“Your mother was born without the ability to remember.”
“I know that,” said Vitto. “But after she and Dad met, things changed. They somehow completed each other; she got her memory back, and he could see color. And they lived a life of bliss until I was born, but then they slowly reverted back.”
“Your mother was able to remember a lot, yes. But not everything.”
“Why not?”
“The same reason you shoved your wartime memories down so deep that it took multiple glasses of fountain water that night to bring it all back up. You remember?”
“Of course I remember.”
“Well your mother had memories she buried deep, too, so deep they remained buried even during those years before you were born. But she knew they were in there. Not what they were exactly, but that they were in there, like the deepest of splinters, unseen but somehow still poking away at her daily. Feelings of guilt and dread and fear followed her without her knowing why. So she drank the water from that fountain so she could remember. I told her not to, but she did it anyway.”
“You knew what the water would do? This isn’t recent?”
“No, Vittorio. That water has always restored memory, and it’s always accelerated the aging process.”
“But the earthquake?”
“Was just an earthquake.”
“The creek reversed?”
“It’s not the first time that’s happened. Ask Father Embry. He’ll tell you stories about it happening even before he arrived. That creek, Robert’s famous River Lethe, has changed course over the centuries like sand in an hourglass.”
“So did the water work for her?”
“Almost immediately,” said Juba. “It used to be stronger, the water. It’s weakened over the decades.”
“Which is why you’re okay with handing it out to the guests? Because it’s weaker.”
Juba nodded. “Back then it was strong enough to bring back those memories your mother feared most but felt she needed to face. The ones her mind had buried so deep she could never bring them back up on her own. But once she brought those memories up, she couldn’t handle them.”
“Lippi?”
Juba nodded. “He took advantage of her inability to remember, Vitto.” The whites of his eyes expanded. “In every way.”
Vitto’s blood seemed to freeze upon hearing the words. His own mother, defenseless against the cravings of an animal. A devil. A devil in the form of a man.
“He beat her. Used her. He said she was his muse, and I suppose that was true—his paintings of her were famous in the day. But he treated her more like his possession. His toy. He kept her hidden away, wouldn’t allow her to go out. It wasn’t supposed . . .”
“It wasn’t supposed to be what, Juba? You speak as if this is some story within a story. Some Greek tragedy script to be followed line by line.”
“You pour enough water in, and eventually it will flood out the bad stuff, Vitto. The memories of Lippi surfaced, and Magdalena couldn’t handle them. She couldn’t handle her battle fatigue. The guilt.”
“She killed Lippi?”
“She snapped.” Juba looked away, for the first time since Vitto had known him showing anger and some hidden guilt of his own. “I was watching over her. Had been for years.”
“Why?”
Juba ignored the question, answered another. “I saw her flee the house that night. I went in, found Lippi’s body . . . what she’d done to it. A woman pushed to the brink of madness.”
For the first time, Vitto hoped Juba would spare him the details, which he did. Then realization dawned. “You set fire to the house.”
“Yes.”
“So the police would never know what she’d done.”
Juba nodded again, fighting memories of his own. He’d begun wiping out the glasses again, his way of dealing with nerves, with stress.
“So did she steal Lippi’s money? Or did you do that?”
Juba’s lips tightened. “The man was dead. He didn’t need it. Besides, she was his adopted daughter.” He said that with a bit of a sneer. “His muse. It was hers by right, so I took it for her.”
Vitto lowered his head, pondering that new piece of information. Then, “Did Mamma push Landry Tuffant’s father off that cliff?”
Juba sighed in defeat. “I don’t know, Vitto. What I do know is that your mother was the kindest and gentlest person I’ve ever known. What happened in that house before I burned it—it wasn’t her. It was desperation. And she was never that desperate again—at least not until she drank the water.”
Juba placed the last clean glass on the shelf. “As much as his son wants some truth, Melvin Tuffant’s death may forever remain a mystery, but I know in my heart she didn’t push him. It was raining that night. He was out on the cliffs. Magdalena was out there with him. The next thing I know she’s running inside the hotel screaming that he’d gone over. That he’d slipped. That she’d tried to warn him about the wind. I believed her, Vitto. Your father believed her, too, of course.”
“But some didn’t?”
“Some didn’t. They knew why Tuffant was there, investigating Magdalena’s past, and in that some saw motive.”
“What was the year?”
“1921.”
“The year I was born,” said Vitto. “Her memory at that point was fine. She was not yet back to writing notes in her journal.”
“No.”
“But it doesn’t mean she didn’t write something down.” Vitto jumped from the stool. “Juba, are her journals still around?”
“Your father boxed them all up and put them in the basement, Vitto. But leave them be. What good could come from reading them? We know she was not capable of pushing a man to his death.”
“For the same reason you’ve always done what you’ve done, Juba. To protect her.”
“In my heart, I already know the truth.”
“But Landry Tuffant does not.”
Thirty-Two
Vitto awoke in the basement to the sound of anxious footsteps above. And voices—not the typical morning pleasantries, but more of a nervous chatter.
“Where’s Vittorio?”
“He can’t do this. That reporter! Why is Robert allowing this?”
Allowing what?
Vitto leaned up on his elbows, and a stack of little leather books tumbled to the cold floor of the wine cellar, where he’d found all of his mother’s journals in boxes stacked in a narrow gap between rows of wine bottles, situated in such a way that he could only pull out one box at a time. He hadn’t anticipated so many boxes—the kind they’d once used for wine, each one holding at least a dozen journals apiece. He’d counted at least fifteen of them, and there were possibly more back in the shadows; he’d only estimated the number by how high and deep the visible boxes were stacked. And there were no labels, no way to know what was in each box. The journals seemed to have been thrown in haphazardly and out of order.
He’d come here last night immediately after his talk with Juba, intending to find the journal, if it even existed, that could possibly shed light on Melvin Tuffant, something more tangible than what had been reported in the newspaper in the days after his death—Magdalena had been quoted as saying she saw him slip, but the writer’s words had made hers sound desperate and untrustworthy. But the wine he’d drunk had kicked in, and he’d fallen asleep paging through the final journal of the first box, whose contents chronicled the end of his third year and the first month of his fourth. At that point Magdalena had already begun to write down nearly everything she did during the day: conversations she’d had, interactions she’d witnessed, guests she’d talked to, the daily doings of being everyone’s muse.
Reading her words had saddened him, slowing his pace despite the urgency to find truth. He’d been too young to understand back then, specifically during the months he’d read about—it almost felt like spying. As he grew older he’d been aware of her memory troubles, had even felt sympathy for her, but had never
known the extent of what she’d had to go through, writing down everything just to be able to function. And to think how it worsened by the month, by the year, until she’d felt the desperate need to drink from that fountain and bring back even the worst of it.
Pinpricks of sunlight found their ways through cracks in the ceiling of the cellar. Dust motes hovered. He made it to his feet, straightened the crick in his back, and decided the commotion upstairs was more relevant now than what had happened in the past. Had something happened to the water? Had someone finally died? He took the curved stone steps leading to the piazza two at a time and found the guests, judging from their voices, as out of sorts as he’d imagined.
He hurried to find Valerie, who was walking quickly toward the Roman arches at the hotel entrance. She spotted him, waited, smoothed down a portion of his hair that must have been sticking up from the awkward way he’d slept. “Where were you last night?”
“I fell asleep in the wine cellar. I’ll explain later.”
She appeared distracted by the goings-on outside the hotel anyway. “What is going on?” he asked. She was reluctant to tell him; she stood there searching for the words. “Is it Dad?”
She shook her head. “No. Vittorio . . . they’re digging up your mother’s grave.”
He didn’t wait for an explanation. He ran out the entrance, where more of the guests stood watching the poppy field. Just beyond it stood the graveyard where Magdalena and a handful of staff from over the years had been buried. Vitto hurried across the field, his feet cutting through the tall grass like machetes, with Valerie following closely behind, telling him things like, Stop . . . There’s nothing we can do . . . We’ve already tried . . . Paperwork . . .
The small graveyard had been partitioned off by rope and was surrounded by four police officers, two other men with shovels, and the reporter Landry Tuffant, who was smoking a cigarette and exhaling plumes into the morning air as Vitto approached, so out of his mind that he could barely even hear the insults and threats coming from his own mouth. Tuffant hadn’t been around in days. Vitto had wondered if he was up to something.
It took three of the police officers to hold him back. One of them took a club to Vitto’s knee, knocking him to the grass, hovering above. “I should arrest you now, Mr. Gandy.”
“You heard him,” shouted Landry Tuffant. “He threatened to kill me.”
Did I?
Valerie had him by the arm, begging him to come with her, begging the police to ignore what he’d just said. “He’s upset. His mother’s grave is being desecrated. How would you react?” she screamed at the officers, then screamed it again at Tuffant, who turned from her, took another drag on his cigarette, and nodded for the two men with shovels to get to it.
The first crunch of blade into soil magnified in Vitto’s head. Words warped in and out of focus, loud, then muted, distorted—words from Valerie, words from the officers, words from Tuffant, words from the guests watching outside the hotel. Vitto allowed himself to be led away, toward the pools, then back toward the building.
“Where is he? Where’s Dad? How is he standing for this?”
Valerie gripped his elbow, halted him before the entrance to the northern wing. “This is your father’s doing.”
“He wanted this?”
“No. But he put the idea in Tuffant’s head.” They both breathed heavily as the ocean rolled in the distance. “A week ago, apparently, your father made a comment when Tuffant was snooping, asking questions of Magdalena’s past. He said that all of his answers were buried with her. Tuffant pushed him on it, asked him if he meant evidence of some sort. And your father said yes, there’s evidence buried with her.”
“What evidence? Why did he say that?”
“I don’t know. I asked him if he’d been sound of mind at the time. He said yes, it was in the middle of the day, and he knew exactly what he was doing.” She tried to rub the tension from her face, her neck. “He even said the words ‘Be my guest.’ Like he wanted Tuffant to do this, Vitto.”
“Where is Dad?”
She pointed through the entrance, toward the piazza. “In there. At one of the tables, drinking coffee like it’s a regular morning.”
Vitto took off through the entrance and ran into Juba. “Juba, do something.”
“Nothing can be done, Vittorio.” Although Juba’s eyes showed worry, his voice was stern. “They’ve gotten permission from the courts. And your father—this seems to be how he wants it.”
“And you, Juba? Do you know what they’re going to find once they open that casket?”
Juba gave a slight nod.
“Tell me. Tell me, Juba.”
“I never should have told you what I did last night. Some things should remain hidden.”
Valerie glanced sharply up at Vitto; he mumbled that he’d tell her later. Juba stepped out onto the grounds, his large feet firmly planted in the middle of the bocce court, and watched from afar as shovels overturned earth and cigarette smoke sifted upward like from a smoldering campfire. Juba said, “It’ll take them all day. Her coffin was buried deep, and the ground is like iron out there.”
Vitto found his father on the piazza just as Valerie had said, sitting by himself at a table and drinking coffee, in view of both the bar and the untouched marble that was to become his final masterpiece. “What is going on?”
Robert looked up from the newspaper on his lap. His legs were crossed lazily at the knees, revealing long, bony legs. “Let them do what they feel necessary, Vittorio.”
“How can you be so . . .”
“So what?”
“What are they going to find in there?”
Robert waved it away. “Oh, nothing.”
“So this is a wild goose chase? You’re allowing them to dig up my mother, and there’s no evidence of anything?”
“I’m not allowing them to do anything, son. They have a court order. The original investigation was dismissed for lack of evidence. But now they believe they’ll find the evidence.”
“And you’re telling me they won’t?”
“Not the evidence they’re looking for.”
“Then what?”
“Relax, Vitto. I know what I’m doing.”
“Do you? It was only a few months ago that you tried brushing your teeth with a razor. You couldn’t find the bathroom, so you soiled your pants.”
Valerie said, “Vitto, please.”
Robert looked over his shoulder toward the empty bar, and it took Vitto only a few seconds to realize what he’d glanced at. “Why do you and Juba keep looking at that clock?”
Robert said, “To see what time it is, Vitto.”
“Tell me about that clock.”
“It’s a Dutch clock, if I remember correctly. Perfectly handcrafted.”
“And Mamma brought it with her from Florence. The orphanage let her take it when she was . . .” He couldn’t bring himself to say “adopted,” now that he knew so much about the monster Francesco Lippi.
“It seems you already know about the clock then. What more is there to tell?”
Vitto clenched his fists, felt like striking something, anything. He probably would have had Valerie not touched his arm. He pointed in the direction of where the exhumation was taking place on the other side of the hotel wall. “I will not let that man destroy my mother’s memory. She was nothing but good. For us. For others.”
“The best,” said Robert, suddenly melancholy. “A goddess. My muse.” And then his face hardened. “That man out there, Vitto, isn’t so different from you.”
Vitto turned on him. “He and I are not the same.”
“Sons desperate for the truth about parents who are no longer around to tell it.”
Vitto seethed, but any anger he still harbored toward his father melted as he gazed upon the frailty of him. He stepped away, placed a forgiving hand on his father’s thin shoulder, and faced the bar. Beside it was the stone stairwell leading below to the wine cellar. The journals. He slid his hand fr
om his father’s shoulder and moved toward the bar.
“Vitto, where are you going?”
He didn’t answer, but Valerie followed as he suspected she would—had hoped she would. Robert raised the newspaper with a palpable snap and continued reading as Vitto and Valerie descended below the hotel. His mission last night had been derailed by tiredness, by a melancholy lack of urgency, by too much wine. But the shovels digging into the earth outside had now made him desperate. He couldn’t legally stop what they were doing out on the grounds, but perhaps he could find some proof, some written words of Magdalena’s that were believable enough for Tuffant to put an end to this madness. Something to bring the man peace so he wouldn’t ruin more lives while trying to fill in the gaps of his own.
As he and Valerie pulled out box after box, Vitto explained what Juba had told him last night, about Magdalena killing Lippi and Juba setting fire to the house to protect her, to keep the police from finding what he’d found.
“What did she do to Lippi? How did she kill him?”
“I don’t know, Val, and I don’t want to. He was a monster. What he did to her, for years, I can’t even . . .”
He told her about the water in the fountain, how Juba had said it had always had the power to bring back memory, but that it was growing weaker.
“How did it get there in the first place?”
“I don’t know.” He handed her another box. “Why don’t you take this one and I’ll go through the other.”
They buried themselves in boxes, in decades’ worth of discarded journals, daily notes and reminders, stories and memories. Some were written the way anyone would write in a journal—to document things in need of remembrance. But most were written out of the desperation of living one day to the next.
At noon William brought them a lunch they could hardly take breaks to eat, so determined were they to find something before Tuffant struck wood outside. They were flipping through pages so quickly, they’d reduced their focus to skimming, searching for words about the tragedy at the Tuscany Hotel, the reporter Melvin Tuffant, or the year 1921. But with nothing labeled or organized, it was like finding a needle in a haystack.
Midnight at the Tuscany Hotel Page 27