Good Blood

“Don’t know which?”

“Any of it, any of the ‘whys.’ Neither does Caravale at this point. Francesca’s the only one who knows, and she wasn’t exactly forthcoming at the police station. She’s a pretty tough cookie, Julie. She just might never explain. We might never find out.”

TWENTY-SIX

THEYfound out the following Sunday, four days later, back home in Port Angeles. Phil had come in from Italy on a red-eye at 7:50 a.m. and had driven straight out to Port Angeles, having promised to fill them in on everything. The idea had been to take a picnic brunch down to Dungeness Spit, the hump-backed, six-mile ribbon of sand and driftwood that angled out into the stormy strait like a sheltering arm, protecting the quiet waters of Dungeness Bay within its curve. It was Phil’s favorite spot on the Peninsula, and he thought the salt air, the sense of space, the cries of seals and gulls, and the grand, ever-present backdrop of the Olympics might help him decompress.

But Sunday, like the previous three days, came up rainy and glowering, a typical Pacific Northwest spring morning without a “sunbreak” in sight, and so they’d settled for a brunch of scrambled eggs, lox, bagels, and cream cheese at home instead. Phil had been taciturn and a little grumpy when he’d walked in, and Gideon’s greeting of “How goes it, padrone?” hadn’t helped matters. “This is nothing to joke about,” had been the querulous reply.

But a bagel sandwich of lox and cream cheese smeared with cherry jam (“That’s the way we Armenians like it,” he’d said defensively. “You want to make something of it?”) had helped him unwind, and with the pouring of his second cup of coffee, he began to open up.

“I had a talk with Francesca, you know,” he said, stirring in sugar. “Yesterday. They’re holding her in Turin. I drove up there to see her.”

“And she talked to you?” Gideon said. “I’m surprised.”

“So am I, to tell you the truth. But I had to at least ask her some questions—you know, to try to make sense of things. They’ve got her in a kind of a . . . not really a cell, but like a dorm room, only the door is metal, and it has a window in it. Somebody stood outside and watched us the whole time. They said I couldn’t see her at first, but I called Caravale and he got me in.” He was stirring, stirring, his mind 7,000 miles away, back in a dorm-like room in Turin.

“How did she seem?” Julie prompted.

“Like Francesca. Nasty. ‘So you’ve come to gloat, eh? Go ahead, have your fill.’Those were her first words to me.”

He had spent half an hour in her company, he explained, unable to get her to say anything. She had sat on her cot in silence, with her arms folded, and her eyes half-closed, and a distant half-smile on her face, while he pleaded with her to shed some light on what she’d done. And then, when he had already gotten up and was about to leave, he had stopped just before signaling to get out and had said, in bafflement and frustration: “He was stabbed in the back, Francesca! I can’t even make myself imagine that. That you would stab Domenico...your father . . . in the back—”

She had jumped up from the cot on which she’d been sitting, her dark eyes alight for the first time. “Yes, in the

back, the way he stabbed me in the back!”

“She confessed to you?” Gideon said, astounded.

Phil nodded. He’d finally finished stirring his coffee and lifted it to his lips, but it was obvious he hardly knew he was drinking it. “She got carried away; she couldn’t hold it back. I mean, it just poured out of her. It was horrible— this flood of bile, of resentment...it was like I wasn’t even there. I was, like, paralyzed...” He put the coffee down, stared out at the gray murk, and in a quiet, neutral voice told them what had burst from her with so much passion.

When Dr. Luzzatto had finally told Domenico the truth (Francesca said)—that her supposed younger brother Vincenzo was neither her brother nor Domenico’s son—but that Phil was—Domenico had made the mistake of coming to her for advice, for guidance—to Francesca, his own natural daughter; Francesca, whose own husband had been banished from the villa. As she had sat there in the kitchen of her gloomy Modena apartment, watching him wring his fine hands and debate with himself about the proper thing to do and the proper way to do it, it had struck her with terrible clarity that his concerns were all about what this might mean to Vincenzo, to the brat Achille, to the de Grazia bloodline. Not for a second did it cross his mind to concern himself with what a change in heirs might mean to her.

Until that moment she had never, except in occasional moments of pique, begrudged her father his stiff-necked adherence to the old-fashioned view that the entailed de Grazia estate was properly passed from son to son, with daughters—even elder daughters—given no consideration. That was a tradition. But now, for the first time she understood that to Domenico she counted for nothing at all, she was a woman, a zero, someone who might provide a reasonably intelligent sounding board, but whose views, whose own interest in the matter, were of no concern.

And the fact was, she did have an interest in the matter. If Phil actually became padrone, a time of unthinkable retribution would descend on her. She would no longer be mistress of the estate, she would be treated like dirt. It was true enough that Phil had many snubs, many disparagements, even many cruelties for which to repay her. She was ready to admit that. But whose fault was it that she had been brought up to look down on the Ungarettis? Couldn’t her father see it was his, no one’s but his?

No, he couldn’t see. Nor, apparently, could he see that the weedy, churlish Phil, regardless of his precious genes, was a cafone through and through—a boor, a vulgarian— whose commonplace manners and lack of breeding would mean the end of the house of de Grazia as they knew it.

But as they talked—as he talked—it had become increasingly clear that for her father one thing mattered above all else: the de Grazia blood line. There had never been any real doubt in his mind about what course he would pursue. He would convene a consiglio as soon as possible, as soon as Phil could fly to Italy; tomorrow, if possible. He would...

As he spoke, a reddish cloud had come down in front of her eyes like a blood-tinged cloth. He was so proud of himself, of “sacrificing” the man he had always thought of as his son—with tears in his eyes he actually compared himself to the Abraham of the Bible, giving up his only begotten son for the greater good—so completely oblivious to Francesca’s needs that, in a fit of shuddering, uncontrollable rage, she had snatched a knife from the block on the kitchen counter...