Daughter of Ashes, page 30
Sebastiano was free. That was all she could think about.
They stopped in front of a room. Another nurse came to help her colleague squeeze the bed through the door. She opened the other panel, too, and they tried to find the right angle. They were soon joined by a doctor, who asked to take a look at Teresa’s charts. Teresa had the feeling she’d met her before.
Another stab of pain in her abdomen, but more powerful this time, enough to elicit a groan. Teresa gripped the bed rails until it passed, leaving her breathless. Was this what going into labor would be like? She tried to reach for her stomach, but the doctor took her hand and crouched over her.
“We’re going to give you something to help you sleep, now.”
Teresa remembered where she had seen her. She was the gynecologist who had checked her over in the ER. Teresa squeezed her hand as hard as she could and tried to tell her about the pain, but the woman eased herself out of Teresa’s grip with little trouble, and started giving the nurse some instructions.
Teresa didn’t want to sleep. She wanted them to listen to her.
She looked for Parri among the people who were passing her by, sometimes bumping into her as if she weren’t even there.
She thought she had recognized him in a figure clad in blue who had hovered at the edges of her vision all this time, the same man who had followed her hospital bed since the moment it had emerged from the elevator.
Teresa tried to focus on his face.
Wearing his blue overalls, and with his hat pulled low over his face, Giacomo looked up as if he had been waiting for this moment all along. He didn’t even attempt to run away; he just stood staring at her—eyes bloodshot with madness, perhaps, or from sleepless, anguished nights—as if this were the only thing that mattered.
Teresa tried to sit up, but the nurse pushed her back onto the pillows. She struggled against him, pulling at Albert’s sleeve. Albert frowned.
“I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
Giacomo took a few steps backward, then turned around and left.
Teresa threw herself off the bed. The IV drip came off her arm, but she didn’t feel anything anymore. She managed to stand up, elbows digging into the bed rails. Everyone started shouting.
For once in his life, Albert seemed to grasp what was going on. He followed her gaze all the way to the man making his way out through a crowd of people who had all scattered at the commotion—but the version of the story he was telling himself was not the right one.
He pulled his gun out and chased after him, keeping the weapon trained on Giacomo. He ordered him to stop, or he would shoot. The corridor had emptied out.
“He came back to finish her off!” he yelled at Parri, who had meanwhile arrived and taken cover behind a trolley.
Giacomo stopped with his back still turned, but he did not raise his hands as Albert had commanded. Perhaps he had never really meant to leave, or perhaps he didn’t want to—or simply couldn’t—stray too far from her.
“Put your hands where I can see them, or I will shoot!”
Albert was shaking. It would not have taken much for him to accidentally pull the trigger.
Lorenzi arrived and crouched beside Teresa, struggling to catch his breath. He’d spilled coffee all over his shirt and trousers. He tried to lift her up and drag her away, but Teresa wriggled free.
They hadn’t realized.
Giacomo turned around, his face lined with tears. He took a step toward her, eyes locked on hers.
No. Teresa wanted to stop him.
Albert cocked his gun.
“Stop!”
Giacomo took another step forward.
Teresa tried to articulate the words to explain that he hadn’t come to kill her or anybody else, but that what had brought him here was probably nothing but the pain he had witnessed, and which would not allow him to leave her side. Perhaps he had felt something then. Something human.
Albert took aim. Teresa grabbed the gun from Lorenzi’s holster, then used him to pull herself back toward the bed and onto her feet. She took aim, too.
Lorenzi cried out in warning. Albert glanced over his shoulder, and understood. He lowered his weapon, suddenly disoriented, then gestured with his arms as if to say, What on earth are you doing?
Teresa was pointing the gun at him.
She had no idea where she’d found the courage to do it, nor what consequences awaited her.
Parri got back to his feet and yelled at Albert to stop.
“She’s trying to tell us it wasn’t him!”
Teresa dropped the gun and slid to the floor. Her legs had gone numb. The medical staff sprang back into action all around her, touching her, trying to help her up, calling for assistance. Albert was still shouting at Giacomo to surrender.
Teresa lifted her hospital gown. It was stained with blood. Her bandages were damp and had turned crimson. She ripped them off.
They had sliced her belly open and patched it back up like an old sock, coarse black thread plunging in and out of her raw, reddened flesh.
She realized why she had felt that void inside when she had first returned to the world. It was because she had returned alone.
They had opened her up and emptied her out. And it didn’t hurt, because her body was still numb from the anesthetics. The pain that was consuming her was something else entirely, something that came from her soul—which knew everything and had seen it all happen without being able to do anything, because there was nothing that could be done.
Teresa had lost her baby. There would never be another baby.
She screamed so loud that she startled the staff who were trying to restrain her—and all around her, strangers with stricken expressions, trays laden with medical equipment clattering to the floor, and Albert calling for security, pointing his gun with the force of fear.
Teresa kept screaming, so much that the sutures on her jaw popped, a wail that told the story of a grief that would never fade, of the guilt that would forever go with it.
That was when Giacomo ran toward her.
He managed to brush his lips against her forehead before Albert and the security personnel pinned him to the floor.
“I was too late,” he whispered, his eyes full of despair. “I came too late.”
56
Today
IT WAS SUPPOSED TO be the end of her old life, but as far as epilogues went, it was pretty eventful.
The desolation Teresa had expected to find waiting for her at home was absent. Instead, Marini and Elena, Alice and Smoky, Parri, de Carli, and Parisi were all there. They’d spent the day rearranging things around her house to better accommodate her illness. They’d covered up all the mirrors, put name tags on any objects that hadn’t been labeled yet, set up a new induction stove in the kitchen, and found a nice cornflower blue with which to paint Alice’s new room. Teresa had persuaded her to move out of the modest apartment she’d been living in and come and stay with her instead. She wanted to help Alice as much as she could—though she suspected it would be the other way around, and the young woman’s vitality would end up helping her.
“You know I’m not asking you to stay so that you can be my live-in nurse.”
“You know I’m not agreeing so that I can persuade you to look for my mother.”
While the others put the finishing touches on the house, Parri made dinner. He’d drawn up a calendar with the dates and times he would spend at her home. Teresa had stared at him as if he’d gone mad.
“It’s been twenty-seven years, Antonio. When will you stop feeling like you owe me some kind of debt?”
“It’s not about debts. I’m just fond of you. And anyway, I’m so lonely that this is actually perfect.”
“It’s actually perfect that I’m sick?”
“Well, when you put it that way, it doesn’t sound so good.”
“That’s the way you put it.”
“I’m a doctor, not a poet.”
Every now and then Teresa would stop to take their pictures, and photograph herself with them, too. She was capturing flashes of joy, and they weren’t just going to stay on her phone. She was going to print them all out and wallpaper the house with them, so that even in her moments of deepest confusion, she would be able to look up and see the familiar faces of the strangers who cared for her. They would be like clues that she had left behind for herself, so that she would know she could trust them. It was all she had left to cling on to, though the fear was that one day, she would no longer even recognize herself.
She walked back into the room that served as her study and library. She had been trying to reorganize it, but it seemed an impossible task to handle efficiently. There were so many memories tucked away between the pages of those books, so many dreams and sleepless nights. That was how she had rebuilt her life.
She pulled one of the desk drawers open. Inside was the last of the notebooks she had carried every day of her working life, singed around the edges, and thick with scribbles. She hadn’t expected to find it there, and didn’t even remember putting it away. Seeing it now caused her pain. It was a symbol. She had spent so many years identifying with her profession.
And yet she was heartened by the sound of cheerful chatter breathing new life into her home. She had managed to make a family after all—not one bound by blood, perhaps, but by strong and at times surprising ties. Not all change is catastrophic. Things always settle down eventually, and life goes on somehow.
She picked up the notebook. It was time for one last farewell.
“No more regrets.”
She walked out into the garden. The driveway was full of boxes of old paperwork to dispose of.
She stood there holding the diary, unable to let it go. It was the tiniest of gestures, yet so difficult to make. A small personal sacrifice, an offering to fate in the hope that it might prove just a little bit merciful—for there was no doubt it was going to be cruel.
All of a sudden, the crickets stopped chirping.
It seemed crazy, but in that burst of unannounced tension, Teresa recognized the same feeling she’d experienced years ago in a lamplit cemetery. Or perhaps she had simply been expecting this to happen.
Her eyes bored into the night.
“I know you’re there.”
Nothing moved, not even a leaf trembled, and for a moment she felt silly, but then Giacomo stepped out of the shadow of a flowering wisteria. He must have rehearsed that step in his mind a thousand times. Hands thrust in the pockets of his jeans, a leather jacket over a T-shirt. He looked almost boyish.
He leaned against the metal gate.
“Always these bars between us.”
Teresa did not approach him.
“I used to think there was honesty between us, too, but instead you’ve been lying to me.”
He didn’t reply, but just kept watching her.
Teresa felt a mixture of anger and hurt that she had been made to feel like a pawn in someone’s game precisely when she had been at her most vulnerable.
“You’ve had your fun, Giacomo.”
“Listen to me.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Teresa strode forward and grabbed the bars.
“Because I wouldn’t believe you.” She could feel her eyes stinging. “You forced me to go looking for Sebastiano’s body without ever stopping to ask yourself how I might feel on discovering it was him.”
“He nearly killed you. What could you possibly have felt?”
She gasped for breath.
“Certainly not happiness, nor any kind of satisfaction.”
Giacomo was looking at her as if he might disavow her.
“It’s true that I lied to you. But not about everything.”
“You knew where the body was buried all along. No one ever moved it.”
His lips tightened into a smile.
“Have some pity on me, Teresa.”
“Pity? I’ve given you plenty more than that these past twenty-seven years. I’ve given you my trust, and you tried to play games with me.”
“It was never a game.”
“Then what was it?”
He looked up at the stars, eyes wet and gleaming with tears.
“A way of keeping you close, perhaps. Of going back in time. As if these twenty-seven years had never passed. I just wanted a different ending this time.”
Teresa lowered her eyes for a moment, then collected herself enough to push her emotions away.
“What’s the statuette about, Giacomo? What does it mean?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Bullshit! I’m tired of your riddles.”
“I would solve it for you if I could.”
“So it wasn’t you who thrust a two-thousand-year-old statuette into Sebastiano’s throat.”
“The only thing I put in Sebastiano’s throat were mosaic tiles. And he was still alive when I did that.”
“Spare me the details, please. Why the hare, why Aquileia? It can’t all be random.”
“It isn’t. I was following the steps of a path to redemption someone told me about—you can probably guess who.”
“The person who got you to do this.”
The stranger had leveraged Giacomo’s imagination, the vision of that Lazarus-like figure—risen from the dead in the form of a corpse—that he had always felt himself to be. He had returned from the afterlife wearing the colors of death, just like Osiris, that ancient god who was always depicted in the greenish hue of putrefying flesh.
“You can trust me, Teresa.”
“Really, now.”
“Come on, don’t use that tone with me. I’m trying to help you.”
“And who’s helping you right now?”
“I’m managing on my own.”
Teresa muttered a curse, and threw a quick glance over her shoulder.
“Why are you here, Giacomo?”
“To warn you. The person who told me to commit this murder wanted to send you a very specific message. They know your past, and they know mine. By the time I figured out that their real target was you, it was already too late. I couldn’t help myself.”
“I know.”
“The person who used me knows you well; it’s their way of telling you that they are very close to you, and know what matters to you most. This time they made you step back into your past, but next time . . .”
“It’ll be my team’s turn? This isn’t helping, Giacomo. You need to give me more.”
He looked melancholy.
“That really is all. And this is goodbye.” He touched her face. “I feel sad.”
“I can’t let you go.”
“What exactly are you going to do? I promise you I’ll never kill again.”
“You know that’s not true.” Teresa spoke the words in a whisper, turning again to look at the house.
“If you really care about them, you won’t call out. There’s a pregnant woman in there. You’ve seen what I’m capable of. An animal is always an animal.”
Teresa looked at his hands. She knew what they could do. She didn’t even want to think of them touching her boys, who had come there to help her—unarmed and unaware.
“The day you caught me, twenty-seven years ago . . .”
“You made that one mistake. I’ve never understood how it could have happened.”
“It wasn’t a mistake, Teresa. There was only one reason why I did it, and it’s the same reason that makes me stand here right now, with three cops just a few meters away and one right in front of me. I was totally, magnificently attracted to your power. I couldn’t stay away from your light.”
Teresa felt tears gathering in her eyes.
“You were so fascinated that you took one of my teeth as I was dying, and kept it for thirty years.”
He shook his head.
“How can you think that? I didn’t take it. It was your husband. He carried it with him. I told you: an animal is always an animal.”
A totem in Sebastiano’s possession. All this time, her executioner had kept it as a symbol and reminder of the power he had exerted over her. The symmetry with Giacomo was astonishing, but there was one fundamental difference. Sebastiano had retained his role within society for as long as possible—he had been the husband, the brother, the irreproachable colleague. Giacomo, on the other hand, was a serial killer who had always lived and been kept at the margins of the world. The former had tried to erase her. The latter had saved her life.
Teresa was shaking, and when Giacomo saw that, he took a step back.
“Keep shining, my darling Teresa. I won’t be the one to extinguish your light.”
He turned around to go, but she stopped him.
“If you really want to help me, tell me more about the man who wanted Sebastiano dead.”
There was a pause.
“I never said it was a man. You just assumed it was.”
Teresa went cold. Had she really made that mistake?
What else had she forgotten?
A terrible thought began to enter her mind. She gripped the metal bars tighter.
“Was it me? Was I the one who asked you to kill him?”
He returned to her, stroked her face through the bars, and saved her for a second time.
“No, Teresa. It wasn’t you.”
As she watched him walk away, she couldn’t decide what to do.
She was still holding her notebook. She could jot down all that he had revealed, or she could throw it away. She could ask for help, or she could keep silent.
But what did she want to do?
It was always the same question whirling in her mind: Could she ever be anything other than a cop?
No.
She opened her notebook in search of a blank page, and saw the last words she herself had written down at the end of a case that had left her with an enigma to decipher. Mother of Bones. Be careful.
That was the warning the strange man gave her before vanishing into darkness, as the blaze that she and Marini had escaped still burned behind her, scattering ashes and sparks into the night. The man who had rescued her notebook from the flames and smuggled away an ancient icon whose power extended well beyond its artistic beauty. He was a friend she didn’t know she had.
