The Savage Garden

    'Have we tried?' She sounded exasperated.

    'You think she's pretending?'

    'I think she does not care anymore. She is leaving soon, before the end of the year.'

    'Where's she going?'

    Antonella turned and pointed, smoke curling from the cigarette between her fingers. 'There.'

    On a rise just beyond the farm buildings, a large house rose foursquare, its stuccoed walls washed orange by the sun and streaked with the shadows of the surrounding cypresses. Too grand for a laborer, but maybe not grand enough for the Lady of the Manor.

    'Why's she moving?'

    'It was her decision. She wants Maurizio—my uncle—to have the villa.'

    'Maybe she's changed her mind.'

    'She would say.'

    'Maybe she's saying it the only way she knows how.'

    'You don't know my grandmother. She would say.'

    Strolling back to the villa, they passed close to the small chapel pressed up against the sandstone cliff. She asked him if he'd seen inside. He had tried, he said, but the door was always locked.

    The key was conveniently located for all would-be thieves beneath a large stone right beside the front step —a fact on which he remarked. 'You never know when someone might need it,' said Antonella simply.

    The lock gnashed at the key, then conceded defeat. The interior was aglow, a ruddy sunlight slanting through the windows. Aside from a handful of old wooden pews, the interior was almost completely devoid of furnishings. The thieves wouldn't have been disappointed, though. The simple stone altar bore a painted triptych of the Adoration of the Magi. As they approached—silently, reverently—Adam tried to place it.

    The colliding perspectives, the elongated figures and the warmth of the tones suggested a painter from the Sienese school. The date was another matter. To his semitrained eye, it could have been anything from the mid— fourteenth century to the mid—fifteenth, later even. It wasn't a masterpiece, but it was distinctive, an unsettling blend of innocence and intensity—like the gaze of a child staring at you from the rear window of the car in front.

    'I must go there,' said Adam.

    'Where?'

    'Siena.'

    'I'm impressed.'

    'Don't be. I couldn't tell you anything else about it.'

    'No one can.'

    'I'm sure someone could.'

    'I hope they don't. Then there would be no more mystery.'

    They made a quick tour of the chapel, stopping at a small plaque set in the wall beneath one of the windows. There were a name and a date etched into the stone:

EMILIO DOCI

27. 7. 1944

    'My uncle,' said Antonella.

    'Your grandmother told me what happened. It's a terrible story.'

    'He's buried there.' She pointed at the unmarked flagstones at her feet. 'I never really knew him. We were living in Milan, and I was only ten or eleven when it happened.'

    Which would make her what ... ?

    'Twenty-four,' she said, reading his mind. 'And you?'

    'Twenty-two next month.'

    The words had a ring of desperation about them, as if he was trying to narrow the gap on her, and he quickly moved the conversation on.

    'Why did he keep his mother's surname?'

    'To keep the Docci name alive. So did Maurizio. Not my mother—she's a Ballerini.'

    'And you?'

    'I'm a Voli. Antonella Voli.'

    He returned her little bow. 'Adam Strickland.'

    'Strickland,' she repeated. It wasn't designed to roll off an Italian tongue.

    Adam glanced back at the plaque. 'Is Emilio the reason the top floor of the villa isn't used?'

    'Yes.'

    It had been her grandfather's idea, apparently. The day after Emilio's murder, the Allies had liberated San