Chapter Fifteen
Fifteen
The letter was addressed to Katerina Sideris.
Katerina.
Skye repeated the name several times, copying the way Andreas sounded the e as an a and adding emphasis to the vowels as he did.
“ ‘Sideris’ comes from the Greek word ‘Sidero,’ which means iron,” he told her. “Folegandros is the Iron Isle of the Cyclades.”
“So we can assume she was from here, this Katerina?”
“Perhaps.” Andreas fingered the envelope. “I have heard this name before, but not very many times.”
“Who’s it from?” she persisted, leaning over until her forehead was almost touching his. “Does it say?”
“I will need to open it,” Andreas said, glancing up so that their eyes met. He, too, had taken off his goggles, though a pink outline remained. There were specks of masonry in his beard, a smear of black on his cheek. “Do you mind?”
“Of course I don’t,” she said. “I’m dying to know more.”
He began by unfastening the twine, being careful not to drop any of the letters. At a glance, Skye estimated that there must be at least twenty in the stack, perhaps more. A discovery that, as far as she was concerned, felt like winning the lottery for a second time.
Andreas removed two sheets of paper, each of which was thin and yellowed with age. The writing was small and in cursive, the lines of text squeezed together. Its author had left barely enough room for punctuation, and splotches of ink dotted the margins.
“Is there a date?” she asked, and he nodded, sliding a finger up to the top corner of the first page. There were no numbers that Skye could see, only three symbols—an M, an O with a line through its center, and an upright triangle.
“Nineteen forty,” Andreas said. “It is dated from the thirtieth day of October.”
Skye scoured her memories, trying to recall what she remembered about the Second World War in Greece.
She was sure something important had happened at the end of that month, but the answer remained stubbornly out of reach.
Andreas continued to read, his mouth working silently as he skimmed over the words.
Several times he paused, bringing the paper closer, squinting to make out what was written, while beside him, Skye fizzed with barely tempered anticipation.
Andreas lowered the letter and blew air into his cheeks.
“What is it?” she asked. “What does it say? Who’s it from?”
“A man,” he said. “He signs at the bottom with only one letter, a sigma, which is an S.”
“How do you know it’s a man?”
Andreas tapped the letter with a finger.
“Because he talks about fighting.”
“But women fought in the war, too, didn’t they?”
“Yes,” he agreed, “but not at the beginning. That all happened later, during the Resistance.”
“I clearly need to brush up on my history.”
Andreas gestured once again to the letter.
“This man, he was in love with Katerina.”
“It’s a love letter?” Skye felt a twinge in her chest.
“Nai,” he said softly. “But I don’t believe they were married, not when this letter was written. There is a lot of”—he paused—“passion.” Skye wasn’t sure if she was imagining it, but it seemed to her as if Andreas was blushing slightly.
“Will you read it out to me?” she asked.
His mouth fell open, then closed again as he pressed his lips into a thin line.
A cloud of vape announced the arrival of Stamatis from around the side of the house.
He glanced from the expression on his boss’s face to the letter in Andreas’s hands, and then to Skye, who quickly explained what they’d found in the fireplace.
Stamatis smirked at the mention of a “love letter” and leaned in, trying to read it upside down.
“éla re,” Andreas grumbled, folding the papers and tucking them back into the envelope. “Break time is over.”
Stamatis gave a long-suffering sigh but didn’t argue, heading back inside just as Joy emerged at the boundary wall.
“There you are,” she called. “I was starting to think I’d been stood up.”
“As if I would,” Skye protested. “I was about to head back to yours.”
“Wait until you see what the girls have found,” she said, which piqued Andreas’s interest.
“Found where?” he asked. “In the house?”
“Out back,” Joy told them. “Dusty was turning over some more earth out there when her shovel hit something. It’s pretty cool, actually. Reckon it’s an antique.”
Skye did not need to hear more; she was already moving, hurrying across the dry ground with Andreas at her side. When they reached the truck, he slid the bundle of letters into the glove compartment, then rolled up the windows and locked the doors.
“They will be safe in there,” he said. Skye offered him a grateful smile and fell into step beside him as they followed Joy to the sisters’ house.
A small crowd was gathered outside. Victoria and Adam—bizarrely dressed in swimming trunks and flip-flops on bottom, with a shirt and tie on top—as well as Louisa, and Cora from the village shop, who had her two young children, Iris and Ajax, in tow.
A harried-looking Theo was mid-apology, assuring her that George would like to play with them another day.
“I’m afraid his social battery has run dry,” he said.
Cora nodded sympathetically as the younger, Ajax, broke away to pet Bruno, his face brightening at the sight of Mia approaching with a box of Popsicles.
“We heard you have found something,” Andreas prompted, and Louisa, whose dress and bare legs were caked in dry mud, turned as red as her long hair.
“Dusty did,” she said, shifting awkwardly. “She’s still out back.”
He stalked away, and Skye followed, into the living area, where three camp beds were set up in a row along one wall, and out through the kitchen to the garden beyond.
“Told you she’d been busy,” Joy said, jogging up behind them.
The once-flat expanse of ground had been almost completely dug up, and there were separate piles of stone, mud, and other detritus such as wire, broken clay pots, and larger rocks.
Dusty had somehow sourced a cement mixer and a vast bag of sand, and there were numerous white sacks in a heap next to a mound of wooden planks.
Andreas ran a hand through his hair. He was still wearing the coveralls he’d put on to demolish the fireplace, and sweat was beginning to dapple across his forehead.
The peak heat of the day was allegedly the middle part, though Skye consistently found that this hour was hotter, between four and five p.m., when the wind dropped off and the air grew still and heavy.
Dusty emerged from the hut at the far end of the garden and raised a hand in greeting. Clad in board shorts and a crop top, she was sporting two sunburned shoulders, and her pale shins were dotted with Band-Aids.
“Bites,” she explained in answer to Skye’s inquiring glance. “The mossies can’t seem to get enough of me.”
“You should burn a citronella candle in the evenings,” Andreas said, to which she tutted.
“Tried that to no avail, and I practically bathe in DEET. I wouldn’t mind if all of us were equally afflicted, but for some reason they don’t seem to go after my sisters.”
“I heard that it’s something to do with all the Marmite we eat,” Mia interjected. She had come out to join them, Victoria and Adam in tow. “It’s packed with B1, and apparently they hate it.”
“Is Marmite the gooey black stuff that tastes like the bottom of a beer barrel?” Victoria wrinkled her nose. “Gross.”
“She’s banned me from eating it,” Adam lamented. “I’m not even allowed a jar in the house.”
Skye, who’d always been able to take Marmite or leave it, turned back to Dusty.
“We heard you’d found something?”
“News really travels fast around here,” she remarked drily. “I’ll go and get it—one sec.”
Andreas, meanwhile, was asking Adam about his absent trousers—“Did you leave them on the beach?”—which promptly sent Mia into a fit of giggles.
“I’ve had a day of meetings,” he explained, “but as they’re all done online, only the top half of me needs to look presentable.”
“Do you have Wi-Fi at the house now, then?” Mia asked, suddenly hopeful, but Adam pulled a face.
“Not yet. The engineer can’t get here until June 18, so a week from Wednesday. I’ve been working out of the taverna most days, drinking every last coffee bean Pantelis has in stock.”
Dusty was coming back toward them, a long, slender object balanced carefully in her hands. As she came closer, Skye saw it resembled some kind of leather-bound tube.
“Cool, right?” Joy said.
“Erm…” Skye hedged. “I’m not actually sure what it is I’m looking at.”
“I didn’t either at first,” Dusty said. “Almost took my hand off fishing it out of the dirt.”
She gripped the narrower end and gave it a gentle tug, releasing a slim, curved blade from what Skye now realized was a scabbard.
“Ah.” Andreas leaned in. “Can I hold it?”
Dusty slid the pieces back together before handing it to him, and Andreas stepped back a few paces before drawing the sword out fully, angling it to catch the light. Skye caught a glimpse of an intricate pattern stenciled into the silver.
“It is a saber,” Andreas said as Adam approached him for a closer look. “I think perhaps it is Ottoman.”
“Valuable?” Dusty asked.
“Maybe one thousand euros, maybe a lot more.” He shrugged. “You will have to find an expert to examine it, somebody who specializes in these kinds of things.”
“And this was just buried here, in your garden?” Adam marveled. “Hear that, Vic? Maybe we should take Andreas’s advice and get him to dig that plunge pool after all. Who knows what we might unearth.”
Skye smiled wryly. What was it with Andreas and his obsession with plunge pools?
“Is that rust all around the top, do you reckon?” Joy asked.
Dusty licked a finger and rubbed at the stain.
“Not clay or soil,” she said. “Whatever it is, it isn’t budging.”
“You probably shouldn’t lick it,” Mia advised.
Andreas scraped at the same patch with his thumbnail.
“It could be rust,” he allowed, “or perhaps blood.”
“Blood?” Victoria exclaimed, scurrying sideways as Dusty spat onto the ground.
“Told you not to lick it,” Mia drawled.
“You really think it could be blood?” Skye asked Andreas, and he nodded, his deep-set eyes serious.
“Consider what it is,” he said, “and why somebody would choose to bury it.”
They all fell silent at that.
Skye looked again at the saber.
An antique blade buried underground, a bundle of letters sealed behind stone. Six houses abandoned since the war, with nothing and nobody to tell them why. There were secrets here. Secrets that someone had gone to great lengths to hide.
A prickle ran up the back of Skye’s neck.
The past, it seemed, had begun to reawaken.