“Can I collapse here?” Callie asked.
“Not yet! Come with me,” Paul said, taking her hand and leading her up the stairs. He opened the door to reveal a private roof garden and a much steeper, crumbling stone stairway leading to the campanile’s bell.
“My rooms are just over there,” he said. “Right across the courtyard. Ours are the only two suites on the rooftop level.”
He led her not toward his quarters but toward the stone steps. There must have been at least forty of them.
“Not more stairs!” Callie said. But she followed him, winded and exhausted, to the top.
The two opposing hills of the Sassi were spread out before them. Callie grabbed the railing for balance and was awed. The hills looked like the figure of a bird in flight. Below, the river wound deep into the ravine. Across the canyon, she could see dark spots on the distant hill.
“What are those dark places?” she asked, pointing.
“Those are entrances to the caves that have been carved out of the tufo. Whole families lived in them for generations, until disease and poverty forced the government to empty them. They built apartments to rehouse the people.”
Paul pointed out other caves, and soon Callie saw them everywhere.
“Artists have started moving in, and some of the families are moving back as well, despite the hazards of living in constant porous dampness. They missed their homes so much they were compelled to return.”
Paul held Callie’s hand. They hadn’t done more than hand-holding since Rose’s death, and Callie was grateful for that. She’d been too depressed, too angry. The last time she’d seen Rafferty, she’d yelled at him. “Find Leah Kormos,” she’d demanded. “Lock up the killer.”
“I’m not sure she is the killer,” Rafferty had said.
“Just fucking find her!”
She’d alienated Rafferty certainly, but she couldn’t help it. In what world was the police force so incompetent that they couldn’t locate a woman given twenty-five years?
She feared her outburst had alienated Towner as well. Their last conversation had been polite but perfunctory.
Despite the sessions she’d booked with Zee, nothing seemed to help.
Paul had been attentive, but he’d also given her space, being there in case she wanted to talk, but not pushing.
“Why don’t you drop everything here and come back to Matera with me?” he had finally said.
She’d been surprised. “I’m afraid I wouldn’t be very good company.”
“I don’t care about that.”
She’d been skeptical.
“It will help,” he’d said. “Trust me. No strings attached.”
Emily had agreed. She and Finn wanted to get away as well, to their home in Palm Beach. “Go,” she’d said. “Get away from all this death. It’ll do you good.”
And almost immediately, away from Pride’s Crossing, Callie could feel her spirits lifting. Standing abreast of the hills of the Sassi, she understood that part of her revived emotional state had to do with the tufo and the company. But the bulk of it, she realized, as she gazed out across the ravine, was that, with the exception of a small orange plant on the balcony of a neighboring palazzo, there wasn’t a single tree in sight.
Paul had stayed with her the first few days, walking her around the hills of the Sassi, pointing out landmarks.
He took her to see the rock churches, including the one he was working to restore. There were more than 150 of them in and around the area, carved into the sides of the ravines with primitive tools, places of worship dug into the soft sedimentary stone, revealing the fossils of St. Jacques shells embedded in walls and ceilings that had once been ocean floor. When religion had come out of hiding, visible churches had been built on top, like the houses built over the caves of the Sassi. Paul took her to see a number of these old churches; most had rooms beneath them—sometimes small chambers for the Basilian and Benedictine monks who used them for meditation, and sometimes burial crypts for the faithful who, according to local tradition, were buried sitting up in coffins carved into the tufo walls. They’d spent one whole morning exploring the huge and ancient cistern that ran under the Sassi itself. “This is a place where hidden wonders are everywhere,” Paul told her.
On the third day, he’d had to get back to work, and he’d left her in the piazza, heading down the hill and into civilization as she headed away from it, deeper into the Sassi, with its hidden stairways and empty shells of houses. She didn’t care where she ended up, and so she followed every stairway she could find, until her thighs burned from the climbing and descending. When she was completely lost and exhausted, she turned and headed back.
Every day, she took a new path, and every night, she met Paul in the piazza for a late dinner, holding his hand as they climbed back up the hill to the monastery, where he said good night, then went to his own rooms to record his findings of the day, and she tumbled into bed, too tired to light the candle, undressing by moonlight and leaving her clothes in a heap on the floor.
There were dreams. The same awful ones she’d had before that awakened her from deep sleep, but in this place, the dreams seemed more distant, muted like the light on the tufo.
Tonight, she awoke from a dream she couldn’t remember. There was no moon. Across the rooftop courtyard, Callie could see the candle Paul had left burning in his window. “In case you need me,” he’d told her. The air smelled musty and damp. She watched the flame for a long time, her unclosing eyes dry and itching. Finally, the flame flickered and died, replaced by the flicker of another brighter candle; a door opened and closed. Rose’s house. The back bedroom. Callie watched from her mattress on the living room floor as the men came and went. She could hear their whispers, the faint strains of harp music as the Goddesses welcomed them. The air was hot and smelled of rosewater and patchouli.
All night long and every night,
When my mama puts out the light,
I see people marching by,
As plain as day before my eye.
The scene shifted, and Callie, an adult now, stood naked at the front of the bedroom at Hammond Castle, her bare feet against cold stone, reciting the letter from Morrigan to Dagda.
“My Love,”
Her hands were locked in the elocutionist’s pose. Her breasts were exposed.
“Meet me tomorrow night in our secret place.” Cheeks burning.
“And I will show you an ecstasy you have never known.” Heart pounding.
“Our bodies will be as the god and goddess.” Heat moving downward in waves.
Piercing blue eyes, unable to look away.
“I will touch you as the Morrigan touches Dagda.”
Paul’s eyes.
“Our heavenly tryst unleashing all the powers of the universe.”
Eyes locked, holding her in place.