“You can’t leave us here. You can’t kill us,” I said. “The police are looking for us.”
Santini cocked his head to one side. “I don’t think so. You never made it to the Carabinieri station.”
“There’s an investigator in Venice who’s helping us,” I said. “Detective Falcone. If we don’t check in with him, he’ll come looking for us.”
To my surprise, Santini laughed. “Falcone? That’s your knight in shining armor, coming to rescue you? I don’t think so.”
“You know him?”
“Of course I do. He and I work together from time to time. I’m sorry, but he won’t be rushing in to save you.”
“Did he tell you where to find us? Outside the train station in Florence?”
Santini didn’t answer but he nodded. My stomach seemed to plummet towards my knees. I’d been holding out hope that Federico and Falcone would somehow be able to trace our location.
“Now I must go,” Santini said. “Please finish the food and wine. I assure you that the small delay is of no consequence to me, but I imagine it will be of some relief to you both.”
Aldo handed him a heavy wool coat. Santini buttoned it up and slid both of our mobiles into its capacious pockets.
“Thank you for your company. The housekeeper will show you to your rooms when you are ready.” He paused, looking towards the door. “Ah, there you are, Sister Renata. These are our guests. Please look after them until tomorrow morning.”
A middle-aged woman stood at the doorway, almost filling it with her bulk. She wore a faded grey dress that hung loosely to her knees and a matching head covering that hid her hair, revealing only a deeply wrinkled face and a downturned mouth. Her jowls wobbled when she took a few steps forward and dipped a curtsey to the cardinal.
“Your Eminence,” she whispered. The cardinal held out his hand for her to kiss, which she did, keeping her lips on his fingers for a long beat of time.
She pulled herself back up to a standing posture and walked across the kitchen, taking up position near the warmth of the stove, glaring at us with undisguised contempt.
“Ciao, Claire and Kate. I enjoyed meeting you both. I will pray for your souls,” said Santini.
“Go to hell,” Claire muttered. The woman took a half step forward, her hand raised as if to slap her, but the cardinal shook his head before disappearing into the dark hallway. I heard the car engine rev into life and then gravel skittered under the tires. Soon, the only noise was the rumble of the wood stove and the wind whistling at the window.
“Come with me,” Renata said. She left the room without waiting to see if we were following. Claire poured more wine into her glass before we caught up with Renata on the stone stairway. Aldo, with his gun in hand, bolted the front door and came up behind us, completing a little procession that made its way up to a wide landing. Through the open door of a room closest to the stairway, I caught a glimpse of a neatly made single bed, over which hung a crucifix. A small TV blared in the corner, and a grey dress, identical to the one Renata wore, hung from a hook on the wall.
The room next door was dark, but Renata snapped the lights on and stood aside for us to enter. There were two beds, little more than cots, each covered with a rough brown blanket and holding one thin pillow. The only other furniture was a washstand bearing a basin and a jug. Claire put her wine glass down on it.
“There is a toilet at the end of the corridor,” Renata said. “Tell Aldo if you need it.”
After she’d left the room, we heard whispered voices and the sound of a key turning in the lock. A chair scraped on the tile floor in the hallway. I guessed Aldo would be sitting there all night.
Claire sat on the end of one of the beds and gazed at the floor. She hadn’t spoken since Santini told us about our imminent execution. Finally, she looked up at me.
“Did you believe Santini when he said that Dante’s not involved in any of this?” she asked.
“I can’t see why he’d say that if it’s not true,” I said, but I wasn’t sure Dante’s innocence would do us any good. He didn’t know where we were, and his brother planned to kill us. And Falcone had betrayed us. There was no help out there anywhere. I perused the room, searching for anything that might help us engineer an escape. The walls were roughly plastered and painted white, and the only decoration was a drab-looking painting of the crucifixion. Cheery, I thought.
The only possible egress would be through the window. I tiptoed over and carefully turned the latch. When the window squeaked as it opened, I held my breath, hoping Aldo hadn’t heard it. Leaning out, I looked down into what seemed to be the back garden of the house, beds of shrubs interlaced with graveled paths. We were high up, maybe five meters or more above the ground.
I glanced at my watch. It was almost ten. My seven o’ clock flight was long gone. And now I didn’t even have a phone to let Leo or Detective Lake know where we were.
We probably had about eight hours until the death call came from Santini. I closed the window, took a sip of Claire’s wine and offered the rest to her, but she shook her head.
She glanced up at the window. “Any hope of getting out that way?”
“Not without a couple of broken legs,” I said. “We’re up too high.”
Claire sighed and threw herself back on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. “We’re going to die here tomorrow and Ethan will die too, if he’s not dead already. My poor mum. She couldn’t stand to lose both of us.” She lifted her eyes to look at me. I knew how she was feeling. My stomach was roiled and I thought I might throw up. Our quest to save Ethan was about to come to an ignominious end. I felt overwhelmingly sad. For Ethan, of course and Claire, but mostly for my family and for my boyfriend Josh. I wondered how long it would take for them to be notified.
Despair settled on my shoulders like a wet towel, heavy and soaked, pushing cold into my skin until my bones ached. The sound of a laugh track on the television drifted through the wall next to us.
I thought of my dad and of Leo. Leo would kill me if I died. That thought made me smile. I couldn’t give up. He wouldn’t.
“Look at me, Claire. We’re not going to die tomorrow. We’re going to get out of here.”
She sat up and nodded. “All right. But how?”
21
“Throw me a pillow,” I said. It was thin and lumpy but padded enough to do the job. I drank the last few drops of Claire’s wine and lay the glass on the marble surface of the washstand. With the pillow covering it, I pressed hard on the glass until I felt it give. When I lifted up the pillow, the glass had broken into two pieces, each with a satisfyingly jagged edge.
“Now we need the sheets,” I said. “We’ll tear them into strips to make a rope. We can use it to drop down to the ground.”
Claire looked from me to the window in horror. “I don’t think I can do that. Heights aren’t my thing. Isn’t there another way?”
I couldn’t give an answer that would help. Our prison offered only one way out.
“Let’s do it.” Claire suddenly seemed intent on moving quickly, probably not wanting to dwell on what we had to do next. She stripped the thin white sheets from the two beds, and then picked up a piece of the broken glass, using it like a knife to cut into the material. The threads separated, letting her pull the sheet in half with ease. The hiss of rupturing fibers seemed loud and obvious in the small room, but the television next door still droned on, a steady cadence punctuated by spikes of volume. I hoped it was enough to cover any noise we were making.
Claire held up the pieces. “We can probably get four strips from each sheet,” she said. “We’ll have to knot them together, but we will still end up with more than six meters in length, don’t you think?”
I nodded, contemplating how to secure our makeshift rope. The beds were only metal frames with skinny mattresses that would easily slide across the floor as soon as we put any weight on the rope. I tested the washstand. It was fastened to the wall and, with its sturdy wooden legs sup
porting a heavy marble top, it didn’t budge when I tried to push it. We could only hope it was stable enough to hold our weight.
We began tying the strips together, testing each knot by pulling hard on it.
“The knots are firm,” Claire said, “but the fabric is so thin. I’m sure it’ll rip.”
The sound of the chair outside scraping on the floor turned me into a temporary statue. Aldo was on the move. Gathering my wits, I whispered to Claire. “Throw those sheets under the blanket and lie down.”
We gathered up all the strips of sheeting and bundled them onto the beds, threw the blankets on top and stretched out as the key rattled in the lock. A definite lump protruded on one side of my bed, but with any luck Aldo wouldn’t notice.
The door opened and he stood in the doorway. He scanned the room, his eyes coming to rest on the window. Thank goodness I’d latched it closed after my initial reconnoiter.
Without a word, he stepped back and closed the door. I held my breath until I heard the key turn and a creak as he settled on his chair again. Then I stood up and hurried over to Claire’s bed.
“Let’s wait for a while and hope Aldo dozes off,” I said.
Claire moved over to make space for me. We both sat with our backs to the wall, our legs dangling over the side of the bed.
“You know,” she said. “I owe you an apology for the way I reacted to your revelations about the aura.” She waved her hand over her head. “I assume it’s still there?”
“Yes.”
“There’s something I want to share with you. It’s bizarre, although not as weird as seeing death-predicting auras… but it might explain why I reacted the way I did. What you told me about your special gift touched a sensitive part of me, the part that knows there are things out there that can’t be explained through science or technology.”
I pulled my knees up and wrapped my arms around them, turning to look at Claire’s face. Her skin was chalky, and the bruise on her cheek seemed to be more prominent.
“What kind of things?” I asked.
“Spirits of the dead. Ghosts, I suppose you’d call them. But ghosts sound ephemeral, or just frightening. To me, these people are as real as you are.” She prodded my shoulder. “And they don’t scare me.”
I was so surprised I couldn’t speak for a moment. I swallowed and managed a few words. “I’d never have imagined you…”
“Remember the old house where Ethan and I grew up?”
Everyone knew the Hamiltons’ house, the grandest one in our neighborhood. It had stood empty for years until the Hamiltons bought it. I vaguely remembered my parents talking about how Claire’s mother had family money. When Ethan had invited Leo over the first week that school started, I was jealous; I was impatient to visit the mysterious place that no one seemed to want to live in. The boys joked about the ghost in the attic at school, but Claire never did. She didn’t want to be the weird kid from the haunted house. It didn’t fit her cool girl persona at all.
“The first day after we moved in, I saw a spirit,” she said. “She was young, maybe twelve, with blonde ringlets, and she wore a pretty flowered dress with a pink sash. Her name was Alice.”
“She talked to you?”
“No, she never did. But she showed me a book once that had her name written inside.” She sighed. “I saw Alice for several years, up until I went away to university,” she continued. “Then when I went home at half-term, she’d gone. It made me so sad. I missed her.”
“And you’ve seen other ghosts too?” I was having trouble assembling my thoughts, let alone my words.
“There’s a man with a beard and bobbed grey hair, dressed in Renaissance era clothes, a green velvet jacket with white linen collar and cuffs. He walks along the Vasari Corridor, you know, the elevated walkway that connects the Pitti Palace to the Uffizi?”
I nodded. I’d visited it once. Offering panoramic views of the Arno and the Ponte Vecchio below, the corridor was lined with paintings by many of my favorite artists. The one kilometer walk, following in the footsteps of the Medici, had been a memorable experience.
“I feel as though he knows I see him,” Claire continued. “He looks directly at me and smiles. Or maybe he’s looking at someone else who’s invisible to me, I don’t know.”
“Have you tried talking to him?”
Claire’s ashen cheeks suffused with color. “Yes,” she said. “But he doesn’t talk back. It’s the same with all of them. None of them speak.”
“There are more?”
“Yes, there’s a small hotel on the Via del Giglio in Florence that’s famous, if famous is the right word, for its ghosts. I stayed one night to find out if it’s true that it’s haunted.”
“And is it?”
“Oh yes. In the middle of the night, I woke up feeling as though someone was sitting on my chest. I could hardly breathe. When I struggled, the weight went away. Then I saw a woman in the corner of the room. She was beautiful, dressed in a sumptuous robe of red and gold with puffed sleeves and a white lace bodice. Her clothes and hairstyle were from the Renaissance period, too. Every spirit I’ve encountered is from then. The Renaissance is my specialty of course, but I never meet anyone from other centuries.”
“It’s as though you’re tuned in to that period of history,” I said. “Your antenna only picks up signals from that era. You’re a radio for Renaissance ghosts.”
Claire smiled. “Apart from Alice,” she said. “She died in the late 1800s. I looked up the history of the house and discovered that a whole family died of cholera there.”
“You saw Alice when you were young, though, before you studied and began working with Renaissance art.”
Claire nodded. “I’m glad I met her first. She was so sweet that I never feared her. I think that experience opened my mind so I’d be able to see these other sprits without being terrified.”
I thought back to my visits to Claire’s house when we were younger, before the fight over the boy. She’d never mentioned Alice then. But I didn’t blame her. Coming clean about paranormal experiences rarely led to anything good. I would know.
She leaned forward. “Thank you for listening. I’ve never told anyone else. I hated it at school when Ethan and Leo did the silly ghosty stuff.” We both laughed. I remembered one time when they’d draped sheets over themselves and jumped at us out of a wardrobe.
“I feel so much better for telling you,” Claire said. “It’s like going to confession. Not that I do, of course. I was raised by atheists.”
Her expression changed and she looked serious. “What about you? Apart from the auras, do you see other things? Spirits?”
“Yeah. I talked with my mum once. Right before I started seeing auras, although I had no idea what they meant then. And I once saw the spirit of a nun who’d helped me come to terms with my aura-seeing ‘gift’ as she called it. I have to say, I can’t wait for the day when a ghost comes to tell me that I won’t see the auras any more.”
“Is it that bad?”
“It’s turned my life upside down.” I sighed. “Not only having to admit to myself that there are things in the universe that we don’t really understand, but also because many times when I come across them, I feel compelled to get involved, to work out what’s going to happen, to save people if I can.”
“Like me. You’re trying to save me.” Claire touched her hair.
I stood up. “That’s the plan. Which means we need to get out of here.”
The television next door still babbled. If Aldo chose to do another spot check, we would be in trouble, but we had nothing to lose.
We retrieved the fabric strips and finished knotting them together. Grabbing one end of our homespun rope, I tied it around a leg of the washstand and told Claire to yank hard on it. She did; the stand remained in place. It was the best we could do. We positioned one of the beds to serve as a step and Claire turned off the room lights before I eased open the window.
The rain had stopped, leaving the sky clear
, a velvety black dome spritzed with stars. A half moon cast a silver patina across the gardens. The air was pungent with the scent of cypress trees, and only the mournful hoot of an owl broke the silence. I loved the Tuscan countryside, but this rural unknown frazzled my nerves. I ached to be back in civilization with lights and telephones.
After throwing our homemade rope out over the ledge, I leaned out to check how far it reached. Either the sheets were shorter or the drop was longer than I’d estimated, because the end of the rope dangled a couple of meters above the ground. I didn’t express my concerns to Claire, who stood at my shoulder, leaning out to look for herself.
“My god,” she whispered. “It’s a long way down.”
“You go first. If we’re interrupted, I’ll defend the window and you run as fast as you can to the shelter of those cypress trees. Then head for the road and get help.”
“But…” Claire’s voice trailed off. “Okay.”
She hoisted her bag over her shoulder, got up on the bed and put one leg out over the windowsill. I gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. “You might have to jump the last few feet.”
At that moment, the nun turned off her television. The silence was a palpable presence, filling the room with the dread of being caught.
Claire leaned further out to look at the window adjacent to ours. “Her light is still on,” she whispered. “The window is closed, but her shutters are open.”
“Come back inside for a few minutes,” I said. “If she’s preparing for bed, she might look outside. Let’s give her time to go to sleep.”
Claire clambered back down, breathing hard. I pulled the rope back up, hoping the nun wasn’t watching. The whiteness of it glowed in the moonlight, a fluorescent line against the dark wall.
Fifteen minutes later, her light went off.
The delay appeared to have given Claire time to accept what she had to do. Without hesitation, she climbed back over the window ledge for the descent, clasping the rope with her feet and hands, letting herself down a few inches at a time. It seemed to take a long time before she dropped to a gravel path at the base of the house. I winced at the patter of stones skittering away under her feet but heard no sound from the hallway or from Renata’s room.
The Complete Kate Benedict Cozy British Mysteries Page 72