The Ancestor

by Danielle Trussoni

  I could hear Luca picking up the base of the phone and walking to the far end of the bar. I could picture it all perfectly—the whiskey shots with beer chasers all lined up on the bar.

  “Where are you? You were supposed to be back by now. I’ve been so worried,” he said. “I’ve been calling that Enzo guy, but he’s not responding. Are you back home? Why would you just disappear like that?”

  I felt a wave of love and gratitude wash over me. Even though I had caused him so much trouble, he hadn’t forgotten about me. He had been worried. He had called Enzo. There was one person in the world who had been looking for me.

  I heard Luca’s father in the background, laughing and talking to one of the regulars. It was definitely Friday, everyone out spending their paycheck. Nothing ever changed in Milton.

  Suddenly, the phone went silent. “Luca?” I said, afraid I’d lost him. I heard the panic in my voice. “Are you there?”

  “I’m here,” he said. “Just moving to a quieter spot. So where are you? What’s going on?”

  “I’m in Nevenero,” I said. “The estate told me that I needed to come here to meet my great-aunt Dolores, but there is way more going on here than they told me. Dolores is sick, and there is this crazy tower, the northeast tower, it’s called, where my great-grandmother—who is alive, it turns out, and has some kind of genetic disorder—is being held. Luca, things are totally fucked up here. I need to come home.”

  “Hold on, hold on,” he said, his voice calm in an effort to bring me down a notch. “Are you hurt?”

  “No, I’m okay,” I said. “But I need to get out of here. This guy Zimmer was supposed to get me, but he hasn’t come back, and it’s been . . . What’s the date?”

  “Friday, January nineteenth,” he said.

  “I’ve been here three weeks? Do you understand that I am trapped? We’re snowed in. There are no roads open. Nothing.”

  “I understand,” he said. “I’m going to find a way to get you out of there. I’ll get in touch with Enzo somehow. If he doesn’t respond, I’ll come get you myself. But I need to ask you something first. What’s going to happen when you’re back home?”

  Of all the questions he might have asked, it was one I hadn’t expected. And the one that hit me hardest. “What do you mean?”

  “After what happened in Turin . . .” he continued. “Not the fight, but everything else. After that, I thought things would change for us.”

  “I thought that, too,” I said, tears blurring my vision. I had hoped that we’d passed through the darkest part of our marriage and could start again.

  His voice was soft, more tender than angry. “I’m sorry for what I said to you. I should have told you earlier about what Nonna said. I just need to know if we’re going to make this work.”

  I wiped tears away with the back of my hand. “I’m sick of hurting you,” I said. “It’s all I’ve done for years now.”

  “You know I’d do anything for you.”

  My heart fell. Of course I knew that. He had proven it time and time again, sacrificing himself for me. I listened to the bar—the song on the jukebox, the voices in the background—and felt a deep, painful longing to be back home with him.

  “I want to start over,” I said. “I know we can make things work.”

  “We can adopt,” he said.

  “I want that, too,” I said. “But there’s one thing I need to know.” I took a deep breath, finding the courage to ask. “After the baby was born, was there paperwork you filled out?”

  “Just what the nurses gave me.”

  “Did you have to write down a name?”

  There was a long, tense pause, and I could feel the pain, months and months of mourning, collecting. “I called him Robert,” he said, his voice cracking. “After my dad.”

  My eyes filled with tears. “That was a good choice, I think.”

  We sat in silence for a moment, loss settling between us. Finally, Luca cleared his throat and said, “I’m going to talk to my dad. We’ll get you out of there.”

  “I love you,” I said. “I can’t wait to see you.”

  “I love you, too. I’ll be there soon.”

  I hung up the phone and walked into the hallway, trembling with emotion, fear and relief and dread, all the feelings I hadn’t expressed to Luca. Now that he knew what had happened, everything would change. He would get in touch with Enzo, and Enzo would make Zimmer send a helicopter, and I would be on my way out of there. Soon, I would be thousands of miles away from the Alps, safe at home with Luca. We would be starting the next chapter of our lives.

  These thoughts were going through my mind when I looked up and found Greta staring at me, her eyes huge with astonishment. Before I could utter a word, she turned and hurried down the corridor as if chased.

  After my call with Luca, a desperate restlessness overtook me. I walked through the castle at all times of the day and night, searching for the helicopter from various angles, catching the sun from the salon and the moon from the grand hall and the snow-topped mountains from the library turret. I checked the sky from my bedroom every evening, opening the window wide and searching the crepuscular light for a helicopter on the horizon. Each morning, I prayed that Greta would arrive with news that I would be returning to Turin that afternoon.

  One evening, as I was reading family records in the library, I wandered to the window. It was early, perhaps four o’clock, the sky darkening as the sun set. There was no helicopter on the horizon but, as I turned back to my reading, I saw a smudge of dark smoke drift across the sky. At first I thought it was a distortion created by the ice on the glass, or a low dark cloud, but when I opened the window to get a clear view, I knew for certain: there was smoke rising from the village below.

  I ran downstairs, thinking of how I could get to Nevenero. Sal had said it was too far to walk, but that was ridiculous: it was ten minutes away, maximum, even walking against the wind. If I could only get there, I would find whoever had lit that fire. With their help, I would be out of the Alps that very night.

  I grabbed the mink from the cloakroom and ran out to the courtyard. It had snowed all afternoon, and while Sal had plowed the courtyard, pushing the snow up into piles along the perimeter, the flagstones were icy. I slipped, steadied myself, and, while regaining my balance, saw it: the enormous iron gate blocking my way. I walked to it and gave it a hard push. It didn’t budge.

  While Greta and Basil (and Bernadette, I supposed, although I had still not met the cook) had rooms in the castle, Sal lived in a modern apartment in the mews. As I ventured through the open door, I saw that the ground floor was unfinished, unheated, and overflowing with equipment. To one side, a snowcat sat high on its wheels and belts like a miniature tank. Sal used the snowcat to groom the snow beyond the moat, including the east lawn, packing the surface to the texture of a ski run. The other side of the mews was cluttered with tools, boxes of trash bags, stacks of slate shingles, and plastic bins filled with dog food. There was a metal pen in one corner where the dogs slept—Fredericka and three other Bergamasco shepherds. A wooden staircase led up to Sal’s apartment, and just behind this staircase hung a corkboard filled with hundreds of hooks.

  The dogs went crazy the second I stepped into the mews. They jumped up, scratching and clawing at their cage, barking and growling, desperate to get at me. I froze at the sight of them, and I wanted to turn and run, but I saw that the keys—the ring with the big, old-fashioned gate key—were there, not far away, hanging on the corkboard.

  Suddenly, the door opened upstairs. I pulled back. Above a burst of Italian opera, Sal shouted for the dogs to shut up and then, without so much as looking in my direction, he slammed the door closed. Giving Fredericka a smile of triumph, I walked behind the staircase and grabbed the keys. But as I opened the gate, and pushed back the heavy door, my heart fell: the smoke was gone, blown away by the wind.

  I was positive that I had seen smoke, but the only way to be sure was to go to the highest point of the grou
nds, where I could see the village clearly. Pushing the gate closed, I took the footpath around the exterior of the castle, relieved to find that Sal had shoveled. It was hard enough to fight the wind without wading through snow in my running shoes.

  Nevertheless, my feet were soaked by the time I reached the east lawn. A full moon had risen into the clear, dark sky so that the snow glistened and the hedges fattened with shadow. I climbed past the pond, past the white mulberry trees, to the mausoleum, where I stood high above the village of Nevenero.

  The village was tucked into a ravine below the castle, and I would have missed it entirely without the light of the moon. There were clots of houses, twenty, perhaps more. Between the castle and the village lay a smooth sweep of snow. The roads were buried. The houses were dark. There was nothing but gales of wind blowing down from the mountain, whistling. Nobody could possibly be down there. I could brave the wind and snow, but it would do me no good. Nevenero was empty.

  I had turned to go when a sound came from somewhere beyond the mausoleum. I stopped to listen. There it was again: snow crunching as something moved over the east lawn. An animal, most likely, I thought as I walked past the white mulberry trees, straining to see across the lawn. At the edge of my vision, a flicker: someone walking near the greenhouse. There was a flash of white in the darkness as the figure paused, then disappeared behind the greenhouse.

  My first thought was that Sal must be collecting herbs again, but I dismissed it: Sal was listening to opera in the mews. Then I wondered if it could be a large animal—perhaps a bear that had wandered down from the mountain. Or maybe I’d been tricked by fog settling over the pond. On cold, wet nights, sheets of mist collected over the valley, layering the lawn with a milky film. But while it might have been possible that a low cloud had twisted over the lawn, it was not the case on that particular night. The sky was clear, with a full moon and stars blazing overhead. No, it wasn’t fog. It could not have been anything other than what I saw: a person walking across the east lawn.

  Whoever it was, I wanted to get as far away from it as possible. I hurried down the path to the pond, heading toward the gate in the hedge, the chill air sweeping over my skin. The temperature had dropped, and the air was so cold it caught in my chest and compressed, settling heavy in my lungs, making it difficult to breathe. The mink wasn’t enough to keep me warm, and my shoes were soaking wet, but it didn’t matter—I was too numb with fear to care.

  I jogged past the pond and was almost at the gate in the hedge when I saw a figure standing in the distance, beyond the greenhouse by the castle wall. It was tall, with long hair, which made me believe it to be a woman, yet, as I strained to see more clearly, I couldn’t be sure.

  Whatever it was, it seemed as surprised as I was. In that moment, the two of us frozen with fear, I became paralyzed, unable to breathe, unable to even blink. It stared at me, and I stared at it, stunned. My heart beat hard, the sound thrumming in my ears. Finally, I turned away, breaking the moment, and the figure ran.

  Sixteen

  What happened on the east lawn left me too unnerved to sleep. I lay in bed, my mind circling what I had experienced, dissecting the encounter in the way one might track the memory of a car accident, desperate to create a logical sequence out of a chaotic tragedy. After the person ran, I had stood there for what seemed a very long time, too afraid and disoriented to move. I almost believed I’d imagined the whole thing, but it had left several clusters of footprints in the snow. I’d squatted down to get a better look and found there, illuminated in the moonlight, the impression of a large, flat foot. The snow was powdery, the print imprecise, but it was clear enough to see that it had not been an animal.

  Back in the courtyard, I leaned against the gate, breathing so hard the world seemed to drain away. There was only the cold metal against my back, the flash of stars overhead, and the realization that whomever I saw on the east lawn, that strange pale creature, was not something in my head. It was real.

  By the time the sun rose, I had managed to convince myself that everything I had experienced on the east lawn—the strange apparition of what could only have been a woman, the footprints in the snow, all of it—could be explained in a logical fashion. Obviously, there was someone living in the castle I hadn’t met yet. It couldn’t have been my great-grandmother—the woman had been too young—but perhaps it had been the cook, Bernadette, collecting herbs for her medicines from the greenhouse. Basil had warned me that Bernadette’s appearance was peculiar, and the woman I had discovered was definitely that. It had been a dark, windy night; she had taken me by surprise, and I had simply overreacted.

  Greta brought a tray to my room and put it on my desk. I got up and poured myself coffee. I hadn’t slept at all and needed caffeine. As I stirred in some cream, something in the distance caught my eye: smoke rising from Nevenero village. I almost dropped my cup. “Do you see that?” I asked Greta, stepping closer to the window and pushing back the curtains to see more clearly. There was smoke rising from the village. Someone was burning a fire in one of the houses. Nevenero wasn’t empty after all.

  But Greta wasn’t interested in the smoke, and she didn’t look out the window. Instead, she stared at me, her large, unblinking eyes filled with worry.

  “Greta,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”

  She nodded her head: Yes, something was wrong.

  “What is it?”

  She fixed her gaze upon my desk, staring at Sal’s ring of keys. “He has been looking everywhere for these,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.

  In my terrified state, I hadn’t thought to put Sal’s keys back. In fact, I couldn’t remember if I had locked the gate when I came back from the east lawn.

  “Would you put them back for me?” I pleaded. “Please?”

  She shook her head: No, she wasn’t going to take them back.

  “But you could hang them in the mews and he would never notice,” I said.

  Tears welled in her eyes, and she shook her head again. “I can’t, madame.”

  “Please, Greta,” I said. “He would never know.”

  “You don’t know why Sal is here, do you?” she whispered.

  It hadn’t struck me until that moment, but I had no idea why Sal, a healthy, decent-looking man in his early forties, would live as he did, so far away from the world. “He needs the work?” I ventured.

  She shook her head, her eyes wide with feeling. “He killed his brother,” she said. “He didn’t mean to. He shot him. It happened during an argument.”

  While this news was unexpected, something about it matched up with the image I had of Sal. “Why isn’t he in jail?”

  “Mr. Zimmer,” she whispered. “Mr. Zimmer helped him. And now he helps Madame Dolores to repay his debt.”

  I was furious. Zimmer had lied to me about everything—Dolores’s reasons for wanting to see me, Vita’s existence, and even Nevenero, which was clearly populated. The estate had manipulated me and had sent me off to the middle of nowhere, where a murderer held the keys to the gate. As soon as I got back to the real world, I would make sure they understood how angry I was.

  “Mr. Zimmer is going to be answering to me about that,” I said at last. “As is Dolores.”

  Greta gave me a terrified look as she picked up the tray with my breakfast.

  I grabbed the keys from the desk and held them out to her. “Take them,” I said. “Please. If you help me now, I will do everything I can to help you find out what happened to your son.”

  She looked at me for a long, somber moment before taking the keys and slipping them into her pocket.

  Dolores had not left her rooms in weeks, and although I knew that her health had deteriorated and she was not well enough to see me, I was so upset by that point, so frustrated and confused about what was going on, that I didn’t care. Debilitated or not, Dolores was going to call Zimmer and tell him to come get me. At the very least, she would instruct Sal to take me down to the village in the Range Rove
r. It didn’t matter how it happened, but I would be leaving Montebianco Castle by nightfall.

  I hurried from my rooms and headed to the first-floor salon, where Dolores took tea in the mornings when she felt well. It was empty, the damask drapes closed over the window, so I walked the cold, drafty hallways to the west wing, trying to find Dolores’s rooms. It had been weeks since I wheeled her there after our talk in the portrait gallery, and I had forgotten the way. I must have taken a wrong turn near the ballroom, because I walked in circles for another half an hour or so before I came to a set of double doors, open, light flooding the corridor.

  I stepped into an enormous wood-paneled hall filled with rows of animal heads—bear, mouflon, chamois, and stag—mounted on the walls from floor to ceiling. The beasts were so lifelike that they seemed to follow me as I moved, their glass eyes tracking me.

  “Pretty impressive taxidermy, wouldn’t you say?” Basil said.

  I turned to find him sitting at a table, his ledger spread out before him. He stood, closed the ledger, and joined me.

  “But the really impressive trophies are the ibex, over here.” He led me to a wall of mounted horns, each pair sharp and erect as sabers. “The family has over a thousand pairs of ibex horns mounted in this trophy room. It used to be a sign of virility to capture an ibex, and the Montebiancos were nothing if not virile. They only stopped trapping the poor things when they became endangered in the nineteenth century.”

  I felt, suddenly, a kinship with the ibex: captured, trapped, on the verge of extinction. “Basil, I need your help,” I said. “I’ve had enough. It’s time to call Zimmer and tell him to come get me.”

  “I see.” I must have sounded as desperate as I felt, because Basil gave me a look of concern. “I know Dolores has been unwell, but perhaps I can speak with her.”

  “You know his number,” I said. “Why don’t you call him for me? I can’t stay here any longer.”