The Light in the Ruins Read Online Free PDF Page A

and the Italians who continued to champion the Fascist cause. They were peasants and aristocrats, communists and monarchists. Sometimes they were mere opportunists. All that most shared was a hatred for the way the Blackshirts and the Nazis had led their country into a ruinous war.
    “The villa is rubble?” Serafina asked Cristina.
    “Not all of it. But it’s certainly not livable. Whole walls are gone. Big holes in the roof. It needs more work than my mother and I can afford to put into it, or Vittore would be willing to put into it.”
    “Vittore?”
    “My other brother.”
    Serafina tasted her espresso. Then: “So you drove all the way up here for lunch? It must be a nine-hour round-trip from Rome.”
    “If I was tired, I would have napped at Francesca’s. Either I’d nap during siesta or I’d spend the night and drive home tomorrow. I’ve done that before.”
    “Spent the night.”
    “Yes.”
    “Any idea who killed your sister-in-law?”
    Cristina shook her head. She was a slender young woman, small and almost skinny, with eyes the gray of a moonstone. She was using her sunglasses like a headband, keeping a sleek mane of ash-brown hair off her face. She was pretty, and Serafina tried not to be jealous of the way the woman could wear earrings or simply pull her hair back behind her ears. “No,” Cristina said. “I don’t.”
    “Was she seeing someone? Did she have a new man in her life?”
    “She always had men in her life after Marco died. But none were serious and she never introduced me to them.”
    “Can you give me some names?”
    She shrugged. “Pick names from the phone book. I could give you eleven first names and they’d all be correct.”
    “What about her parents? Where are they?”
    “Her father died years and years ago, when she was a little girl. Her mother died in 1941—no, 1942.”
    “Sisters? Brothers?”
    “Francesca was an only child.”
    “I presume she doesn’t have any children.”
    “She had two. A boy and a girl.”
    “With your brother Marco?”
    “Yes.”
    Serafina analyzed Cristina’s use of the past tense. She felt a twinge of apprehension when she asked her next question: “Where are they now?”
    “In heaven,” Cristina answered.
    Serafina nodded. “I’m very sorry,” she said. She thought of the dead children she had seen in the war and the dead twins she had seen on a case her second year here in Florence. Those boys had been killed by their father, after he had shot their mother. Then, with one final bullet, he had taken his own life. In her experience, dead children, unlike dead adults, always looked as if they were sleeping—though she understood that there was an element of wishful thinking whenever she had come across corpses that young.
    “Well, at least now they have their mother again,” Cristinasaid, folding her arms across her chest and sitting back in her chair. “They have both their parents. And my sister-in-law is no longer alone.”
    “You’re trying to find a silver lining in Francesca’s murder?”
    “No. But at least they’re all together now.”
    “Tell me how they died—your niece, your nephew, and your brother,” Serafina said.
    “It was during the war. We knew the Germans had mined the roads. We didn’t know they had mined parts of the estate. We thought the children would be safe near the tombs.”
    “The tombs?”
    Overhead they heard an airplane, and Cristina brought her hand to her eyebrows like a visor and followed it for a moment. Then she turned her attention back to the detective and said, “Some people called it a necropolis—a city of the dead. But that’s the wrong word. It wasn’t nearly that large. But it was a burial vault for some powerful Etruscan family. We found it on our estate years after my grandfather died, and it’s a testimony to his … instincts. He knew the property was Etruscan, and he was right.” She paused. Then: “Who knows? Maybe he was on to something when he named the