Arcadia Awakens Read Online Free PDF Page B

Mom?”
    “She’s not as bad as you think.”
    “You weren’t there.”
    Zoe lowered her gaze. “No, I wasn’t. I’m sorry.” She said nothing for a moment. “I ought to have been there to help you.” But it sounded as if she was still glad that she’d been a long way away at the time.
    Rosa took Zoe’s hand. “Come on, show me around the place.”
    Together they walked around the palazzo under the chestnuts. The shining glass of some kind of greenhouse was visible among the trees, like a long glass finger sticking out of the back wall of the house. Rosa had noticed it earlier from her room; it was right under her window.
    On the west side, on the outskirts of the olive groves farther down the slope, they met neither the gardeners nor the guards of the property. Rosa was walking in a kind of daze, as if on cotton, but she knew that if she lay down in bed now she wouldn’t be able to sleep.
    “Florinda wants us to go with her tomorrow,” said Zoe.
    “Go where?”
    “It’s kind of an official thing. Has to do with family politics.”
    “Robbing a bank?”
    A vertical line appeared between Zoe’s brows. “I told you, we don’t have anything to do with all that.”
    “We just collect what comes in from the people who commit the crimes in our area, right?”
    “A lot of the business is … let’s say semilegal these days. Do you know how Florinda’s been making a small fortune year after year? With wind turbines. All over the mountains, all over Sicily, she has one of her companies putting up wind turbines. She gets millions from Rome in funding for the project—and so far they haven’t produced a single watt of electricity.” When she realized that Rosa was hardly listening, she sighed. “Tomorrow is a funeral. Everyone has to go, I mean every family sends its representatives. One of the big capi has died. That means we all have to be there at his last rites to show respect, even his enemies … code of honor, blah, blah, blah.”
    “His enemies?” said Rosa. “Is that us?”
    “The Alcantaras and Carnevares have hated each other forever. But there’s kind of a truce that no one will break.”
    Rosa stopped as if rooted to the spot. “That name.”
    “Carnevare? They’re burying their capo tomorrow. Baron Massimo Carnevare.”
    The cotton under Rosa’s feet gave way a little.
    Family business , he’d said.

ENEMIES
    R OSA SLEPT UNTIL WELL into the morning. After breakfast in the dining room, she explored the building. On the second floor up, the piano nobile , where there were salons adorned with faded frescoes and a dusty ballroom, she met one of the housekeepers who came in from the village, working for an hourly wage trying to get the better of the dust of centuries. The woman gave her a monosyllabic greeting and scurried into one of the other rooms.
    At the end of a long corridor on the third floor she found Florinda’s study, a spacious room paneled in dark wood. It had no door, only an open, rounded arch that gave her a view straight through to the desk. A wrought-iron balcony looked out on the inner courtyard of the palazzo. The glass balcony door was open. All was still outside, with only a few cicadas chirping in the overgrown flower bed in the courtyard.
    There was a computer on a side table. Rosa looked around, and as there was no one in sight to ask for permission, she sat down in front of the monitor. When she moved the mouse, it came to life.
    She downloaded “My Death” to Florinda’s desktop and made the song the background to her own MySpace page. She hadn’t updated her status in over two years, and her list of friends was as dead as the names on the tombs in the family vault. Same with Facebook. She checked out Twitter and her email, found a few from people she communicated with only sporadically over the internet—and only over the internet—but didn’t feel like answering and closed the program again. Then she sent the music file to the recycle bin and emptied