hung in a niche above the chapel porch, as black as if pitch had been poured over it.
Just outside the entrance, Rosa stopped. She heard Iole’s footsteps behind her and wondered for a moment whether to tell her not to come closer. But she lost patience and pushed both doors inward. All the doors in the palazzo squealed, this one loudest of all. Signora Falchi, still thirty feet away, sighed, “Holy Mother of God!” and slowed down.
Hands firmly clutching the pickax handle, Rosa stepped into the chapel. Inside, it smelled of dank masonry and withered flowers, although the floral arrangements for the last funeral here had been removed long ago. The odor seemed to have sunk deep into the walls and the faded fresco of saints under the ceiling.
The front and side walls were covered with a chessboard pattern of granite slabs, arranged one on top of the other in sets of three. Rosa didn’t know when the first of her ancestors had been laid to rest here, but she assumed that the family tree went back centuries.
Costanza’s tomb was on the far side of the room, beyond the altar in the front of the chapel. Rosa went up to the panel embedded in the wall and dropped the heavy end of the pickax. The metal crashed on the stone floor, and the sound vibrated through the high interior. The bell on the porch seemed to reply with a deep clang.
Rosa’s fingertips touched the lettering carved into the granite surface. COSTANZA ALCANTARA. Black dust had settled inside the characters. Instinctively, she wiped her fingers on her jeans. There were no dates of birth and death, same as all the other tombs. Just names. As if it made no difference when the family members had lived. All that mattered was that they continued the Alcantara line, ensuring the survival of the dynasty.
Iole stumbled through the door, the tutor close on her heels. They both stood speechless. Rosa could feel their eyes on her back.
She placed the palm of her hand on the stone slab, as if feeling whether anything was moving behind it. A little dirt was left under her fingernails. She could see it even through the black nail polish that she had to reapply after every transformation. For a long time she had been making an effort to stop biting her nails. The dirt from the inscription on Costanza’s tomb would certainly stop her now.
She withdrew her fingers, grasped the pickax again with both hands, and turned to the interior of the chapel.
Iole watched with bated breath. Signora Falchi’s eyes, behind the lenses of her glasses, looked anxious and simultaneously fascinated in a macabre way. “Signorina,” she began cautiously.
“Just keep it to yourself,” retorted Rosa.
“But—”
“Not now.”
Three or four steps, and Rosa was looking at her father’s tomb. Like Costanza’s, it was in the middle row of slabs. The one below it bore no inscription; the lettering on the one above it was faded. Curiously enough, no dust had settled there. As if only Costanza attracted all the dirt in this place.
Rosa took a deep breath and swung her arm. With an earsplitting noise, she drove the tip of the pickax into her father’s tombstone.
“Signorina!”
Steps behind her. Clattering heels.
Rosa struck a second time. A crack as wide as her finger ran across the surface like a flash of black lightning.
“Signorina Alcantara, I beg you—”
Spinning around, she let out a hiss that made the tutor flinch. Rosa felt her tongue split behind her teeth, but she took care not to open her mouth as the woman gave her one more dark glance, then turned and ran back to Iole, stationing herself protectively in front of the girl, as if seriously afraid that Rosa might go for her with the pickax.
When Rosa hit the tombstone for the third time, a gray triangle broke off the stone beneath the inscription. She had to strike the slab several more times before it crumbled away completely. The fragments fell to the floor, leaving only a few splinters in the open compartment of the tomb.
She could see the foot of a casket. The last eleven years had left it untouched. A gilded handle shone in the darkness.
Suddenly Iole was beside her. “Here, I’ll help you,” she said quietly. Rosa nodded gratefully, propped the pickax against the wall, and took hold of the broad metal handle on one side of the casket. It was cold as ice. Iole grasped the other handle, and as the tutor stood