The Last Promise by Richard Paul Evans Read Free Book Online Page A

bedrooms. The owner was a barrel-chested man with a thick Florentine accent, who offered them Chianti wine until they relented and took a glass.
    After touring the house, they walked around the side patio and Luigi pulled Ross aside. “I asked the owner if they had ever rented it for winter. He said they have not. The house is heated with gasolio— how do you say in English?”
    “Diesel fuel.”
    “Yes, diesel fuel is not efficient. This was built for a summerhouse, I think. I think it would be very expensive to heat in winter. And you would still be cold.”
    Ross looked across the yard. The place was beautiful but not right for him. “Let’s keep looking,” he said.
    Their second stop was closer to Florence, in a compact, busy township called Grassina. The rental property was new and clean, but its decor was modern European and lacked the rustic Italian feel Ross was looking for.
    Their third stop was a villa near the Chianti township of Impruneta. It was in the countryside, away from the main thoroughfare and difficult to find. Luigi kept a hand-drawn map on his lap which he frequently consulted as he plied the wooded back roads, stopping, backtracking, then launching out again, each time asserting with certainty that he knew exactly where it was. He made several wrong turns before the road emerged from a forest into a large orchard of dusty olive trees. A posted, hand-lettered sign read “Villa Rendola, 1000 metri.” Luigi said, “That is the name of the place.”
    “What does Rendola mean?”
    “I don’t know. It is only a name, maybe.”
    A few meters past the first sign was another: “Olio di Oliva e Vino. Vendita diretta” ( Olive oil and wine sold direct ).
    As the Punto rose over a small knoll, Ross got his first glimpse of the villa. He liked the place immediately. It was as if they had passed through a portal and emerged five centuries earlier. The villa was a majestic structure surrounded by high, amber-colored stucco walls. A small tower rose above it. It was set back on a working fattoria at the end of a long, cypress-lined driveway. On the distant hill overlooking the villa was a castle.
    Luigi parked the car on a small gravel incline and they both climbed out. The landscape of the fattoria was lush with foliage. There were neatly trimmed hedges of pliable, tab-leafed bosso and sturdier, rougher hedges of laurel, dark in places and bright green where new branches grew. Luigi snapped a dark leaf off a laurel bush as they walked and crumbled it in his hand before holding it out for Ross to smell. It was sweetly fragrant. “You can cook with this,” he said. “And, of course, you can crown emperors.”
    Three massive cedars of Lebanon grew around the house—symbols of a villa’s age and power. There were other trees: oak; cypress, fat bodied and spear shaped; a single walnut tree next to the villa. “A walnut tree is a companion for the house,” Luigi added, as if the villa was in danger of loneliness.
    Scattered around were myriad flowers: poppies, yellow broom, irises and a dozen others Ross couldn’t put a name to.
    “This is a villa that has been divided up into three apartments,” Luigi said. “The sheet on it says that there is a one-bedroom apartment available and it is furnished.”
    The villa was surrounded by an eight-foot stucco wall, with a large spray of jasmine spilling over its top like a white-crested wave.
    Ross pushed the gate—a large, wooden door shackled with iron hardware, nearly black with rust and age—which opened to an enclosed courtyard. They stepped inside. The ground was paved in large black-and-gray blocks of pietra serena cobblestone, which had been worn and grooved through centuries of weathering. Moss grew from the porous stone in green-and-white splatters resembling a painter’s drop cloth. To his immediate right was the back door of the villa’s stone chapel, next to a wall shrouded by a large hedge of white oleander and hyacinth. In the center of