The Hawthorne Season Read online

  ALSO BY RICCARDO BRUNI

  The Lion and the Rose

  The Night of the Moths

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2017 by Riccardo Bruni

  Translation copyright © 2018 by Hillary Locke

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Previously published as La stagione del biancospino by Amazon Publishing, Amazon Media EU S.à.r.l. in 2017 in Italy. Translated from Italian by Hillary Locke. First published in English by AmazonCrossing in 2018.

  Published by AmazonCrossing, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and AmazonCrossing are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503901926

  ISBN-10: 1503901920

  Cover design by PEPE nymi, Milano

  CONTENTS

  START READING

  PREFACE

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE THE RETURN

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  TEN

  PART TWO AMNESIA

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART THREE REVELATIONS

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  EIGHT

  NINE

  PART FOUR THE ESCAPE

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART FIVE THE HUNT

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  FOUR

  FIVE

  SIX

  SEVEN

  PART SIX HAWTHORNE SEASON

  ONE

  TWO

  THREE

  EPILOGUE

  Don’t go, please

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR

  What the white whale was to Ahab, has been hinted; what, at times, he was to me, as yet remains unsaid.

  Herman Melville, Moby Dick

  PREFACE

  The orange cat has a secret. The black cat already died many times before. The white cat is the evil one. A strange world on a Tuscan mountainside made of ancient woods, distant legends, and a little village where everyone knows everyone. There, winter is a heavy white mantle, a blanket of snow that seems as if it will never lift.

  And a blanket covers the mind of Giulio Rodari: arrested as a suspect in his ex-girlfriend’s murder, he can’t remember a thing from that night. His memory contains an impenetrable void, a painful amnesia. And there’s also an open wound in the memory of the region: they call it Bridge Day, and it’s a void that four years ago swallowed the lives of seven people, turning this strange world upside down.

  Venomous secrets hide underneath the white mantle of winter. A part of the old woods is about to be wiped out, a committee of dedicated citizens fights to save it, unruly spirits commit inexplicable acts, and a subtle tension runs through the lives of many. But the secrets will blossom when the snow melts, in the hawthorne season.

  PROLOGUE

  Let’s try to lend some order to this mess. We’ll start with the bodies.

  The first two were in the living room. When the men in black arrived, they could hardly believe their eyes. It took them a good while to get them out of there. They hardly budged. The third was in a small closet, still wrapped up in a carpet. It didn’t take a genius to figure out there was a body in there, since the whole bundle was soaked in blood. The fourth was downstairs, in the basement. When they found it, it had already frozen into a block of ice. The fifth was in the woods. A trail of blood spanned from the house to the point where it had come to rest. The sixth was farther away, slouched against a rock, right in the center of a red stain that spread outward in the white snow. Half its face had been blown away, the mouth caught in a strange expression of shock. The seventh and eighth had been buried. One was still in decent condition, considering the circumstances, but the other was already crawling with worms. Eight bodies.

  And then there were the other two. When they found them, they were still alive.

  PART ONE

  THE RETURN

  I’m the orange cat. I have a secret.

  ONE

  Nothing but white. All around.

  The carabinieri’s dark car winds along the county road. It seems like a mistake, an aberration, in the midst of the bare branches covered with snow, the tranquil landscape wrapped in the white blanket that spreads into the woods. And yet one can sense life there, down below, waiting. But on the surface, everything looks the same. White.

  Giulio Rodari observes the monotony, his head heavy from exhaustion, slumped against the window of the patrol car. A few days’ worth of beard. Bloodshot eyes. Dark glasses, pale face. A bandage over his left eyebrow covers a wound he doesn’t remember getting. One of the many things he doesn’t remember. He massages his wrists. His handcuffs are off now, but when he left the prison, they’d had to put them on, for the optics.

  “Do they hurt?” asks the carabiniere sitting next to him in the back seat. His name is Scalise, the colonel of the county command.

  “A little.”

  “It’ll pass. We won’t have to use them again. The press won’t follow us this far out.”

  “How do you know?”

  “They have their photos, they’ll use the same ones for months. No one will hassle you here. The journalists are doing their writing. They do it all by phone. They call me more times a day than my wife. They ask the dumbest questions and then record the answers wrong. Anyway, they won’t be able to get any more shots of you now, so relax.”

  Giulio forces a smile. According to the carabiniere, this is good news. But Giulio doesn’t bother to point out that, over the next few months, he’ll be in all the papers in handcuffs. He doesn’t feel like talking now. The painkillers are wearing off, and his headache is back. He hasn’t slept for two nights straight, and can’t remember a thing from the first night. The void. White, blank. Maybe he killed someone. The deputy prosecutor is sure of it.

  “Everything is so white out here,” says Scalise. “I love white. It makes everything seem so pure.”

  “You think?” asks Giulio, without turning around.

  “Everyone thinks. Why do you think brides wear white?”

  “If you say so.”

  “Confetti, sugar . . . the best sugar is white, isn’t that so?”

  “Some white things can be awful.”

  “For example?”

  “A dead man’s skin.”

  The carabiniere nods, unprepared for an answer like that. He looks back out at the landscape, but he won’t stay silent for long. He’s the type that never stays silent for long.

  “I get why you don’t like the color white,” he says after a few minutes have passed.

  “Do you?”

  “You’re an illustrator. I gave my youngest son a few of your books, you know. The ones about the gnome . . . what’s it called?”

  “The gnome?”

  “Yeah. A mister
. . . mister . . . I don’t remember.”

  “Teo the gnome.”

  “That’s it, Teo the gnome. You’re really great. I love your work. And I love the stories. Do you write them? You don’t just draw, do you? You write the stories too, am I right?”

  “Yeah, I do all of it.”

  Giulio tries to lift his head from the window, but it’s too leaden and nods backward against the seat.

  “An illustrator like you who works with so many colors wouldn’t like white. Maybe you just see white as a blank page to fill. White doesn’t contain any other colors.”

  “That’s not true. Blackness is the absence of color. White is the opposite. In a way, it contains all the colors.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is. That’s why it’s so scary.” Giulio looks out at the expanse of snow gliding by the moving car. “The void is white.”

  Scalise narrows his eyes and meditates on those last words.

  “I wouldn’t say white is a scary color,” he says, shaking his head.

  “That’s because you’re the victim of a common misconception.”

  “Me? A victim? How’s that?”

  “Do you remember Moby Dick? There’s that whole part about the whiteness of the whale. That’s exactly what we’re talking about.”

  “I saw the movie. The one where Gregory Peck plays the captain.”

  Giulio turns to Scalise. The colonel is the kind of person who never has a doubt in his mind about anything. For some reason he can’t understand, Giulio feels compelled to make the colonel waver about something, even for a second, and even if it’s about the most insignificant thing in the world.

  “Just try for a second to let go of all the things you usually associate with the color white,” he says. “Purity, chastity, light. They’re nothing but abstract variations on the concept of goodness. Set those aside, let them go. Try to separate white from the idea of good. And now look at it. Doesn’t it seem like something else entirely? That albino pallor, the emptiness? Think of something scary, something that really terrifies you. And now imagine it in white. Doesn’t it seem even more terrifying?”

  Scalise looks out the window again. Maybe this conversation isn’t going the way Giulio expected. And questioning something he’s so sure of, even the most insignificant thing, doesn’t seem like something Scalise would enjoy.

  “Anyway, this didn’t turn out so bad for you,” he says after a few minutes, turning to Giulio again. “I mean, it’s nice here, it’ll be like a vacation for you. House arrest is never that bad. And as long as your apartment is under search and seizure, you’ll be comfortable here. Plus you’ll be able to work. I saw you brought all your stuff with you. What is it? Colored pencils? Paper?”

  “My materials, yeah. I want to work. You can go crazy in a place like this without something to do.”

  “You’re talking to the wrong guy. Next month I’m going on vacation with my family, and I’d give an eye to be able to lie down by the sea and not lift a finger.”

  Giulio slouches against the window again, his head growing heavier by the minute. He lets his eyes fall shut but doesn’t manage to sleep. He can still see those faces. All disfigured, like in a nightmare. Everything that happened the night before his arrest. Patrizia’s neighbor screaming over her body with his enormous mouth, a well that could swallow a person forever. Patrizia. Did he kill her? Was it really possible to kill just like that, without remembering it? To wipe it from his memory like a stain of jam?

  “Giulio, you’re going to hurt us both.” Sometimes in his memory the edges of everything are blurred. Patrizia is an evanescent face against a white background, an overexposed image. There’s no context. Patrizia could have said those words to him anywhere. In any place they’d been over the past few months. His amnesia had swallowed him for about four hours, but it’s as if the hole in his memory had expanded. A mighty storm upending everything in its path. And the background is white. It’s empty.

  “You’re from around here anyway, aren’t you? So it’s a bit of a homecoming, am I right?” asks Scalise. Giulio doesn’t know how many more times he can stand to hear the “am I right?” that the colonel uses to conclude most of his sentences. His way of posing rhetorical questions as if they were granted affirmations is typical of the kind of person who’s convinced they’re always right. The kind of person who’s incapable of questioning even the most useless and minute and obtuse certainty they have. “Who doesn’t like to go home? And you said your mom, Ms. Barbara, is an excellent cook, am I right?”

  “They call it Ulysses syndrome,” says Giulio.

  “What?”

  “We spend half our lives leaving home and the other half trying to return.”

  “Interesting . . .”

  “Even if in my case the return is somewhat forced . . .”

  “Either way, Ulysses is quite a character. Very astute. Remember the old version, the one with that Greek actor? Beautiful.”

  “Bekim Fehmiu.”

  “That’s it.”

  “He wasn’t Greek. He was Albanian.”

  “Really? Funny. Albanian? You think of yourself as quite a cultured person, am I right?”

  “You seem surprised.”

  “Usually when we arrest someone like yourself, it’s hard to connect the charges with the prisoner.”

  “Do you think educated people are more civil?”

  “They usually are.”

  “I thought so too.”

  “Women are worse than the devil,” says the carabiniere behind the wheel.

  “You do the driving and mind your own business,” says Scalise. Then he turns back to Giulio. “What I mean is that you don’t look like the dangerous type, and I’m having trouble picturing it while, well, you get it.”

  “Is that why you took off my handcuffs?”

  “I didn’t think they were necessary, but I can put them back on if you prefer.”

  “I’m just trying to figure this out. Are you saying my arrest is a mistake?”

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “It sounded like you did.”

  “Do you really want to know what I think?”

  “By all means.” In reality he didn’t, but he knew Scalise would tell him anyway.

  “I have a few theories myself, you know?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Back when I was working at another command, I arrested this guy. He was in his sixties, just retired. He was the simple type. The kind of guy who went to play cards all day and took his dog out hunting a few times a year. You know the kind of guy I’m talking about? One day he got home, took off his shoes, turned on the TV, and sat down in his armchair to watch one of those game shows where they win a bunch of money, then he got up during the commercials, took his gun, and blew away his wife and daughter. Just like that. It still gives me chills to think about it. His wife was in the kitchen. He shot her dead while she was cooking dinner. Two bullets. Then he reloaded. Can you imagine? It wasn’t just the heat of the moment. He actually took the time to reload his gun. And then he went to his daughter’s room, where she was lying on her bed, listening to music with her headphones on. She didn’t even have time to jump up. Two shots. Right in the chest. No fuss. Then he called the carabinieri. As we took him away, I kept trying to figure it out. He was the most normal kind of guy. You get me? But then the commercials came on, and he decided to commit a massacre. Insanity, am I right? Who would have ever thought someone like him could have been capable of doing something like that? Do you get what I’m saying? The truth is that there’s always a dark room. But do you know what bugs me most about the whole story? What was the answer to the winning game show question? You think the man knew it?”

  “I don’t know, but I don’t get your theory.”

  “I don’t think there’s always an explanation for evil. We just have to endure it. And that’s what makes it so terrifying. Because as long as we can’t explain it, we’ll never feel safe.”

&
nbsp; The barroom is trimmed in light oak. The bar itself, the stools, the tables with their soft chairs, covered with brick-colored velvet, the hand-carved backrests. Circles, diamonds, hearts.

  The Gherarda Hotel is perched at an altitude of 1,500 meters, just above the village. Facing the county road, it overlooks a meadow and is surrounded by the old woods. That’s how they’ve always referred to it in these parts, the old woods. Even before the region conducted the census that revealed, at this very spot, the greatest concentration of monumental trees in all of Tuscany.

  Barbara stands by the window. Her gray hair hangs loose around her shoulders. She looks in the direction of the meadow on the other side of the street. A white bed.

  She clasps her morning cup of herbal tea to her chest with both hands. She lets it cool a little as she takes in its aromas of rose and black currant. The heat relaxes the arthritic joints in her fingers.

  “They should be close by now.”

  Akan’s voice behind her. Barbara studies the reflection of his face on the glass, which appears to float in the middle of the meadow. Dark skin, thick mustache.

  “Did you turn off the heating on the third floor?”

  “It’s all off, downstairs too.”

  “Are you sure you want to stay?”

  “We’ve already discussed that.” Barbara turns and looks directly at him. “It’s been quite a while since I’ve seen him, I didn’t think . . .”

  “You should relax. Everything will be fine.”

  “But what if he really . . . ?”

  “You’ll be the first to know.”

  “I’d like to believe you.”

  She turns again. The meadow. The woods. The white trees, like skeletons. Down the road, at the bend, a car appears. Barbara rests her cup on a table and walks outside, tightening her shawl around her neck. Akan follows her.

  Two teaspoons of instant coffee and one teaspoon of sugar at the bottom of one of the last cups yet to be chipped. She should buy a few more. First task of the day for Grazia: buy new cups. But the day is long, more urgent matters will arise, and the cups will remain at the back of her mind until the next morning.

  Grazia pours the water and slowly stirs, observing how quickly the coffee dissolves. She places the empty pot in the sink, along with the dirty dishes from the evening before. The dishwasher is full, and she’ll take care of it later; still, she can’t help but feel a pang of guilt. Second task: keep the kitchen clean and tidy.