Chapter 66

WHEN I COME TO, Alessandra is again sitting beside me on the bed, once more holding my hand.

“You were dreaming again,” she says softly. “A nightmare.”

She dries my forehead with a warm washcloth and presses the back of her hand against my face like she’s taking my temperature.

“I saw Grace,” I whisper.

“In your dream?”

“She was floating on the Grand Canal. In a gondola. I was swimming for her. We both sank under the surface. We both drowned.”

She pats my forehead.

“It was just a dream,” Alessandra consoles. “Just. A. Dream.”

I sit up, my face close to her face, her deep-set eyes looking into my own. For a brief moment, we are desperate figures caught up in a still-life. It takes me a while to realize our hands are still locked together. Until I pull mine slowly away, and stand.

“How are your eyes, Captain?”

“Fragile,” I say, looking out over the easel, out the open French doors and onto the fading afternoon sunlight. “I needed rest. That’s all. Rest and sleep.”

My gaze shifts from the doors to the harvest table and her laptop. It’s open, a sheet of notes set beside it, a pen sitting on top of the notes, her cell phone set beside the pen.

“And your article?”

“Finished,” she says. “Submitted to my editor, and posted. Thank God for the digital age, Captain.”

“Let me read it.”

She sits down before her computer. Clicking several commands she turns the computer in my direction.

“Please,” she says.

I sit myself down, read the piece from off the CNN website.

It’s not much of a piece. But that’s not the point. It’s the spin Alessandra has put on the piece that counts. What to most people will seem like a follow-up to the “American Woman Missing in Italy” story published yesterday, this piece states that after further investigation, it’s been determined by the Venice police that Grace Blunt was indeed abducted from the café in the Piazza San Marco in broad daylight. While no one has claimed responsibility for the kidnapping, the police welcome open contact with the abductor or abductors in order to “consider their demands.” The piece ends with the police phone number and website contact address.

I sit back in the chair, run my hands through my cropped hair.

“Do you really believe this will work?” I pose.

“It’s common knowledge that the police always claim to never negotiate with terrorists or kidnappers. Publicly, that is. But I think if Grace was taken by a member of an angry Afghan faction or Taliban as payback for what you had to do to their village, then I believe they will want their demands to be heard. Like any politician, they crave the soapbox.”

“But will we get some kind of proof of Grace’s life?”

“We have to wait and see, Captain,” she says, while setting her hand on my shoulder.

She quickly slips it off when the apartment phone rings.