The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  Anna looked at the vault above her, at the pitted stone, the cracks, and white rimes of lime, and was not sure why it hadn’t collapsed. Why all the rooms hadn’t fallen down into the street—lace curtains, pots and pans and toothbrushes. She rolled her shoulders, flexed her hands to stop them from freezing, and shifted the pack at her feet and the two shopping bags piled on top of it. She was cold and tired, spoiled by the last three nights she’d spent in the relative comfort of hotels.

  On Thursday she’d taken the first train north. Jumped on as soon as she’d reached Santa Maria Novella, not picky about the destination as long as she got clear of Florence. She’d ended up in Reggio, which had been all she’d wanted—a medium-large town with a fair selection of hotels. The one she’d chosen, just behind the inevitable Duomo, had been a bit down at heels, with a full dining room, and family run. Which virtually guaranteed not enough staff at dinnertime when she’d made sure to ask for a room. She shouldn’t have been able to check in without an identity card or passport. But when the harried girl behind the desk had asked for it, she’d fussed with the backpack, pulling half the contents out, strewing them across the lobby floor until she was handed a set of keys and told to bring her ID down later. On Friday morning she’d made sure someone else was on duty, then paid in cash and vanished during the breakfast rush.

  Thanks to Graziella Farelli, no such antics had been necessary in Bologna. Anna had stayed there two nights and left early this morning, hoping that the reports to whatever database kept the details of where everyone stayed and when wouldn’t be updated until Monday. She was betting that bureaucracy still shut down for the weekend.

  Now, however, things were different. Using Graziella’s identity card to register at another hotel would be too risky. She had dodged and weaved, changed her appearance as best she could, but tomorrow was Monday. It would be only a matter of time. If Graziella Farelli had not realized already, she would surely understand by tomorrow morning that her wallet really was missing rather than just misplaced. Then, if she had not already done so, she would report the loss of her ID card and wallet first thing. By which time a description of Anna Carson would also be turning up on whatever databases descriptions of missing women turned up on.

  Despite the fact that they had been basically on the verge of splitting up, arguing more or less nonstop—about Kristin and everything else—Anna had no doubt that Ken would have reported her missing, and sooner rather than later. She suspected, in fact, that he had gone demented. It would be a matter of control, she thought acidly, as much as passion. She’d found that comforting once. The God complex, so well documented in doctors, and especially surgeons, had made her feel secure. Then it just drove her crazy. They’d almost split, she couldn’t count how many times. At the eleventh hour he’d always talked her into staying, not because he loved her, but because he needed to win. And over and over again, she’d given in, although she wasn’t sure why. Habit? Inertia? She smiled bitterly. The irony was, up to a few years ago, she’d stayed for Kristin. Told herself that no matter how much the kid acted out, she’d lost one mother and couldn’t lose another. She’d told herself Kristin needed her.

  It was the last refuge of the weak, Anna thought. The rallying cry of the martyred and the spineless. Not to mention the egocentric. He needs me! She needs me! The sick joke was, if she had actually gotten it together to leave, packed her things and walked out the door, vanished from their lives the way she’d vanished from others before, Kristin wouldn’t need her. She’d be sitting in a nice apartment, or in a college dorm in Boston, or New York, or wherever, happily going about her usual business of making someone else’s life hell, instead of—

  Anna didn’t want to think about instead of. She reached into her pocket and felt the scratchy, balding head of the little white bear. Her finger pressed his bright black eye.

  A bell began to toll. Seconds later it was joined by another. Midnight. The witching hour. Time for the dead, and the undead, to walk. Anna picked up the pack and fitted it onto her shoulders. Then she took a shopping bag in each hand. She looked both ways. No windows were lit and no one was moving. A streetlamp glowed at the mouth of Via Carbone, highlighting the black skeleton of a bicycle, blue plastic shopping bag tied over its seat. She stepped out from under the arch, Kristin’s boots leaving dark footsteps in the snow.

  She had arrived in Ferrara just after noon, and been immediately struck by how ordinary and how surreal it felt at the same time. Like one of those dreams when you meet yourself as a child. The castle had seemed, not smaller, as memory required, but bigger and uglier. Cannons had been placed at the entrance, cannonballs stacked beside them, as if the town expected to be attacked. The moat was fetid and green and laced with ice. The row of shops cowered in the opposite buildings.

  Anna had turned away, heading automatically for Corso d’Este, where the gray faces of the palazzos still faced each other, tears of damp running from their shutter latches. The fat legs of the little boys still dangled from the portico of the Prosperi Sacrati. A winter fog, so cold it felt splintered with ice, drifted across the afternoon. It was thick enough that, as she neared the end of the street, she had not been able to see the Angels’ Gate, and had the panicked thought that it might not be there. Or worse, might have been restored. Made glossy and new. Or been removed altogether, replaced by some sleek architectural statement. Then, all at once, it had loomed in front of her, the crumbling pillars and great wooden panels with the giant padlock still sealing in the past.

  Laughter had come from the top of the walls as a bicycle rattled down the path, the boy standing up and pedaling hard, his girlfriend on the seat behind him, clutching his waist. Anna had watched them disappear. Then she’d turned around. The line of houses were still behind their iron railings. The doors had been repainted, and the gravel of a few of the driveways replaced by fancy herringbone pavement. Winter branches still laced above the frost-white lawns. Stone steps still led to the front doors.

  The cemetery had not changed much, either. She’d been half afraid, as she wove her way between the crypts that stood like tiny houses, her fingers brushing the monuments as if she was blind, that her parents’ grave might have disappeared. Or been moved to make room for the more recently departed, or those who at least had someone left to remember them. But the stone angel still stood near the wall of the little courtyard, hanging back as if she was shy, her wings half spread, one hand raised.

  Anna hadn’t understood as a child that her father probably hadn’t been able to afford the statue. That part of the mushroom cloud that had haunted her and helped to kill him had probably begun with its pitted marble cheek and folded gown. The angel had looked so exactly the same, down to the chip on her sandaled foot and the wilting bouquet that lay on her pedestal, that at first Anna hadn’t even noticed the new line of engraving that had been added below her parents’.

  Angela Vari, Daughter, 1958–1980.

  When she finally caught her breath, she’d asked herself what she’d expected. Then wondered if she’d had a funeral, and if so, if anyone had bothered to come.

  The bouquet had answered at least part of the question. The flowers were real, not plastic or fabric, like some she’d seen, the livid blues and reds where the dye had leaked off spackling the gravel. Curious, she’d lifted the fresh blooms. A card was stuffed down in the stems. Annabeth, Marco, Angela—Forever in my prayers, Renata.

  The smell of chicken soup. The sound of kitchen shutters banging open, a voice scolding. The warmth of a hand slipping her a coin for the collection at Easter mass. The sight of her father, one drunken summer night, holding a woman in his arms, kissing her in the shadowed halo of a street lamp. Renata Ravalli, who all these years later kept them in her prayers.

  Anna found herself grateful. But the fact that the Ravallis, or at least one of them, were obviously still alive and might still live in Via Vittoria made her wary. After leaving the cemetery, she’d taken her time, circling like a hungry cur dog. It had
been more than an hour before she crossed Corso Giovecca and slipped into the ghetto, then sidled like a thief into Via Mayr.

  What she’d found made her stop in her tracks. Although she didn’t know what she’d expected. A minimart? The delicatessen of her mother’s dreams? A bijou little slow food shop selling cold cuts and pickles all wrapped in fancy paper with names like Nonna’s, and made in China or New Jersey by Kraft or Nestlé? She’d braced herself for that. Or simply for a hole in the wall. Or a new line of glossy shops. Possibly even a fast-food place, or a pricey trattoria with faux scarred tables, paper napkins, tripe on the menu, and six stickers on the door announcing it had been recommended by travel websites. Anything but what she saw.

  There was a hole in the sign. MACEL ìA it read, the letters chipped and barely legible above sheets of plywood that had been nailed across the front of her father’s shop. Fuck Berlusconi! someone had spray painted. Three Avatar posters were pasted below, suggesting the prime minister might be bright blue and have a tail.

  Anna was not sure, but she thought a small squeak escaped her, a twinge of outrage from the Angela who still dwelled inside her. “Fuckers,” she had found herself muttering. Then she had darted across the street like her younger self, dodging between a rattling gray van and a new Mercedes whose driver had honked and raised his fist.

  Glancing down the block she’d seen that the Pirottis had somehow survived and were still open. Mindful that if Renata Ravalli was still alive, Signor and Signora Pirotti might be, too, Anna had ducked around the corner where a van that looked suspiciously like their old one was parked, and seen the door to the storeroom.

  The lock had been damaged, part of the hinge pulled away, either deliberately or by mistake. She’d eased it open, telling herself she only wanted to look. Inside, leaves and bits of newspaper littered the floor. Rust marked the old porcelain sink. A workbench along the far wall where the buckets had once been stacked was piled with crates and what looked to be bits of a vacuum cleaner. A big ladder, possibly the same one she and Antonio had used, hung in cobwebbed brackets on the wall, half its rungs missing. The place was obviously abandoned. Then, under the grime, she’d noticed the outline of the hatch—the little door her mother had insisted on putting in to hand buckets and sponges and soap and bags of sawdust through.

  Now she stood holding the fruits of her afternoon shopping spree, and felt her stomach sink. There was just enough light from the street lamp on the corner to see that someone had come along and closed the storeroom door. Anna hesitated, then put the bags down, pulled off the mittens she had bought, and felt along the rotting sill. Relief flooded through her. It wasn’t locked. It had just been pushed, or had blown shut, and was jammed. She got her fingers in a crack and pulled.

  Inside it was pitch dark. Anna closed the door and dug in one of the bags for the flashlight she’d bought. It was a big one, a Maglite, the same kind the police carried at home in the States, useful equally for lighting dark corners and bashing people over the head. The bright white beam made the little room seem even smaller. She ferried her bags to the far wall beyond the ladder, then took the pack off, rested it at her feet, and began to feel with her free hand around the edge of the hatch.

  The hatch’s wooden panel didn’t budge. Anna huffed in frustration. Then her fingers found the little slip lock. She tried to pull it back, but it stuck. She put the flashlight between her feet, pointing up at the cobwebby roof, and used both hands. It still wouldn’t move. She was beginning to wonder if it had been super-glued, when finally, she picked up the Maglite and put it to its other intended use. One good whack and the lock gave. The hinges on the little door creaked as she pushed. She hoped they hadn’t rusted out, wouldn’t snap so the whole thing came off in her hand. Whining, the hatch finally swung back. Anna took a deep breath, then shined the Maglite through the opening.

  The first thing it caught was the marble counter, thick with dust, then beyond, darkness, and a weird shine—the window made black by the boards nailed over it. Threads of light zigged and zagged in a silver spider’s web, a black hole at its heart where someone had thrown a rock at the glass. The name, Vari, was gone, replaced by two lines of red lettering: Carne Rapido! Anna read backward. Sette Giorni per la Settimana! Sette à Sette! Meat fast! Seven days a week! Seven to seven!

  So the supermarket hadn’t let it go derelict after all. They’d merely tried to beat her at her own game. And failed. The ghost of Angela felt a spurt of satisfaction. She swung the light up and caught white tiles, half expecting to see them cracked, too, attacked out of sheer spite. But, no. The pig and the cow still grinned and laughed.

  Anna set the flashlight down, reached for the pack, and shoved it through the hatch. Next she lowered each of the shopping bags, trying not to tip them over, or at least not to break anything. Then she dropped the Maglite through the hatch. The beam canted wildly as it hit one of the paper sacks. Finally she took a deep breath, put both hands on the ledge, and hoisted herself up.

  Monday, February 8

  The first thing Pallioti saw when he walked into his office was the package sitting in the center of his desk. He stood with his overcoat on his shoulders, staring at it. His friend had been as good as his promise.

  Enzo had already called in, reporting that he’d arrived in Bologna at the crack of dawn and spoken to one Graziella Farelli, who’d had her bag rifled in church, and who did bear a passing resemblance to Anna Carson, if Anna Carson cut and dyed her hair. But so did a lot of people. Tallish, good-looking-ish, and dark-ish wasn’t exactly unusual. So far that was the sum total of their progress. Pallioti sighed, took his coat off, and hung it in his closet, smoothing the arm and flicking a speck of icy grit from the cuff.

  Turning around, he rather hoped the package might have vanished. But it was still on his desk. Some poor lunatic on a motorcycle had probably raced through the night from Rome, risking life and limbs, his and others, to deliver it. He snorted and reached for the silver letter opener he kept in his top drawer. The thing was almost a foot long and sharp as a shiv. As handy for opening throats as letters, it had been given to him by a woman he had once, very briefly and a long time ago, thought he might marry. Apart from a vague memory of her voice—which had been low and almost obscenely beautiful—it was the only relic of the affair. Which seemed fitting. Weighing it in his hand, seeing his initials engraved on the blade, he thought it was actually a far more appropriate gift than it had seemed at the time. He wondered if he’d given her the obligatory coin for it. Probably not, otherwise they’d have been married happily and he’d be bouncing grandchildren on his knee. Not sure what the point of looking at photographs of Angela Vari’s funeral would actually be, he slit the packing tape in one clean cut.

  The photographs were eight by tens, black and white, glossy and slightly cracked and old-fashioned looking. Pallioti spread them on his desk, wondering when it was that things created in his own lifetime had begun to feel like antiques. There was no note, no billet-doux, from his friend trapped in the fat man’s body. Yellowing paper tabs were taped to the bottom of each shot, giving the names of the unwitting subjects. High-tech for the time.

  Surveillance photos always gave Pallioti the creeps, partly because he found them so interesting. There was something horribly irresistible about gazing on people who did not know they were being watched, a nasty little jolt every bit as satisfying as a grappa. If God was sitting up in his heaven, gazing down on the faithless had to be his favorite pastime.

  His friend had sent fifteen photos in all. Which meant there were almost certainly more where these came from. Jesus, Pallioti thought, fanning them across his blotter, didn’t they have anything better to do than document the burying of an urn filled with sand? He wondered how many photographers had been crouched behind monuments and lurking in mausoleums. Tomaselli himself appeared, on first glance anyway, to be completely unaware of his starring role. He wasn’t in chains, either. Nor were there a cadre of minders—only two that Pallioti coul
d pick out, standing respectfully far back. His estimation of the prison services went up a few notches. The fat man hadn’t been joking after all. They did have hearts. He pulled out his glasses and slipped them on.

  Even through a telephoto lens, even in black and white and over the space of three decades, it was obvious that chains were hardly necessary. And would have been obscene. Because Antonio Tomaselli was devastated. His handsome face appeared empty and slightly crumpled, like a piece of paper that had been screwed up and only partially smoothed out. He stared at a hole at the foot of a stone angel as if he wished he might somehow be sucked into it. In one photograph, he stood with his hand over his mouth, his shoulders hunched in grief.

  He had loved her.

  Pallioti straightened up, ashamed of himself for being surprised. He drummed his fingers on the edge of his desk. Then he leaned down and examined the prints more closely.

  Almost all the shots showed a priest and five mourners. The death had been reported in the papers. That was the point after all, for everyone—or at least certain people—to know Angela Vari was dead. But the piece had run only after the fake interment. So the mourners here would have been those who had been previously notified, her equivalent of family.

  Three of them were clearly older. The fat man had said Angela Vari didn’t have any immediate family, so probably they were friends of her parents’, or very distant relatives of some kind. They stood together in their baggy black coats. The elderly man wore an old-fashioned black hat of the type Pallioti remembered their gardener wearing to his mother’s funeral. The two women wore headscarves and no gloves. Wound in their pale fingers, he could make out what looked like lengths of string. Rosary beads. Heads bent, they intoned their prayers for the dead. Pallioti could almost hear the words, smell the faint sickening waft of incense drifting down the years.