GIDEON just shook his head. Even after two decades, Phil was always coming up with something to surprise him. His career had been one unexpected (and entertaining) twist after another, a sort of career-in-reverse. When he’d gotten his Ph. D. in cultural anthropology, he had stepped into a coveted tenure-track position at a big state university but had found university politics more than he was willing to cope with. He’d then tried teaching at a Seattle community college, but couldn’t stand the committee assignments. Next had come a period as a high school teacher (but the nonteaching, largely custodial responsibilities weren’t to his liking), followed by a three-year stint teaching grade school. While he pondered his next move— kindergarten? preschool? day care?—he was offered a summer job going to Egypt to research and write
It had turned his life around. With his scruffy, eager, friendly manner and his natural willingness to see the best in common people and in their customs, he had at last found the occupation he’d been made for. The book had done better than anyone expected, and Phil had been made a contributing editor for the new series, a position he still held. In addition, he also led eight or ten no-frills tours a year for the company, of which the Italian lakes trip was the latest.
Gideon, by contrast, had taken a more conventional path, beginning as an assistant professor of physical anthropology at Northern California State University, where he was promoted after a few years to associate professor and contentedly settled in for a long, rewarding career of teaching and scholarship in San Mateo, California.
But fate had a jog of its own in store for him. Almost by accident, he had begun consulting for the FBI on the side, on cases involving forensic anthropology, and eight years ago one of those cases had taken him to Washington State’s Olympic rain forest, where two things had occurred that would change his life forever, one to his mild but frequent embarrassment, the other to his great and unremitting joy. The first was that a local reporter following the case had referred to him as the Skeleton Detective, and the sobriquet had stuck to him like glue, providing a rich source of not-so-subtle ragging to his colleagues at meetings and conventions ever since.
The second thing, the enormous, life-altering thing, was that he’d met a beautiful young park ranger named Julie Tendler, who had been incidentally involved in finding the human remains that had brought him to Washington. His much-loved first wife Nora had been killed in a car crash two years earlier, and Gideon had never gotten over his grief. In his case, it had slowly evolved into a terrible impassivity, a sense of deep isolation from everyone around him. For two years he had felt himself to be as cold and dead and impervious to emotion—to positive emotion—as a stone. It was Julie who had reawakened him, unthawing feelings and sensibilities that he had truly thought frozen for good.
A year after that they’d been married and he’d lucked into an associate professorship at the University of Washington’s Port Angeles campus (he’d since advanced to full professor). They had bought this hillside house that was a ten-minute walk in one direction from Julie’s office in the headquarters building, and a ten-minute walk in the other direction to campus. A perfect location. A perfect life. A day didn’t go by that he wasn’t grateful to her for bringing him to life again.
“Filiberto Ungaretti,” she said now, also shaking her head. “That’s amazing. Sure, it’d be interesting to visit your family, Phil. If you’re really sure they wouldn’t mind.”
“Interesting I can’t promise. Weird I can guarantee.”
“Weird how?” Gideon asked. “Weird like you?”
“No, different. They own this island, sort of, and they live in practically this palace—well, you’ll see.”
“A day at the Ungarettis,” Julie mused. “Sounds good.”
“No, Ungaretti was my father’s name, the creep. I haven’t seen him since I was three. This is my mother’s family we’d be visiting.”
“And what’s their name?”
“Their name,” said Phil, “is de Grazia.”
FIVE
STRESA was much as Phil had described it: a bright, clean, discreetly fading nineteenth-century resort town on Lake Maggiore, full of flowers, gardens, and romantic villas, and boasting a generous, park-like promenade, the Lungolago, that ran along the lakefront from one tip of the city to the other, bordering one side of the main street, the Corso Italia. On the other side of the Corso was an unbroken row of upscale boutiques and hotels. Away from the lakefront, Stresa was equally attractive, but in a different way: a maze of romantic piazzas and narrow, cobblestoned streets lined with picturesque restaurants and hole-in-the wall cafes. Their hotel, the Primavera, was on one of these streets, a modest, pleasant place a block inland (the four-and five-star hotels were all on the lakefront). Phil, who had slept most of the time on the fifteen-hour flight from Seattle, had, amazingly, gone to sleep in his room as soon as they’d arrived, but Julie and Gideon, who hadn’t slept at all, and whose eyes by now felt glued open, were eager to get out in the fresh air.
They had strolled lazily around the town for half an hour and now they sat, loopy and jet-lagged, among families of Swiss and Italian tourists, at a sun-drenched outdoor cafe on the promenade, where Phil had promised to join them at nine-thirty for the visit to the de Grazias. From the boat terminal a block away, ferries carried tourists to, from, and around Stresa’s big attractions, the fabulous Borromean Islands a few hundred yards offshore, with their splendid seventeenth-century gardens and palaces. Gideon was reading aloud from a guidebook description of Isola Bella, the closest and most fantastic of the three islands.
“‘But it is to the most ambitious and far-sighted of the Borromeos, Vitalio the Sixth, to whom we owe thanks for the Isola Bella we see today. It was Vitalio who began the prodigious earth-moving project that transformed the morphology of the land into ten superimposed garden terraces in the form of a gigantic truncated pyramid on the example of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. The many pools and fountains were fed by pipes from an enormous cistern installed beneath...’”
He glanced up at Julie, who had been suspiciously silent for a long time. She sat with her eyes closed and her face tipped up to the sun. “Hello?” he said. “Are you still with us?”
“Mm-hm,” she said, keeping her eyes closed. “‘It was Vitalio who something-somethinged the project that transformed the something into ten superimposed somethingsomethings on the example of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon.’ Do go on.”
With a smile, he closed the book. “I think maybe I’ve had enough too. Why don’t we just sit here and soak up the sunshine and this nice, warm air? Doesn’t it feel great after the spring we’ve had, or rather, haven’t had?”
“Mmm,” she said, more a purr than a murmur. Except to recross her ankles, she didn’t stir.
Given the chance, he watched her face for a while: the slightly turned-up nose; the pert chin—softening now,
