Because she was still concentrating on the garden, Brunetti and Vianello exchanged a quick glance but remained silent until eventually Vianello said, ‘That’s a big change.’
‘Yes, it was. He was happier. Well, I thought he was happier. My mother was, too.’ She continued to think about this and added, ‘He was quieter, too; he never got angry any more, and that was wonderful.’
Brunetti broke in here to say, ‘It’s hard for me to imagine your father being angry at anything.’
‘No, not after we came here, he wasn’t.’
‘And his bees?’ Brunetti asked.
‘Oh, he got them when he came here. First my parents rented a house, and then my father got the job as caretaker here, so we moved to this house and there were bees here already.’ She stopped for a moment and then said, ‘They’re still there.’ She put her hand to her mouth. ‘Who’ll take care of them?’
21
Silence descended until Brunetti thought to ask, ‘Do they need much taking care of?’
His question seemed to trouble Federica, who took her hand away and closed her eyes. Brunetti noticed her left hand, gripped into a fist. He was afraid she was going to cry.
‘I don’t know,’ she said in a broken voice. ‘I never learned what to do. All these years, watching him and going out with him to see them, and I don’t know what to do with them or when, or what to feed them in the winter. I never really paid any attention to what he was doing. He tried to explain, but I wasn’t interested. I just wanted to eat the honey.’ She took a deep breath.
It’s always the odd, unpredictable things that set us off, Brunetti thought. Grief lies inside us like a land mine: heavy footsteps will pass by it safely, while others, even those as light as air, will cause it to explode.
When at last she looked at Brunetti, she said, ‘Maybe I was jealous of them. Is that possible?’ She tried to shake the idea away. ‘Of bees?’
Brunetti smiled to show he understood what she meant. ‘If they took his attention away from you, then it makes sense that you’d be jealous, especially when you were a child.’
She nodded, wanting to believe him. Then she sat straighter in her chair and folded her hands in front of her. ‘What do you want to know?’
‘I went swimming with your father, and I saw the scars on his back. Do you know anything about them?’
She shook her head, first confused by his question and then confused by her own response.
He watched as she sent her mind into the past. Her eyes contracted a few times, and then she said, ‘It was the accident. He didn’t have the scars when we were living in Marghera, but then the next summer, when we were out in the boat and going swimming, he had them. I still remember seeing them for the first time. I think I started to cry, they were so awful. But my mother told me not to be silly: if my father could forget about them, then so should I.’
‘Did she tell you how your father got them?’ Vianello asked.
‘I asked her,’ Federica said, ‘and she told me that they were why he was gone for so long, because he had to get better from them.’
‘Do you have any idea what work he did?’ Vianello asked.
She must have anticipated this question, for she said at once, ‘He was a pilot and moved things from the different parts of the factory.’ She gazed into her childhood years, remembering. ‘He used to draw me pictures of the boats he piloted and tell me about the canals that went around the buildings and out into the laguna.’
‘This was before the accident?’ Brunetti specified.
‘Yes. He always loved the laguna, even when we lived on terraferma. I remember he told me about the tides – even if I didn’t really understand.’
Brunetti watched as memory surfaced and she went on. ‘After we came out here, he gave me a book about the birds that lived there.’ She bowed her head and propped her elbow on the table so she could put one hand to her forehead. ‘I still have it: Uccelli della laguna veneta. It was a book for grown-ups, but he read it to me and explained the things I didn’t understand.’ She took a few deep breaths and said, ‘I read it to my children.’
‘This was after the accident?’ Brunetti asked.
Head still lowered and eyes shielded by her hand, she didn’t reply at first. ‘Yes,’ she finally said. ‘He didn’t read to me before. My mother did, but he usually wasn’t there when I went to bed.’
‘Do you know where he was?’ Vianello interrupted.
She lifted her hand and looked at the Inspector, who had spoken softly, as one would to a girl.
‘My mother always complained that he was out with his friends.’ She looked back and forth between them, as though to see which of them would be the first to accuse her of disloyalty to her father.
‘Sounds like my wife,’ Vianello said with a smile that suggested he was exaggerating.
‘He really was,’ she admitted. ‘My mother would get angry, and they’d argue, and then he’d leave and come back after I was asleep.’ That said, she rubbed her hands together and began to pick at one of her fingernails. ‘I think he drank a lot. Then.’
She looked at the two men, and said, ‘I remember that’s the way he was before we came out here. But then it was as if we’d come to a magic country where people changed into the person you wanted them to be, and all of a sudden my father became quiet and patient and had time to read to me.’
‘And your mother?’ Brunetti asked, allowing himself to slip back into the part of good cop.
‘Ah,’ she said, dragging out the syllable. ‘She was very happy for a long time. More than ten years. I finished school and found a job on Murano.’
‘When was that?’ Vianello asked.
‘Oh, when I was nineteen. I took the summer off after school, and then I found a job in a glass factory, in the office there.’ She thought for a moment and added, ‘There was lots of work then. Not like now.’
‘And later on, what happened?’ Brunetti inquired.
‘My mother was diagnosed with cancer,’ she said flatly.
Silence settled into the room and forced itself upon them.
‘I had just had my daughter when she was diagnosed.’ She took a deep breath, shrugged. Then, with the ease of a schoolgirl pronouncing the name of a foreign classmate, she said, ‘Mesotelioma pleurico polmonare.’
Vianello broke in to say, ‘How awful for you all.’
‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘My father disappeared after she died.’
‘Do you mean he went away?’ Vianello asked.
‘No, but he might as well have done that. I’d get up in the morning and come over here – we still lived in Massimo’s house then – with my daughter to at least have coffee with him, and I’d find breakfast ready for me on the table. Coffee made: all I had to do was put it on the stove.’
‘And your father?’ the Inspector asked.