The Hawthorne Season

by Riccardo Bruni

  “Oh, it’s all right,” says the mayor, smiling under his cowboy hat. “We all care about our woods, and I know this whole thing will blow over in no time. And Barbara, I promise you next time I’ll come and explain everything to that committee of ours. But tonight I want a nice glass of that wine and, if I can get to it, a nice hunk of bacon on a piece of bread, what do you say?”

  Akan serves the mayor as Mirna’s dough transforms into a crusty loaf.

  Barbara moves over a few steps. She looks up. Giulio’s window. The light is still on.

  “Is there room for me?” Adele appears next to Mirna and places her dough on the stone floor by the oven. “I couldn’t find a place to park, so I had to walk fifteen minutes to get here. A glass of wine wouldn’t hurt.”

  Dorina greets her cousin with a smile so strained it looks like her face is frozen. Barbara hands her a glass, and Mirna mimes a toast with hers. Now that her companion has joined the group, the Buraco quartet is complete.

  The mayor notices the friction in the air among the women and edges closer to Akan, who is adjusting a slice of bacon on the grill with some tongs.

  “Thank goodness it stopped snowing,” says Falconi.

  The Kurd smiles at him with his mouth full. In the other hand he’s holding some bread sandwiching a sausage.

  He’s drawing. Giulio Rodari is wielding a pencil again, but not for his next Teo the gnome adventure. He’s trying to reconstruct a picture only with the elements he can see in front of him. If it were just any illustration, it would be perfect as usual. But Giulio needs it to be something more. He needs it to be true.

  After what happened at that party, when he lost his memory, he managed to recover it by redrawing the faces of his friends and the journey he made later that night. Piece after piece, almost everything returned to its place. There are always holes, but sometimes he’s convinced that they shrink over the years. Now, however, he doesn’t have that kind of time. He must remember. If he really killed Patrizia, he won’t even try to defend his actions. But he needs to know what happened. He has to silence that deadly mixture of anxiety and terror that has been eating him from within.

  His mother has hidden away a lot of things from Bridge Day. She tucked them all into a green envelope. There were pictures of her sister in the newspaper. A piece of her sister is still inside of his mother. That’s always how it is when a twin dies. And they were truly identical in a lot of ways. Sometimes they had entire conversations between them without even opening their mouths. Maybe if he could find those clippings, it would jog his memory. There were interviews with Patrizia in there, photos of her. All of it from the days they first met.

  He knows where the envelope is. He goes to get it.

  Grazia and Donato are inside the patrol car. They’re nearing the GeoService office for special surveillance duty arranged by Scalise.

  Apparently, the company called the command ranting about a lawsuit against unknown parties for acts of vandalism. So Scalise asked someone to go over and take a look.

  “I don’t know if he’s messing with me or if it really did get that far,” says Grazia. Donato is sitting next to her, but this time he’s in the passenger seat. He still has a lingering headache from the chocolate liqueur he got from the lumberjacks at Bar Fuga. “I mean, I told him how things are. And then he keeps talking about my men, he tells me to send someone. To do what? Monitor a shack?”

  “Boss, do you think I’ll ever be able to explain my situation to him?”

  “Donato. Did you hear me? I told him we’re only two people, and he keeps talking to me as if it was no big deal. As if I had all the staff in the world available. Or is he totally out of it? That would explain why they sent him here after his Rome assignment. Or maybe this is his way of telling me that the issue at my station is my problem alone and he has no intention of raising a finger for it. You know we have to do night shifts too, right? Do you remember what happened the last time you didn’t sleep for three days? You were so hyped up on coffee your hands were shaking. We’re useless in that state. I don’t even have five minutes to talk to my own daughter. And she smokes weed, did you know that? I know. I need to talk to her, but instead I got sucked into an interrogation that ran all afternoon and now this and in an hour we have to be at the Gherarda again. Do you want some real advice?”

  “I don’t know, maybe this isn’t the right time—”

  “Leave this place. I’m serious. Get out of here.”

  “That would be a shame, since—”

  A noise.

  “Did you hear that?” Grazia asks.

  They get out of the car.

  “It came from behind the shack,” says Donato, standing up straighter.

  They turn on their flashlights. Hands on their guns.

  “Is there anybody there?” says Grazia.

  Again.

  They circle the shack and point their flashlights.

  A black cat is licking its paw next to a fallen stack of wood.

  “What are you doing here?” Grazia asks. She removes her hand from her gun and walks toward the cat. “You gave me a pretty good scare, did you know that? Look—”

  “Boss, over there!”

  Donato points into the woods. A green light. Just a flash, then it vanishes.

  “What the hell could that be?” asks Grazia.

  “An ignis fatuus,” says Donato.

  “A what?”

  “An ignis fatuus. I read about them online. They’re common in haunted forests.”

  “Haunted by what, exactly?”

  “Don’t pretend you don’t know what I’m talking about, boss.”

  “You don’t seriously believe there are spirits here, do you?”

  “I believe what I see. And what I just saw may have been an ignis fatuus.”

  “All right, let’s go check it out.”

  They walk into the woods.

  “There’s no one here, Donato. There’s not a single footprint in the snow.”

  “There it is again,” says Donato.

  A green light flashes in the direction he’s pointing.

  “Anyone there?” shouts Grazia. “This isn’t funny.”

  They walk in that direction. The green light appears again. But it’s even farther away now.

  “There it is again—there,” says Donato. “It looks like it’s moving away from us.”

  Grazia looks at it. She turns back. It’s dark in the woods, and it will take a while to get back to the patrol car by the light of their flashlights alone.

  “I think this looks like something else, Donato.”

  “What’s that, boss?”

  “Like we’re two suckers.”

  They’ve gone deeper into the woods than they intended. It’s pitch-black, and the beams from their flashlights don’t reach long enough for them to follow their own tracks. When they finally make it back to the clearing where the GeoService office stands, what they find, for Grazia, is no surprise.

  Where the old scrawl that Maglio’s lumberjacks cleaned had been, there has appeared another, also in red.

  THE SPIRITS OF THE WOODS WILL NOT ALLOW IT

  And under the writing, a drawing of a giant deer head. It has a demonic look to it, with drops of paint dripping from the horns, resembling blood.

  “How did they manage to draw it in so little time?” Donato asks.

  “They had one of those stencils that graffiti artists use,” Grazia answers. “Looks like they didn’t have any dead foxes on hand this time.” She approaches the deer head. She takes a handkerchief from her jacket pocket and dabs at the paint. She looks at the handkerchief: the red really looks like blood this time. “They were organized. Ignis fatuus and all.”

  Giulio opens the wardrobe in his mother’s room. He finds the green envelope where his mother put all the clippings from those days. But there’s something else under the envelope. It’s another envelope, containing the photograph that had been hanging on the wall of the bar. The frame is intact; th
ere’s no trace of the damage his mother referred to. Perhaps it represents one of their last happy days, when they were all still together. A New Year’s Eve at the Gherarda, back in the early eighties. His father, as he recalls, died not long after. In the picture, he has a huge mustache and is wearing a tight waistcoat. The inevitable cigarette in one hand and an arm around his wife’s shoulders. Barbara, in an evening dress, an arm around her husband’s waist, and a hand resting on her son’s shoulder. Giulio in the middle, smiling. He’s just a kid, with long hair and huge teeth. Amanda is the only one who isn’t looking at the camera. She’s sitting at the table, smiling, with a glass in her hand, looking over to her right as if she were greeting someone. She’s posed that way to cover the left side of her neck, where she has a scar, a burn she got when she was a little girl from a fallen pot of boiling water. Giulio can remember his mother’s story about that episode. Amanda was cooking the eyes of a cat. She had found it in the street, dead, and she knew—Barbara didn’t remember how—that she could gain superhuman night vision if she made a potion out of its eyes.

  She had been a witch as a child.

  Teo the gnome says that time is just an illusion, because things that seem so long ago can still touch you, right on the heart. The gnome sometimes says things that can’t be included in a children’s story. Because children don’t have a sense of time. They already know it’s just an illusion.

  My name is Theophrastus Grimblegromble, but you can call me Teo, if you please. I have a red beard and a nice green hat.

  His aunt Amanda was the first person to tell him about the gnomes.

  “When you can’t remember something,” she told him one night, “ask your gnome friend to remind you.”

  Patrizia’s scent is overwhelming. It’s one of the last nights they spent together. Giulio tries to deny it, but he already senses her distance. Something’s wrong. She’s moving away from him. He hugs her tight to him, with all his strength. He clings. Beyond her is the abyss, and he doesn’t want to fall into it again.

  “Let me go. You’re hurting me.”

  Patrizia turns. She looks at him. There it is, her face, right in front of his.

  Giulio feels he could do it now. He could give life to that portrait he was attempting before. He’s about to close the wardrobe and go back to drawing when another envelope catches his eye.

  He opens it. There’s a document inside. It’s a preliminary letter of intent.

  His mother is selling the Gherarda to GeoService.

  SEVEN

  Adele parks her olive-green Panda four by four in its usual spot, next to the old fountain in the little square. It’s still the Evening of Bread, and the streets are echoing with the voices of revelers. Motorcycles roar over the noise. They will persist until dawn. Hooligans. Kids who want nothing more from life than to get wasted and make a scene.

  She turns the key in the wooden door. The houses are old, no one wants to buy them, and they aren’t worth a cent. Because they’re too narrow and can’t be widened without knocking them down and starting over. She’s spent years envying one of those newer homes down in the valley, built not long ago. The terraces, the large windows, the wide and luminous staircases. She passed by the Carli Agency and looked at the ads. In one of those modern homes, someone might have been able to take Marcello out for some air. But it’s all about to end anyway.

  She climbs the narrow stairs, arriving at the narrow door.

  “I’m home,” she says. Even her voice seems narrower, here inside.

  She turns on the foyer light. Entering the kitchen, she flicks on that light too and rests her freshly baked bread on the table.

  “It came out so well, a delight,” she says, pulling off a piece and tasting it. “When it’s still hot like this, it’s the best thing in the world.”

  She takes off her coat and leaves it on the chair.

  “And you should have seen Dorina, how pleased she was. And I believe it. With the habit she has of taking things that don’t belong to her, of course she took the opportunity to swipe herself some supper, living alone and all, the old cheapskate.”

  She enters her bedroom and turns on the light. Adele hates darkness and always turns on all the lights.

  “She’s deaf as a bat, always wearing that hearing aid and thinking people don’t notice. She tries to hide it.”

  Marcello, her husband, is sitting in his wheelchair, facing the window.

  “I can’t believe that lazy Romanian. She hasn’t spun you around once all evening.”

  Adele approaches, takes the chair, and deftly swivels it around. Marcello’s face is frozen. Twisted in a grimace. His mouth is open, a filament of drool clinging to it. Adele dries it with the wrinkled napkin on his legs. He’s been like this for years. Adele forces herself each day to forget how many. She doesn’t want to know. She doesn’t even remember the last real words they exchanged before the imaginary dialogues that she has been carrying on since then, trying to interpret what he would say if he were still here with her.

  “I’ll put on some TV for you, what do you say? Let’s see if there’s one of those westerns you like so much. But don’t think I’m going to let you sit here all night in front of the television. Night is made for sleeping, and you know it, my dear sir.” Adele searches for the remote control. “What did you say? Were there a lot of people there? Yeah, there were. When it comes to eating and drinking for free, they appear like mushrooms.” She finds the remote control and turns on the TV. She searches for a movie, putting the volume on low. “I know, I know, you never go out and you want to know the word around town . . . but what do you want me to tell you? The people around here just go on and on about the same old things.”

  “And did you talk about that thing?” Marcello doesn’t ask.

  “I didn’t have the chance, but anyway, there’s not much to say. It will all go as planned, you’ll see.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure. I wouldn’t say so if I wasn’t. You ask all these questions, as if you don’t trust me.”

  “I trust you.”

  “Well, that’s good, because if I hadn’t found out on my own that your father left that little piece of land in the woods, I don’t know how we’d get out of this mess. Out of this old, damp house that makes my bones ache.”

  “You really are on the ball.”

  “I know, I know, don’t worry, sir.” Adele caresses her husband’s face. It’s as hard as stone. His eyes are motionless, fixed in a strained and unnatural stare. “You don’t have to worry about a thing, you know that, right?”

  “You know what’s best for everyone. I trust you.”

  Adele hears the noise emanating from her husband’s belly and, soon after that, the stink of shit.

  “You couldn’t at least warn me?” she says. “I would have put that thing on you.”

  “I couldn’t say anything in time. I was thinking about when all this will end, and I’m a little excited,” her husband doesn’t answer.

  “Do you think the Romanian can take care of it tomorrow? I have a terrible backache tonight.”

  “Don’t worry, Adelina. Of course I can wait. Go to sleep in your room, I’ll watch some TV and nod off.”

  “Good night, then.”

  “Good night.”

  Adele looks at him again as she closes the door. Marcello is motionless, with the blue light of the TV flashing against his contorted face.

  Before going to sleep she goes to the bathroom. She opens the medicine cabinet. There is a box with a padlock. She carries the key around her neck. Inside is a syringe, at the ready. As soon as that thing is done, she can leave this place forever. Get away to somewhere warm, far from here. Far from her cousin. But she has no intention of leaving Marcello alone in his condition. Inside that locked box that only the key around her neck can open is a loaded syringe that will allow her to bring her husband with her, wherever she goes.

  Forever.

  EIGHT

  Grazi
a dropped Donato off at the station to rest for a few hours on the cot so he could cover the morning shift. The last hurdle of the day is the ride to the Gherarda, and she can do it alone, before returning home.

  She stops in front of the hotel and turns off the engine. At this hour, Viola will already be asleep. She’ll have to find another time to talk to her.

  She rests her head back on the seat. She tries to relax, gather her thoughts. To review and reprioritize her commitments as clearly as possible now that she has a moment to think.

  She looks toward the Gherarda and sees a cloud of smoke rising against the glow from one of the outside lights. There’s someone sitting on the stairs to the hotel. She can just make out the dark profile, which seemed to be as much a part of the hotel as the nearby pile of wood. He’s wrapped in a blanket. It’s Giulio. He lifts his arm and waves at her. Grazia gets out of the car and approaches him.

  “Are you trying to freeze to death?” she asks him.

  “I suppose I shouldn’t be out here,” Giulio says, blowing out the smoke of the cigarette between his fingers. “Because of the ordinance, or whatever the hell it’s called.”

  “That’s right. According to the ordinance, you’re actually considered a fugitive right now. But if you give me a cigarette, I promise I won’t report you.”

  “They’re Akan’s,” says Rodari, handing her the pack of Camel Lights. “He hides them in the sideboard behind the cans. He says he doesn’t smoke. And I quit ten years ago, so I get to deny taking them. You know how it goes.”

  “I stopped eighteen years ago when I got pregnant. I win.”

  Grazia sits beside him. Maybe he’s a killer, but maybe not even he really knows for certain. Does it matter?

  “It’s a good reason to start over,” says Rodari.

  “Do you remember the time you drew me?”

  “The warrior queen.”

  “You actually remember.”

  “It’s not like I fried my entire brain, you know.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean it that way. I heard that—”

  “Nothing to do with the case tonight, okay? Just two old classmates hanging out on a stoop after last call, sneaking cigarettes.”