Now she was going to have to stop thinking about Ridley. Curiously, Ridley had purged her of constant thoughts of Dwayne, though she remained unsure if that was progress or just a step sideways.
“…becoming a significant challenge.” Bridget slapped the laptop in disgust.
“Why?” She wasn’t going to ask “Perch” because Ridley wouldn’t be here to get the joke.
Bridget eyed her.
“I’m smart about business. Maybe I can help.” It was the one thing she was sure of about herself and it seemed as good a place to start as any. Smart about men was clearly absent from her resume.
* * *
Ridley hung on for dear life and prayed that his death was not near to hand. Or perhaps with how his head felt, he should pray for it to come get him sooner rather than later.
Emilio sat at the controls of one of the tiny monorail cars Ridley had spotted but never given much thought to. The steeply terraced vineyards were laced with steel rails no bigger than his forearm; each held aloft by a pair of crossed steel posts every twenty feet or so. He’d even inspected one of the little conveyances that hung over the rail. Pulled by little more than a lawnmower engine driving small cogged gears, it was designed to drag several trailers a couple feet wide and six feet long. It was an elegant, if rickety-looking method of getting supplies up to the terraces, and grapes back down at harvest time.
He’d never thought about it moving the people.
But Emilio had clambered aboard and waved Ridley to sit in the tiny car behind him. The too-short couch, the blinding sun, and the throbbing headache weren’t sufficient abuse. Now he was teetering over the brink as the tiny monorail churned along the thin band of steel. To his left was the sea, to his right, the vertical walls of grapevines towering about them. He tried to turn back and see Corniglia, suddenly the too-short couch looked pretty good, but his hangover said that turning his head that far wasn’t an option.
First, it swooped down as they plunged through a ravine. He leaned back until he head was nearly touching the car behind him. Then they were climbing once more, up onto the other side, practically forcing his head to his knees.
“James Bond never had to put up with this shit.” But the tiny lawnmower engine drowned out his words and he simply hung on.
The trail that he and Erica had walked from Vernazza to Corniglia that day sliced by somewhere above them. He turned to look back at the town—an ill-advised motion as Emilio slammed through a gut-wrenching turn.
From here, Corniglia was postcard perfect, sitting proudly high atop an Italian cliff. An image he’d shattered for Erica.
He was such a shit! “Bring it on, Emilio.” This punishment was the least he deserved.
Instead, Emilio stopped the little monorail. They were parked on a terrace high up the steep wall. From the town to here, the terraces had been well-tended. The rock walls standing firm, the vines pruned and healthy. The fruit bunches little more than tiny green globes the size of the tip of his pinky—just what they should be this time of year.
Emilio climbed down in the last of these.
The very next terrace was a demonstration in disarray.
A whole section of the wall lay as a pile of stone rubble in the back of Emilio’s last good terrace. Some dirt had escaped, but not much. Emilio waved a hand back and forth over the lower terrace to show that the dirt was still there, but couldn’t be moved back up a level until the rock wall was repaired. Beyond it stood the vines.
They were much worse off than the ones outside Vernazza. They needed a harsh pruning now, then another when they were dormant in the winter. Even with that, next year would be unlikely to be a banner year.
But Emilio had grabbed a gnarled hand around the stout base of one of the vines.
“Bene! Bene!” Then he made a fist as if to say the vine was still strong. He thumped his fist against his chest over his heart to emphasize his point.
“Sì,” Ridley acknowledged.
Then Emilio began pulling down the stone wall.
Emilio was right. Ridley sighed.
Bibi had wanted gardens at the Claremont Manor. Ones that were fitting for the Tuscan style of the grand mansion. She hadn’t been much for lifting rock, but he’d spent a whole summer helping the stone masons build dry-laid walls to bring Bibi’s gardens to life. It had made her happy and it had made him strong in ways that the girls appreciated. A win-win situation.
Ridley knew they had to tear down the wall until they reached a stable base layer, and then begin the rebuilding.
He groaned as he lifted the first rock and tossed it aside. Drinking night paybacks were hell.
He felt a little better when he noticed Emilio was also wincing with each stone he lifted and sorted by size into the growing piles.
* * *
“Enough,” Bridget shoved the laptop closed, actually nipping the tips of Erica’s fingers.
“But—”
“You didn’t come here to work, luv.”
“Actually, I don’t know why I came here.” And Erica knew it was true as soon as she said it. “I thought I did, but I don’t.”
“For now, it is enough that you’re here. So go out and be here.”
“But—” They’d barely scratched the surface of the Italian accounts and it was clear that Conrad held many interests in other countries. “The organization needs—”
“—fixing. Yes, I understood that even though you put it so incredibly tactfully. It’s a right royal, bloody disaster, it is. Not be fixed in a day though, will it? An hour here and there will get us there. What’s your hourly rate?”
Erica could only blink at her. “I’ve never worked freelance before. I don’t think I want money…” Then she winced as she thought of her bank account. It wasn’t appreciating the start of her third week vacationing in a foreign country. She was fine, but…
“Well, until you figure it out, you have free room and board here.”
“I couldn’t!” To stay in Italy for free?
“Trust me. If you can fix that,” Bridget snarled at the laptop. “I will be the one making the good deal, not you. Now go. Play.” And she ended the discussion by tucking the laptop under her arm and walking away.
Clearly dismissed, Erica stood once again at the threshold between café and carruggio.
“Which way?” she could hear Ridley asking. “There’s adventure along every path.”
And he’d proven that for two. But what was it for one?
Struck by the idea, she trotted up the stairs, changed into her sneakers, and slathered on some sunscreen. She’d had to check the mirror rather than with Ridley to make sure she hadn’t missed rubbing in any, but she’d gotten it.
Downstairs, through the dip at the base of town, there was the head of a long ravine to the sea. It was a steep path down the cliff, between the towering banks of vineyards. At the base had been a surprise—like a gem, the heart of Corniglia. Down there, she and Ridley had discovered a rough landing little more than boat-wide. Fifty feet up the cliff stood a crane and a small platform, crowded tightly with the five small fishing boats used by the locals. Corniglia did have a harbor. Or perhaps it had been more of an escape by sea.
In the other direction, the road led out of town, and she turned for it. A hundred meters along, she spotted the trail leading north to Vernazza.
She and Ridley had walked that trail toward Corniglia. She would now walk it backward toward Vernazza—sort of unwind her experience with Ridley and see what she thought of it her own self.
The first step almost dropped her to her knees.
They had walked here…together. They had stopped to share a kiss and admire the view. They’d been—
She leaned her back against the hard stone wall.
Erica had been able to lose herself for a few hours in Bridget’s accounting mess, and it was a mess. Not a disaster, but her system had clearly grown organically until it was beyond cumbersome. It would take hours, days perhaps to get a handle on it,
never mind straighten it out. That she understood.
The knife in her gut, the one that had just stolen all her air, she didn’t understand at all. But it was no less real.
No, that was wrong. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t physical pain, though it was trying to cripple her. She checked her gut, actually peeking down the front of her blouse and earning her an askance look from a trooping couple who scurried away quickly. No knife protruded. No blood streamed.
It might feel real, but it was all in her head. Or her heart.
Pushing off the wall, she forced herself to move. To walk past the ghosts of Ridley and herself moving along hand in hand. The trail plunged briefly between rock wall above and thick, rich green vines below. When it emerged, it was once more the cliffside trail above the sea. The salt mixed with the chlorophyll. The tiny globes of the grapes were too young to have a scent, yet she could smell their hope on the breeze. It mixed with olive, eucalyptus, and the occasional batch of wildflowers.
A seep trickled out of the cliff face above her. A small stone bridge arched over the tiny trickle—almost comic in its tininess. And on the other side, at a spot wide enough to form a narrow grassy strip, a solid cloud of daisies spread for five steps along the trail. Thousands of them turned their smiling faces aloft and buoyed her steps for a long way after.
This time, rather than being a goal beckoning on the horizon, Corniglia was a memory, only visible over her shoulder.
Alone, the trail looked new and fresh. Without the electric awareness of their first kiss—across a policeman’s baton of all things—sizzling through her every step, she was able to see more of the trail itself. The labor that had gone into it. So unlike the Via dell’Amore, which had been built by railroad workers in the 1920s to make punching the train tunnel easier. That, and a load of pain she was still going to ignore, lay buried under a 2012 landslide that had closed the trail.
This and the other cliff-edge trails between the towns were built for mules to carry olives and grapes centuries ago. Another set of trails lay farther up the slope, but she’d explore those another day. At the moment, she was thrilled to be able to walk at all.
Vernazza pulled at her, making each step easier. Maybe she should have gone there instead.
Then she never would have met Ridley Claremont III and had her heart tromped on so thoroughly.
But she’d probably still be thinking about Dwayne and have that ball of anger wrapped in her gut.
Now all she could feel was pity. Not for him. Instead for the woman who had thought a man like Dwayne was offering so much. Erica of Old.
Old Erica. Better than Good-girl Erica. As she and her underwear had discovered this morning, there were parts of Good-girl Erica that New-girl Erica wanted to keep. From now on, she’d stay focused on New Erica and find out who she was, instead of being some man’s version of herself.
Whatever else Ridley had done, just by being himself, he had opened doors that could never be closed again. Doors she had now walked through and had no interest in revisiting ever again.
Then she staggered and nearly sprained her ankle.
Her instincts reached out to grab Ridley’s arm, but he wasn’t there.
She found her balance again…
Chapter 12
It had taken three days to rebuild the wall. Another to heave the dirt back over the wall one shovelful at a time, every now and then climbing up the foot-wide set of stairs he’d rebuilt into the wall to tamp it down.
Then they’d gone after the vines with hand clippers.
There had been a long debate with many words on either side (that neither understood) and far more gestures. He wanted to cut them to some semblance of shape, maybe doing a green drop as well to winnow it down to a dozen grape clusters per vine. Emilio argued for a graduated cut across multiple years. (“Years” had taken him a while to get as Emilio kept gesticulated at the sky showing the sun higher and lower then higher again. Then he’d finally understood anno as the root of “annual” but they’d moved on by then.)
Eventually Emilio had done one of those “whatever” Italian shrugs and stomped away to go work on the other vines in the lower terraces.
Now that it was quiet, Ridley could start.
But he hesitated.
The old man knew the soil and the vines, but through a mindset that ranged back over centuries. Father had acquired old fields before—none as neglected as these, but old. They’d both gone in and cut hard. It hurt the first season, but the payoff in the second and third season had been very strong. Emilio’s method would ease into place by the third year. Maybe the fourth. Being brutal now, Ridley’d get a solid yield in the second year.
Ridley traced the arc of the sun across the sky—Emilio had been very concerned with that. Then he knelt down to look beneath the heavy canopy of leaves and inspect the positioning of the vines themselves. Whoever had planted them originally had been smart, choosing his angles wisely to maximize exposure, even at the cost of more labor. Not the most efficient set, but the best.
He liked that. He liked that a lot.
He moved to the most sunward plant, checked the imaginary arc of the sun once more, and began cutting.
By the end of the day, they were trimmed to his satisfaction. He’d had to find a saw to get through some of the long-untended branchings, but he’d gotten it done.
Emilio returned late in the afternoon.
He spent a long time inspecting the plants. He walked up and down the short rows. Sometimes he made tsking sounds, other times he shrugged as if asking the vine a question but uncertain of its answer.
Ridley sat at the far end of the terrace. His back against the sun-warmed stone, he watched the sea. Weather was brewing out there somewhere. High, thin mares’ tails clouds down to the south.
“Storm’s already been here,” he told the sky. “And it’s blown her out to sea.”
He’d seen Erica occasionally. If it was morning, she’d be hunched over a laptop or playing with Snoop by the bar. In the evening they’d passed along the carruggio in opposite directions, trading careful nods—careful for his part anyway, she’d seemed courteous…but not really willing to talk.
Once, he’d stopped for lunch and sat upon the wall with a flask of wine and a baguette thick with smeared soft cheese and generous cold cuts. He could just make her out as she came down the distant B&B stairs. She paused near his bike and did some leg stretches. Then bounced on her toes a few times and stepped out into a quick jog. He’d caught tantalizing glimpses before she’d disappeared along the road leading out of town.
A runner. How had he not known that about her? He imagined that trim body in tight Lycra and groaned.
“Che cosa?”
Though he understood Emilio’s question, not a chance would he be trying to explain what he was thinking. He’d lost any hope there but good.
Once he’d passed her on the narrow stairs, so close he could smell her hair.
“Hi,” she’d said softly.
She’d given him a moment before continuing past, but he’d been beyond speech.
Unable to face the memories, he watched Emilio as he finished his inspection and returned along the long terrace.
“Ridley.”
That startled him to his feet. Until now, he’d mostly been some form of “Eh!” No more than a generic call.
Emilio clasped his hand and held it hard. He might be old, but he had a grip of iron. He shook Ridley’s hand between both of his.
“Bene! Molto bene!” He continued and though Ridley didn’t follow the words, he could follow the gestures. He tapped Ridley’s chest, then put a finger to his own eye. Then he held up three fingers.
“I see three things. Got it. What three things do I see?”
“Uno,” Emilio knelt down far enough to pat the soil.
“Due,” he held up two fingers, then pointed toward the sun.
“Tre,” three fingers, then he brushed a hand over the nearest vine.
“Bene! Mol
to bene!” He patted his hands downward as if indicating the entire terrace.
It did look like a vineyard now. The pain he’d caused the vines was there to see, but he could also see that while this year’s harvest might be marginal. With luck and rain, next year’s set would be strong.
Emilio took his arm and led him to the front center of the terrace. Then he turned him so that they were both looking up the hill rather than down at the sea.
“Uno,” he patted his hands toward the terrace again. Then he raised his hands, and patted them higher, clearly indicating the next terrace. It was in no better shape than the one he’d just finished.
“Due,” Emilio pointed.
“Yeah. Yeah. I got the message. Another terrace.” And looking up he could see the one beyond that and the next. When he’d first seen the hillside, he’d only seen the overgrowth. But now he could see the ancient, neglected terraces ranging up the slope and off to either side as thick rolls in the form of the overgrowth. Each terrace ten or twenty feet deep and fifty to a hundred long. There were dozens, no, hundreds of terraces hiding beneath the leaves of thousands of vines.
“Merda!”
“Sì! Merda! Merda santa!” Emilio agreed happily.
Holy shit indeed.
* * *
Erica had given up on any simple approach. It wasn’t a matter of building a few macros or making some tweaks to Bridget’s system.
It was so bad that she had to start a spreadsheet of spreadsheets. And these were all top-level numbers—the feeds from various accountant’s packages. Experience had taught her that at this level, every system was custom. Commercial packages just couldn’t create the kind of views needed. She’d interned for the president of a national insurance company in Boston, and the reports that came to him were all distilled down to a few spreadsheets—a few, very custom spreadsheets—that had given him a manager’s view of the company.
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