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I’m not herbellissimadaughter and I never have been. This sweet old lady routine is all an act.
I pull up the photograph on my phone and thrust it in front of her. Elena peers at the screen. ‘Chi è questo?’ she asks.
‘You know who it is,’ I say.
She glances from the phone to me and back again, confused.
‘It’s you,’ I say, impatiently.
She bursts out laughing. ‘Sono io?’ she exclaims. ‘No!’
‘It’s you, on the beach in Florida,’ I say, struggling to control my temper. ‘The day Lottie disappeared.’
‘No, non sono io. Questa donna è molto più grassa– more fat than me!’ She wags her finger in a mock admonishment, still laughing. ‘I am not such fat woman, Alexa. Not such old.’
We’re talking about the kidnap of my daughter – her own granddaughter. As crazy as she is, I can’t see how she can find anything about this conversation amusing.
‘If it’s not you, Elena, do you know who it is?’ Quinn asks.
The old woman shrugs helplessly. ‘Non sono io,’ she says again.
She seems genuinely perplexed by our questions. Is this all part of her dementia? Does she even remember what she’s done?
‘This isn’t getting us anywhere,’ I say, frustrated.
‘Can we look around the villa?’ Quinn asks, gesturing to make herself understood.
Elena beams. ‘È bello, sì?’
‘Very beautiful,’ Quinn says. ‘Please, I’d love you to show it to me.’
I want to rip the villa apart stone by stone, not shuffle around after this demented old woman admiring tapestries.
‘Trust me,’ Quinn murmurs, as she offers the old woman her arm.
She’s effusive in her praise as Elena gives us a tour and the old woman visibly blooms as she shows us around. She proudly shows us hidden passageways and concealed rooms we’d never have found without her. There’s no sign of either Roberto or the maid.
And there’s no sign a child lives here, either.
No toys, no scribbled pictures, no unmade bed, no children’s books, no small shoes tumbled near the door.
Lottie isn’t here.
We search the villa from top to bottom. My daughter isn’t here and clearly never has been. I was wrong about the photo. It wasn’t Elena on the beach, after all. This is yet another false trail, one more dead end born of wishful thinking and the same dysmorphic longing that caused me to see Lottie in another girl’s face.
Elena isn’t a crazy kidnapper. She’s just a lonely, half-senile old woman who’s lost both her son and her granddaughter. She welcomed me into her home when I turned up unannounced on her doorstep and I hope she never knows why I was really here.
I’m suddenly as desperate to escape the villa as I was to reach it.
‘I need to get out of here,’ I tell Quinn as we return to the courtyard.
‘Just because Lottie’s not here now, Alex, it doesn’t mean—’
‘I was wrong, Quinn. It’s not her.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Look at her,’ I say, as Elena sinks onto a stone bench by the fountain. Her mouth is slightly open and her eyes are dull. ‘She couldn’t shoplift a lipstick, never mind kidnap a child.’
