The Lost Daughter

by Lucretia Grindle

  At first that had hurt most—that he no longer wanted her. Would barely even speak to her. That instead of love, instead of destiny, something else flickered in his eyes. Something beyond distaste. Something close to revulsion. At first, that had made her cry. Then it made her angry. Finally, on the second or maybe the third day, when she heard him coming, heard his footsteps tapping on the stairs like Morse code, the echo ricocheting through the empty house, she’d taken her clothes off and lain down on the mattress. She’d arranged herself, hair fanned across the blankets, like a gift. Determined to make him want her, to understand whatever game he was playing. To make him see her again. Look at her the way he used to look at her. She wanted him to lick his lips. Take her hand. Call her Carina.

  “I want you,” she’d said, making her voice warm, imagining she was purring as he opened the door. “Please, baby.” Despite her best efforts a tremble had come into the words, a pleading. “Please,” she’d said. “Please.”

  She’d reached a hand toward him—a hand he’d kissed, how many times? And for a moment he’d smiled and she’d felt something—a warmth, a flare of hope?

  Then he’d said, “You shouldn’t catch cold. Get dressed.”

  And she’d realized the smile was because he was laughing, at her, which was when she’d screamed.

  “My dad!” Kristin had jumped up. “My dad will come for you! You can’t get away with this!”

  She’d slapped him, just once, before he caught her hand, and dragged her down the stairs, and locked her in the basement.

  There were no windows. No Ping-Pong table. Or green shag rug like the one in her parents’ house, the one Karen said she’d chosen because it looked like grass. Karen had painted flowers on the wall, too. Big sunflowers, with yellow and brown petals that matched the plaid on the sofa. There were twenty-three of them. Kristin knew because she’d counted.

  After she’d heard her mother’s car start, she’d counted the flowers, sure Karen would remember and come back for her before she got to the end of the row. She’d eaten a cookie from the pack Karen had given her for every flower. When she got to the end, she’d started counting again. She hadn’t started to cry until the cookies ran out. She hadn’t climbed the steps and knocked on the door, Mr. Ted gripped in her free hand, until she’d counted the flowers six, seven, eight times.

  “Mommy?” she’d whispered it at first, as if Karen might be right on the other side, her ear pressed to the keyhole, waiting to hear.

  In his basement, his Seventh Circle of Hell—when had she thought that was a joke?—the floor was packed earth. The walls were made of stone and wept with damp, and there was no light. With nothing but a blanket wrapped around her, Kristin hadn’t tried to count anything. Even if there had been anything to count, she wouldn’t have been able to, because of the thing that crept up and wrapped itself around her. Clung to her skin. Sealed itself over her ears and nose and mouth. When she choked on it, her eyes streaming, the taste of cookies rose on the back of her tongue and made her gag. Then, before she knew it, she’d screamed. She’d bent double and bellowed the single word. “Mommy!”

  Which was when she knew he’d won.

  After that she’d reached for her waist. There was nothing to use, only her nails. But she could feel them. The scar tissue ridged, like lips. Sealed, not a word coming out. The belt that held her in. Mom, Me, Mom, Me. Kristin walked her fingers across her belly, bumping in time. Mom, Me. And didn’t need to count. She knew how many cuts there were. Twenty-three. One for every flower.

  A day later when he let her out, she’d clutched the blanket around her, covered herself up, and hadn’t looked at him.

  That had been three, maybe four or even five days ago. She’d tried to keep track. There was a pile of dead leaves in the empty fireplace. Every morning, she took one and put it under the mattress.

  She’d thought at first that the rustling they made had been mice. She’d even climbed up on the chair. Then, gradually, she’d realized it was just a draft. Now the noise seemed almost friendly, a comfortable little muttering. She wondered if she was going crazy. If making friends with inanimate objects was what happened. Would she start talking to the mattress next? The bucket?

  She’d assumed the leaves had blown down the chimney and the thought had given her a little hiccup of hope. But when she’d crawled to the back of the hearth and looked up, she hadn’t been able to see light. She realized they must have blown in through the window the last time it was opened. Whenever that was. The locks were welded closed. Sticking her hand through the bars, she could reach them, could finger the cold, hard metal. But she couldn’t make them budge. Or break the glass. She’d thought of that first. Had picked up the chair and tried ramming a leg through. But the bars were too close together. And now she wasn’t sure what good it would do her anyway, even if she could smash the window. It wasn’t like she’d be able to squeeze through the bars and climb out. And even if by some miracle she did, there was no overhang, no porch roof, not even a drainpipe to climb out onto.

  The house was a cube. A cube plonked down in the middle of nowhere. Which was why he didn’t bother to close the shutters. There was no point. There was nothing beyond. Just a sea of dead grass. Frozen gray, swaying on the wind. Its furred top mottled to gold in the rare moments when the sun split the clouds.

  * * *

  “Ispettóre Saenz?”

  Enzo jumped. He’d finally left Bologna an hour earlier—they’d found the hotel, and a box of hair dye and a bunch of ruined towels in a laundry chute, and most important, lifted a fingerprint off the vending machine. Then he’d driven like a bat out of hell to Ferrara, half high on the idea that he might even find Anna Carson tonight and get home in time to sleep in his own bed.

  “I am Carla Rossetti,” the woman said.

  Her outstretched hand and gray tailored suit made him suddenly aware that not only had he not shaved, but after two frantic drives and a long day in the Bologna police station, he looked, and possibly smelled, like a tramp. His habitual uniform of jeans, running shoes, and leather jacket felt as if he’d slept in them. His shirt was rumpled. He had no luggage. The fact that he outranked Ispettóre Rossetti by some considerable distance did nothing to mitigate the fact that if she had not been standing beside him, the receptionist at the unexpectedly chic Ferrara hotel where Guillermo had booked him a room just in case would undoubtedly have taken one look at him and thrown him out. As it was the young man behind the desk contented himself with raising an eyebrow.

  Guillermo, who had spoken with the Ferrara police, had given Enzo the name of his contact. Too late, Enzo realized, he had assumed—for no particularly good reason, and probably quite a few bad ones—that Ispettóre Rossetti was a man, not the mahogany-haired Amazon he was facing.

  “Shall we?” She gestured toward the tables and chairs scattered around the lobby. “I have what you asked for. Or would you rather” —she hesitated and smiled—“unpack? I’m happy to wait,” she added.

  For a bald-faced liar, she wasn’t bad. Enzo wondered what it was—kid, lover, husband? All of the above? A cold splash of loneliness hit him, so real he almost shook himself like a dog. He had nothing to unpack, and never a reason not to wait. And still held out the hope that he would not need the room at all and would be heading back over the Apennines in a matter of hours dragging Anna Carson like some bounty hunter’s prize so he could go sleep alone with his cat. It must have shown on his face, because Carla Rossetti looked sympathetic.

  “I’m afraid the news isn’t very good,” she said. “Perhaps we ought to order a coffee.” She was nice enough not to say that he looked like he needed one, just waved to a waiter hovering by the bar and headed for a table.

  A double espresso later, Enzo was forced to agree. The news was not very good. He didn’t know what story Guillermo had cooked up when he’d called Ferrara and asked for their help, but it didn’t really matter. The net result was the same. “Graziella Farelli” had not checked into a hote
l, or a B and B, or a guest house, or rented a tourist apartment. Not last night, or the night before, or anytime in the last week.

  “I ran it backward a few days, just to be certain,” Ispettóre Rossetti explained.

  Enzo took the printout she handed him, refrained from telling her that she’d wasted her time, and thanked her instead. He made a mental note to write a citation and make sure it got to the right person. More women needed to be promoted and she had been nothing if not thorough. She’d even checked the city’s homeless shelter.

  But not only had “Graziella Farelli” apparently not slept anywhere in the city, she hadn’t booked any kind of transportation, train, bus, or boat—there was a tour company that ran down the river even in this frigid weather, bird watchers mostly, according to the ispettóre—in order to try to leave it. Nor had she rented a car. Or bicycle. Ferrara apparently, had a higher density of bicycles per capita than any other town in Europe, except for someplace in Belgium. Carla Rosetti informed him of this with no small measure of pride. Enzo was tempted to ask if she’d checked Rollerblades and skateboards, too, but decided against it.

  The second sheet of paper Ispettóre Rossetti pulled out of her briefcase did not make him any happier than the first. Only two handbags and one man’s wallet had been reported missing or stolen in Ferrara during the last forty-eight hours. One belonged to a sixty-year-old day laborer who weighed two hundred pounds and was bald. One to a student with blue eyes and blond hair who stood five foot two, and the last to a seventy-five-year-old who was in a wheelchair in an old folks’ home. When she asked if she ought to check any of these out in person, Enzo told her not to bother. Anna Carson was too smart to pull the same trick twice. No red backpacks or green quilted down jackets from somewhere called Barneys had turned up at checked luggage in the bus or train stations, either. And no cars had been stolen. The long and the short of it was, if Kristin’s stepmother was in Ferrara, she was either sleeping rough or staying with someone.

  Or she had led them a very pretty dance. Been even cleverer than he’d given her credit for—a mistake he vowed then and there not to repeat, even if he had to write Brigate Rosse one hundred times on the pad in the hotel room where he was now certain he’d be staying.

  Realizing they would trace her to Bologna, he thought, and to the wallet and hotel, Anna Carson could have bought herself some time to do he didn’t even want to think what by making certain she was seen getting on the Ferrara train—which was, after all, where they would expect her to go—and then either getting off before she got here, or immediately catching another train to God knows where. Or she’d arrived, trotted to the bus station, and paid cash on a local puddle jumper. Or she’d ducked off the station in Bologna, somehow avoiding the cameras, and never left at all. The possibilities were virtually endless.

  Enzo knew Guillermo had not told Ferrara any more about the mystery woman they were searching for than he had told Bologna. The same stories would circulate here soon enough, maybe even better ones. Although, he thought, it would be hard to come up with something much better than the truth—that Brigate Rosse, now in their fifties, were back. And still winning. He groaned inwardly. Or perhaps he only thought it was inwardly, because Carla Rossetti was looking at him with something like concern on her face.

  He thanked her, then he told her what he needed. She listened without taking notes and said she would go herself, immediately, to the train station. She would send someone else to the bus station. They would get the CCTV tapes for him and set up at the Questura. She showed him where it was on a little green-and-red tourist map and told him a room would be at his disposal for as long as he needed it beginning with all night tonight.

  If he could not spot Anna Carson getting off a train or onto a bus in Ferrara, Enzo would have to go back to Bologna and pick up the trail where it had gone cold. The thought made him sick with frustration. He thanked Carla Rosetti again and waited until she left. Then he went to the front desk and asked the clerk where he could find a store that sold underwear and socks.

  It was past seven p.m. when, showered, shaved, and redressed, he left the hotel. Coin, God bless it, had not only been open and willing and able to supply socks, underwear, and shirts, but had even stretched to a new pair of jeans, two very warm rolled-neck sweaters, and gloves, which Enzo usually disdained. Not tonight. There was a damp chill hanging in the air that threatened to turn his very breath to ice. Before it left his lungs. Ferrara was not only flat, it was freezing. A fact the locals obviously knew how to deal with. The animal rights people would have a fit—or a field day, depending on how you looked at it. Enzo had never seen so much fur in his life. Walking out into the piazza was like walking into a convention of bears. They stood chatting in groups, walked arm in arm, and rode by on rickety bicycles, mink whispering, tatty plastic shopping bags dangling from the handles. Even the men wore long fur coats. He imagined Moscow was something like this. But with vodka. And more snow.

  Before venturing out, Enzo had taken time not only to call his grandmother and ask her to feed the cat, but also to feed himself, and to go back over his file on Angela Vari while he ate. After finishing with room service, he had taken a pen and marked up the tourist map Carla Rossetti had given him. Made little Xs on the old Spanish Synagogue, and on the corner of Via Mayr where her father had had his shop. He doubted, frankly, that she’d do anything that obvious—and since she was supposed to be dead he could hardly go knocking on doors and asking if anyone had seen her. But there was no harm in looking. He figured the detour would take him only a few minutes before being locked up all night watching CCTV tapes.

  Enzo walked along the walls of the Castello and passed under the arch that led out to Corso Libertà. The Duomo shimmered under the gaze of its floodlights. People thronged in front of it, their shadows dancing on the piazza. The market stalls were still open and doing brisk business. The scene looked almost medieval. It was the silence, as much as anything else, Enzo realized, that gave the town it’s slightly unreal air. As it was closed to traffic, the only noises that echoed off the buildings of the old city were human—laughter and snatches of conversation or arguments, punctuated by the whirr and rattle of bicycles and the sharp ding of their bells as they coasted over the cobbles.

  There was no way to tell anymore where the Ghetto had begun. No plaque or statue marked the place where the giant gates had once swung shut, locking away half the inhabitants from dusk to dawn. Enzo stopped in front of the newer synagogue where Bassani had worshipped, and where, in The Garden of the Finzi-Continis—which he had been disappointed to read in the hotel brochure didn’t actually exist—Micol had sat in blond splendor looking down on all the broken-hearted young men. There was a plaque by the door listing name after name, entire families who had been swept up during the German Occupation and shipped in cattle cars, east, toward sunrise and death. The street where Angela Vari had lived was opposite. Enzo turned down it and felt the past close around him.

  The houses were not that tall, most of them three stories. Jammed together, they blocked out what light there was, reducing the sky to nothing but a darkened strip. He felt as if he was walking into a canyon. There weren’t many streetlights. As a result, he missed the Spanish Synagogue, got to the end of the street before he realized his mistake, and doubled back. When he finally found it, he discovered that the door of the mangy brick building was padlocked, and the paint peeling. There was a plaque here, too. Something about the d’Este dukes, and then—Distrutta nel 1944 per mano dei Nazifacisti. Destroyed in 1944 at the hands of Nazifascists. He could barely make out the words. Someone passed on a bicycle, nothing more than a dark shape teetering down toward the corner. A pigeon rustled its feathers against the cold. A block away footsteps and laughter rose and died. Enzo turned and looked across the street.

  The house where Angela Vari had grown up was no different from the others. If anything, it was a little smaller. Narrow, brick, and only two stories high. There was a lamp over the front door,
which looked to be newly painted. Four windows looked out from each floor, shutters closed over all of them. Light snuck through the slats in the lower ones. The second story was dark. Enzo knew that during the war displaced families had sometimes moved into the ghettos and taken over whole houses and apartments. Furniture, clothing, pots, and pans. After the Jews had been rounded up and taken away, others had simply stepped into their lives. Sometimes, literally, into their shoes.

  He wondered if that had happened here. If that was how Angela Vari’s family had come to call this place home. Standing in the street, looking at the house, Enzo thought of the girl whose father had died, who had labored on here alone in what must have been her own kind of hell, a void of loneliness, and wondered where she was now. Had she survived all these years only to find the past repeating itself? Had she come back and found someone living her old life? Or had she found no one, and moved in herself, a ghost reclaiming its safe haven?

  For a moment, the idea gripped him, and he became convinced that that was exactly what she had done. That somehow she had gotten inside, found a key, gone up the stairs, and was there now, in the dark behind those closed shutters. So close that if he called her name she’d hear him.

  Enzo felt himself start to cross the street. Then he heard a phone. A young couple carrying grocery bags emerged out of the dark. He watched as in the light from the door lamp the woman dug her cell phone out of her pocket with her free hand, shifting a bulging bag to the other. The man laughed and fished in the other pocket of her jacket as she talked, pulling out a set of keys. They smiled at Enzo as they went up the steps to Angela Vari’s house. She was still talking as the door closed behind them. A minute later the upstairs lights went on. Enzo Saenz turned and walked away.