a blue ring binder wrapped in waxed paper.
Every recipe was written in Rose's tidy cursive.
There were notes for bread, lemon cake, sfogliatelle, and Christmas cookies.
But one page had been replaced with unusually thick paper.
I held it to the window.
Faint letters emerged between the printed ingredient lines.
The book was a crude but effective hiding place for a transcription cipher.
Dana photographed the pages, then matched the ledger's W entries to words in the bread recipes.
After an hour we had the first sentence.
RIVER FIRE WAS ORDERED BY ENZO.
Matteo read it and leaned against the wall.
His grandfather Enzo Vescari had supposedly died shortly after the warehouse fire.
The same man Sofia said she had seen alive in the hospital.
The same man identified in my military investigation under the alias Victor Bell.
"Why would Rose write this down instead of going to police?" Isabella asked.
"Maybe she did," Dana replied. "And someone made sure it didn't matter."
The next sentence identified a payment account used to support Eleanor Vale.
The third gave a safety-deposit box number and the initials L.V.
Lucia Vescari.
Matteo rubbed his forehead.
"My grandmother was collecting evidence against her own husband."
"Perhaps she was collecting proof that would keep him from killing someone else," I said.
We couldn't decode the final paragraph because several recipe pages were missing.
The gaps were precise, torn from the rings years ago.
Then Dana noticed a faint indentation on the back cover.
She rubbed pencil graphite gently over a sheet of paper placed above it.
A message appeared.
IF EMILY FINDS THIS, TELL HER I WAS SORRY ABOUT FORT ASHBY.
I felt as though the floor had tilted.
Fort Ashby was the Army installation where my old case had collapsed.
My partner Daniel Reeves had disappeared after telling me he had located a key witness.
I had spent years believing he had either betrayed me or fled the country.
"Your grandmother knew about Fort Ashby?" Dana asked.
"She told me to leave it alone. She said some questions ate the people who asked them."
The room became very quiet.
Matteo looked at me with a new softness.
"You think she knew your partner?"
"I think she knew why he vanished."
Sofia tugged my sleeve and pointed to the edge of the cover.
A narrow slit had been cut into the cardboard.
Inside was a plastic-wrapped key and a folded scrap of paper.
The paper held an address near Camden and three words in Grandma's handwriting.
ELEANOR KNOWS EVERYTHING.
Dana reached for the key.
I closed my hand around it.
"We go together," I said.
My phone rang.
The caller ID showed a Philadelphia police detective whose number I hadn't given anyone.
"Ms. Carter," he said, "you're wanted for questioning about the arson at your bakery."
Then he added, "We found your fingerprints on the accelerant container."
May you like
The people who burned my business were now trying to make me responsible for it.
