Her cousin, or second cousin, or whoever the lady was who had owned this house, had used one single bedroom over the past few years and that room was well lived in. Apart from that room, the house had been closed up, and it showed. In some places the mildew was creeping up the walls, and there was a distinct smell that made you wonder and worry about what you were breathing into your lungs.
Back in the kitchen, Indigo was putting on a pot of tea. Aside from the state of disrepair, the kitchen was surprisingly clean and homey. It smelled like lemons.
“She lived in the kitchen. She was always cooking. It was her passion.” Indigo said as she poured two mugs of milky tea.
“Who? Dad’s cousin?”
“Oh... yeah.” Indigo put the mugs on the table and then fluttered around uncomfortably, opening empty cupboards and wiping needlessly at the spotless counter. She was avoiding Hazel’s eye. Hazel’s Indigo alarm bells went off in her mind. Indigo was hiding something.
“You knew her?” Hazel asked. Indigo hadn’t originally mentioned knowing anything about this mysterious cousin. According to her, it had all been a surprise.
“Only when I was young.” Indigo grabbed a broom from the corner and started sweeping the shiny floor. “I was here once when I was young.”
“You were here? At this house?” This was news to Hazel. “I thought you said it was some distant cousin that you didn’t know?”
“Well, I was confused. It was the grief; you know? It got me all upside down. You need to be more sensitive.” Indigo put down the broom and sat in front of her tea, pushing a cup toward Hazel with a stern raise of the eyebrows. Sternness didn’t work on Indigo’s face; she just looked constipated.
Here we go. She prepared herself for a classic Indigo conversation. “Grief for whom, Mother? You aren’t making sense. You need to explain this to me a bit more clearly. Whose house is this, and what do they have to do with us?”
A phone suddenly burst into song, and they both jumped, Indigo’s coffee spilled onto the back of her hand. She winced and lifted it to her mouth to lick it off. Hazel grabbed her phone and glanced at the screen. The word Liz jumped out at her, and she quickly swiped at the green accept button.
“Liz?” There was nothing on the other end, just static. She held the phone away from her face to check the signal. It looked like it was full. She'd been waiting for Liz to call her since yesterday. Why was her phone acting up? “Liz? I’m here, Liz! Can you hear me?” Nothing. Disconnected.
She slammed the phone down on the table in frustration. “Darn it!”
“Some friend she is!” Indigo mumbled from behind her cup.
“What?” Hazel picked up the phone again and checked the signal. Yep. It sure looked like it was full. Why was nothing working?
“Liz. I thought she was your friend.”
“Of course she’s my friend, what are you talking about?”
Indigo got up to pour herself another cup of tea. “Well, I know that my friends would never fire me. My friends are always there when I need them.”
Hazel decide to turn her phone off and restart - maybe that would help. As she went to press the power button, she noticed her battery, two-percent. Maybe that was the problem. Where on earth had she put her plug? “Oh? And which one of your friends has helped you lately, exactly?” She crossed to her carry-on which she had dumped on the floor by the back door and started digging through it for her charger. “The last time you needed help was when you were getting thrown out of that apartment last year, remember? The apartment you were sharing with Sunshine or Rainbow, or whatever her name was? I don’t remember her paying her share of the rent then. I think that was me, if you recall.”
“Well it may have been you, but it certainly wasn’t Liz,” Indigo sniffed. “As I said, some friend.”
Hazel took her charger to the only socket she could see in the room and realized she was stymied again. Of course, it was a different plug - why hadn’t she thought of that? She was trying to remember if she had packed her only converter when her mother’s words sank into her brain.
“Liz, Mother? Why would Liz cover your rent for you?” Her mother always did this to her. Got her all turned around and way off of the original subject she wanted to discuss. “Wait a minute. Why are you changing the subject? Are you going to tell me who owns this house, or what?”
“Excuse me…,” Hazel and Indigo turned to the back door to find a very lanky, Italian youth (maybe still a teenager) standing there with a brown leather backpack hanging from his hand. “I think it would be me. I think I own this house.”
Hazel dropped the charger and turned to her mother who shrugged, looking completely unconcerned.
“I don’t know who that boy is,” Indigo said.
12
Hazel
Hazel looked over at her mother. Indigo’s face matched the wallpaper, all creamy white with a greenish tinge. What was going on here? Her mother wouldn’t give her a single, straight answer, not that that was particularly unusual, and now a stranger had arrived, claiming the house belonged to him. Was Indigo lying? Did she know who this guy was? Everything seemed out of her control and beyond her understanding.
“And you are?” she asked, turning to the young stranger who hadn’t moved from the doorway.
“My name is Stefano,” the boy said. “Maria’s nephew.”
“Pfffff…” Hazel turned to Indigo at the sound. She folded her arms across her chest, nearly spilling her tea in the complicated maneuver, and rolled her eyes up to the ceiling with an expression of disgust.
“Pffff what, Mother? What does “pffff” mean?”
Indigo cleared her throat, crossed to the sink and poured her coffee down the drain. “Maria didn’t have a nephew…. I don’t think?” Indigo’s brow creased, giving away the fact that she had no clue what she was talking about. “His sister didn’t have kids, did she? Hmmm… maybe she did, how would I know? Still. She was the younger one.”
What was Indigo mumbling about? Who the heck was Maria? “Mother, who’s Maria? Was she the owner?”
Stefano raised a grubby hand, then scratched the back of his head. He looked as though he hadn’t eaten in a week. “I think I’m the owner.”
“So you’ve said,” Hazel studied Indigo. Her mother was inching toward the door. She was trying not to be obvious but subtlety was not a skill she possessed. “Mother, don’t even think about it. You’re not going anywhere.”
“Maybe I should talk to the boy,” Indigo said. “This should be easy to straighten out.” She inched even closer to the back door.
She was trying to escape Hazel’s questions. This was always her modus operandi when she didn’t want to deal with a problem.
“Are you okay, Mother?”
“I’m fine honey, but you shouldn’t have to deal with this stress. The lawyers told me that there might be claimants coming out of the woodwork. They said it always happens in Italy. Apparently, everyone thinks they are related to everyone else, and everyone wants a piece of everything. I have all the legal paperwork in the car. I’ll take this young man out and show him. The house clearly belongs to us. It's all in the will.”
Over the course of Indigo’s frantic sounding monologue, she’d crossed the distance between the sink and the back door. Now she had the boy by the arm and was dragging him, none too gently, out onto the porch and down the back steps.
Hazel’s phone rang, making her jump again.
She jabbed frantically at the screen and was relieved when she was able to swipe left just in time. “Hello… Hello, Liz? You there?” There was nothing, just a fizzy buzz on the line, not even a hint that the call had connected. Damn it! She needed to speak to Liz. She needed to know what Samuel was doing. Had he screwed up yet?
She looked up from her useless phone to discover that her mother and the boy, Stefano, were gone. She had no clue what her mother was up to, and all of a sudden, she realized that she didn’t have the energy even to care. She considered going outside a
nd hunting them down, but at that moment a tsunami of lethargy crashed down upon her. She'd been running on fumes since she’d left Jacksonville. She’d had no sleep on the plane at all. The bed was calling to her. She would try and get some sense out of Indigo after she’d had a nice, long, restorative nap. She could sleep for a few hours and shut out all of her anxieties about work and this beast of a house.
She hunted around her feet for her bag and hauled herself to her feet. She’d have to guess at which bedroom was hers. Just as she turned toward the hallway and the grand staircase, Indigo came rushing back through the door.
“There! I’ve taken care of it. He’s gone!” she trilled.
Indigo was flushed beet red, and it wasn’t from the heat. She was up to something, that much was clear, but the thought of playing the interrogation game with her right now made Hazel want to weep. “Honestly, I have no clue what questions to even start with. I have so many, but right now all I want to do is sleep. Can we talk about everything later? I need to go lie down.”
She tried to ignore the look of relief on Indigo’s face, but it still caused her stomach to drop in anxiety - something was going on, and she would need to get to the bottom of it.
“Okay, okay, sweetie. Go lie down. But just one thing?”
The sigh that Hazel felt gathering in her body was so big it was almost painful. She let it out. “What, Mother?”
“Well, the thing is, I have to go out right now because I’m meeting with some people; you know, house-fixing type people. But the lawyer had said he might come by today to countersign our copy of Maria’s will and drop off some more paperwork. I need you to keep an eye out for him. Don’t worry; he speaks English.”
‘House-fixing type people?’ Hazel could not even deal. She hadn’t even had a chance to properly assess the state of the house nor the work required yet, but her Mother was off to meet with some ‘house-fixing type people’? Before she’d agreed to this project, Hazel had made Indigo promise her that the project would be entirely in her hands. Completely under her control. She already felt the floor tilting under her. “That’s fine, but what house-fixing stuff? I haven’t even started a project plan or anything yet. Please don’t hire anyone or buy anything until I can get myself together?”
“No, no, not to worry, honey. I have everything under control. Well, almost everything. I just need to…,” Indigo was hunting around in the kitchen. Pulling out chairs that scraped loudly on the tiles to reach the piles of paperwork on the table. “Ah.” She lifted a sheaf of papers and waved them at Hazel. “Here they are. When the lawyer guy comes, get him to sign those. Very important, okay?”
Hazel glanced at the paperwork but knew she wouldn’t be reviewing it before this lawyer signed. It was all in Italian. Indigo didn’t speak Italian either. How did she know what she had signed?
“What is this paperwork about?”
“Oh, it’s inheritance stuff.” Indigo waved dismissively across her shoulder as she disappeared through the back door.
Once again, Hazel was left speechless, confused and exhausted in her mother’s wake. It was always like this. Indigo got involved in some crazy scheme. Then Hazel got dragged into it even though her mother couldn’t stay still for two minutes to explain anything to her, that is, if she even understood what she was doing herself.
They’d been through this scenario many times. Like when she was twelve and her mother had decided that she was going to create a yoga studio in their house for recently released criminals, or when she was twenty-five and she'd had to save her mother by paying off the loan shark Indigo had borrowed from to invest in a health-food supplement pyramid scheme. Hazel could go on and on. Why had she thought that this might be different? Why had she thought that it was realistic that her mother had inherited a house in Italy and that this house could save her career? This might just be the biggest mistake she had ever made.
A big glass of sparkling water and bed, that was what she needed. She moved to the fridge and opened it to find it empty, save for a third of a bottle of flat prosecco. Perfect.
Hazel gave up and turned to pick up her carry-on that was still sitting by the back door. As she crossed the vast kitchen, she ran her hand over the massive sink and enjoyed the feel of the cool porcelain under her sweaty hand, cool even in this hot temperature. The feeling was almost as delicious as the cold, antique tiles under her feet. She looked up and admired the dusty, crystal chandelier hanging from the center of the room. It was sparkling in the light coming in from the back windows; sparkling through all that dust and throwing reflecting prisms of light across the wallpaper.
This was a beautiful house. She was already falling in love with it. Let’s hope this time Indigo knew what she was doing.
13
Dean
Dean was missing something. He could feel it in the weird tension at Stella’s house. Something serious was going down with Sara and Adam, and Adam had left him in the dark. The question was, why had Adam sent him here without giving him any warning or any guidance as to what was happening in his marriage?
He felt another pang of guilt at the distance from Sara he’d let grow over the past few months. Dean had a problem with goodbyes. It was part of his background; growing up in foster homes you “got used to” goodbyes. When someone left, it was best to put that person out of your mind. The closer you were to the person doing the leaving, the further out of your mind you put them. When you were in the foster system, the people who left rarely came back. He had to admit that it was his fault that he hadn’t reached out to Sara, because there was a part of him that was mad at her for leaving. That tough, self-protecting shell he'd developed over the years had kept him from reaching out to his friend. Would he ever have a normal relationship?
He strained to put all of these stressful thoughts from his mind. After all, he was here to relax and repair, not wallow in self-recriminations. And seriously, there was no excuse for not getting on with it. Just look where he was. Stella had fed him enough lunch for ten people and then Sara had kicked him out of the house.
“Go for a walk,” she’d said. “Explore the town and soak up the fresh mountain air and sunshine. It will help to clear your head. I should know.” She had given him a wan smile.
Maybe she thought he needed some space after her mother’s fussing and the prickly energy he could detect floating between them? Even so, Dean was glad she had suggested the walk, because she was right about the air. It was different somehow. Invigorating.
He took a deep breath and took in his surroundings. He was headed down a hill toward town, retracing the path the limo driver had taken. In front of him, he could see the church steeple and the roofs on the cluster of houses in the town center. The town of Borgotaro nestled like a baby bird, cupped in the picturesque mountains and hills that encircled it like large, protective hands. Tiny colorful houses dotted the surrounding slopes, and if he looked carefully, he could see cars winding up the mountains on cliffside roads. He quickened his pace, eager to see what else this treasure of a place had to offer. When he reached the bottom of the hill, he found the road he was on intersected with a broad street. Large, leafy trees shaded the raised sidewalk that ran alongside the street. The sidewalk was wide enough for large groups of family members to stroll together, chatting and laughing. It seemed everyone knew everyone else. Families often stopped when passing others to squeeze baby cheeks and pet enthusiastic dogs and puppies. The villas lining this street were even grander than the houses on the road he was leaving, but it looked like many of these had been turned into apartments as he could see multiple mailboxes at the front doors.
He took another big gulp of the mountain air. The air was sweeter in Borgotaro. His heart lifted with the sight of so many people outside, enjoying a good walk and time with their family. In Los Angeles folks rarely went anywhere but from a house to a car, or from a car to a restaurant. They certainly didn’t stroll down leafy sidewalks greeting other strollers as though they were long-lost family. H
e felt instantly at home here. This place was going to be good for him, he could feel it.
On his right was a huge park and he turned toward it, drawn by the laughing voices of children and the quaint wooden benches that lined the path. He imagined bringing down a book and lounging on one of those benches for hours. When was the last time he had read a book? As he passed the gelato shop on his right, he heard excited voices raised and steps quicken behind him. His recently acquired sense of relaxation drained when he turned and saw a gaggle of women approaching, chattering intensely with one another. He didn’t understand what they were saying, but he recognized those expressions. So much for going incognito. His heart sank.
“Rosa ha detto a mia madre che stava arrivando. Non le credevo!”
“Pensavo fosse uno scherzo!”
“Lui è qui! A Borgotaro!”
When the ladies realized he was looking their way, the excited conversation came to an abrupt halt, and they screamed in unison, “Dean! Dean!”
To Dean’s great dismay, he felt that rush of panic again. This time, instead of falling into the lens of a camera, he felt sucked into the huge smiles of the keyed up women in front of him. If he didn’t get out of here, he would embarrass himself and expose his “condition” to the public. He could picture the headline now, “Dean McLean, has ‘episode’ in Italy. Producers worried about his health.”
He forced his ‘Dean McLean: movie star’ persona to smile and wave, and then he turned back up the hill and started to walk as quickly as he could. The road was fading in and out in front of him.
Just breathe, Dean. Keep breathing steadily. Don’t hyperventilate.
There was a heavenly moment when he thought they wouldn’t follow, but then he heard their voices again.
Flipped (Better With Prosecco Book 1) Page 7