The Whirling Girl (28 page)

IT WAS LIKE THE wooden puzzle from her childhood, a box-joint box, though much enlarged. Its corners were intricately mortised so that the entire cube seemed solid and impenetrable, top, bottom and sides.

Had she secretly understood this since the night she'd first glimpsed it, but been determined to concentrate on distractions, good or bad, that might keep her from her life's true core?

Eight moves.

The remembered instruction.
Force is never needed. If a piece does not move with gentle persuasion, it is not its time to be moved
.

Like so much else. Like the clues that had led her to this moment when she was finally able to lift the mortised lid. A course that now seemed obvious and foretold.

THE SUITCASE WAS SHOVED in diagonally, upended. The case he'd carried when he left the farm. He'd taken almost nothing, a few clothes, a few books. Now this same case held reams of pages scribbled, typed, underlined, crumpled and then re-smoothed. Photos. Black and white, taken with his old Zeiss Ikon.

Little Clare. In the haymow, on the swing, riding the saddle blanket on the porch rail, little Clare and bigger Clare. The smile is rapturous and greedy for attention in the centre of squares of uneven exposure, face radiant with the conscious illicit-feeling joy of being the centre, observed, the light of someone's life.
Chiara
.

There were newspaper clippings. He must have started collecting almost immediately after leaving.

SKAGIT TEEN FEARED MISSING …

BOYFRIEND OF MISSING TEEN REPORTED MISSING

“He was a home boy,” the mother of a seventeen-year-old basketball star Eric Klassen told this reporter. “He never would have been the one to get this idea.”

TRAIL GOES COLD ON MISSING TEENS

MISSING PAIR SPOTTED CAMPING ON OREGON COAST

CELEBRATION IN SKAGIT HOUSEHOLD: MISSING SON RETURNS

All this Clare herself had never read. Even more surprising were notices of little exhibitions where her early work had been included, when she was living in Vancouver. Then one mentioning the inclusion of her
Dicentra Formosa
in a volume published by the university. How did he do it? By this time, he'd have been working in Rome. Then the catalogue of a show at the Smithsonian, which had included two of her pencil drawings.

And then — three reviews of her Amazonia book, including the one in
The New York Times
. Could that have been the moment when he decided to leave the property to her?

Didn't all this speak clearly enough? Why leaf through it all again?

THE ENVELOPE, WHEN SHE finally spotted it, was taped inside the lid. Obviously the first thing she had been expected to see, though in her haste to pull out the suitcase she had missed it altogether.

Inside were two hand-drawn maps. The first was clearly of the property here in Tuscany, showing the house, the gate, the stream winding up into the meadow, then cross-hatching to indicate the meadow itself and, more firmly drawn, the horseshoe ring of the cliff behind. No writing.

The other map was puzzling at first, until she realized she was looking at a portion of the Skagit farm, showing the house and the Italian tower and the field below, which she and her uncle had crossed so many times, the field with the bull, with its semicircle of chalky cliffs where once long ago she had dug, and been buried.

She heard his voice.
We'll pretend the cliff is limestone, shall we? Its location would have been ideal for our Etruscan friends — a city of the dead, in view of the habitation of the living! Shall we carve the entrance of a rock-tomb? Clare on his shoulder taking turns with his knife to carve an elaborate house-front into clay. The columen, the pediment, the architrave, Chiara …!

So there it was. She and Luke could have dragged any amount of fancy equipment over the grass, over the mounds, for days, for weeks, for years; they would never have found a thing. If there were tombs, they were carved right into the cliff behind rubble fallen centuries ago.

Poltergeist

TWO PIECES OF PAPER. What a taunt. What a hugely successful trick.

For the past week, Clare had strained and dug and scrambled, first with wild excitement, then stubbornly, until the truth sank in. Those hand-drawn maps were merely two more misdirections on the trail of tantalizing scraps her uncle had left her, a puzzle pitched exactly to the clever-little-girl mind he used to love to feed, but leading to a final bitter payback.

Nothing. Not an inkling. Day after day she'd scrabbled, shovelled, pried.

“That's it,” she'd said late yesterday as she limped down along the dried-up stream, her arms aching from trying to pry boulders, her back bent out of shape. If there was anything to find along that horseshoe rim of cliffs, it had been buried by whatever had caused rocks, boulders, earth to slide from the slope above centuries ago.

The contents of the inlaid box were still spread over the table, the sofa, the floor, as it had been for the whole week. Clothes she'd pulled off in exhaustion, the sink full of dirty dishes, the crowbar dumped by the door.

Luckily Marta had been off all week helping a granddaughter have a baby. This morning she'd be back. Clare was surveying the disaster she had to clean up first, when she glanced out and saw Nikki Stockton driving up the lane. Perfect trickster timing.

CLARE STOOD VERY STILL in her smelly long black shirt — all she was wearing. Maybe she could pass as a shadow if Nikki peered through the glass.

When she finally went to answer the door, Nikki was aiming a camera up into the wisteria vine, bending backwards, one foot stretched in front, an extreme arch to her back, the theatrical effect heightened by her black-and-red harlequin pants, the red blouse with wing-like sleeves that fell and fluttered as she turned this way and that, clicking away with hands that looked to have been bleached though were still somewhat grey, and were patterned now with vines and scrolls that ran past her wrists and up her arms; fine black-ink twining lines, coloured with what looked like henna in several red and marigold shades.

Nikki said, “Oops!” as if she'd been caught doing what she shouldn't. “I hope you'll forgive me for just dropping by so early, but something a bit unsettling has happened.”

IT WAS BECAUSE OF Luke Tindhall's name turning up on one of the cartons, she said; so she'd decided she'd better let Clare know.

The day before, a student with their dig had been out hiking in the hills above Trasimeno and had come upon an old shed that had been broken into. There were bits of exploration equipment scattered around, and that torn-open carton which bore Luke's name. So Nikki herself, earlier this morning, had driven over and checked. She'd been too creeped out to go inside the shed, she said, but she'd thought she'd better let Clare know so she could get in touch with Luke, in case the equipment was to do with the Foundation.

Clare said, My goodness and how strange; she didn't know anything about this. But probably, yes, she should let Luke know.

“I was thinking,” Nikki said, “maybe you would like to come along with me, now; because I went home and got a honking big padlock to replace the broken one. But I'd rather have company when I went back there.”

Nikki was still outside the door. Clare waved her over to a wicker arbour chair, while she went in and jammed all the papers back into the box, under the bronze she-wolf.

The idea of leaving everything and driving off with this harlequin figure with the hennaed hands sounded like a Houdini-type escape.

She showered, then made a fake call to London in a voice that would carry to the arbour, leaving a fake message for Luke.

NIKKI'S IDEA WAS TO take a back road to a viewpoint over the lake, then sneak down to the shed. She said if the “bad guys” had come back they could catch them red-handed. “Like this …” She raised her own decorated hands from the wheel in a strangling gesture.

No one was lurking near the shed. But Nikki insisted they stick to the plan of sneaking down. The climb involved scrambling over a steep ledge. Nikki went first and braced herself to ease Clare down, and when Clare's foot slipped she was caught in a tight wiry embrace, so that their cheeks rubbed together. Clare caught a whiff of Nikki's foxy smell.

They found a metal detector in the bushes near the shed, wires and gizmos strewn around. This would surely mean that someone really had followed Luke's car from Tarquinia. It was only when she and Nikki had gathered all the equipment up that Clare began to wonder.

Nikki hung back when Clare pushed open the battered door. As it creaked open, she caught a tiny glitter on the floor just inside. A pink crystal. Like one from her shawl. And another, further in. And several more. Maybe the beads had dropped from Nikki's bag when she was here before? But Nikki had only surveyed the shed from outside, she'd claimed.

Nikki was right behind her. “So? Can we carry this stuff in? Is it safe?” She was holding the end of her pigtail across her upper lip, feigning an evil moustache, a devilish kid.

A word flashed up.
Poltergeist
.

Clare said, “All clear. No bad guys. Just you and me. So let's do it, let's get this place locked up.”

WHEN THEY'D FINISHED LOCKING up the shed, Nikki climbed onto a large flat boulder. After a moment, Clare joined her there.

Was it really possible that Nikki herself had been the one to break into the shed? If so, the dropped crystals would be a message, wouldn't they?

Clare looked out at the aquamarine jewel of the lake, the far-off towns, the peaceful shore where once a battle had raged that turned the water red. She had said yes, once, right here.

Nikki stretched her red-wing arms. “Anders Piersen is moving into our tobacco shed. I guess you knew that.”

“No.”

“It turns out that he and William have a surprising amount in common.”

Anders was going be William's personal assistant now, she said, the idea being that he could also assume those day-to-day details that had kept Nikki away from her work at the lab, where there was a backlog because the conservator from London was late arriving.

“Talk about the law of unintended consequences, eh? Here's one William didn't foresee when he came up with that very practical idea! Two goofing-off women, just a-sittin' in the sun. So come on — sit — so we can goof off properly.” She took Clare's arm and pulled her down.

The morning was full of the scent of herbs and sun-warmed grass. High above a hawk was circling. The sky was that endless blue.

Nikki held out her hennaed hands. “So what do you think? Would I make a lovely Eastern bride? Like Thais?”

“What's that from again? Remind me.”

It was from a poem by Dryden, Nikki said. “Alexander's Feast.” About a beautiful courtesan urging on Alexander the Great, so that in a drunken revel he burned down the city of Persepolis. She had been listening to a recording of it, which a friend from college had sent her, while she applied the henna. She and her friend used to recite it when they got dressed up to go out on dates; they'd goof around about how they were going to set the town on fire.

She reached for Clare's hand before Clare thought to shift away.

She traced a stem of grass up a finger, traced a curlicue at the wrist. Why didn't they go back to her place? she asked. She could do Clare's hands too. Then even if they didn't exactly burn up the town, they'd at least light up the countryside.

The ticklish blade was moving up Clare's arm. “Yes, I remember that now,” Clare said. “We learned it in school. It has a chorus that goes ‘None but the brave ... None but the brave deserves the fair.'”

She slid off the rock.

Would her life take a turn in that direction, now? She remembered how Nikki had caught her tight when she slipped on the cliff. She looked up. The moment seemed burned there, fiery orange, like a petroglyph. And beyond was the lake where Clare had said yes when she didn't mean it.

She could say yes again.

She could say yes, and yes could bloom.

None but the brave deserves the fair.

“Look, there's a hawk,” she said.

THEY WERE ON A FAST road driving east along the lake, towards Perugia.

Clare had fibbed and told Nikki she needed to get home; she had a pressing deadline, a publisher who was hounding her. But Nikki had insisted that there was one place that Clare really ought to see while they were out. Clare's publisher would never forgive her if she, a famous flower artist, missed this chance to visit the remarkable monastery garden in Perugia when she was so near. This was a medieval garden in a cloister, a
hortus sanctus
where medicinal plants were still cultivated, some of which were only otherwise available to see in very old Italian herbals. But the place had been planned, too, as a sort of refuge for the spirit, laid out in a philosophical manner.

A monastery garden in Perugia.

When you follow the intricate philosophical paths that have been laid out, when you breathe the healing air, you will also find yourself in the centre of the truth of your own life.

How many monastery gardens could there be in a place the size of Perugia? She couldn't go there. She would see nothing. She would hear nothing but that voice. But she caught such stark disappointment when she insisted that she didn't have the time that in the end she'd agreed to go along.

It wasn't until Nikki had Clare safely captive in her van that she'd said, raising her moustache pigtail over her lip again, that now that she had Clare in her power she was going to take her, after they'd been to the garden, to a trattoria in the hills where they served a chocolate mousse cake that double-soothed the soul.

NIKKI WAS HAPPY NOW; Nikki was chattering with the determination of someone who would not allow her vision of the day to go off course. She had brought watercolours and extra brushes and she intended that she and Clare would paint together in the cloister garden. Her words tumbled through Clare's thoughts as they drove.

The sky clouded. Everything Clare had sought to leave behind earlier had trailed her. A new worry assailed her. What if in her rush to get away she hadn't properly locked the box? What if Marta pried into it? Or what if the maps actually meant that she should have been searching further up the slope, and Marta had already given the maps to Niccolo who was busy digging up there right now? But worst was the way her past had come fuming out of that box, the musty awfulness that she could still smell clinging to her skin, her clothes.