Chapter 22
Chapter 22
“Matteo,” he said. “Bring the bolt cutters.”
The west corridor was colder than the rest of the house. It ran behind the ballroom, narrow and high-ceilinged, lit by a single row of sconces that had been converted to electric sometime in the sixties. The carpet was old and worn thin in a track down the center, and the doors along it were unnumbered.
At the end, where the corridor turned, there was a wall.
It looked like a wall. It had been papered in the same faded damask as the rest of the corridor, and the seam where it met the ceiling had been painted over.
But the baseboard did not match. It had been replaced — newer wood, stained to look old, and poorly.
Dante ran his hand along it.
“There,” Allesia said.
She had found the seam before he did, at the level of the lock. A thin vertical line, almost invisible in the sconce light.
The key went in.
It did not turn.
“Frozen,” Matteo said. “Give me a minute.”
He worked at it with a can of graphite and a small tool, patient as a man picking a lock, though there was no lock to pick — only eleven years of paint and rust and the particular stubbornness of a door that had been told never to open again.
Then, with a sound like a knuckle cracking, it turned.
Dante pushed.
The wall swung inward on silent hinges, and cold air came out of the dark — old air, dry, smelling of dust and paper and something faintly floral, the ghost of a perfume.
Matteo found the switch. Nothing happened. He clicked it again.
“The power’s been cut to this wing,” he said. “Give me a minute.”
But Dante was already through the door.
Allesia followed him.
The room was small and high, with one tall window on the far wall, covered by a shutter that had been painted shut. Dust lay over everything in a gray fur. There was a desk. A chair. A small sofa. A bookcase, half full, the rest of the shelves bare.
And on the desk, undisturbed, were three objects.
A lamp, unplugged.
A teacup, with tea still dried at the bottom.
And a photograph in a silver frame — Bianca Moretti, young, holding a baby.
Dante picked it up.
May you like
The baby was him.
He stood there in the dark with his mother’s face in his hands, and Allesia stood a few feet away and did not speak, because there was nothing to say that would not have been worse than silence.
