Secrets Of Bella Terra (6 page)

Gazing out over the yard, over the valley, he saw the familiar vista and yet . . . how different things were now, knowing as he did that somewhere out there, a predator lurked and, perhaps, a plot to harm his grandmother. Why, he didn’t yet understand. But he would. He would.

“If you don’t have the keys, I do.” Brooke fished them out of her purse.

Well, of course she did. In the years since he’d lived in Bella Terra, Brooke had received the key to every Di Luca lock.

Opening the door, she gestured for him to precede her.

He entered the house, and stopped just inside to listen and observe.

The dim hallway went straight back to the kitchen. To the left, a wide arch opened into the old-fashioned parlor complete with crocheted doilies on the arms of the chairs and the couch, and . . . “When did Nonna get a flat-screen TV?” he asked.

“When she realized she could watch football in HD.”

“Of course.” His Nonna had always been an outstanding athlete, as competitive in badminton as she was in softball, and that translated to a fierce love of pro sports.

Brooke smiled fondly at the massive television that covered most of the wall over the fireplace. “She’s into Australian football now.”

“What’s so great about Australian football?”

“She says it’s faster, more exciting, and since the guys don’t wear pads, she can really see their tushies.”

Rafe rounded on Brooke.

She held up her hands. “Hey, I’m just repeating what she said.”

Women
. He turned back to his examination of the room.

“But she’s right,” Brooke said reflectively.

“You’ve been up here to watch with her?” He kept his tone noncommittal.

“Yes. It’s fun. I bring hors d’oeuvres, she serves champagne, and we shout at the TV.”

“Aren’t hors d’oeuvres and champagne contrary to the spirit of Australian football?”

“Probably. Does that kind of nefarious activity make me even more of a suspect?”

He fully faced her. “Yes.”

“Which part?” Brooke’s eyes sparked with ire. “The hors d’oeuvres and champagne, the tushies, or enjoying an evening with the matriarch whose grandsons don’t spend enough time with her?”

R
afe winced. Brooke never hesitated to make her opinion known, at least not to him, and he should have seen that reproach coming. “What makes you a suspect? All of your activities. None of them. I may not have been here for Nonna when she needed me, but I’m not going to fail her now.”

“She worries about you.”

“No need.”

“You’re not Teflon. You already proved that once.”

“Nonna knows I’m fine.”

“Avoiding the issue. I guess you’re not as brave as the military medals might signify.”

Brooke could always talk rings around him.

He turned to the bedroom on the right, Nonna’s bedroom. He pushed the door open, stepped inside, and breathed in Nonna’s perfume, flowers dipped in vanilla. The flowered comforter was spread precisely over the queen-size bed; the dust ruffle brushed the off-white carpet; the pillow shams were arranged against the headboard. Family photos covered the walls and the cedar chest, and Nonna’s collection of glass perfume bottles was arrayed on the dresser. Everything looked exactly as it had every morning when Nonna left it.

He was lucky. Nonna kept her house habitually and with precision. If she’d been a different woman, this investigation would be a lot more difficult.

Beside him, Brooke said, “It’s amazing how this house makes me feel like all the generations of Di Lucas have worked to create a safe haven.”

Because she had said exactly what he was thinking, he curtly answered, “Somehow this generation blew it, since a few days ago the heart of the family was hurt. See anything out of place?”

“No.”

He moved on to the dining room, a good-size room where a dozen chairs of various shapes and sizes surrounded a long, battered walnut table. Cabinets were built into the far wall. All were constructed in the forties by Palmiro Di Luca, a carpenter. The top row of doors was glass, displaying Nonna’s heirloom china and cut glass. Nothing expensive, just stuff that had been passed down through the generations and was precious to the whole family.

He scanned the shelves. Eventually, he’d look in the cupboards, but right now, everything looked as it had looked all the years of his life.

Yet here in the dining room, something was out of place. . . .

He narrowed his eyes, putting the room out of focus.

“The candles,” Brooke said uncertainly. “They’re . . . sort of . . .”

“Yeah.” Ever since he could remember, Nonna had lit the dining room table with tapers inserted into empty Di Luca wine bottles. Now instead of lining the center of the table, the six bottles and their candles were lined up before the master’s chair.

Brooke started to walk forward, but he gestured her back, flipped on the overhead, and walked in a slow circuit around the table, examining the floor.

“What are you looking for?” Her voice, always low and throaty, was quieter than normal, as if she feared being overheard.

“A man’s dirty footprint.” He barked out a laugh that mocked his expectations. “The driver’s license he dropped.”

“I already looked for that.”

She spoke so solemnly he looked to see if she was serious. Only when he realized her expression was deadpan did he sigh and shake his head reprovingly. He donned a pair of latex gloves. “Don’t touch anything,” he warned, and walked to the table.

She followed. “Nonna could have been cleaning the bottles.”

He pointed at the wax drippings that dusted the table, then lifted one candle out of its base. It easily came free. “He removed all the candles, looking for . . . what?”

“More important, he replaced all the candles when he was done. Why would a thief care enough to tidy up after himself?”

Of course Brooke would observe the fact that most interested him. “We’ll see if Dopey can lift a fingerprint off any of these,” he said.

“Don’t be childish, Rafe. His name is DuPey.”

Her sharp tone was a slap to his pride. “Dating him, are you?”

“I would, but his wife has access to his guns.”

Is that where you got the pistol with which you shot and killed a man?

But he didn’t ask. Not yet.

He glanced around one more time, then gestured her back into the hallway. They checked the bathroom and second bedroom, but all was in order there.

They entered the kitchen. He saw the dent in the plaster wall Nonna’s head had created, the splotch of blood on the floor where she’d lain unconscious. His cold, clear anger grew, and for that he was grateful. That icy rage gave him the edge that had made him the best tracker in his unit.

Out of respect for Nonna’s wine collection, someone had shut the cellar door her attacker had left open.

Still, it smelled off in here, and Brooke gave an exclamation of dismay. “Honestly. You men. Couldn’t you have cleaned up the groceries?”

He looked. A puddle of ice cream had leaked from the cloth bag and dried on the table and the floor. “I wasn’t one of the men who . . .” He shut up. He wasn’t going to win that one.

Brooke went to the counter to collect paper towels.

“Leave it,” he said. “We’ll get someone up here to clean it up. One of the maids from the resort.”

“No. I want to do it.” Brooke pulled a swath off the roll and used it to wipe up the worst of the mess. “Nonna wouldn’t like it to sit here on her table and floor.”

He wanted to tell her no, he didn’t want her fingerprints muddying the crime scene. But that ship had sailed; the EMTs had been in here, and the cops, and Brooke had been here, too, on the day his grandmother had been attacked. Besides, the slight quaver in Brooke’s voice alerted him. She’d seen the bloodstain, too, and she wasn’t as callous as he was.

Or maybe she was guilty.

Or maybe she knew his grandmother’s wishes better than he liked to admit.

“Make yourself happy,” he said, and made a tour of the kitchen, studying everything. The condition of the back door—it had been forcefully yanked open, so the guy was definitely fleeing. The faucet—it was centered on the sink, and Nonna was a tyrant about that. And finally, most important, the area around the cellar door—still no footprints, no dirt from the flower beds. “So the perp was wearing latex gloves and maybe shoe protection,” Rafe mused aloud. He would have to follow the trail out the back door, to the bushes where the guy had stashed the motorcycle, and photograph the marks left by the tires. If they were original to the bike, the tread could be traced to a specific manufacturer, and then Rafe could check public records for everyone who owned that kind of motorcycle. But first . . . “Are you done? C’mon. I’m going down to the cellar. I could use your keen eye.”

“No. No, when I finish here, I’m going outside.” Going to the sink, she wet a dish towel. “I’ll meet you there.”

He watched her as she returned to the table and swabbed the sticky ice cream away, then knelt on the floor and did it again. “That’s right. You don’t like the basement.”

She didn’t answer for a long moment. Then, “No. No, I don’t like the basement. It’s silly, I know. No good reason for it, and I do go down, because every time Nonna goes to get potatoes or garlic or a bottle of wine, I worry. To tell you the truth, that was the phone call I was afraid to get—that she’d fallen down those steps and broken her arm or—” Brooke took a quavering breath. “I didn’t expect her to get mugged in her own house. That’s all.”

“You’re upset.”

“This is the first time I’ve been back since I was here with the ambulance.” Pale with cold sweat, she sat down heavily on one of the kitchen chairs.

Opening a drawer, he pulled out a kitchen towel, ran it under the cool water, and laid it around her neck. “Do you know where Nonna’s flashlight is?”

She didn’t ask why he needed it, simply pressed the towel closer and gestured toward the cupboard beside the sink.

“Better to put your head between your knees than to fall on the floor,” he instructed, then opened the cupboard.

The flashlight was the one he’d given Nonna for Christmas, with three LEDs that gave a strong, white, directed light. Remembering her enthusiasm, and satisfied he’d given her a cool gift that she could truly use, he took it and headed down the stairs into the cellar.

The cellar probably looked like every other cellar constructed in the late nineteenth century—a hole in the ground, twenty by thirty, with a high ceiling, rough cement walls, tiny windows up at ground level covered by outdoor vegetation and indoor grime. Not even Nonna, who so carefully tended her home, would climb up to wash those windows.

Sometime in the early twentieth century, someone had run an electric wire to a bare bulb in the middle of the room, turned on and off by a good long stretch and a chain. Not long after her grandsons arrived, Nonna had an electrician in to bring the electricity up to code. A fluorescent fixture replaced the bulb, which still dangled, useless, from the ceiling.

Rafe flipped the switch, and with a flicker, blaring white light illuminated the cellar.

A slow, constant shower of dust from the ceiling coated the floor. A couple of paths ran through it, created by his grandmother as she trekked to the shelves where she kept her winter vegetables and to the wall filled with wines.

Men’s footprints tracked across the floor, not too many, all with their own tread.

The cops had been down here, of course.

But none of those footprints matched the motorcyclist’s, and none had that distinctive lack of tread that shoe covers would have provided.

So Nonna’s attacker had been down here looking at the same stuff she did. The vegetables? Not likely. The wine? For sure. She had some valuable bottles, but hell, who came all this way to steal a few bottles of wine when half the households in Bella Valley had great wine sitting around in unprotected wine cellars? Add that to the fact that no similar break-ins or attacks had happened, the candles were out of the wine bottles on the table, and there were no fingerprints, and Rafe had a mystery on his hands.

Turning off the fluorescent lights, he flicked on the flashlight and shone it around the basement, using its bright focused illumination to spot anything out of place. There was nothing. Except . . . He shone it in the slots where the bottles of wine rested. The dust in each slot had been disturbed and—he pulled out the bottles one by one—the labels had been wiped off. For a better look?

Yes, the perp had been searching for something specific, and doing it with subtlety. If Nonna hadn’t come home and interrupted him, she would never have known he was there.

On the other hand, she’d said he hit her with a tire iron, and she had the broken arm to prove it. So the perp had come prepared for trouble.

Rafe put the bottles back and shone the flashlight around one last time, then turned it off.

What bottle was the perp searching for? Did Nonna know? Did she hide a secret?

And why had the trouble started now?

R
afe came around the house to the front to find Brooke reclined on the stairs, her feet braced against the bottommost step, her long legs stretched out straight, her head and shoulders resting on the porch. Her eyes were closed. Her face was turned up to the sun.

She had her father’s fair skin. “You’ll burn,” he said.

“
SPF
forty at all times,” she answered, and never stirred a muscle.

He nodded, climbed the stairs, and sat down on the top step, his elbows resting on his knees, his hands clasped loosely between his legs. “You killed a man.”

Still she didn’t open her eyes. Or move. “It didn’t take long for you to garner that information.”

“I didn’t
garner
that information.” He’d forgotten how irritating she could be. “It was given to me by my brothers as a reason why I should catch the perp and get out of town.”

“They were trying to scare you away?”

“They were telling me I shouldn’t screw with you.”

She smirked. “Because I would kill you, too?”

“No, because you’re fragile from your ordeal.”