Chapter 35

Heading back to the convent, I felt the heavy weight of failure on my shoulders.

I was no closer to proving that Sophie had not taken her own life. And I was having my own doubts. For a teenage girl who was already upset by the thought that her father was cheating on her mother, the truth—so much worse than she’d suspected—must have been devastating. I could only imagine the shock of discovering that other family. Seeing her father’s happy face prominent among the Moretti family photographs. She’d wanted to spill it all to someone—Cristiano, Sister Assunta, maybe even me—but she couldn’t say the words. Maybe she had felt so powerless that she just didn’t want to live.

But in the depths of my heart, I couldn’t believe it.

What else could I do? I had asked a lot of questions and had few useful answers. The only person I hadn’t spoken to was Bianca. She could have contacted Sophie. Sophie could have let her into the convent. And she could have left the convent in the frantic moments just after Sophie’s body plunged to the ground. The police that were in the piazza for crowd control would have rushed to the body, made calls, focused on securing the area from the pulsing crowd—but would they immediately have guarded the door of the convent, so that no one could have left? Still, even if that scenario could have happened, there was that locked door.

I stopped at a gelateria and ordered a cone of some exotic flavor, chocolate-based. Walking on with my cone, I thought about Sophie’s exchange with Varinia Santoro the morning before her death. I kept trying to find meaning in Sophie’s words as they played and played again in my mind: Something I saw when I was going to my bathroom. Something about Varinia, surely, because she had practically frozen when Varinia spoke to her. You seemed very confused, Varinia had said. Sophie was drunk, and Varinia had wanted her to believe that whatever she’d seen was imagined, rather than real. But what was it that Sophie had seen?

I finished my gelato and walked a little faster. My phone rang as I crossed the piazza, heading toward the convent. “Alex!” I said. “I’m glad it’s you. I should’ve called you earlier.”

Though he tried for initial pleasantries, I detected something ominous in his voice.

“Are you all right?” I asked, thinking first, as I always did, about his health.

“Nothing wrong with me,” he said, “but I’m afraid there’s something very wrong here. Bianca came back, and—Jordan, this is all so terribly confusing.”

“Bianca’s back? Isn’t that a good thing?” I said before it hit me. Bianca would have come back for one reason, only. She had returned to tell the Moretti family everything.

And that was exactly what she’d done.

“I can’t even begin to tell you how it all happened, but Angelica is beside herself. The very idea that Raffaele has a family in another part of Italy, that he’s deceived everyone for many years, and Sophie was his daughter”—Alex’s heightened emotion was not like him, but he had witnessed Angelica’s reaction to this shocking news. How upsetting it must have been to him—to everyone at the villa.

“I’m so sorry, Alex. It’s hard to believe,” I said.

He waited a beat. “Jordan, you didn’t know about this, did you?”

I hesitated, but I had to be truthful. “Not until yesterday,” I said. “I couldn’t tell you, not on the phone. I saw Raff at the police station. That’s how I found out.”

He didn’t reply immediately, but then he said, “I’m going to stay here a while longer. For Angelica. Rob and Ambra have asked me to stay.”

“Of course you should,” I said.

Before we ended the call, I asked if Bianca was still at the villa. Alex said she was clearing out all of her things. He had no idea where she was going.

I was sure I’d never have the chance to ask her any questions about Sophie.

“So cruel,” Alex said. “So very cruel.” I suspected he was talking about Bianca, the cruelty she’d shown in revealing Raff’s treachery to Angelica. Like hitting Angelica with a brick.

But Alex could have meant Raff, who had left so much heartbreak in his path.

* * * * *

Paul had texted once, earlier in the day. Apparently, he’d spent the afternoon making and receiving calls to and from Paris and the States. He would come by for me at six-thirty, he said. “I want to show you a sight you should not miss. Please be sure you will be warm.”

I checked the time as I approached the convent, glad I’d have a chance to unwind—more than two hours—but also feeling the electric anticipation of being with Paul again, something new and thrilling and confusing, too, because in a couple of days we’d leave Florence, and what then? Could I be satisfied with calling it an exciting, lovely fling and letting it go at that?

Just outside the entrance, Ivonna passed by on her Vespa and waved. She pulled her motorscooter around to the side of the convent, and, since I’d followed her on Sunday, I knew she’d be coming through the garden and entering the building near the breakfast room. I retrieved my room key from the office and went to meet her.

She used the stepping stones that led around the fountain but did not continue into the maze of hedges—or past that into the property I’d discovered on Sunday. Outside the French doors, where I waited, Ivonna stopped to clean off her boots. “So much mud!” she said. “What a rainstorm last night! Were you awake when the storm came?”

“I wasn’t here last night,” I said.

Ivonna winked, surprising me, for she was typically so formal. “He is very handsome, Signora.”

What could I say? I gave a little laugh. “He’s quite charming.” I told her I wasn’t expecting to be at the convent tonight, either. My uncle was in Tuscany, I said. He wouldn’t be back until tomorrow, at the earliest.

When she finished wiping her boots on the grass, also using a tissue she’d pulled from her backpack, we went inside. I stopped at the vending machine for a bottle of water and bought one for Ivonna, also.

“How much longer will you be in Florence?” she asked.

“We’re scheduled to leave on Friday,” I said, and I felt a stitch in my chest, knowing then that what I’d been thinking had just become more real.

She thanked me for the water. “You are kind. I will miss you,” she said.

“I’ll miss you, too,” I said. “I’ll miss Florence—everything about it.”

A minute later—maybe more than a minute because the elevator took a while—I was on my floor. A couple of turns, and I came to the hall with all the guest rooms, mine at the other end. Luigi had opened an access panel and was shining a flashlight into the mechanical shaft. I hadn’t seen behind the access panel next to my room, but one would expect the mechanical shafts to be similar in their contents. I noted that this one was located next to number 11, the room that belonged to Varinia and Carlo Santoro.

I greeted Luigi. He smiled and nodded, always a pleasant man, but I could see he was distracted. I wished I knew how to tell him that I was an architect and the pipes and ductwork and wiring, especially in historic buildings, were all interesting to me. He didn’t seem to be bothered by my curiosity, so I moved closer. He focused the beam of his flashlight on the narrow section of floor just inside the large rectangular opening. A long moment—both of us studying what we were seeing—and Luigi looked back at me. His expression told me what I had no trouble understanding: These muddy footprints are not mine. Who has been here?