The man swiped at a cobweb. One of the women must have missed it yesterday.
Not that a cobweb was bound to draw much attention to itself when there were entire sections of plaster crumbling down every time he slammed a door too roughly, but he had been hired to prepare the property and that was a responsibility he wouldn’t shirk. Even if he had to pluck spiders out one at a time.
Wiping his hands against his trousers, he peered into the kitchen. Clean, bare. Just as the new owners had requested.
The man still didn’t quite understand how the property had passed on to the hands of the couple who would be arriving in three days. From Milano, of all places. An arrangement, a scandal of some kind. Something to do with a stolen patent, if he wasn’t mistaken. But it was all very peculiar.
Then again, everything about this place was peculiar.
He walked down the corridor to the music room, or at least that was what he’d gotten into the habit of calling it, for the piano had been there. Though he supposed he could have as easily called it the blood room.
He sighed at the dull stains on the wooden boards. He and the local women he’d hired had tried their best, but there was just so much any of them could do against all that red. Even the piano, which he’d been loath to toss out and had taken to his own home, still had traces of it on its keys, which nothing could remove. From the rumors that had spread through Ovada, the man, the perpetrator of the crimes, had fallen against it when he’d shot himself, coming to rest on the bench, hands held out to his wife.
And then there were the claw marks on the doorframe.
His gaze lingered over a set of deep gouges on the wood, much too high for any animal to have made. He and the local women had tried to hide them, but every bit of wood paste they applied cracked right off. Like they refused to be covered up.
Not for the first time since he’d taken on this task, he felt the hairs on his arms rise.
Why anyone would want to come live in a place like this, he didn’t know. Yes, he’d heard the new owner had aspirations of putting the mill back to work, but he was bringing his wife along with him and this was no place for a woman.
Still, it wasn’t any of his concern. He had done what he’d been hired to do and cleared the house of all traces of the previous owners. He’d even had the astoundingly shoddy electrical work ripped out. The villa was as bare as a newborn. The only thing that remained was the stone table in the largest sala, which was impossible to so much as shift. If the new owner—an ingegnere Pisani, if he remembered correctly—wanted it removed, he’d have to hire people to take a sledgehammer to it. It seemed a shame, for it was very old and had likely seen its share of extraordinary meals, but it wasn’t any of his concern.
The man crossed the courtyard and walked to the door, stepping out onto the colonnade. The summer sun blazed down on the villa, the torrent talking to itself as birds sang in clashing choruses. Despite the heat, there was a slight breeze that smelled of pine and of something darker but not unpleasant.
Even he had to admit it was rather lovely like this, out here.
He took the heavy iron key from his vest pocket and began pulling the door closed.
Somewhere in the forest, a horse cried out. Likely from a nearby farm, lost.
It was as the door clicked into place, in that second, that he heard the piano, the lilting first chords of a waltz.
The piano that was no longer in the music room because it was in his home.
His skin prickled as a gust of winter air tried to push him back, off balance. He shoved the key into the lock at the center of the puffed angel face and turned it before racing down the steps.
He kept waiting for the coldest of hands to grip his arms. To pull him back.
No. No matter how enticing it might sometimes look, there was something wrong with the place. He’d known it from the moment he’d first seen it and he was not one to ignore his instincts. No one should live here.
He, for one, would make certain he never stepped foot on the land again.
And that piano would be firewood.