The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian Read Free Book Online Page B

always managed to look down her slender nose at whomever she was talking to.
    “I’m so sad,” Isabella was saying now to the detective, as they spoke in a small, windowless room with two sewing machines behind the shop, but she really didn’t seem especially devastated. Serafina had the sense that the woman was more annoyed that shehad lost a salesperson who also could sew than she was saddened by the fact that Francesca was dead.
    “Did Francesca tell you where she was going after work the day before yesterday?” she asked Isabella.
    “The day she died.”
    “That’s right.”
    “No. But I knew she had a date. A new man.”
    “What was his name?”
    She sighed, and for a second Serafina presumed the shopkeeper was trying to recall the name; then, however, she realized that Isabella was pausing because she was disgusted. “She saw too many men. This one was a lawyer. He worked in Bologna and was only coming to town to take her to dinner and then have his way with her.”
    “His name?”
    “I never asked.”
    “Did she say what kind of law he practiced?”
    “He was wealthy. At least Francesca believed he was.”
    “Did she believe he was going to marry her someday?”
    “Maybe. But I’m not sure she cared about that.”
    “Getting married.”
    Isabella nodded and looked down at her fingernails. The polish was red and starting to chip.
    “Did any of her boyfriends ever come to your store?”
    “No. Francesca’s private life? She would give us little clues, little tidbits, but really share nothing. She said she had once lived in a beautiful villa, but who knows if that’s the truth. Maybe it was.” She shrugged. “Maybe she was Mussolini’s mistress. Maybe she slept with the Germans.”
    “You think she was a collaborator during the war?” Serafina asked. She found it interesting that she, too, had briefly wondered the same thing yesterday about Cristina—about the whole family. From what Cristina had told her, however, the shopkeeper was mistaken: Francesca, Cristina said, had detested both the Nazis and the Italian Fascists. She considered correcting the woman.
    “I think she had done things in her past that she was ashamed of,” Isabella said. “Otherwise she would have told us more. She would not have been so secretive.”
    “What about the other salesgirls? Maybe she told them something that might help us.”
    Isabella rolled her eyes and cackled. “My other salesgirls? There was Francesca and there is Sofia. Talk to Sofia when she gets here this afternoon. She won’t know anything more about Francesca than I do. I promise.”
    “Did Francesca tell you where she and this lawyer from Bologna were having dinner?”
    “Il Latini. Very elegant. Francesca made sure we knew that her lawyer friend was only taking her to the very best.”
    On her way out of the store, Serafina glanced at a red velvet sheath dress on a mannequin. She paused in front of it for a long moment, admiring the rhinestone flower at the bodice, and might have asked Isabella how much it cost. But then she saw how low-cut it was in the back and realized it wasn’t for her.

    A waiter at Il Latini recognized Francesca from a photograph and remembered her well. Apparently she had men take her there often. And while he couldn’t recall her companion’s name from her most recent visit, he described him as short but broad-shouldered and handsome. He had a thin mustache and a high forehead and was somewhere in his late thirties or early forties.
    When she got back to the office, however, she found that the description was unnecessary. Mario Spagnoli had read about Francesca Rosati’s death in the newspaper that morning and was coming to Florence that afternoon to share what he could with the police about the woman’s last night on this earth.

    “Can you imagine,” the coroner was saying to Serafina and Paolo as they stood beside the corpse on the angled autopsy table,“surgeons are starting to operate on the heart. In