brought a tray to my room and put it on my desk. I got up and poured myself coffee. I hadn’t slept at all and needed caffeine. As I stirred in some cream, something in the distance caught my eye: smoke rising from Nevenero village. I almost dropped my cup. “Do you see that?” I asked Greta, stepping closer to the window and pushing back the curtains to see more clearly. There was smoke rising from the village. Someone was burning a fire in one of the houses. Nevenero wasn’t empty after all.
But Greta wasn’t interested in the smoke, and she didn’t look out the window. Instead, she stared at me, her large, unblinking eyes filled with worry.
“Greta,” I said. “Is there something wrong?”
She nodded her head: Yes, something was wrong.
“What is it?”
She fixed her gaze upon my desk, staring at Sal’s ring of keys. “He has been looking everywhere for these,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper.
In my terrified state, I hadn’t thought to put Sal’s keys back. In fact, I couldn’t remember if I had locked the gate when I came back from the east lawn.
“Would you put them back for me?” I pleaded. “Please?”
She shook her head: No, she wasn’t going to take them back.
“But you could hang them in the mews and he would never notice,” I said.
Tears welled in her eyes, and she shook her head again. “I can’t, madame.”
“Please, Greta,” I said. “He would never know.”
“You don’t know why Sal is here, do you?” she whispered.
It hadn’t struck me until that moment, but I had no idea why Sal, a healthy, decent-looking man in his early forties, would live as he did, so far away from the world. “He needs the work?” I ventured.
She shook her head, her eyes wide with feeling. “He killed his brother,” she said. “He didn’t mean to. He shot him. It happened during an argument.”
While this news was unexpected, something about it matched up with the image I had of Sal. “Why isn’t he in jail?”
“Mr. Zimmer,” she whispered. “Mr. Zimmer helped him. And now he helps Madame Dolores to repay his debt.”
I was furious. Zimmer had lied to me about everything—Dolores’s reasons for wanting to see me, Vita’s existence, and even Nevenero, which was clearly populated. The estate had manipulated me and had sent me off to the middle of nowhere, where a murderer held the keys to the gate. As soon as I got back to the real world, I would make sure they understood how angry I was.
“Mr. Zimmer is going to be answering to me about that,” I said at last. “As is Dolores.”
Greta gave me a terrified look as she picked up the tray with my breakfast.
I grabbed the keys from the desk and held them out to her. “Take them,” I said. “Please. If you help me now, I will do everything I can to help you find out what happened to your son.”
She looked at me for a long, somber moment before taking the keys and slipping them into her pocket.
Dolores had not left her rooms in weeks, and although I knew that her health had deteriorated and she was not well enough to see me, I was so upset by that point, so frustrated and confused about what was going on, that I didn’t care. Debilitated or not, Dolores was going to call Zimmer and tell him to come get me. At the very least, she would instruct Sal to take me down to the village in the Range Rover. It didn’t matter how it happened, but I would be leaving Montebianco Castle by nightfall.
I hurried from my rooms and headed to the first-floor salon, where Dolores took tea in the mornings when she felt well. It was empty, the damask drapes closed over the window, so I walked the cold, drafty hallways to the west wing, trying to find Dolores’s rooms. It had been weeks since I wheeled her there after our talk in the portrait gallery, and I had forgotten the way. I must have taken a wrong turn near the ballroom, because I walked in circles for another half an hour or so before I came to a set of double doors, open, light flooding the corridor.
I stepped into an enormous wood-paneled hall filled with rows of animal heads—bear, mouflon, chamois, and stag—mounted on the walls from floor to ceiling. The beasts were so lifelike that they seemed to follow me as I moved, their