The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  As if by mutual agreement, Antonio Tomaselli and the second younger mourner stood on the other side of the grave. Tomaselli wore no overcoat, just a dark suit and tie. The prison service, or someone, had been generous. The clothes appeared to fit. They even made him look a halfway suitable partner for the woman who stood beside him. She was tall. Her dark hair was pulled back, accentuating the strong bones of her face. She appeared to be about Antonio’s age, but something in the way she stood suggested that she was at least twice the man he was. Possibly twice the man any man was. She wore a black overcoat, not unlike Pallioti’s own, black heels, black gloves. Even from thirty years away, Pallioti could tell they were expensive. She reminded him of those statues of Pallas Athena he’d seen in picture books. He wouldn’t have been the least bit surprised if in the next photo she’d been holding a spear, or had an owl emerging from her forehead.

  No such luck, although one of the photographers did catch her putting her hand on Antonio Tomaselli’s shoulder, speaking to him much the way a parent would speak to a distressed child. In another picture, she had stepped to the background and was holding her arms out, fending off the two police minders, her mouth open, obviously telling them to leave Antonio alone as he stood in tears, his hand on the outstretched arm of the angel.

  Pallioti straightened up and frowned. If this woman was part of the prison service, all he could say was that it had sure gone to hell in the last thirty years. He squinted down at the faded little yellow strips of paper. The old people were named as Alda Pirotti, Tommaso Pirotti, and Renata Ravalli. Antonio Tomaselli was Antonio Tomaselli. The woman, unsurprisingly, was not Pallas Athena. Her name was Barbara Barelli.

  * * *

  The train left right on time. It was old and dented and unglamorous, but prompt. Anna lifted the bike she had stolen into the luggage van. There had been at least two dozen pig-piled outside the library in Piazza Paradiso, some shoved close enough to be chained to the metal rack, others chained to other bikes, or to themselves—back wheel to front, hobbled like cowboys’ horses.

  She had lurked around, searching for one that wasn’t locked, and had almost been undone by a pair of old ladies who had walked by slowly as turtles, exchanging snatches of gossip. They hadn’t seemed to notice her, but Anna knew better. Nonna Franchi had had eyes not just in the back, but probably in the sides and top, of her head as well. Seeing them she had missed Nonna with a pang so sudden it felt like a cramp—a vicious little stab of loss. When she was sure they’d turned the corner, she’d grabbed the handlebars and hefted a bike she’d spotted out of the tangle. Moments later she was pedaling through Piazza Trieste, telling herself that the fact the thing had gears at all made up, almost, for the spectacularly uncomfortable seat.

  Now she climbed into the carriage, which was all but empty, and settled herself by the window, watching as Ferrara slipped into a wasteland of railway yards and industrial estates. Silver fencing topped with razor wire guarded the business parks that had expanded like inkblots, sprawling into the flat featureless countryside. There was no sign anymore of the factory that had exploded. It would have been pulled down years ago. Somewhere there would be a plaque, an obligatory listing of the names of the dead. Beside an entrance door, or in a lobby. Next to a dribbling fountain whose bottom was lined with pennies and waterlogged cigarette butts.

  Anna leaned back in the seat and drew her new jacket around her. She’d replaced her whole wardrobe yesterday, with cheaper and certainly less fashionable substitutes. Now she wondered if she shouldn’t have gone whole hog and dyed her hair again as well. Or cut it shorter. She’d considered it, but wasn’t really sure what she could do. Going back to blond would make her look too much like Anna Carson, American Housewife, and darkening it and chopping it off wouldn’t really make that much difference. Besides, it was so obvious they were probably looking for it. In the end she’d bought a bunch of hair elastics, pulled it back tight, and decided to keep it up under the decidedly unflattering knitted watch cap she’d purchased. With any luck and no makeup—she’d pitched all of Kristin’s Goth eyeliner and mascara and the horrid lilac lipstick with no regret at all—she might be mistaken for a guy.

  She’d been sorely tempted to keep Kristin’s beautiful, and very warm, down jacket to layer under her new sleeping bag—even with a pad, the shelf of the cold room left a lot to be desired—then had told herself not to be stupid. So it had gone, along with everything else—the pack that was so obvious she might as well be waving a flag, and, of course, Graziella’s wallet. She couldn’t use the ID card again. Although she still had well over a thousand euros of her own left, she’d taken what cash there was, then zipped the wallet into the deep inner pocket of Kristin’s coat, and pushed the whole lot through the panel of the Caritas box. Graziella Farelli had looked like a nice person and it was a nice wallet. Maybe when the Good Samaritans, or the Brothers of St. Francis, or whoever they were, found it, they’d mail it back to her.

  The train jerked and slowed. Anna had been standing between carriages for the last ten minutes, worried the station was so small and would be so empty that she would not have time to jump out and get the bike from the luggage van. If that happened, she would have to walk, and that would take a very long time.

  She bent and peered through the grimy window, watching as the platform slunk into view. It was nothing but a concrete terrace and a shelter sided with Plexiglas like a bus stop, two slat benches inside and a sign hanging above. There wasn’t a house in sight, or even another building. The stop was just a stop, barely even a place. In the middle of nowhere.

  A guard stuck his head out of one of the forward carriages, watching as she ran back to the luggage van. The moment she’d lifted the bike down, he raised his hand. The train was moving again by the time she slammed the door. Its gray rump rattled past, then grew smaller and smaller until, finally, it shrank to nothing, swallowed by the empty stretches of the fields. Anna turned around. There was only one road. A blast of wind, smelling of mud, hit her in the face, making her eyes tear as she got on the bike and began to pedal.

  After forty minutes, her calves burned. She stopped, bent and massaged her legs, fingers easing the knotted muscles. It was not true that you could flip from one sport to another. That legs could run, pump, and kick equally happily. At least not at her age. Not anymore. She hadn’t been on a bike in years and the seat of this one was so fiendish she found it more comfortable to stand up. Anna licked her lips and tasted salt. She’d stopped once to consult the map she’d bought yesterday. It had been reassuring, a check on her nerves, but the truth was, it hadn’t been necessary. The sea marshes couldn’t be more than five or six miles away now, as the crow flew. She knew exactly where she was.

  Tucked into the passenger seat of Antonio’s tiny rattling Fiat, her hand on his thigh, her elbow hitting his as he searched for the gears that were so loose it was hard to tell first from third, she’d felt her hair blown back in the draft from the open window as she’d watched the fields and the rows of the orchards, green and dense with summer.

  “I’ve never brought anyone here before,” he’d said suddenly. He’d smiled, not taking his eyes off the thin grayed strip of road.

  “To the abbey?”

  She’d turned to him as she asked, and found herself still amazed that he was here. Or that she was here with him. Or both. Although, in the week since he had walked into the pizzeria, they had barely been out of each other’s sight.

  Angela had taken him home, to her den of memories and piles of clothes and dirty dishes. They had climbed the stairs and closed the door and fumbled, barely speaking, into the sitting room, to the sofa, to the worn rug, for—she wasn’t even sure how long for. The rest of the day. The night. The next day. She had called and told the pizza man she was sick, forgotten several of the small jobs she was supposed to do, and hadn’t cared. Lying in the dark, and then in the shuttered half-light, and then in the dark again, running her hands across Antonio’s body, feeling the slick sweat
of his arms, his thighs, his stomach, tangling her hands in his hair, she hadn’t cared about anything. She hadn’t even asked where he’d gotten the car, or why he wasn’t going back to the university at Padua, or what he was going to do in Rome, which was where he said he was going. He could tell her, or not. All she had cared about was that she could touch him. Smell him. Taste him. Feel him inside her like the beating of her own heart.

  He shook his head.

  “Not the abbey,” he’d said. “Not Pomposa. We’ll go there after. We’re going to the farm. My grandpa’s farm. I told you, remember?”

  And she had nodded, because of course she remembered. She remembered every word he’d ever said to her. Every time she’d ever glimpsed him. She’d squeezed his thigh then, run her hand up, and leaned back, watching his face as the summer rippled away beyond the open window. They had stopped a few minutes later. Clambering out of the little Fiat, and climbing the embankment. Falling into the grass on the other side, they’d pushed clothes up, pulled them down, not caring if a car or a fruit truck or even someone on a bicycle came by and saw the flash of naked skin.

  When you’re young, you think sex is love, Anna thought. And maybe you’re right. Or as right as you’ll ever be. It’s the brain that lies, not the body. Not the skin, the blood. Cells, for Christ’s sake. Viscera—liver, heart, gut. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The fields around her were as flat and featureless as the sea. For all she knew, this was the very spot where the junky little car had stopped. The past ought to have markers. Way signs. A pile of rocks, or a forked stick. Something to at least tell you how far you had to go. And let you know when you arrived.

  Forty minutes later she finally saw the pillars, rising out of nowhere, two abandoned columns fronting the ghostly outline of a track. Fog was creeping in from the sea, hazing the already weak afternoon sun. It was colder. By tomorrow morning the whole world would be sugared in frost.

  Anna got off the bicycle. She was aware of her heart hammering, suddenly frantic, as if it didn’t want to be here and was trying to escape—scrabble through her breastbone and take flight. Or run. Bound ahead on its own.

  Ciao, Carina. Long time. Where are you?” she’d demanded, standing in the breakfast room at the Excelsior, and he’d laughed.

  Where do you think? he’d asked, and if she’d allowed herself to, she could have felt his breath seeping through the tiny phone she’d held clamped to her ear.

  Now she almost thought she heard his voice, hanging in the still, chilly air.

  Where do you think I am, Carina? he’d asked again. And then, Last time, I came and found you. Now it’s your turn.

  Anna half expected the ground to give way as she stepped through the pillars. Or to find that, like something out of a children’s book, she’d stepped through a slit in time. That all around her the fields would billow and roll into green, and she would look up and see the Fiat parked on the pale packed gravel. See Antonio leaning against the door. Hear him say, “This is where I grew up. This is my nonno’s farm.”

  She hadn’t been able to see the house and barns then, and she couldn’t see them now. The fields looked to be flat. But like an animal playing possum, the landscape was not as empty or as dead as it appeared. The track, rutted and frozen and all but impassable, ran on for some way before it fell down into the slight dip, almost a hollow, the buildings nestled in. She propped the bike against the crumbling brick pillar and felt in her pocket for the knife.

  It was a filleting blade, mid-length. She’d found it last night in the butcher’s shop. Or rather it had found her. Backing out of the cold room, she had felt something finger her hair, almost giving her a heart attack. A shine with the Maglite caught some old utensils, abandoned on a cobwebbed hanging rack. The knife had not been as sharp as she would have liked and, lacking a whetstone, she’d used the underside of the marble counter to sharpen it. Then she’d wrapped the blade in a sock. Not surprisingly the point had stuck through, jabbing her in the thigh as she’d pedaled.

  Despite the chill, sweat rolled down her chest. Her hands were itchy in the cheap wool mittens. She followed the track, watching it disappear over the edge of the world. When she reached the lip of the hill, she stopped and let her eyes roam down the shallow slope. Then she began to run.

  But even as she did, even as she pulled her hands from her pockets, flailing, tripping on a tuft of weeds and regaining her balance, Anna knew she wasn’t wrong. She had come to the right place. She recognized the little pond. And the stand of poplar trees. And, as she got closer, the well in what had been the front yard where Antonio had been so happy to find the bucket still attached to the winch even if it leaked and the water was brackish. Gathering speed, she hit loose gravel, scrambled, and let out a cry, not caring who saw or heard her—and knowing at the same time that there was no one to see or hear.

  The fire must have happened years ago, because earth had blown and packed over the rubble. Spikes of dead grass poked up, furring the yard like whiskers on an old man’s cheek. Anna climbed over the shattered sill of the foundation. The house had been derelict, but still standing, still with all its doors and windows, when Antonio had brought her here. He’d gone around the back, and pushed open the kitchen door. Led her into the stone-floored room. Showed her where the table had stood, and where his mother and grandmother had cut notches on the inside of the pantry wall, marking each birthday he and Piero had passed.

  Anna had realized at once, as soon as she saw him in the pizzeria, that Antonio had changed. He was leaner than he had been a year before, his features sharper, as if Piero’s death had stripped a layer off him. Pared him down, exposing a new hardness in his face and in the set of his shoulders. She had not had to ask to know that he no longer believed in bread and roses. That afternoon, standing in the farmhouse kitchen, she’d watched as he pressed his finger into the last shallow indent that had marked the top of his brother’s head. She’d seen him push against it. Lean hard, as if he could make the wood splinter and somehow release Piero’s ghost. Finally he had wiped his eyes with the back of his arm. Then he’d taken her hand, and they’d climbed the stairs, stepping on every creaking board.

  Standing in the room under the eaves, Antonio had put his arms around her. He’d whispered in her ear. Then he’d leaned down, and with the elbow of his shirt made a circle on the dusty pane so she could see what he had seen every morning from the bed he shared with his brother—the sea of fields that spread around them, lapping the island of his grandfather’s farm.

  A shard of glass glinted in the weakening sun. Faint char marks were still visible on some of the pale square stones. Anna wondered how it had started. If someone had been living here and had been careless, left the stove on or let an electrical box short out. Then she thought of the boarded-up front of her father’s shop, the spider’s web in the plate glass, and wondered if that was what had happened here, too. If they had come to avenge Aldo Moro, cresting the hill with torches, moving down the slope bearing gasoline cans and rags the way centuries before they had sacked the houses of traitors and burned the hovels of witches.

  If so they hadn’t got to the barn. It was still standing on the far side of the yard. The roof had fallen in, taking half the walls with it, but for a crazed moment Anna had the idea that she might not be wrong after all—that Antonio had set up some kind of camp in the ruins, and that any second now he would appear, or she would spot the bumper of a car under a tarpaulin or pile of brush. She skirted the crumbling building and peered through one of the busted-out windows. There was nothing inside but the sagging skeleton of a tractor.

  Her tears welled and burned in the cold. She had been so sure, so absolutely certain when he said find me, that this was where he meant. Where he would have gone. Anna turned around. He had to be watching. From somewhere inside the broken shadows. Or up on the hill.

  “Antonio!”

  She cupped her hands to her mouth and bellowed, then jumped as an egret exploded through the bulrus
hes at the edge of the pond and flapped toward the sun.

  “Antonio,” Anna whispered to the empty space.

  Then she screamed it so loud her lungs scorched.

  * * *

  Enzo Saenz watched the blurry figure hurry through the tunnel that connected the platforms of the Bologna train station. It scuttled out of one security camera’s range and into the field of the next, dodging passengers coming in the other direction, the pack making it hunchbacked. At the top of platform three it came up the steps and stood, disoriented for a moment in the daylight. Then it turned abruptly, walked toward a bench, and stopped to study a vending machine. Enzo leaned forward as it reached into a pocket and found a coin.

  Come on, he thought, come on.

  Slowly a pale, ungloved hand reached out and pushed a button.

  “Bingo,” he said out loud, and froze the tape.

  * * *

  The junior detective who had been sent to the Bologna train station and returned with the trophy of the CCTV tapes grinned, trying to suppress the excitement—the thrill of being part of what was obviously a major investigation, even if he didn’t know what it was. Scuttlebutt in the cafeteria said the woman they were looking for had murdered her husband, who was a mafioso who had abused her for years, and was now on the run, and possibly in possession of a series of secret bank numbers leading to accounts in the Cayman Islands that she planned to use as bargaining chips. A rival story circulating through the gym showers said she was a courier for a trafficking ring based in Bari who’d gone rogue. In the course of the last few hours, Enzo had heard each told in increasingly elaborate detail and had done nothing to refute either. Instead he’d stood by the coffee machine, tearing open sugar packets and nodding in a way he hoped might suggest both were true.