Chapter 3Caterina
Caterina
I tighten the laces on Gemma's sneakers.
Half a size small. Her feet were narrower than mine, which is the kind of detail Rocco could not have known and would not have cared about if he had.
I am running anyway. A bride-to-be jogs.
A bride-to-be uses her first morning in her fiancé's house to learn the property the way a woman in love learns it, which is to say, with her eyes open.
GPS off. Phone in the zip pocket against my hip. Hair up, pin between my teeth.
I take the east perimeter because the east perimeter has the kennel and the kennel has eyes on it from two directions and a woman who runs past dogs without flinching reads as a woman who grew up with them.
Gemma did. Two German shepherds, a beagle her mother let onto the couch.
I have read her photo albums the way other women read scripture.
The grass is wet to the ankle. The lake is flat. The study curtains on the ground floor are drawn, and they were not drawn at midnight when I checked from my window, which means somebody pulled them after 1:00 a.m. Somebody used that room past 1:00 a.m. Somebody who did not want the lawn to see.
I file it and keep my pace.
Past the boathouse I see her before she sees me. Or she's let me see her, which is the more honest read.
A woman on the dock, legs over the edge, bare feet not quite touching the water, a cigarette held between her fingers with the focus of a woman who is daring it to burn down faster.
Chiara Valenti, twenty-four, Columbia law.
She is in an oversized cardigan and what look like men's pajama pants, and she has Massimo's eyes set in a softer face, and when she turns her head I catch the same trick of stillness I have seen in her brother: the way the head moves and the rest of the body doesn't.
"You're not who they think you are, are you?" she says.
I slow. Stop. Wipe my palms on my thighs because Gemma would and because mine are dry.
"Good morning."
I sit down beside her. Close enough she can offer the pack. Not so close she has to.
She does not offer the pack. She takes another drag and exhales it sideways, away from me, courteous. Twenty-four, Columbia law, the file said. Smokes Nazionali, her grandfather's brand, the one you reach for when you want the family to think you are not trying to be a woman about it.
"I'm not going to ask again," she says. "That was a question for the form of it. I'm telling you."
"You're telling me."
"You move like somebody who's been in rooms. Gemma's been in dressing rooms."
I let myself look at her. The dock smells like creosote and lake. A bird I don't know the name of moves in the reeds.
"You knew her."
"A little." She crushes the cigarette on the planks.
Grinds it. The ember dies in the wet wood with a tiny hiss I would not have caught if I hadn't been listening for it.
"She called me the night before they pulled her.
I was on the train back to the city. She said something was wrong with the terms. She said it twice.
Once like she was figuring it out, once like she'd figured it out. "
"What terms?"
"She didn't say. She was crying without crying. You know that thing."
I know that thing.
"And then she was gone," Chiara says, "and a week later I get told my brother's marrying her after all, only the her is a different her, only nobody is saying that out loud."
The pearls sit cold against my collarbone. Yesterday they were costume. This morning they are a dead girl's necklace on a live girl's throat, and the weight of that is at my pulse.
"Why are you telling me this?"
She looks at the lake. "Because she was sweet. And she was scared. And nobody at that table last night was scared, including you, and that's interesting to me."
"You could be wrong about me."
"I could." She pulls the pack from her cardigan, taps a fresh one out, doesn't light it. "I'm not."
I do not answer that.
"I'm not going to tell him," she says. "Not yet. I want to know what you came for first. Then I'll decide."
"Fair."
"It is fair. I'm a fair person." She tucks the unlit cigarette behind her ear like a pencil. "Don't get me wrong. I love my brother. I just love a lot of things."
I stand up. My quads complain. The sneakers pinch.
"I run another mile," I say. "Then I shower. Then I come down to breakfast and pretend you and I haven't met yet today."
"Sure."
I am three steps down the dock before she speaks again.
"He doesn't take women into the study," she says, to my back. "If he takes you in there, it isn't because he wants you there."
I keep walking.
Breakfast is on the terrace. Cosimo in a linen shirt, Nonna in her black with a wedge of melon she will not finish, Chiara across from me reading something in Italian on her phone and not looking up.
Massimo is not at the table. His coffee cup is, half full, a dark ring of espresso on the rim, and the chair pushed back the way a man pushes it when he leaves mid-thought.
"He had a call," Cosimo says, when he sees me looking. "He'll be back."
"I'm not on his schedule."
"You will be."
He says it like a weather report. I drink my coffee. Nonna watches me eat a fig and does not comment when I eat it with my right hand. She does not comment on anything. Her silence costs more than the chandelier.
I excuse myself at 8:40 a.m. Headache, I say, even though I have not had a headache. It worked last night and it works again, which tells me something about how this family handles women who claim small ailments, which is that they let them go.
Upstairs first. I switch the running clothes for a cream blouse and a skirt and slide my feet into flats that Gemma would have worn and I would not. I touch up the lipstick because the lipstick is the camera. I take the back stairs down.
The study door is open.
It is open because there is a housemaid's caddy on the runner outside it and a brass doorstop wedged at the base of the door, and somewhere on this floor a woman with a feather duster is working her way along the picture rail and singing under her breath in a voice that wants to be heard.
Four minutes. That is my window. The hallway has a clock and I look at it.
I do not look around when I go in. Looking around is what guilty people do.
I walk in the way a fiancée walks into her fiancé's study when she has gotten lost on her way to the chapel, which is to say, with my hand already lifting to my collarbone in the gesture of a woman about to say oh, I'm sorry.
I shut the door behind me without latching it.
Two walls of books. One wall of ledgers. The desk faces the lake the way Rocco said. There is a humidor and a decanter and a photograph in a silver frame of a boy who must be Massimo at maybe eleven, standing next to a smaller boy holding a fish. I do not look at the smaller boy long.
I angle the button-cam across the shelves. Ledgers, two rows, dated spines. I shoot them in a slow pan, the way I'd shoot a horizon, holding for the count on each row. Then up.
The morocco-bound book is on the third shelf from the top. Above eye level. The spine is unmarked. It is the only spine on that shelf that is unmarked, which is the kind of detail a man hides in plain sight when he has decided his enemies are stupid.
Behind it, where it had been pushed to make room, is the open face of a wall safe.
I do not have time to be surprised.
The safe door is ajar a thumb's width. The handle is up, not down. Somebody opened it and did not close it. Somebody who used this room past 1:00 a.m. and pulled the curtains after.
I check the clock. Three minutes left.
I take the book down. I set it open across the desk blotter. The pages are not a ledger. They are columns of numbers in a hand I do not know and dates in a hand I do, and the dates start seventeen years ago, three months before my father stopped coming home.
The pearls are cold. My hands are not shaking. Good hands. Honest hands. I shoot.
Page. Page. Turn. Page. Page. I do it the way I would shoot a deposition transcript on a hot tip, fast and flat and even, my thumb finding the corner of each page without looking, my breath shallow so the camera at my sternum does not bounce.
A name I know. Then another. Then a third I do not, with a notation beside it I will need to read in better light. I keep going.
Behind me the door closes.
It does not slam. It closes the way a door closes when somebody puts their palm flat to the wood and pushes it home. I hear the latch click and then I hear nothing, because whoever closed it is standing on the runner and the runner eats sound.
I do not turn around.
I close the book. I set it on the desk. I take my hand off it slowly and let it fall to my side. The pearls have warmed a degree against my skin. I count exits. Door behind me. Window in front of me, latched, two stories, gravel. The fireplace. One.
He crosses the room. I hear three steps and then he is at my elbow, and he reaches past me without touching me and lifts the book off the desk, and closes it, and sets it down again on the blotter, square, the way a man squares a thing he intends to come back to.
He turns me by the shoulders. Slow. The room moves, not me. He walks me backward three steps until my shoulders meet the door, and I let him, because letting him is the only card I have left and I want to see what he does with it.
One hand flat on the door beside my head.
Clean wool, gunmetal, the faint iron of something older under both.
The other hand comes up under my jaw, thumb at the corner of my mouth, and my pulse drops into my wrists the way it does when the floor under me has shifted and I haven't found the new edge yet.
He kisses me once. Hard. Closed mouth, no question in it.
I kiss him back.
His thumb shifts one degree at the corner of my mouth. He does not press the advantage. He pulls back half an inch and holds there, and his mouth is still near mine when he speaks.
"Whatever you came here to find," he says, low, "you should ask me for it."
Then he says a name. Gemma. He sets it between us the way you set down a chip you are not yet calling.
He opens the door. He walks out. He does not close it behind him.
I stand against the wood and I do not move. The housemaid is somewhere down the hall still singing. The book sits square to the blotter. I run the exits again. Door. Window. Fireplace. I press two fingers to my lips, once, then drop my hand.
I straighten the pearls. I walk out. I leave the door open the way he left it.