MARGARET STOHL
I. L’Incidente (The Accident)
If they had only found the body, Theo thought, so much of this unpleasantness could have been avoided.
Corpses, though unattractive, were a matter of indisputable fact. And facts, especially on the set of a decidedly B horror movie like The Castle of Otranto, were hard to come by—as hard to come by as truth, maybe, or your own trailer. Both of which were the topics of the day, especially after all the trouble.
The morning of the accident, now that Theo looked back on it, began like any other day. Or so he had told the polizia, when they had questioned him along with the rest of production. Theo had seen nothing, been nowhere near the set when it happened. In point of fact, he’d been sent home in disgrace only the night before, when he’d failed to produce the required twenty-four liters of fake blood for the severed hand shoot, and they’d had to wrap early.
The shame!
But that was last night. Today was a new day, and Theo had busied himself with due cappuccino, ordered at the same time and sprinkled with cocoa, alongside a flaky cornetto that only somewhat haphazardly contained pudding or not. These were carried outside, as usual, and eaten in hot silence, also as usual, at the small tables in front of the Jardinieri, the one café with an Internet point. Only the old woman had been there, the one with the still older hands and the ankles that looked like elephant legs, dry and cracking and firmly planted beneath her shapeless black shift. She nodded at Theo, he recalled, but didn’t meet his eyes.
“Effing sirocco.” That’s what Theo had said, he remembered saying it, though aside from the Elephant Woman, there was no one there to tell. He hadn’t had breakfast with anyone—not even with his father—since first coming on location to the small southeastern Italian town. The sirocco, the hot, gritty wind blown up from North Africa, had wrapped its fingers around Theo like a fist, carrying off the words the moment they left his mouth. Though he sat no more than fifty yards from the Adriatic Sea, there was no relief. Even the small medusas that lazed in the blue-lit waters had gone into hiding beneath the rocks. This particular wind’s hold on Theodore Gray was miserable and total, like so many other things in his life.
What next?
Theo remembered it like flashbacks, like one of the dream sequences his father, Jerome Gray, the American director, il regista americano, was so fond of using.
Cue scene.
A boy running through the archway of the Porta Terra, stumbling over the cobblestone path leading into the Old City of Otranto.
Cue sound.
Shouting, in two languages. Italian for the shopkeepers, and English for the americano.
Cue crazy.
Frantic gesturing, hands flapping in the air like wings. Theo finally understood the vague message—that something was really, truly wrong. That something had finally happened.
The waitress finally tried to explain it to him, herself. “Gli americani ottusi! Gli idioti di Hollywood! Hanno gettato una casa in mare!”
Theo understood “stupid Americans”—he’d heard it often enough—and something about Hollywood, probably and deservedly equally stupid.
But that last part—tossing a house into the sea? Or a gelato into the house of sea? His Rosetta Stone Italian must be failing him.
The Elephant Woman shook her head, finally pointing up the hill toward the center of the Old City. When she spoke, her ivory teeth—capped in gold but rotting black—took on the air of some sort of ancient, evil treasure. “Go, boy. Castello Aragonese. There is trouble. Americano trouble.” As if on cue, a gust of wind knocked a café table over, sending it rolling into the stone street, while a large black bird circled overhead, squawking. It was amazing, really, like a scene from a movie—possibly even the movie they had come to Otranto to shoot, themselves.
A black feather came floating down from the sky, and the Elephant Woman crossed herself. “Il falco, un cattivo presagio.”
“Il falco? The falcon?” Theo put down his cup.
“Cattivo presagio,” she repeated. “You say, Inglese, dark—dark omen.” She kept speaking, but Theo couldn’t hear, as the bells of the cattedrale had begun to chime.
Nine o’clock, on the hour.
After the bells faded into silence, only the sound of screaming hung in the air.
A woman.
Not just any woman.
A woman so famous for that particular scream, she’d made a career spanning forty years out of it. Pippa Lords-Stewart, star of stage and screen. Eclipsed only by Her Majesty’s Own Sir Manfred Lords, Pippa’s former husband and present costar of their current project—the first time they’d shared the screen in the decade since their infamous marriage more infamously ended. All of which meant more paparazzi than Theo had ever seen on one of his father’s sets, which meant more coverage, which meant more money for the budget—or any money at all, as the case may be. Truthfully, Pippa and Sir Manny and their exquisitely rotten relationship—the sheer number of drinks either could toss at any given dinner went into the double digits—were the only reason Jerome Gray had managed to secure some slightly shady Bulgarian film financing at the last minute, once Germany had pulled out.
Nobody hated each other as well—or as wealthily—as they did.
But the woman could also scream like no one else, and that was Pippa screaming, Theo was sure of it. After the scene they’d shot on the roof of the Castello Aragonese last night—the one where Pippa, the lady of the castle, discovers the lifeless body of her son, who has been killed by a falling suit of armor—well, after seventeen takes, even a lowly production assistant like Theo would know that particular scream anywhere. A single close-up of the disembodied hand still wearing bloody armor had taken nearly an hour. “It’s a freaking haunted castle. Get me more blood,” his father had bellowed, between every take.
Twenty-four liters.
When it came to Jerome Gray and blood, there was never enough.
The only problem was, they weren’t filming now—and yet Pippa was still screaming.
That one deduction sent Theo running through the Porta Terra, stumbling over the cobblestones like the shouting boy had before him, like the wind. He wound his way up through the alleyways of the Old City, past the shops, past the walls of weathered leather sandals and dried herbs and Puglian wine and ceramic bowls painted with olives or sailboats—past the clay tarantulas, the sign of the tarantella still danced in Salento—past the cattedrale itself, with the tombs and the crypts and the frescoes and the mosaic floor that looked as if it were built by a mad, drunk priest—until the Castello came into sight.
The Castello Aragonese, also known to production as the Castle of Otranto, and as thus the setting of his father’s film of the same name, was the reason they were here for the hottest summer of Theo’s seventeen years. His father had insisted a sound stage in Burbank wouldn’t do, and Pippa agreed on this location when she’d heard Helen Mirren had bought a masseria in Puglia—which sounded very glamorous to Pippa, until she realized the word only meant “farmhouse,” mosquitos and rocks and all.
And then there was the small matter of the castle itself, in reality. In hot, dusty reality. Squat and stone, the color of a carved brown potato and about as glamorous looking, it was perhaps not so much Gothic as medieval, and not so much preserved as abandoned. As far as security measures, there was only one key to the place, and only one surly Italian fellow (in the same dirty black rocker T-shirt, with the words “Pink Floyd” embossed in gold) named Dante allowed to wield it. Dante showed up most mornings, after he’d had a good two or three small coffees, to unchain the front gate and twist open the ancient iron bars. Dante locked the Castello again when he left for lunch and sieste—and since his sieste could sometimes last all the way until dinner, Jerome Gray had decided early on that production had no choice but to let themselves be locked in along with the gate. It had been Theo’s job, then, to get the bar across the piazza to slide panini between the bars in the afternoons. Such was the glamour of life in the Castello.
Then came the transformation. The crew had spent hours adding carved foam pieces to every dusty wall, gluing silk cobwebs and synthetic ivy to every naturally webby, overgrown corner. The very real cannonballs that were still lodged throughout the place were sprayed a gleaming black over their disappointingly tan stone color, only to be scrubbed tan again when the scene had been wrapped. Stone the color of stone. Dust the color of dust. Mold the color of mold—and none of it the kind you see in the movies—that was the Castello. Really, Theo found it hard to imagine a novel had ever been written about the place at all.
A row of trailers had been set down in what once was the surrounding moat, now the home of wild fruit trees and tall grasses. The wind blew through them, rattling the grasses like maracas, sending the trailers shaking on their wheels. Still more trailers squatted along the sea wall behind the castle, where the battlements enclosing the town gave way to the rocky ocean itself. There was the props trailer, and the costume trailer. There was his father’s trailer, where he watched the dailies and came out shouting into his headset (or into his water bottle, which had held many liquids though never, apparently, water) for the rest of the afternoon. There was Pippa’s trailer, the one she shared with Sullen Matilda, her exceptionally dour assistant, who was only ever known to smile at Theo—a fact Theo found less not more encouraging. There was Sir Manny’s trailer, and next to it, the one belonging to his equally sullen on-screen son, Conrad James—that Conrad James, teen werewolf of the small screen and the oiled chest. (Oiled and shaved, as was pro forma for a twenty-six-year-old playing a teen wolf on a nonlupine “off” day.)
Only—
Theo stopped in his tracks, panting.
Only there wasn’t Connie’s trailer. Not where it was supposed to be.
There wasn’t anything, only a gap in the row and a patch of blue-green sea.
And a line of production assistants as expendable as Theo himself, talking in clusters of tattoos and hipster bangs and cut-off jean shorts, smoking. “—what with the wind, you couldn’t hear a thing—”
And Sir Manfred, wearing only half a head of hair extensions, screaming into a walkie-talkie, smoking. “—it could have been me—”
And Jerome Gray, Theo’s father, talking to the polizia with both hands, smoking. “—wind insurance? Who the hell needs wind insurance—”
And Sullen Matilda, texting and smoking. “—fofmfgf—”
And Pippa, screaming and smoking. “Connie—Connie—”
That scream.
Conrad James.
Where was Connie?
By the time Theo reached the sea wall, he could see only the remnants of a white trailer, smashed upon the rocks a hundred feet below. A piece of white tin bobbed in the tides. A white door, with a red star upon it.
Conrad’s trailer.
When Theo looked closer, he could see it was dripping red, staining the water and rocks beneath, just like the severed hand in the scene at the Castello the night before.
Less than a liter, by the look of it.
Effing movies.
There was no body, though. No body, and no Connie. Only red water and rocks, and a scattering of odd-looking black feathers, bobbing in the current.
That was the first problem.
That was how it all began.
II. La Maladizione (The Curse)
Within the hour, word had gotten out, and calls from the States came flooding in.
Production shut down. The cast sequestered themselves inside the small, warm darkness of the Bar Il Castello across the way, too afraid to enter their own trailers.
By lunchtime, the paparazzi posted blurry photos of the wreckage online at TopPop Italia.
By sieste, the polizia swarmed the Castello. The normally chained gates were taped off, surrounded by red-and-white-striped cones. There was no way in or out—and crowds of curious Italian tourists stood in the piazza, looking up at the large, stone potato-castle in front of them, wondering what all the fuss was about. Farther back, crowds of paparazzi sharpened their long, long lenses like so many teeth, like antennae.
An hour after that, the Guardia Costiera began dredging the harbor. It was the greatest spectacle Otranto had seen since plumbing first came to the region.
Bigger, even.
Inside the Castello bar, the cast put on a different sort of show, even if no one but Theo and the bartender were there to see it. “I’ve a mind to call the British ambassador. Those are my personal possessions. It’s a matter of security.” Sir Manny was unhappy because his cell phone was trapped inside the Castello, in the leather saddlebag he liked to sling over his director’s chair.
“Security? Don’t you mean insecurity?” Pippa rolled her eyes, tightening her clutch on her Coca-Cola Light. Theo wondered if she was going to throw it at him.
“Who’s the one complaining about the paps getting their bad side up online, eh, darling?” Sir Manny narrowed his eyes.
Sullen Matilda glared back at him, sitting as she was between them. If drinks were thrown, she’d be the first casualty.
Theo decided not to wait to find out. Instead, he slipped outside, moving quickly past the production assistants who stood guard at the doorway.
He’d had enough drama for one morning.
It wasn’t until Theo made his way to the shadows behind his father’s trailer that he heard the shouting coming from inside.
“Don’t answer that. Blocked number—that’s Bulgaria, and I got nothing to say to Bulgaria.” His father sounded frantic, and the phone only kept buzzing.
“Jerry. It’s online already. Bulgaria knows. New York knows. LA probably knows.” Diego, the Italian dialogue coach, answered in perfect English.
“What is there to know? If there’s no body, there’s no body. It can’t be a murder if no one was murdered.” His father sounded panicked.
“Tell that to the polizia, Jerry. They’re shutting us down. You know that’s what comes next.” Diego was from Malie, the next town over, which meant he was the only person who knew anything about what the police or the town magistrates or the Italian film commission was actually going to do at any given time. “You know what they think, the whole castle’s cursed. We shouldn’t have come here. They shouldn’t have let us film here, no matter how many euros crossed hands.”
“You’re acting like we bribed them.” Jerome was shrill—the phones were still ringing.
“Because we did.” Diego sounded relaxed. “You did, anyway.”
“It’s called business. I’m not in the mafia. And there’s no curse, Diego. Unless you’re talking about that fakakta plumbing.”
Theo took a breath, climbing the steps to the trailer door. No one answered his knock, so he pushed his way inside, where his father and Diego sat at a small table, a bottle of some kind of gold-colored liquor between them.
“Jerome,” Theo said, clearing his throat. He always called his father by his first name on set. Anything else, the director maintained, would have been weird. Theo thought this was weird, but his father ignored him—just as he did now.
Diego nodded at Theo, but he didn’t stop talking. “You don’t think it’s cursed, Jerry, and I don’t think it. But you have to ask—why have they kept the place closed down, all these years?”
Jerome poured himself another yellow drink. “Because it’s Italy. Because no one got around to unlocking it. Why the hell do I care, so long as it’s open tomorrow.”
Diego shook his head. “No, Jerry. Because it’s in the book. The book is about the castle—this cursed castle. And the curse is all anyone has on their mind since Connie … ” His words trailed off.
“What curse?” The moment Theo said the words, his father looked at him like he’d popped some sort of peculiar bubble.
Diego pushed a tattered book toward Theo. “Hubris. Vanity. Thinking the studio and our distributors are more important than a thousand years of local history.”
Theo stared at the book. “That’s all in this book?” The cracking black leather cover was embossed with fine gold print. He hadn’t seen it in the trailer before. His father didn’t usually read books, especially books as old as this one. The Castle of Otranto, by Horace Walpole. That’s what the gold letters said, on the cover.
“Not in so many words,” said Diego. “But see for yourself. The story of the castle is really the story of losing the castle.”
Theo opened it to where one particular passage was underlined in red ink on the ivory page. He began to read.
“That the castle and lordship of Otranto should pass from the present family, whenever the real owner should be grown too large to inhabit it—”
“Too large?” Theo looked up, confused. “What does that mean?”
“It means, we’re going to be driven out of the castle,” Diego said, tapping the book.
“It doesn’t say that.” Jerome shoved the book out of Theo’s hands.
“Why not? We’re the largest cast and crew ever to come to Otranto,” Diego offered unhelpfully.
“More like, it means the hundred thousand large we paid to use this dump wasn’t large enough,” snorted Jerome. “So now someone’s screwing with us.”
“Or the size of your ego,” said Theo, looking at his father. “Extra-large.”
Silence.
“I mean, our egos. You know. Hollyweird.” Theo shoved the book away, but the damage had been done. It didn’t happen very often, but on occasion his father heard him. So Theo kept talking. “Besides, if someone wants to start tossing people off cliffs—I mean, who’s even the lord of the castle now, anyway?”
Jerome sighed. “I’d say it depends on how you look at it. I think the city owns the castle, but a threat’s a threat. It could be meant for any one of us. Sir Manfred—he’s literally a lord. Pippa—she’s a lady.”
“Not much of one,” Theo pointed out.
Jerome smiled, softening toward his son. “Technically, anyway. And there’s me.”
“You are the boss man.” Diego nodded. “Lord of the set.”
“And Dante,” Theo suggested, trying not to roll his eyes at Diego.
“Who?” Jerome furrowed his brow. He was still caught up in reconsidering his own lordly status, Theo imagined.
Diego sighed. “Dante. You know. The poor schmoe with the castle key.”
“Who?” Jerome looked at him blankly.
Theo tried to help. “The guy with the key. He brings you your lunch, like, every day? His name’s Dante.”
“Sure. Dante, Diego, whatever.” Jerome shrugged. Diego looked insulted. Theo tried not to laugh, but the obvious point hung in the air between them.
When it came to everyone involved with The Castle of Otranto, the movie—how could heads get any bigger?
More to the point, who wouldn’t want to push any one of them off a cliff?
Theo shivered.
Jerome’s phone buzzed again, and he picked it up. “Now fakakta Bulgaria is texting me. He’s here.”
“Here, here?” Now even Diego looked stressed.
“The cab stand, at Porta Terra.” Jerome dropped the phone, pouring himself a tall, yellow drink. “Do me a favor, will you, Theo? Go get him.”
Of course Theo would. He was a lowly PA. He’d have to do whatever Jerome said, even if he wasn’t his father.
Which was how Theodore Gray came to meet Bulgaria for himself. Bulgaria—and the beautiful Isabella.
Because nobody told him Bulgaria had a daughter.
When Theo reached the Porta Terra, there was exactly one cab waiting at the stand—not a surprise, really, since there was exactly one cab company in all of Otranto—across from the pizza restaurant. This was only one of the reasons you ignored the people who said there was no tipping in Italy; you pissed off the one cab company in town, and you were never going to the airport again. Theo’s father had learned that the hard way, which was why Diego had now been made to hire a car of his own.
This afternoon, the cab driver looked irritated, smoking while the engine ran. In the back, a man sat on the edge of his seat, his short, gray-suited legs dangling out the side. They didn’t reach the ground.
Bulgaria.
A girl sat on a nearby bench, Indian-style, reading a book. An army backpack sat on the bench next to her. She was all kinds of hanging hair—in her face, down her back. It didn’t seem to bother her; she blew the dark strands out of her face only when the wind blew them directly into her eyes.
Theo cleared his throat. “Hello?”
No response.
Neither the man nor the girl seemed to be in any kind of hurry, which apparently made the taxi driver rev the car’s engine even more.
Theo took a tentative step closer. “Excuse me?” The girl still didn’t look up. Neither did the man. Instead, he growled into the phone. “BS. It’s all BS.”
Theo tried again. “Sir?”
The man barked, “Don’t tell me this isn’t Jerome Gray playing the odds. He knows he has a crap production, and he’s doing everything he can to shut it down and cash out before he hangs his own cash out on the line.”
The girl finally looked up from her book and scowled. “Dad. Dad!” She turned to look at Theo. “Sorry. He’s kind of a jerk. But I guess you’re probably picking that up on your own.”
“Me too.”
“You’re a jerk?”
“Yeah. No. My dad. I’m Theo.”
“Isabella. Daughter of Jerk.”
“Likewise. We must be related.”
“Hope not.”
The taxi driver revved the engine reproachfully.
Theo smiled, and Isabella smiled back, and he didn’t say anything after that. He was too busy staring at what was, however improbably, the most beautiful creature he’d seen in seventeen years, let alone the last seven weeks.
Long black hair hung in straight lines—spiky black bangs—over pale skin and peach-colored lips. Strangely light eyes. Dark everything else.
She was like a Venus, Theo thought. She could have been in a thousand movies; she could have been a model …
“I hate this shit,” she said, squirming uncomfortably.
In the front seat, the restless driver was squirming even more.
Theo was positively smitten. It was as if somewhere offscreen, rogue cherubs were staking him with every arrow in the prop trailer.
The short man in the taxi shouted louder, unaware of the relative significance of the moment. “But it’s not his cash out there, it’s mine—”
Theo and Isabella rolled their eyes, right at the very same moment. Friendships had been born for less, Theo thought.
Friendships, or something more.
The driver began to honk, one long blast after another. They’d been sitting at the Porta Terra for nearly a quarter of an hour now; enough was enough.
Then the man slid out of the car and onto the hot black pavement. He motioned to Theo. “Can you pay the guy, kid? Don’t have anything smaller than a hundy—” He waved a fistful of euros in Theo’s face.
Theo scavenged in his pocket, until he handed over every last euro to the angry driver. Bulgaria wouldn’t be getting a cab to the airport anytime soon. Theo didn’t care. It was funny. At least, he hoped Isabella thought so.
She did.
They laughed about it all the way back to the Palazzo Papaleo, the only hotel in town, Isabella hitching her backpack easily over her shoulder, while her father slipped on the hot stones in his patent leather loafers.
Connie may be missing, but the universe was kind, and all was right in the world.
“Are you crying?” Isabella leaned toward Theo, curiously, the moment the cobblestoned piazza of the cattedrale bumped into sight, just across from the hotel.
“It’s the stupid sirocco; it’s blown something into my eyes.” Theo rubbed his sleeve into his eyelid. “Everything’s fine, see?”
“I love the wind. It changes everything,” Isabella said, pulling his sleeve away from his face. Then she smiled and ran toward the hotel, and Theo knew right then everything really would be all right.
Only the fact of the wind promised otherwise.
III. L’Investigazione (The Investigation)
The postcard-perfect sunset came and went, all peach and blue and geraniums and wrought iron and fuzzy orange stripes as it should be, before anyone came to meet Theo on the roof of the hotel.
He waited for Isabella, but it was only his father who finally appeared. It was disappointing, of course, but Theo was used to disappointment.
Jerome Gray slid into the chair across the table from Theo. He poured himself a glass of wine from the communal jug on the table—the sort Theo knew had been filled with basically a gas pump nozzle from the working vineyard nearest Galatina—without saying a word.
“So. Bulgaria.” Jerome played with the bottom of his glass.
“Yeah?” Theo didn’t look at his father.
“It would be helpful if you could entertain the daughter. Bulgaria and I, we have some tough conversations. Financials, that kind of thing.”
Theo nodded.
“Because Bulgaria is a total dickwad,” his father added. He couldn’t let it go.
“Got it.” Takes one to know one. So Theo thought. But still, he said nothing.
Jerome Gray drained his glass.
By the time Isabella and her father appeared at the rooftop restaurant of the hotel, the first jug was empty, and Theo’s father was on his best behavior.
The wine had been flowing for hours. Hours. Better than the conversation, at least between the dickwads. Theo sighed. Though he had noticed his father not picking up his phone when it buzzed this time, either. “It’s New York,” Jerome had said. “I have nothing to say to New York, right?” Bulgaria had agreed. After that, Theo hadn’t bothered listening.
Entertain her. That was what his father had said.
Entertain me. That was what the peach lips said. She didn’t often touch her wineglass—neither one of them had needed to—but still, the dark red liquid reminded Theo of the red on the splintered trailer doors, dashed on the rocks of the harbor. He didn’t feel sad, though. Not for Connie, not this time.
He was exhilarated.
Isabella smiled at him, sort of a smirk, while they both ignored the conversation around them.
“Do you even know what they’re talking about?” She leaned forward, breathing the heady scent of muscat grape into his face. Theo felt like he was going to pass out.
“The movie, probably. Sixty million American dollars, most likely. All blown over the side of a cliff, as far as we know.”
“All ruined by one dead guy.” The words sounded sweet, any words would have. Even those.
“Exactly. At least, missing.”
I love you. I mean, I think I love you. I’m going to love you. You’re the most beautiful girl in the world.
“What?” She looked amused.
“Nothing.” Theo looked at his plate of pasta, shaped like clumsy ears.
“Did you say something?”
“No.” Theo shrugged. “Did you hear something?”
“I guess not.”
“Do you want to get out of here?”
“Is that even a question?”
They were gone before either of their fathers noticed.
Theo first took Isabella’s hand in the alley leading toward the Cattedrale di Otranto. Her fingers were cold and calm, while he felt warm and worried.
“It’s beautiful,” she breathed.
“You should see the inside. The mosaic floor. It’s actually quite insane. Like, Zeus and Hera meet Adam and Eve insane.” Theo smiled. “At least, insane by a monk’s standards.”
“Monks have very high standards.” Isabella smiled back at him. “And you sound like you’re pitching a movie.”
Theo winced. “Speaking of which. Why are you here, I mean, with your father?”
“He always makes me meet him when he comes to Italy. I’m north of here, up in Viterbo for the year. My junior year. Intensive Latin and Italian. School Year Abroad.”
“College?”
“High school.” Theo felt a rush of relief; they were the same age, after all.
“I thought you guys were from Bulgaria? I mean, that’s your dad, right?”
She shook her head. “We moved there when I was thirteen. Low-budget movie capital of the world. Before that it was strictly California. Sorry to disappoint you. I’m nothing too exotic.”
I’m not disappointed. He didn’t say it, but he realized it was true.
“Me, either.”
They turned the corner and Theo found himself staring at a green wooden door. He stopped short. “That’s Connie’s place.”
“Conrad? The one with the trailer that blew into the ocean? The dead guy?”
“Technically, he’s missing. But yeah, you know. It’s pretty crazy. The whole sirocco thing.” Talking about it made Theo more uncomfortable than he wanted to admit. He was only seventeen; he’d never actually known a dead person until now.
Or missing, he reminded himself.
“If the guy’s really dead, where are all the cops? Why isn’t the place, like, roped off or something?” She looked excited.
“They think he was in his trailer, but they can’t be sure. It’s not like actors really live in their trailers, not when they’re not on set. This is where Connie spends the nights—only no one’s supposed to know that.” Theo sighed. “When he’s not in rehab, he isn’t allowed to live on his own. It’s part of his probation.”
“What? What does that mean?”
“Let’s just say, he’s not the easiest person to insure. But when he showed up in town, he wouldn’t stay where he was supposed to.”
“And where was that?”
“With me. And my dad. On the other side of the cattedrale. But Connie had a fit, he wouldn’t even move his bags in. We had to get him his own place. Off the books.” Theo shifted, uncomfortably. “You probably shouldn’t tell anyone.”
“Let’s check it out. Maybe he’s here. Maybe he just passed out or something.” Isabella’s eyes gleamed at the idea.
“He didn’t. My dad sent Diego over, first thing.”
“Maybe Diego didn’t look carefully enough.” She started up the steps.
“Don’t. We shouldn’t.” Theo didn’t know why she’d even want to, but then somehow her wanting to made him want to, though he didn’t—it was all so very confusing. “I mean, why?”
“Why not? Because he’s a movie star. Because he’s dead.”
Keep her busy. Entertain her. That’s what he’d said, his father.
“Okay. Yes. I guess. Just for a second.”
They made their way up the rest of the stone steps—hundreds of years worn in the center, like everything else in Otranto—past the pots full of red geraniums. Conrad’s door—painted a dark green, just like the exterior one—was closed, but when Theo pushed on it, it opened with a creak.
“Conrad?” Theo’s voice sounded strained, like he was reading a line of dialogue from a particularly haunted scene. The one right before the hero gets the ax, he thought.
“No one’s there,” Isabella whispered.
“Maybe we should go.” Theo tried not to sound relieved.
A woman poked her head out the door across the way. “Buona sera—”
It was her, the Elephant Woman. Theo’s breakfast companion of many weeks now, the harbinger of all of Otranto’s bad omens and americano doom.
And apparently, Connie’s landlord.
“We really shouldn’t be in here.”
Theo looked uncomfortably around the small, square room—all white plaster walls and terra-cotta-tiled floors. He also tried not to look at the small wooden cross, nailed up over the bed, probably because of the heaps of unidentifiably illegal substances piled beneath it.
“Relax,” said Isabella, picking up one of the plastic bags that composed Connie’s stash. “What is this? Is that—a beet?”
“I don’t know. Maybe a turnip? I wouldn’t put it past him. He’d smoke Lindsay Lohan if you lit her on fire.”
Isabella dropped the bag and walked outside to the portico. The harbor beyond the stone balcony looked only like the dark absence of lights; dated disco music floated over the water, from the dance club at the beach across the way.
Theo crept out after her. The balcony doors were wedged open, though every few minutes or so the wind blew them loose, slamming them into their wooden frames with a bang so startlingly loud, it sounded as if someone had been shot—no matter how many times you heard it. “It’s just the wind,” Theo said, though he didn’t know who it was he was reassuring, not exactly.
“Right. Tell that to Connie. Poor guy.” She laughed, but Theo didn’t think it was so funny. Not when the poor guy’s trailer was still in a thousand splintery pieces on the harbor rocks.
Had it been the wind? Really? Trailers were pretty heavy.
Isabella only kicked a wine bottle out of the way as she moved back to the door. “Poor, classy guy.”
Theo picked the bottle up, righting it on the table inside the door. He followed her into the empty kitchen, where a green-and-white-checked oilcloth covered a square table. There was only a silver espresso kettle on the tiny stove, though Theo had gotten Connie coffee enough times to seriously doubt he’d ever managed to make it himself. He couldn’t even manage to put sweetener in, not on his own.
“All right. We’ve seen enough. Let’s get out of here.”
Isabella hitched her bag more tightly to her shoulder. “Seriously? You know actors. This Connie guy’s either dead—in which case he doesn’t mind—or he’s not—in which case he’s probably such a power tool, you’d want to annoy him.”
“Really?” Theo didn’t. In fact, he was getting increasingly uncomfortable with the whole conversation.
“You have no idea.” Isabella pointed to something beneath the bed. “Wait. Jackpot.”
“His stash?”
“No. His laptop.”
There it was, poking just one steel-cased corner out from under the crumpled laundry and the gossip magazines—mostly starring Connie himself.
Theo stepped between her and the bed. “Hold on. You can’t just open his computer. He’ll have it password protected. Some kind of alarm probably goes off at CAA every time you open that thing.”
“Seriously? Are you always this much of a stiff?” She slid past him, yanking the laptop out from under the bed and flopping down next to it.
She flipped open the lid. “Okay. Password. Any ideas?”
“No. We’re not doing this.”
She ignored him. “It’s not douchebag. So I’m stumped.”
“Isabella.” Theo gave up.
“It’s not Spartacus, either. No intensive Latin here.” She grinned.
Theo looked at the screen. “Some pet name for his girlfriend? Or his grandma. Or his car. Or maybe his—”
“Don’t say it.” Isabella shoved his shoulder.
“I was going to say dog.” Theo shoved her back.
Isabella tapped her chin. “Or what about the name of his last movie? What was that?”
Theo was impressed. “Seriously? You really have to ask?”
“Hey, I’ve been in Italy, remember?” Isabella blushed. “And besides, I’m not really into movies.”
“Just movie stars?” Theo raised an eyebrow.
“Okay. I’m into movies. I’m just not into douchebag movies.”
Theo angled the keyboard in his direction and slowly began to type into the password box.
“TEEN_HAIRWOLF.”
She groaned. “Really? That’s even worse than I thought.”
“Three hundred million at the box office. Bet you a hundred bucks, there’s no way a guy like Connie would have wanted to type anything else.”
The glowing white prompt flashed no more than three times before they found themselves staring at Connie’s mailbox.
“I don’t believe it. We’re in.”
Theo sprang up off the bed, pacing around the room. He didn’t know what to do with himself. “We can’t look at a dead guy’s mail. Even if he’s not a dead dead guy. Isn’t that mail fraud or something? As in, a federal offense?”
Isabella clicked on the INBOX, nodding. “Probably worse than that, since we’re not even in the country.”
Theo tried not to look at the screen, but he couldn’t seem to help himself. “Right. There might be all sorts of Italian laws.”
Isabella clicked on NEW MAIL. “Except Italians don’t have laws. They don’t even bother to put money in their Bancomats on the weekend.” She looked up. “Are you going to stop me or not?”
BANG—
The wind slammed the balcony door shut, so hard the walls shook. Theo looked out at the moon in the glass of the door. It shone round and high, almost like in the Teen Hairwolf posters.
How many secrets could a guy like that have, anyway?
And he was missing, wasn’t he?
It wasn’t like the police weren’t going to take all this stuff for themselves and sell it to the paparazzi, as soon as they found their way to Connie’s apartment. Where he really lived.
Had lived.
It was only a matter of hours, really.
Minutes, even.
“Maybe just for a second.”
One second turned into one hour. The Internet being what it was. The Internet, and secrets.
Connie, it turned out, led a strangely uninteresting life online, at least for a minor movie star slash major drug addict.
The duller the e-mail, the more quickly Theo and Isabella flew through them—and the more they wanted to read. There was something gripping about every dull interaction with every dull ex-girlfriend, at least when they were reading them through the digital eyes of one possibly dead former star.
It was Theo who stopped everything.
All it took was one click on a particularly dull-looking attachment in an e-mail from Connie’s agent at CAA.
Theo scrolled down the screen. “Wait a second. Look—that looks like some kind of insurance document.”
“It is. It’s a policy. See that word, right there. Polizza. Polizza de Assicurazione.” Isabella looked up at him. “It’s absolutely an insurance policy.”
Theo frowned. “Well, I guess the good news is that Connie finally got insured. They were trying to get him bonded for, like, forever.”
Isabella looked at him sideways. “What’s the bad news?”
“Well, it sort of gives a motivation for somebody to kill him—I mean, doesn’t it?” Theo didn’t want to be the one to say it, but there. He had.
“You mean it’s an insurance scam—like in the movies?” Theo didn’t know why Isabella sounded so chipper about the whole thing.
“Yeah, except in the movies you usually find out they faked their own death. Instead of, you know, dying.”
Isabella didn’t respond. She just kept reading.
Theo tried again. “Oh my god. It’s Law & Order: Otranto.”
“Shh.” Isabella quieted him. It seemed to Theo that she couldn’t take her eyes off the screen.
“Isabella? You there?”
Only very slowly did she finally turn to Theo. “Why would a person like Connie want to fake his own death? He was making a lot of money just being Connie—wasn’t he?”
Theo shrugged. “No question, that guy has a lot of outstanding debts. Probably buying smack from the Italian mafia, for all we know.”
Isabella looked puzzled. “But he’s not the beneficiary. Connie. He wasn’t going to make any money from disappearing, not right now.”
“So, maybe he’s getting paid off. The Bulgarians might have had something to say about it … ” Theo looked at her, embarrassed.
“Say it. You’re talking about my father.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“That’s exactly what you said. And look, my Italian’s not perfect, but that word there”—she pointed to a small line at the bottom of the screen—“beneficario della politica. The beneficiaries.”
All Theo could see were two names, and he knew them both. He knew she did, too, but he left it to her to read them.
His heart was pounding in his ears—also like a Law & Order: Otranto episode. His heart was pounding, and all his witty comments blew out the window with the wind, toward the sea.
So the room stayed quiet, as long as neither one of them could think what to say next.
Because of the two names.
Two scanned signatures, on the dotted line.
The director, for one.
And the Bulgarian.
“It might not be them. I mean. They may not be involved.” Theo said the words—finally, sadly, not even believing them himself.
“Or they might not both be involved.” Isabella stood up, moving to the far window.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Theo bristled, in spite of everything.
She took a breath. “My father’s a businessman. Your father’s a film director. If someone were to sabotage his own production—well, one of those would have a lot better idea how to go about it than the other.”
Theo ran his fingers through his spiky brown hair. “I can’t believe you’re saying that. I can’t believe you’re accusing the man. He’s my father.”
She looked like she wanted to slap him. “I can’t believe you’re defending him. What does that say about my father?”
Theo was incredulous. “I thought you hated your father?”
Isabella was furious. “I think you’re confusing him with yours.”
There it was.
Family ties had bound and gagged them both.
The room contracted around them with the impasse. They couldn’t look at each other, but they couldn’t seem to look away. The small space had only grown hotter and hotter with two more bodies and badly adapted technology—the outlet in the wall was, after all, practically smoking—inside.
This particular sirocco might as well be coming from inside the windows, rather than from the night sky beyond.
Then Theo caught something else. “Look at the e-mail attached to the policy. The time stamp. It’s today. Why would someone send an e-mail about an insurance policy to a dead man?”
Isabella looked down at the screen, over his shoulder. “Unless he was a not-dead dead man?”
“According to the message, they’re meeting tonight at the taxi stand.”
She sniffed. “Of course they are. That’s where your father meets people.”
He raised an eyebrow. “People like your father, you mean.” But the wheels were turning in Theo’s head. “Fine. I’ll go see for myself.”
She flung her fingers into the air, just like an Italian, Theo thought. The gesture was endearing, even though she herself was—at this particular moment—not.
“What, you’re going to march up to a criminal at an illicit rendezvous and demand an explanation?”
He shrugged. “Give me a little credit. I’m not going to march anywhere. Just spy. You can see the taxi stand from the piazza.”
Isabella looked skeptical. “Not at night.”
“Yes. From the roof of the Castello, you can. It’s at the top of the hill—you can see the whole town from there.”
“Fine.”
“Fine.”
“Midnight. That’s what it says.”
“Midnight.”
“See you then.”
“Same here.”
They stood there in the dark heat, until Theo switched off the computer and yanked the plug out of the adapter in the wall.
When he looked back up, Isabella was gone.
The wind slammed the door, louder than a shot, faster than a bullet. It was enough to drive a normal person crazy.
This time, Theo didn’t so much as flinch.
IV. Il Castello (The Castle)
Even the stones were hot beneath Theo’s feet in the darkness. He could feel himself sweating as he reached the top of the hill, even if he couldn’t see it. It didn’t matter. He could feel it, the wind at his throat—its fingers around his neck.
He couldn’t breathe without knowing it was there.
And I’m here, too.
He stared up at the Castello Aragonese. It may not have been all that impressive on its own, but the dark splotch of crumbling stone towers and cannonballs—twisting passageways and ancient turrets—blocked out even the moon, from where Theo stood.
How strange, he thought, to be standing here, in the middle of the night, in the center of the piazza, in the heart of town, in the heel of the boot—and facing—what?
For the first time, Theodore Gray had absolutely no idea. Not about what had happened, not about what would happen. Not even about what was happening.
He didn’t know if that was good or bad, but it was something.
It was new.
“I didn’t think you were going to make it.” Isabella hung back in the shadows of the castle wall. It took a moment for Theo’s eyes to adjust, but they did. She was dark and outlined in darkness. Something slight and shadowy, just like everything else around her.
He drew a breath. “I made it. This isn’t a movie. In real life, people make it when they say they’re going to make it.”
“Not all people,” she said, softly.
“I do.” He looked at her.
“And the wind doesn’t push over trailers?” She looked like she was about to cry.
“No.” Theo swallowed. “Not usually.”
She looked away. “You sure, Theo? You want to do this? I mean, I don’t blame you if you don’t. It’s a lot to handle. For either one of us.”
Theo felt in his pocket for Dante’s key—the only key to the castle, the one he’d had to drag out of Dante’s hands in exchange for his brand-new phone. The deal had taken longer than he’d thought, and he almost hadn’t made it all the way up the hill to the castle in time.
Standing here right now he almost wished he hadn’t.
Theo pulled the key out now, looking at her. “Do I want to do this? I’m pretty sure I don’t. Yet here we are.”
Isabella nodded, taking the key out of his hand. “Well, then.” She shoved the key into the lock. Rattled it, up and down. The chains fell, clanging, to the cobblestone ground beneath them.
Isabella threw her small body against the gate, and it creaked slowly open, just a few inches at a time.
It’s ironic, Theo thought, how quickly some chains fall. While others—
She smiled at him. “After you.”
A strangely hollow feeling overtook Theo, but when Isabella turned back to him, she didn’t look especially like herself, either. It was like they’d both been cast in someone else’s haunted, horrid ghost story.
“Do you hear something?” He stopped himself, his hand on the door.
She shrugged. “Some sort of bird, I think. Or an alley cat.”
“It sounded like crying,” said Theo.
“More like screaming,” Isabella said, listening, her head crooked like a bird.
“We could go home,” he said. “It’s not too late.”
But it was.
A horror movie, that was this story. The Castle of Otranto. Of course.
Wasn’t that why he was here, for the longest, hottest summer of his seventeen years?
“Come on, then. What are you waiting for?” She tossed her hair and disappeared into the darkness, before his eyes.
He followed her into the night.
Inside the castle, it looked like oblivion—if oblivion looked like fog, Theo thought. Fog, billowing aimlessly toward nowhere in particular. That was how he’d become used to feeling; it was also how he felt, standing in the central courtyard of the Castello Aragonese.
Isabella didn’t wait for him. She took off into the shadows, while Theo felt like his feet had been somehow glued into the very foundation of the Castello itself. Frozen in place.
He looked up at the soaring stone walls that rose into the darkness around him. One floor, two, three, four—the many stairwells connecting the castle turrets to each other were largely hidden from sight now. He could see Isabella only from a distance now, a glimpse here and there as her T-shirt caught the moonlight on the stairs.
“Isabella! What are you doing? Come on, now—”
She didn’t answer, and she didn’t stop. She was heading for the castle roof, Theo knew that much. He recognized the path she was taking; he’d taken it himself, the night they shot the death scene, with Pippa and Sir Manny.
With Connie, and all the blood.
Fake blood, he reminded himself. No use freaking out about it now.
Then he started up the stairs after her.
He wasn’t scared.
He kept his eyes on his feet for no particular reason, other than that it was difficult to go up the stairs in the pitch-dark.
Thinking this, he stopped and drew a lighter from his pocket, flicking it open.
The small splotch of light spluttered into an unsteady, pale glow.
I’m not scared.
“Isabella, wait!”
I’m not.
That’s what he thought, when he mounted the final stair to the Castello roof.
That’s what he thought, when he passed the dark falconieri, the small alcove where the falcon trainer usually slept, when a scene called for birds on set.
That’s what he thought, when he saw Isabella standing on the edge of the stone roof, holding on to a thin, iron rail that rose from the blocky floor like a silver antenna.
That’s what he thought when the wind whipped her long black skirt, fanning her hair out into the sky behind her.
“Oh my god. Come here,” she said, without turning to Theo. “Come see. You have to see.”
He took a step closer, like someone in a dream, in a trance. “What, Isabella? What are you saying?”
He reached out for her hand, and she took it, twisting her head toward him.
Bringing her lips to his.
She kissed him, sweetly, as if no one in the world existed, except the two of them—not even the two of them.
I love you, he thought. I love you, and you’re real, and I’m not scared. My father’s not down there, and neither is yours. Connie isn’t dead, and I’m not here, and we’re on a train, he thought. We’re on a train to Rome.
We’ve escaped.
That’s what he was thinking as he stepped up next to her, a giant black bird circling in the air around them.
We can escape.
That’s what he was thinking as she took his arm, silver in the moonlight, and the black feathers blew in the wind, surrounding them.
We—
V. Il Falconieri (The Falconer)
In the distance, a bird shrieked. It sounded like a scream, like a child crying. It didn’t matter; the sirocco wind took the sound away—that sound, and every other sound the moonlight and the midnight hid between them.
No one was listening.
Not anymore.
The boy from the café and the girl from the train lay unconscious on the cobblestone, far beneath the parapet. Only a few black feathers to break their fall.
No one noticed.
Not yet.
No one except the Elephant Woman, who stood on the blood-stained rocks near the harbor, below the castle, below the empty trailers, below the deserted set.
Holding out her hand, waiting for the black-feathered creature to return.
He had done well, Dante, her faithful. He was the lord of the castle, not anyone else. By sunrise, he would lose his feathers and his true shape, and return to his human form once again. Just as he had been for hundreds of years now.
They would go now, the americani. The two of them would be left alone—as they should be. That was their birthright, just as it had been her mother’s, and her grandmother’s, and her grandmother’s grandmother before that. They alone were the Keepers of the Castello, Keepers of the Curse.
The Castello Aragonese would be locked again, and soon. It would never belong to anyone but the two of them, not really.
“Dante! Dante, bravo ragazzo! Bravo!”
When she smiled, her teeth were ivory and gold.