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 Rover. 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.”
“Understood,” Basil said, going back to the table and collecting his ledger. “I would be very happy to communicate with Mr. Zimmer on your behalf, but I will need permission to do so.”
“You don’t have to call yourself. You can just give me his number,” I pleaded. “Please, Basil.”
But Basil didn’t reply. He had walked to the far end of the trophy room, where he was returning something to a glass cabinet. I followed him and found a case filled with exotic objects—fossilized ammonites, butterflies pressed between sheets of glass, chunks of quartz, dozens of amethyst geodes, a stuffed hummingbird, and a string of sharp yellow teeth, perhaps fifty, bound together with twine.
“What is that?” I asked, walking to the cabinet.
“Trophies of another sort,” Basil said. “I have been cataloging the collection of rock crystals. They are extraordinary and should really be in a natural history museum rather than locked up in a dusty trophy room.”
I reached into the cabinet and took the string of teeth between my fingers.
“Wolves’ teeth,” Basil said. “Quite old, I believe. Collected for good luck and worn by generations of Montebiancos during the hunt.”
As I returned the teeth, something else caught my eye: a glossy white coil at the back of the shelf. “May I?”
Basil nodded in assent, and I lifted a long, thick braid of white hair from the cabinet. It was course, like horse’s hair, and thick as a rope. “What on earth . . . ?”
“Hair,” Basil said. “Quite a lot of it.”
I unfurled the coil. It slithered over the floor like a bullwhip. “Hair from what?”
“I cannot verify the story,” Basil said. “And it is, in all likelihood, apocryphal, but Guillaume told me that his grandfather Ambrose Montebianco, the twenty-sixth Count of Montebianco, your great-great-grandfather, killed the owner of that hair in the early nineteenth century.”
I turned back to him, fascinated. “Really?”
“The story goes that he came across a man while hunting. He shot him, then cut and braided his hair as a kind of trophy.”
“There’s so much of it,” I said, running the braid through my fingers as I wound it back into a coil and placed it on the shelf.
Basil lifted a photograph, tucked between two crystals, and showed it to me. “That is probably what the man looked like.”
I recognized the photo immediately as the one I had seen in Turin: the Beast of Nevenero.
“This fellow is not the owner of the hair, as this photograph was taken in the early twentieth century, but, from the account I heard from Guillaume, this man in the picture and the owner of the hair seem to be of the same breed.”
“How strange,” I said, examining the photo more closely. “I saw this photo before.”
“Let me guess: The Monsters of the Alps,” Basil said, shaking his head. “That book has done quite a lot of damage to this region. Look.” Basil turned the photograph over. Written in faint pencil was the word: Iceman.
“Iceman?” I asked, perplexed.
“That’s what the family called it,” Basil said. “Not very tasteful, if you ask me, to keep human trophies, but . . .” Basil returned the photograph to the cabinet and closed the door. “No one has asked me, so I leave it alone.”
With Basil’s help, I found Dolores’s rooms. She sat in her wheelchair near the fire and, hearing me at the door, asked Greta to show me in. I stepped into a huge, ornately decorated space, all silks and velvets, the colors bright and clashing. The decor was so different from the dour atmosphere of my rooms, so unexpected, that it felt like finding flowers and lemons in the greenhouse: a bright living thing in the dead of winter.
“Come in, child,” Dolores said, her green eyes fixed upon me. “Come in.”
Greta gave me a strange look, half frightened, half conspiratorial, and I realized she was trying to tell me that she had done it: the keys were back in the mews.
“That will be enough for now, Greta,” Dolores said, dismissing her and turning to me. “It is nearly time for my nap. Would you be so kind? My bed is there, beyond the chinoiserie.”
I steered Dolores between a pair of large oriental vases painted in jeweled colors and into a bedroom that was as Victorian as the salon: heavy brocade silk drapes, the floor covered with oriental carpets, every inch of the walls occupied by oil paintings of flowers. A cut crystal vase near the bed bloomed with pink peonies cut from the greenhouse.
“You look as strong as Greta,” Dolores said, eyeing me from her wheelchair. “Can you manage?”
“I think so,” I said, and after turning back the bed sheets, I slid my arms beneath her—one arm against her back, the other under her butt—and lifted. She was skin and bones against my chest, light as my suitcase, and I deposited her in her bed with ease.
“Would you mind putting some wood onto the fire?” she asked. “The cold creeps in so quickly.”
I took birch logs from a basket and lay them on the dying fire of the kachelofen.
“I’ve come to ask for your help,” I said, all my anger dissolving as I stood before Dolores. She seemed so frail and helpless. “Zimmer was supposed to return, but he hasn’t. Could you authorize Basil to call him?”
“Of course, I would love to help you,” Dolores said. “But it was not I who told Zimmer to stay away.”
“You didn’t?” I asked, perplexed.
Dolores shook her head, fixing me with a dark look. “You will have to speak to Vita. The servants answer to her.”
“But I thought she was . . .” I searched for the right word. “Disabled.”
“Her disabilities have never kept her from controlling the family,” Dolores said. “Her mother, Eleanor, was the only one who kept Vita in check, and while Eleanor died in nineteen forty-two, leaving the estate to her grandson Giovanni, Vita did her best to control things from behind the scenes.”
“But Giovanni was only”—I did the calculation with my grandfather’s year of birth, 1931—“eleven years old in nineteen forty-two.”
“There was a legal guardian installed, a version of Zimmer who managed everything until Giovanni and Guillaume were of age. When I met Guillaume in nineteen seventy-one, Giovanni was long gone and Guillaume ran the estate himself.” Her eyes filled with tears. “I loved Guillaume, but I admit, I didn’t have the clearest picture of his situation. My family had known the Montebiancos for generations—I am a descendant of the English Crawfords—and I was introduced to Guillaume on one of our skiing holidays. I married him before I understood what I was getting into, I daresay, and although we made the best of it, Vita made our lives impossible. We couldn’t invite friends to Nevenero. It was too difficult. We rarely traveled. Guillaume could never leave his mother. Not after Giovanni abandoned her. You know, Vita is a monster, but she suffered greatly after Giovanni left. She loved her sons to the point of obsession. Do you know that Giovanni didn’t even tell them—Vita and Guillaume—that he was leaving? He just took off in the middle of the night with one of the village girls.”
“My grandmother,” I said. “Marta.”
“Marta,” Dolores said. The name sounded ugly, coarse. “Well, Miss Marta was lucky. I imagine she and Giovanni had a splendid life in the New World. My life, on the other hand, was hell. Vita hated me because Guillaume loved me. He loved me more than he loved her—at least I have that to hold on to.”
Dolores glanced at me and, recovering her composure, said, “You might say that Vita and I have a long-standing feud. With time, it has become a kind of standoff. She has always had the upper hand—Guillaume protected her—but Guillaume is gone now. I just may win in the end. And if I do,” she said, smiling with pleasure, “you, and all the Montebiancos after you, win, too.”
The fire cracked and popped, the heat of it warming my back.
“I want to see her,” I said, determined to speak to Vita myself about Zimmer. “Maybe she will listen to me.”
“That can be arranged,” Dolores said, her gaze settled on me, as if I had come around to the very subject she had been hoping to discuss. “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but we have a wonderful greenhouse here at the castle.”
“Of course I’ve noticed,” I said. “The citrus trees are amazing.”
“The blood oranges are a great luxury in this climate,” she said, her eyes flashing with a sudden complicity. “A great luxury to be sure. But I’m not interested in citrus trees, my dear. I am much more concerned with what Sal has been cultivating for us.”
I remembered the rows of herbs Sal had harvested, the clipboard and the paper with the Latin words.
“Sal is quite an adept horticulturalist,” Dolores continued. “He has been growing some treasures for me. They are fickle things, even in the best of conditions, and difficult to cultivate at this altitude, or so I am told. But Sal has managed it. Alone, the plants are more or less harmless. Ingest one, and there would be stomach problems and an extended stay in the water closet, perhaps. But together, they form a very powerful poison, one that can eliminate a person altogether, should that person drink it.”
She met my gaze and held it. A tingling grew in my chest, a chilling and horrible sensation as I realized the purpose of the herbs Sal had collected in the greenhouse.
“The only question remaining,” Dolores said, “is when.”