A Year at 32 September Way (6 page)

Cancel any appointments you have tomorrow morning. In fact, clear the                                            whole day. You’ve been seen and now the family wants to see you. You’re                             expected in
Bardolino
at 9am.

He returned the cellphone to his pants pocket and glanced over toward Eva to make sure she hadn’t seen his reaction. Marcello slowly ran his left hand through his hair—a gesture he made out of habit whenever he was nervous. He climbed back in bed and lay with his back turned to Eva, who moved closer to him until he could feel her breasts pressed against his back. Her hand caressed his arm and moved toward his inner thigh.

“Sweetheart, I’m afraid you’ve worn me out tonight,” he said as he lifted her hand to kiss it, and then moved it away from his body. “I have to sleep now; we have so many more nights together.”

He turned enough to kiss her goodnight and could see the smile on her face as she leaned over him to blow out the candle. Within minutes she was fast asleep, and Marcello could hear the rhythmic sound of her breathing. But he couldn’t sleep a wink. Salvatore summoning him to a family meeting was rarely a good thing. By the time he rose at 5am, Marcello’s pillowcase and side of the bed were drenched in sweat; he had spent the whole night tossing and turning, vacillating between nervousness and fear.

Chapter 4

Marrying Carlotta had been a fruitful venture in many ways. Aside from the fact that she was a much-sought-after beauty in the Lake Garda area, Marcello knew her family connections would help him get a more secure footing in the business world. Sure, the
Benedettos
had been well-known in Venice for decades and enjoyed modest success with their hotel business. But they wanted to expand…
needed
to expand, and were counting on their son Marcello to make that happen for them with business dealings in Verona and around Lake Garda.

Initially, there was quite a bit of competition vying for Carlotta’s attention. But, eventually, none of them could compare to Marcello’s ability to romance her, hold her interest, keep her guessing with his mysterious side and make her laugh with his playfulness. Most importantly, her family approved of and accepted him. They also offered a substantial dowry—a detail Marcello hadn’t overlooked—that included partial ownership of
Via
del Sol, the family-owned vineyard in
Bardolino
.

But not long after their wedding that crisp fall day thirty years ago, Marcello discovered that along with the benefits of marrying Carlotta, there were also definite disadvantages. The greatest one by far was the short leash her family kept him on. If her father wasn’t cornering him to discuss the future of the vineyards, her brothers seemed to make part-time jobs out of doing surveillance on him, whether he was in Lake Garda, Verona or Venice. Salvatore, Carlotta’s older brother, quickly became a thorn in Marcello’s side; because of him, Marcello was called to his first family meeting eighteen months after he’d married Carlotta.

In Italy it was common to flirt and admire the beauty of other women, but Salvatore took it as a personal affront when he caught Marcello doing just that. They’d just recently announced to Carlotta’s family the impending birth of their first child when he was summoned to meet with the family. Marcello had every reason to believe he was about to be congratulated as a father-to-be. In fact, he even suspected there might be a monetary gift coming his way.

When he left the closed-door meeting in the rear wine-tasting room on the vineyard property, Marcello’s neatly slicked back hair was disheveled, his lower lip was split, and large purple and blue bruises were forming along his left temple and across the top of his left hand. He’d been seen winking at a young woman on the piazza and had waved at her before rounding the corner. The penalty had been mild, he’d been informed. But was just enough to leave him imagining how much worse it could get. The bruises from the gut punches wouldn’t show, but he would most definitely feel them over the next days.

Over the course of the next two decades, there were never any more family meetings called in regards to romantic indiscretions.
But, there were a few related to business mistakes.
Each time he was summoned, Marcello spent the entire night praying that the punishment would be doled out by Carlotta’s father, who always seemed to be slightly more merciful. If one or more of the brothers rose from the table to deliver the punishment, he knew it would be long, painful and severe. 
The only brother that never participated in handing down the punishments was the youngest, Louis, who was almost like Marcello’s younger brother, too.
But generally, after Marcello sat silently and listened to the family discuss his indiscretion for an hour or so, it was all he could do to pray the beating that followed would be swift.

Carlotta never said a thing in response to his bruises or soreness, nor did she ever attempt to tend to them. Over time, this grew to be less of a surprise to Marcello, who’d begun to notice the increase in her erratic behavior and mood swings. It was almost as if someone flipped a switch inside of her during those childbearing years, and the Carlotta he had loved and married was slowly becoming someone else.

Years after their youngest child—a daughter—was born, Carlotta’s father pulled Marcello aside and told him that an occasional romantic indiscretion would be acceptable now that Carlotta was getting older and the children were almost grown. Even so, Marcello was extra careful over the years and had never engaged in more than a few rendezvous with the same woman until Eva had come along.

Then, his first night in the apartment with Eva, he’d been summoned to a family meeting again. There hadn’t been one in almost seven years. “Have I slacked off?” wondered Marcello. “Have I slipped? None of my people have reported anyone following me.” During
the 45-minute drive from Verona to
Bardolino
, he continued to wrack his brain over the possible reasons for the summons. He arrived a full two hours before the meeting would start…plenty of time for breakfast, cappuccino and the newspaper. But all Marcello could do was pace up and down the boardwalk along the lake’s edge. He stopped and peered out over the clear blue-green water of Lake Garda and the villages that rose along the sides of the lake up toward the mountains. He wished he could escape into the scenery, somewhere high upon Monte
Baldo
where no one would bother to find him. But it seemed Carlotta’s family had eyes all over northern Italy, and one or more of them was always watching Marcello’s back, waiting for him to make a mistake. Maybe he’d finally made the worst one of all with his beautiful Eva.

Chapter 5

During her first two weeks in Verona, Eva saw Marcello only once after that first night. When he didn’t show up at her apartment the second evening, as promised, she became worried. He was habitually late, but never a no-show. In the past he’d said never to call his cellphone more than once, so she didn’t. But, by her third day, there was still no word from Marcello, and Eva was nearly sick with worry.

The next day her phone rang early in the morning as she lay in bed. It was Marcello; he explained that he’d been hit by a speeding moped the morning he’d left her apartment and was in the hospital with broken ribs and bruises on his face. At first, he forbade her to come and see him looking the way he did. “I have to see you, Marcello,” she choked into the phone as she wiped away tears of relief.

He relented to her tears but instructed her to come at the same time as his assistant, mumbling something about not being ready to deal with his family. Eva was disappointed and relieved all at the same time. She needed to see him with her own eyes to make sure he was going to be okay. But she couldn’t understand why he wanted her to come with his office assistant, as if she were someone he knew from his business dealings.

“What is going on?” she wondered. The situation was odd, but there was no time to think about it. She pushed it toward the back of her mind to sit with all the other memories of situations in which she’d felt slighted by Marcello. Tucked away in a far corner she seldom chose to visit were a growing collection of memories— events, conversations and feelings—that led Eva to sense that something wasn’t right between her and Marcello. She could have delved further into each one but always chose not to.
Most of the time she was happy…happier than she’d ever been in her life.
Exploring a minor suspicion could bring an end to her happiness, and she wouldn’t take any chances with that. In the end, she always wondered how she could possibly have doubted Marcello in the first place. It was clear he was as madly in love with her as she was with him; she knew it and chose to focus on that rather than any silly little niggling feeling that tried to creep into her mind.

In the meantime, Eva walked the nearby streets and explored central Verona repeatedly, becoming familiar with a few of the vendors at the markets she frequented. She never crossed
paths with anyone else in the rear courtyard of the apartment, and the only sign of life she saw on the long stairway to her home was her own shadow. Surely, there must have been other people living in the four-story building. It would be a waste of space and loss of money if there weren’t. But if there were any other tenants, she certainly never saw or heard them. She’d even wandered around to the front of the building one evening, but there was no trace of anyone else. There was a front entryway, but it was locked. Through the glass in the door, Eva could see a staircase.

It made no sense. “Why am I living on the fourth floor of an empty apartment building?” Eva wondered, feeling like Rapunzel hidden away in the tower. “There’s a perfectly good staircase inside, but my apartment is accessible only from a private door. Why is it so disconnected, like it’s a secret hiding place?”

She cupped her hand over her forehead, peered through the front door and knocked on the wood.
Nothing.
She knocked again and waited.
Still nothing.
Eva was curious and had plenty of time on her hands to get to the bottom of the situation if she wanted. But it was probably better to wait; she’d be sure to ask Marcello about the locked door and the other apartments as soon as he was better.

The first two weeks in Verona flew by once she knew Marcello was okay. Eva slowly enlarged her comfort zone, walking farther away from her apartment or venturing down different cobblestone streets or stone pathways each day. At night, she elected to stay in and spend her time quietly while she waited for Marcello to return to her.

One night toward the end of those two weeks, she found herself standing in front of the tall bookcase in her living room, searching for a book to read on her balcony. The books were packed so tightly on the third shelf that she had to push and pull the one she’d selected back and forth to jimmy it out of its space. The book inched forward. And just when she thought she’d be able to extricate it, she accidentally applied too much pressure and pushed it back so it landed with a “
thunk
” on the floor between the bookshelf and the wall.

Her slender fingers barely fit in the narrow gap, but she was able to slide the book toward her. As she did, she felt something jutting out from the wall. There was no way to see what it was in that dark space. If she wanted to know, she’d have to figure it out by touching it. She removed her hand from the gap and turned it so her palm faced the wall. Slowly, Eva slid her hand back along the floor until she could feel the bump. Once the palm of her hand was lying against the bump, she began to move her hand upward. The bump continued beyond the point she could reach while squatting on the floor, so she stood up and continued running her hand along the bump until she was standing tippy-toed and her hand reached what felt like a corner.

“I know this feeling,” she kept thinking, “I know what it is.” She stood there thinking aloud to herself with her hand resting against the bump on the wall before glancing over toward the front door. It was then she realized what she’d found. Her hand was resting over a door frame; hidden behind the tall, heavy wooden bookcase was a door.

“I wonder where it leads,” Eva thought out loud as she began to take books off the top shelf and pile them on the floor.

***

The first two weeks had been endless exploration for Carlisle, and she’d written barely a sentence of her novel, much to her agent’s chagrin. Life was far too exciting and, for the first time in seven years, Carlisle felt as if the dark cloud she’d been under was finally dissipating. “Thank goodness,” she’d often thought as she awoke in the morning feeling happy and expectant instead of filled with gloom and dread.

Toward the end of the first week, Carlisle was on her way out for a morning stroll through the city when she bumped into another woman coming out of the first-floor apartment. “Oh my, it’s been so quiet down here, I wasn’t even sure anyone lived on the first floor,” said Carlisle as she looked up toward the woman who was at least half a head taller. She extended her hand, “I’m Carlisle. It’s nice to meet you.”

“What a relief to know there’s another woman in the building,” sighed Nicolette. “I’m Nicolette, by the way. The only other person I’ve seen here, besides my husband, is the disheveled-looking man in the gray suit. But I’ve only seen him twice.
Creepy, to say the least.”

The two women ended up taking their conversation out to the front courtyard, and Carlisle happily put off her walk until later in the evening when the temperature would start to cool again. She’d been busy exploring, but had also felt a little lonesome from time to time. “Maybe this woman and I can become friends,” she thought.