the swell of a piano’s crescendo. Someone was listening to classical music.
Creeping to the door, I pushed it open. The music grew louder, filling a small, narrow space without furniture or lights. I was about to turn and get out of there when I saw, in the center of the space, a mound of something fleshy and liquid and very dead. Stepping closer, I found the bloody carcass of a goat, an ibex to be precise, its long gray horns curled against the stone. I crouched down to get a closer look. Its body lay open. White bone jutted from wet flesh where the fur had been ripped away. It hadn’t been dead long—the blood was fresh on the stone floor, and there was no smell of decay. Its large, liquid eye stared up at me, wide and lifeless. I touched its side. It was still warm.
I was so disgusted by the goat that I had forgotten the music behind the door. But when I heard it again—the intertwining of violin and piano, an eerie duet—I knew I wasn’t alone. I stepped backward, toward the hallway, straining to see in the dim light. There was someone there, close by. Just then, I saw another door at the far side of the room. I had not entered a closet, as I had thought, but an antechamber, one that communicated with a larger room. I didn’t have time to consider the uses of such a space, or to question why a goat might have been slaughtered there, because at that very moment the hinges squeaked and the door began to creak open. Abandoning the goat, and whoever waited beyond the door, I turned and ran.
I was out of breath by the time I made it to the first floor, so unnerved, so turned around that I nearly ran into Greta in the corridor. She sidestepped me, lifted a silver tray above her head, and gave me a look of reproach. “Lunch is served in the grand hall,” she said, walking ahead.
I followed her into a long room with wood-paneled walls. I had passed by the grand hall the night before, when it was dark and the outline of the long table was barely visible at the center of the room. In daylight, I found a frayed carpet over the stone floor, and a long, capacious cabinet stacked with silver plates. An enormous fireplace, fashioned of stone and decorated with the Montebianco coat of arms, filled the room with heat.
Greta put the silver tray on the table, turned on her heel, and walked out of the room.
“Hello, there,” a man said from the far end of the table. “Fancy some lunch?”
The table might have seated fifty—it was long and narrow, stretching clear from one end of the hall to the other—but there were just two place settings. I walked the length of the room toward the man. When I reached him, I grasped the edge of the table, trying to catch my breath.
“Are you quite all right?” he asked, looking me over.
“I don’t know,” I said, taking the cloth napkin from the second place setting and wiping my brow. “I just saw something really strange.”
He was a thin, pale man in his mid-fifties, with precisely clipped hair and a trimmed mustache, wearing a baggy sweater under a tweed jacket. He leveled his eyes at me. “Was it a dead goat?”
“Oh my God, yes, that is exactly what it was!” I said, relieved that I wasn’t crazy. “Did you see it, too?”
“No, but I did witness Sal with a live goat in the castle this morning, so . . .” He stood, pulled out my chair, and nodded to indicate that I should sit.
“That isn’t unusual here?” I asked. “A dead goat in the castle?”
He gave a quick shake of the head—no, not so terribly unusual—and sat down across from me. “You must be Alberta,” he said. His face had gone pink. “I’m Basil Harwell, secretary to the Montebianco family. How was your journey?”
“Bumpy,” I said, trying to calm down.
“Ah, helicopter transport. There’s certainly no other option at this time of year, is there?” Basil shook his head again. “The snow is impenetrable from November to May. We are Old Man Winter’s prisoners until springtime. One gets used to it.”
He directed his gaze at me, and detecting my disheveled appearance, and the sweat glistening on my forehead, he asked, “Did you get lost?”
“Is it that obvious?” I asked, feeling dangerously close to breaking into