“Hi,” she said, not moving.
“Hi,” he said, one eyebrow hitched high. “Have you come to say farewell? I saw Devlin beetling his way out of here. I assumed you would not be far behind.”
“No,” she said. “I’m not going back to L.A. At least not yet. I’ve been asked to go to Paris. For a month or so. To help open a new Pinnacle.”
“Paris?” he said softly, and she could see he was surprised.
“Look, I know it’s been . . .”
“Complicated?”
“Complicated,” she echoed. “For both of us. And maybe the whole thing is just impossible, after everything that’s happened, but—”
He kissed her, of course, just as she knew he would, and maybe, she thought, it was enough for love, this limited certainty, these sudden small moments of joy. She put Devlin, with all his surprising contradictions and requirements, out of her mind and let herself feel happy. Only happy. Just for a few moments. Michael pulled her close against him and she wondered if there was a chance they could stitch something together out of just this, something that would bear the weight of even a little bit of time.
Chapter Nineteen
IMPOSSIBLY, AT THE END of three days, all of the equipment, the lights, the trailers, the cameras, the dollies, the tracks, the props, the foliage, and all the miles and miles of electrical cords and wire were gone. All through the night the trucks roared in and out of the courtyard, up and down the dirt road until morning broke, and even the sound of the birds seemed muted and cowed.
The silence had woken Juliette and she was walking in the garden behind the villa. Now amid the wildflowers grew topiary and rose trees and all manner of lilies—at some point, the crew had planted all of the flowers and shrubs that had been used to decorate the abbey and the various sets around the villa. It gave the silent walled-in place a wild and gorgeous look, like an outdoor hothouse or a child’s imaginary garden.
“I can have them taken away if you like,” said Carson, coming up from behind. “The production designer thought you might like . . . a memento.”
“Most of them will die anyway,” Juliette said, not sure how to take the other woman’s tone. “They don’t belong here, the soil’s wrong, and the light. But,” she added, softening, “it will be very beautiful for a little while.”
“Oh, I think you’ll be surprised,” Carson said amiably. “The climate here is a lot like L.A. Very forgiving. All manner of things can thrive. You’re lucky,” she said. “Not everyone has such a refuge. You should stop feeling so sorry for yourself.”
Her elbows were on top of the low wall and she was leaning into the breeze, her golden hair fluttering behind her, her face serene as she gazed over the vineyards and forests, the houses and fields. She was very beautiful and sure of herself, and Juliette hated her.
“Our parents were hit by a train,” Juliette said harshly. “That’s why Gabe and I have this place. Because our parents died when I was nineteen.”
Cason nodded and did not take her eyes from the view. “I know. My parents are dead, too. Or at least my dad’s dead. My mother has Alzheimer’s; she’s in a home. She doesn’t know who I am, or who she is, for that matter. She might as well be dead. She would wish she were dead, if she remembered how to wish.”
Juliette swallowed. “I’m sorry,” she said. “That must be very hard.”
Carson shrugged. “Every fucking thing is hard. Or hadn’t you noticed?”
To her own surprise, Juliette laughed. Carson looked at her speculatively, then she laughed, too.
“So what is your deal with Devlin?” she asked. “Just out of curiosity.”
“No deal,” Juliette answered shortly. “He left.”
“Sometimes leaving works,” Carson said. “Especially when the person you’re leaving has so many loose ends to tie up.” She gave her a sideways look. “I hear you’re going to Paris. That should be fun.”
“Thanks,” Juliette said, a little doubtfully.
“If I had known you and Michael were such a big deal, I wouldn’t have . . . well, no, I probably would have anyway.” She gave Juliette a dazzling smile. “Life is short, right? You’ve got great taste in men.”
“Oh, yeah,” Juliette said. “I like them damaged, promiscuous, and emotionally unavailable.”
“Me, too,” said Carson with apparent sincerity. “It makes them much better kissers, for some reason. And the damaged ones at least have something interesting to say when you talk to them. But then, I’m not looking for monogamy. It’s hard to have more than one relationship at a time, and right now I’m in a dysfunctional but highly productive and fairly promising marriage with Bill Becker.” Just then her iPhone beeped. “As I say,” she said, looking down at it, then lifing it to her ear. “Thanks for the laugh, and the movie, Juliette Greyson. Oh, and for the record,” she added over her shoulder as she walked away, “my money’s on Devlin.”
Juliette stayed in the garden for a few more minutes, thinking that of all the extraordinary things that had happened in the past few weeks the fact that Carson turned out to be almost likable may have been the most surprising. But Dev she couldn’t think of, Dev who just up and left, who looked at her as if there were some big secret to life that she just didn’t understand. Who made her feel like it was her fault that she hadn’t begged him to reveal all his carefully guarded secrets. Not that he had ever offered her much information. She thought of how calm he had been when she had told him about her parents, about her father, how he had just treated it as any other piece of information, had tried to absolve her of all the guilt and misery.
He would have made an excellent priest, she thought sourly. He had looked so at home in the chapel, his fingers steepled in prayer. Which was just one more thing she hadn’t known about him, even after twenty years—who would have thought Eamonn Devlin believed in God, much less confided in Him? For a moment, Juliette let herself imagine Devlin as a small boy back in Ireland, making his first Communion, in a white cassock as an altar boy, or going to confession to recount all the sweet and sticky sins of youth, things you believed you could not ever tell anyone without getting in trouble. Then you grew up and discovered there were secrets so big you had to keep them even from God Himself. Which was impossible, of course, because, if there was a God, He had to know everything without you even telling Him; confession was for the benefit of the confessor. God already knew.
“Oh,” said Juliette, standing absolutely still as a tiny thought took hold, then bloomed inside her. “Oh, my Lord.”
Pounding into the villa, she stuck her head in every room looking for Gabe. She found him in his office, hunched over the computer; Mercy was curled up reading a book on the sofa nearby. “Come on,” she said, literally jerking him out of his seat. “You, too,” she said to Mercy, because she felt it was the least she could do for the girl after all she had gone through.
Past the kitchen she pulled them, through the hallway, up the two flights of stairs, down the corridor, and into the chapel.
“What?” Gabe said, panting and flushed. His voice sounded loud and bruising in the silent room.
“Ssshh.” Juliette looked around at the walls, with their bland white stucco and the crucifix above the altar. “If it were on one of the walls, everyone would have seen . . .” Her gaze met the confessional, which was really an ornately carved box standing against one wall to the side of the last row of pews. “The place only God knows,” she said, and she met Mercy’s eyes, which opened wide in recognition. Together they walked over to the confessional. Juliette leaned against it and gave a heave. It did not move.
“Jules, it’s attached to the wall,” Gabriel said. “You’re going to give yourself a hernia.”
“It has to be here,” Mercy explained as Juliette poked and pried, trying to see if there was some way of separating the wood from the wall. “Don’t you see? The place only God knows.”
“We thought it was the castle because of its name,” Juliette said, “but the place only
God knows is your soul. And where do you bare your soul? Geez, Gabe, you should have figured it out, you’re gassing on and on about it all the time. Confession.”
She opened the wooden door and ducked in, kneeling on the worn purple velvet cushion, facing the intricately carved screen that separated the supplicant from the priest. All around her was the dim oppressive feeling she always associated with religion. She closed her eyes and thought of Giotto and his pious patron the contessa, who would have had different emotions about it all.
Behind her she could feel Mercy vibrating with approval. “If I wanted to give someone a gift,” she whispered, “I would put it where she could see it every day.”
On Juliette’s right, a wall of wood paneling rose; behind it was the wall. Sliding her hand along the edges of the panel, she searched for a seam or a knob. Resin gathered under her nails.
“What are you doing in there?” Gabe shoved his head into the confessional.
“Looking for a latch. To see if this wall will roll away, or something.”
“What, like a power window? I don’t think—”
“Why don’t you look under the seat?” Mercy said.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gabe said. “I think we would have noticed—”
“Nothing,” Juliette said. “All those years and we noticed nothing.” For, sliding her hand under the seat, she had found a small lever. She pushed it and, unbelievably, a small crack appeared in the paneling.
“Ratchet it,” Gabe said excitedly, shoving his way in, “keep ratcheting it. Here, I’ll do it.”
“Get away, you’ll break it,” she snapped, shoving him back with her shoulder. “Mercy, sit on him or something.” Mercy obligingly shoved Gabe onto the small seat and perched on his lap while Juliette, on her knees, carefully pulled the small wooden lever back and pushed it forward again. The panel slid open farther.
Slowly and carefully she worked the lever, and inch by inch the panel receded, revealing images. A wall, a garden, a tree in full bloom, the hem of a dress. No one spoke or breathed, and there was a child’s foot, the wing of a bird, and soon they were looking at a portrait of the Blessed Mother sitting in a garden with the young, naked Jesus standing before her, his arms raised to be lifted into her lap. Three feet high and as many wide, the fresco’s colors were still rich and vivid, the expressions on the two faces stern but joyful, full of love, with no thought to the future or the past. Above them the sky was blue and full of birds and their halos shone gold even in the confessional’s dim light.
“It’s our garden,” Gabe said, when he could speak. “It’s the garden behind the villa.” And Juliette could see the familiar wall, the tall chestnuts, the cypress trees in the distance, the wildflowers in the grass at the Virgin’s feet.
“It’s beautiful,” Mercy said, reaching out a hand to touch it, then stopping for fear it would crumble. “So beautiful.”
“It’s real,” Juliette said, her voice trembling. “It’s been real this whole time.”
They sat for many minutes looking at the painting that no one had seen for centuries. Here it was, a thing of lasting beauty in a chaotic and indifferent world, a bit of immortality daubed onto a wall in a house where so much living and dying had occurred. She thought of all the hours and days she and Gabe had spent searching for it, of her father’s insistence that it was there, of her dreams of finding it and making him truly happy for once. If her father had seen it, if her father had found it, would things have turned out differently? She saw Mercy’s fingers entwined with Gabe’s, the love and hope in her shining eyes. She felt her cousin’s shoulders rise and fall with his breathing, how solid and strong he was, how easily he could be happy. Still. Now that they knew it had been real all this time.
The air in the confessional grew hotter and damp with their breath, and sounds began seeping through the chapel, voices and footsteps in the nearby library and the corridor.
“What should we do?” Gabe said, whispering now.
“I don’t know,” Juliette said, suddenly shaken, realizing their glorious discovery was also a huge responsibility. “I guess we should tell someone. Find some wonderful art historian, or whoever’s in charge of preserving the Giottos in Florence and Siena. The colors alone . . . I’ve never seen any so bright.”
“No,” Mercy said firmly, pushing Juliette out of the way so she could reach the lever and begin closing the panel.
“What do you mean, no?” Juliette said. “You’re the one who was so hot to find it, even more than we were.”
Mercy continued to work the lever.
“Maybe someday,” she said. “But not right now. You think a film crew is bad? Try a bunch of art historians. Believe me, while I was researching my part I talked to a few, and they made Bill Becker look like a kindly social worker.”
“Mercy,” Juliette said, irritation creeping into her voice; after all, Cerreta was hers and Gabe’s.
“I know it’s not my decision, but . . .” The panel closed with a click. Mercy turned and looked at them pleadingly. “Please, please. Leave it safe. Leave it here. For a little while. It’s so beautiful and . . .”—she groped for words—“it will drive people crazy. Everyone will want it, or a piece of it. And they’ll make it something it’s not. They’ll try to make it more than it is and wind up making it less. Please,” she said, her voice falling to a whisper, her face luminous in the dim light, and Juliette knew exactly what she was saying.
“All right,” she said, and beside her she felt Mercy relax. “All right. We’ll keep it a secret. For a little while.”
In the end, Mercy stayed and Juliette left. After the last of the various rental cars and limos pulled away from Cerreta, after Becker had handed Gabe a check for an amount so large it actually rendered him silent for a full five minutes, the three of them—Gabe, Juliette, and Mercy—stood in the courtyard, swaying a bit in the vacuum that had been left behind. Everything looked miraculously the same, only different—the repainted doors shone more cheerfully, the dirt had been carefully groomed, the garden was full of now-wilting but still lovely flowering plants, and far off in the woods a new well meant that no guest would go without a shower again.
“So,” Juliette said, turning to smile at her cousin, the smile vanishing as she saw that Mercy, pale and sweaty, was leaning over as if she might vomit in the dirt. She moved to help her but Gabe held up his hand.
“You should go lie down,” he said kindly. “And drink lots of water.” Mercy nodded mutely and began to walk slowly toward the villa, giving a small anguished smile as she went, a smile that did its job. “I’ll come sit with you in a bit,” he said, and she kept moving.
Looking at Juliette, he shrugged. “I told her it wouldn’t be fun, but she says this is what she wants. She’s going cold turkey, day one. She did call her father, which is something. He’s flying in tomorrow.” He shrugged again, but Juliette could see pleasure and fear battling in his face. “We’ll see.”
“You’re a good man, Gabriel Delfino,” she said, putting her arm around his shoulder. “And I’m proud to be your kin.”
“So what are you still doing here anyway?” he said, shifting uncomfortably beneath the embrace and the compliment. “I figured you would have left with O’Connor.”
“No,” Juliette said. “I’m going back to work. The general manager of the Pinnacle Paris was overjoyed at the prospect of my helping them open; I’m flying there tonight, start tomorrow at eight a.m. Michael’s in Paris already. I’m sure I’ll see him, but I’m actually looking forward to going back to work.”
“You didn’t get much of a vacation.”
“I don’t seem to do so well on vacation,” she said with a laugh. “All this silence and beauty and sunshine.” She shuddered ironically. “I’ve always found the whole serenity thing highly overrated. But here’s hoping it works for Mercy.”
Which was why, when Juliette finally made her way down the drive, through the new gate, and onto the main road, she had traded her rented Mi
ni Cooper for a black Ferrari. She wore a white-blond wig and big black sunglasses, hunched herself small and young behind the steering wheel, and drove as erratically as she dared in the hopes it would look like she was running away from something. It must have worked; the paparazzi followed her all the way back to Florence. She lost them before she hit the airport, but still, she gave them a few photos to offer the websites, the magazines. She figured it would buy the starlet a few days, maybe a week, and that was something.
Acknowledgments
THE ESTATE CERRETA IS based on Spannocchia, a similar though not identical tenuta in Tuscany where my family and I have spent many wonderful days. Though no murders or moviemaking have been committed there, the lovely people who run it are engaged in a grand experiment of conservation and preservation that we should all support. Information is available at www.spannocchia.com and www.spannocchia.org. I would like to thank Randall Stratton, Francesca Cinelli, and Erin Cinelli in particular for their friendship and for allowing us to share their vision.
I would like to thank my editor, Kerri Kolen, for her faith, keen eye, and unflagging sense of romance; and my agent Lauren Pearson, for her patience, imagination, organization, and ability to take a bundle of loose ends and turn it into a gorgeous bow.
I would also like to thank early readers of this book, including my most wonderful and patient husband, Richard Stayton; and my friends Betsy Sharkey, Chris Joseph, Kate Arthur, and Michael O’Neill. Your comments and confidence were invaluable.
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