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NINE
SARA
“Where the hell did you get this police report?”
Giusy stared at me with an abstracted air, as though my question about Serafina’s murder was absurd and unreasonable. “It is in the town records. I have many friends in the polizia and the carabinieri.”
Of course she did.
I had no idea what a police report should look like, much less one from a hundred years ago. This document was probably real. Regardless, everything about the situation was completely insane, both Giusy giving me the information and the fact it existed at all.
“Why are you showing me this?” I asked.
“It’s proof.”
“Proof of what?”
“That Serafina was murdered. It is what your aunt wanted you to learn. I have solved your mystery for you. You are welcome, American!” She had the nerve to make jazz hands.
I massaged my temples with my index fingers. The unease that always accompanied my hangovers doubled and the tendons in my neck and behind my eyes tightened. Despite what my aunt had asked me to do in the letter I couldn’t worry about this generations-old mystery Rosie had started to piece together before she died. I needed to focus on my life, my miserable, ruined life, and in order to fix any of it I needed money, the money I might be able to get if I could sell my family’s land. That was what I needed to be working on.
“Giusy. I don’t know what you want me to say. What is in this report is terrible and disgusting and... I don’t have words for it. But it happened a long time ago.”
“To your grandmother.”
“Great-grandmother,” I corrected her even as it felt like a tight fist was closing around my throat. Serafina. The woman I was named for. Tortured. Beaten to death.
“She is your kin. Your namesake, the mother of your aunt who you loved so much. What they did to her is a sin.”
“Who is ‘they’?”
“I do not know. Her murderer was never caught. It is like the most famous unsolved crime here in Caltabellessa. That is what I thought you would want to figure out. I thought you would want to bring justice to her.”
Her words made me queasy. That this story was the town’s public property. “Bring justice to her? Who do you think I am? Whoever did this has been dead for a long time.”
“This is what your aunt Rosie would have wanted. Didn’t she ask you to find out what happened to her mother? It may seem like a long time ago, but time means nothing here.” Giusy exhaled with intention. “People in our town still talk about Serafina.”
“They talk about a woman who was killed a hundred years ago? Why?”
“Because she was murdered out of revenge and because they say she was wicked, because she defied the conventions of the town and she was punished for it.”
“Revenge for what?”
“For the things she did.”
“What things? Stop talking in riddles, Giusy.”
“It’s a story we all know, our grandmothers knew and told our mothers, who told us. We all knew her name, Serafina Forte, one of the women left behind. Her husband worked hard in America and sent money home and she betrayed him. She found other lovers. She practiced dark magic. She was a witch and whore. That’s what happens when a woman is left to her own devices and she was killed for it. She’s a cautionary tale here.”
I quickly realized how little I knew about Serafina. “None of this is right.” I laid out what I believed to be true. “What I know about my great-grandmother is the opposite.” I explained how my family had always talked about Serafina. Serafina the matronly saint. Serafina the dutiful wife. “You have her confused with someone else. And even if you don’t, come on. Witch? This may have happened a long time ago, but it was still the twentieth century not the Middle Ages. And besides, even if people here believed she was a witch then, they couldn’t possibly believe it now. And if they do, I’m not here to change anyone’s mind about century-old gossip.” But the names Giusy called Serafina wormed into my brain. Witch and whore. Didn’t I know something about how rumors and lies could be spread by those wishing to hurt you and damage your reputation?
“You’ll never sell that land if you don’t.”
That one sentence sent a chill down my spine despite the glare of the sun on my shoulders. Yet another thing Giusy knew about me that I hadn’t told her yet. She knew about the deed Rosie gave me.
“I don’t know much about the land that Rosie left me, but I can’t imagine selling it would involve solving this crime,” I said.
“You are wrong and dumb. People here still question how Serafina got the land, whether it belonged to her or whether she tricked a man into giving it to her. If she did, if she cast a spell on him, or blackmailed him, then the land doesn’t belong to you. There are men here who will fight you for it and the town elders will be the ones to decide what will happen.”
