Stolen

by Tess Stimson

  So I’m going to march up to the front door and ask for her.

  The road forks a few metres ahead of us. I turn right, onto a narrow, unpaved track that corkscrews up the peak towards the villa, jolting in first gear over rocks and deep, sun-baked ruts.

  The track stops in front of a low stone wall encircling the building two-thirds of the way up the mountain. We’ll have to make the rest of the way on foot.

  Quinn struggles to keep her balance on the uneven ground, but I’m too keyed up to wait for her. I’m almost running up the steep slope now, sending stones skittering down the hillside behind me.

  I stop when I reach the entrance, a latticed iron door which opens onto a large, tranquil courtyard. Colonnaded archways lead off to cool, open-sided rooms on three sides of the courtyard, while a small fountain surrounded by stone benches burbles quietly in the centre.

  The villa seems deserted, but I know our approach must have been heard. As Quinn finally reaches the top of the hill, panting with exertion, I open a small wooden panel in the wall to the right of the door and reach for the bell pull within.

  We wait, the sun beating down on us, as the bell echoes distantly within the villa. The final reverberations die away, leaving behind a silence broken only by the sound of water splashing in the fountain and the rasp of cicadas.

  I’m about to reach for the bell pull again when a door slams deep inside the villa. We hear footsteps coming towards us.

  My stomach fizzes with nerves. My chest tightens and it’s suddenly hard to breathe.

  A woman approaches the latticed door.

  The woman from the photograph: the woman who stole my child.

  chapter 76

  alex

  Luca’s mother raises the edge of her hand to her eyes, blocking out the sun. We’re backlit against it, our faces in shadow, and it takes her a moment to recognise me.

  Her reaction is absolutely the last thing I expect.

  ‘La mia bellissima figlia!’ she exclaims. ‘Vieni qui! Vieni qui!’

  She beckons us forward, her face wreathed in smiles as she unlocks the latticed iron gate.

  ‘Roberto!’ she shouts over her shoulder. ‘Vieni qui presto, sono Alexa!’

  ‘What the fuck?’ Quinn mutters.

  Elena Martini presses her palms on either side of my face, squeezing my cheeks, and then clasps her hands joyfully to her heart, shaking her head in wonder.

  ‘Mio cara! Questo è un miracolo! Roberto!’ she shouts again.

  She looks much older than I remember. It’s only three years since I last saw her at Luca’s funeral, but her hair is almost entirely white now and her weathered skin has an unhealthy yellowish cast to it. There’s a vacant look in her eyes, too, that makes me wonder how advanced her dementia is. She’s always been a petite woman, but now she looks fragile and insubstantial, as if a puff of wind might blow her across the courtyard.

  Roberto doesn’t appear. Elena ushers us through an archway and into a cool sitting room on the far side of the courtyard. A flight of stone steps in the corner of the room leads down to a second, lower courtyard filled with bougainvillea, the purple blossoms a vivid splash of colour against the mellow gold stone. A window set high in one wall reveals sweeping views of the valley below.

  I remember being shown into this same room when Luca brought me back to meet his parents. Then, as now, I was struck by its strong Arab influence: the kilim rug in muted shades of blue and red, the engraved Moroccan silver coffee table, the blown glass hookah beside the fireplace. Sicily is as much Arabian as it is Italian, a legacy of the island’s conquest by Saracens in the ninth century, and more than two hundred years of subsequent Muslim rule.

  When I first came here, I’d been to Italy several times before with my parents, and I’d even spent one summer waitressing along the Amalfi coast. But the tourist Italy I’d known hadn’t been this Italy. Sitting in that Moorish room seven years ago, I’d been struck by a truth whose significance I only realised after we married: Luca and I might both be cosmopolitan Europeans on the surface, but we came from very different cultures and backgrounds.

  Elena waves us towards a semicircle of white linen sofas scattered with mirrored cushions. ‘Caffè? Acqua? Tè alla menta? Solo un momento, per favor.’

  She returns to the courtyard and we hear her call out to an unseen maid. My sense of dislocation grows. I feel as if I’ve slipped into a parallel universe, in which my child is not missing and my mother-in-law and I are in the habit of spending the afternoon drinking mint tea.

  ‘My Italian’s pretty basic,’ Quinn murmurs, ‘but I think your mother-in-law just went off to kill the fatted calf.’

  ‘I told you, she’s crazy,’ I say, going over to the window. ‘She saw us coming up the hill. Roberto must be hiding with Lottie while she tries to get rid of us.’

  There’s only one road down the mountain: the same way we came up. It’s impossible to approach the villa unseen, but equally impossible to leave without being spotted. If Roberto, or anyone else, tries to spirit Lottie away while Elena distracts me, I’ll see them from here.

  ‘You are sure it’s her in the photo, right?’ Quinn asks.

  ‘Of course I’m sure!’

  She looks sceptical. I don’t blame her: despite my confident assertion, suddenly I’m not sure at all.

  Could a senile old woman really kidnap a child and smuggle her thousands of miles across international borders? Quinn had to enhance that blurry photograph with some high-tech software to make the woman’s face recognisable. Maybe the process made a passing resemblance appear much stronger than it was. Maybe I wanted to see Elena’s face, because that would mean my daughter was still alive. Would she really have welcomed me with such open arms if Lottie was hidden somewhere in the villa?

  I was wrong about Flora Birch. Am I wrong about this, too?

  My former mother-in-law returns and sits down, patting the sofa for me to join her. I pretend not to notice, keeping my vigil at the window.

  ‘Quindi, chi è questo?’ Elena asks, indicating Quinn.

  ‘She’s a friend of mine,’ I say.

  ‘Alexa, cara, why you are here? You have news della mia bella ragazza?’

  Her beautiful girl?

  I’m suddenly filled with anger. After Luca’s funeral, Elena cut me off as if I’d never existed. She never once got in touch with me to see how I was or asked to see her granddaughter. I didn’t pursue it, because of her dementia; when Lottie disappeared, it was Roberto, not Elena, who sent me a brief letter of condolence, offering to send money and promising to pray for Lottie.

  I’m not her bellissima daughter and I never have been. This sweet old lady routine is all an act.

  I pull up the photograph on my phone and thrust it in front of her. Elena peers at the screen. ‘Chi è questo?’ she asks.

  ‘You know who it is,’ I say.

  She glances from the phone to me and back again, confused.

  ‘It’s you,’ I say, impatiently.

  She bursts out laughing. ‘Sono io?’ she exclaims. ‘No!’

  ‘It’s you, on the beach in Florida,’ I say, struggling to control my temper. ‘The day Lottie disappeared.’

  ‘No, non sono io. Questa donna è molto più grassa – more fat than me!’ She wags her finger in a mock admonishment, still laughing. ‘I am not such fat woman, Alexa. Not such old.’

  We’re talking about the kidnap of my daughter – her own granddaughter. As crazy as she is, I can’t see how she can find anything about this conversation amusing.

  ‘If it’s not you, Elena, do you know who it is?’ Quinn asks.

  The old woman shrugs helplessly. ‘Non sono io,’ she says again.

  She seems genuinely perplexed by our questions. Is this all part of her dementia? Does she even remember what she’s done?

  ‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ I say, frustrated.

  ‘Can we look around the villa?’ Quinn asks, gesturing to make herself understood.

 
Elena beams. ‘È bello, sì?’

  ‘Very beautiful,’ Quinn says. ‘Please, I’d love you to show it to me.’

  I want to rip the villa apart stone by stone, not shuffle around after this demented old woman admiring tapestries.

  ‘Trust me,’ Quinn murmurs, as she offers the old woman her arm.

  She’s effusive in her praise as Elena gives us a tour and the old woman visibly blooms as she shows us around. She proudly shows us hidden passageways and concealed rooms we’d never have found without her. There’s no sign of either Roberto or the maid.

  And there’s no sign a child lives here, either.

  No toys, no scribbled pictures, no unmade bed, no children’s books, no small shoes tumbled near the door.

  Lottie isn’t here.

  We search the villa from top to bottom. My daughter isn’t here and clearly never has been. I was wrong about the photo. It wasn’t Elena on the beach, after all. This is yet another false trail, one more dead end born of wishful thinking and the same dysmorphic longing that caused me to see Lottie in another girl’s face.

  Elena isn’t a crazy kidnapper. She’s just a lonely, half-senile old woman who’s lost both her son and her granddaughter. She welcomed me into her home when I turned up unannounced on her doorstep and I hope she never knows why I was really here.

  I’m suddenly as desperate to escape the villa as I was to reach it.

  ‘I need to get out of here,’ I tell Quinn as we return to the courtyard.

  ‘Just because Lottie’s not here now, Alex, it doesn’t mean—’

  ‘I was wrong, Quinn. It’s not her.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Look at her,’ I say, as Elena sinks onto a stone bench by the fountain. Her mouth is slightly open and her eyes are dull. ‘She couldn’t shoplift a lipstick, never mind kidnap a child.’

  ‘Your call,’ Quinn says.

  I can’t do this any more. I always said I’d never stop looking for Lottie, but I can’t keep riding these tsunamis of alternating hope and despair. I’m jumping at shadows, suspicious of everything, trusting no one. In the last two days, I’ve accused my sister and my former mother-in-law, with little evidence for either. It has to stop.

  ‘Mind if I use the bathroom?’ Quinn asks Elena.

  She points to a door near the iron gate. ‘Questo è il più vicino.’

  As Quinn tries to open the door to the lavatory, it jams. Something is evidently caught beneath it, and she struggles to free it with just her good hand.

  I go over to help her and then stop. My blood turns to ice.

  The reason the door won’t open is because, crammed beneath it by little fingers, are a dozen small pieces of paper.

  chapter 77

  alex

  Lottie, here.

  My daughter, here, in this villa, pushing small scraps of paper beneath the bathroom door.

  She’s been here all the time.

  The next second, I have Elena by the shoulders. ‘Where is she?’ I shout, shaking the woman so hard her head whips back and forth. ‘What have you done with her?Where is she?’

  Quinn tries to pull me off, but my rage is so visceral, so primitive, so filled with all the fear and pain and grief of the last two years that I’m beyond reach. I’m consumed by a fury that will engulf us all.

  ‘Jesus! You’re going to kill her!’ Quinn cries. ‘Alex, for God’s sake! She can’t tell you anything like this! Let her go!’

  She finally penetrates the red mist. With a feral howl, I shove the old woman away from me. Quinn catches her before she falls. ‘Alex, what the hell?’

  ‘Lottie was here,’ I say. Disgust thickens my voice like mucus. ‘The bitch has been lying to us from the beginning. Those pieces of paper under the door. It’s something Lottie used to do when she was anxious. She was here.’

  Quinn withdraws her comforting arm from Elena’s shoulders. This time she doesn’t need to ask me if I’m sure.

  ‘She isn’t here now,’ Quinn says. ‘We’ve searched this place top to bottom.’

  ‘Perhaps they don’t keep her here. Maybe Roberto has taken her somewhere else. Perhaps they keep her in a fucking dungeon!’

  Elena starts to sob, rocking back and forth on the bench, her hands covering her face. I watch her with something close to hatred. I don’t care how old she is, how senile, how lonely. She stole my child from me. There’s no punishment I could mete out that would be fittingly cruel.

  I crouch down in front of her and grab her hands, roughly forcing them from her face. ‘Dov’è Lottie?’ I demand. ‘Where have you taken her? Where is she?’

  ‘Non capisco, non capisco—’

  ‘You understand,’ I say, grimly. ‘Where is she, Elena?’

  ‘Non lo so,’ the woman whimpers.

  I brandish my phone in front of her, forcing her to look at the photograph. ‘This is you! You were there the day Lottie disappeared! Where is she?’

  ‘Non lo so. Non lo so!’

  I don’t know. I don’t know.

  ‘Goddamn it,’ I say, rocking back on my heels.

  ‘She’s fucking terrified, Alex.’

  ‘She should be,’ I snarl.

  I suppress the urge to put my hands around the woman’s throat and squeeze the truth out of her. Lottie loved her nonna; before Luca died, he often took her to see his ailing parents in Genoa, knowing how much it cheered them. Lottie would have gone with her grandmother willingly. How could Elena do this to me? Did she just wake up one day and decide that because she’d lost her child, she’d take mine? Or is she simply mad?

  Without pity, I seize Elena’s wrist and haul her to her feet. She’s so light, she can’t weigh more than a child herself.

  ‘I don’t care if we have to tear this place apart,’ I tell her. ‘If Lottie is here, we’ll find her. Do you understand, Elena? Capisci?’

  ‘Wait,’ Quinn says suddenly.

  Footsteps echo from within the villa. Roberto: the tread is too heavy to be the maid. There’s no attempt to approach quietly; either he doesn’t know or doesn’t care that we’re here.

  Quinn edges out of sight, behind an archway, her phone in her hand.

  ‘Roberto!’ Elena cries.

  She twists free of my grip with surprising strength, breaking towards him. He opens one arm, pulling her into a casual embrace and dropping a kiss onto the top of her white head. His black eyes don’t leave mine for one second.

  My mouth is so dry my tongue cleaves to the roof. There’s a burning sensation behind my eyes, a jangling in my ears. I try to speak, but the muscles in my cheeks are numb with shock.

  ‘Hello, Alex,’ Luca says.

  chapter 78

  alex

  Everything seems to stop and spin. I don’t know if the sound in my head is the wind whipping through the courtyard or the blood rushing to my ears. My stomach swoops, as if I’m falling into an abyss. My gut churns and my lungs constrict and it’s suddenly hard to breathe.

  It’s not possible.

  Luca is dead. I was there when he was buried.

  I saw him go into the ground.

  I watch my dead husband saunter across the courtyard, solicitously seating his mother back on the stone bench by the fountain. A pungent, sweet smell is suddenly strong in my nostrils: the woody, spicy scent of incense, eddying around the courtyard. I hear the clink of the chain as the priest raises his gold thurible, the muffled sound of stifled sobs, the shuffle of feet on the flagstones, the ancient pews creaking as mourners take their seats.

  My brain struggles to process conflicting images, superimposing them on each other like a photographic double negative:

  Luca in his coffin, beautiful and pale and still.

  Luca in front of me, tanned and vital and alive.

  ‘I’m impressed,’ he says to me. ‘You actually found us. I wondered if you might. Mamma here was certain you’d give up, but I told her, you don’t know Alex.’ He smiles fondly at Elena. ‘She doesn’t remember much, these days. S
he hasn’t been the same since Papà died last year. She doesn’t know what day it is, most of the time. She thinks I’m my father, and I don’t have the heart to correct her.’

  Shock is the mind’s way of protecting you, a shutdown mechanism designed to buy you time to repair your shattered defences. The external world fades from view; sound and sight are put on hold as the brain eliminates distraction, while it reconciles your lived experience with the impossible. Only when your mind has caught up does the real world come roaring back, vivid and unstoppable.

  My first thought:

  ‘Where is she?’ I say.

  ‘Lottie’s safe,’ Luca says. ‘Whatever you’re thinking of doing right now, Alex, stop. If you want to see her again, that is.’

  I clench my hands against my thighs, my nails digging into my palms, to stop myself from flying at him and gouging out those come-to-bed eyes, ripping the flesh from his beautiful bones.

  He faked his own death.

  I can’t imagine how confused Lottie must be. He’s not just the narcissist I always suspected him to be; he’s a psychopath. His very existence is living proof: there’s nothing this man won’t do.

  But even as I try to wrap my head around this, I’m aware the ice I’m standing on is perilously thin.

  I’ve seen him, now. His cover is blown.

  He can’t let me leave.

  Quinn is still hidden in the shadows of the loggia and I realise Luca hasn’t seen her. For the briefest of moments, I catch her eye, and she nods.

  Lottie’s all that matters. If something goes wrong, you don’t wait for me. You take Lottie and you leave.

  ‘I buried you, Luca!’ I cry, making sure his attention stays on me. ‘You were dead. I saw you!’

  ‘You saw what you were meant to see.’

  ‘How? How is it even possible?’

  Luca rubs a pale scar on his forehead. ‘I was in the Genoa bridge collapse. That wasn’t a lie. I was in a coma for more than six weeks. In a state like that your body shuts down, and your breathing slows way, way down. Your circulation slows, too: you’re pale as death, and it’s hard for someone to find a pulse. You’d think I was dead, to look at me. Unless you touched me and realised I was still warm, you’d never know I was alive.’