Cascade Read Free

Marcello, thirty now that I’d been gone. Was he giving up? Giving in to Lady Rossi and the pressure to follow through on their marriage agreement? Had he guessed that she might have been poisoning me?
    Mom was still staring at me, at Lia, assessing. “Come on,” she said finally, lifting the back of the tent and bending.
    She was going to sneak out. My mother never sneaked anywhere. She boldly went where she wished.
    I stood up and went to her, looking back to Lia. She hesitated, frowning, and then with an exaggerated roll of her big blue eyes—so like Mom’s—followed us. We ducked under the edge and looked around. We could hear voices on the other side and up the hill by the tombs. Just as it looked like we could make a clean escape, a guy in a Societa Archeologico hat came around the corner.
    Mom froze for a second and then took my arm. “Come on, Gabi,” she said, “we’ll take care of you.”
    The man’s eyes moved to my bloodstained gown, and he hurried over to us. “Ti posso aiutare?” he asked. Can I help?
    “ Si, I just need to get her to our car,” Mom responded in Italian.
    Smart of her, I thought. The parking lot would get us halfway to the tomb.
    The man took my arm as if he thought I’d faint at any point, and I accepted his help as if I just might. A couple of other guys were walking up at the far end of the tumuli, but they ignored us. “I can take care of her from here,” Mom said to the man.
    “You’re sure?” He opened the door and settled me onto the seat.
    “Yes.”
    “I can call for an ambulance.”
    “No. It looks worse than it is.”
    Still, he hesitated.
    “Lei ha le sue cose,” I said, turning wise, pained eyes on him, meaning that time of the month, or as they said it here, she has her things. Whatever. We didn’t have time to waste. How long had I been away from Marcello now? A month?
    He frowned and immediately began to back away. The blood’s location made no sense with the explanation, but I knew it’d send him running.
    Mom gave me a little smile and grabbed the medical kit. “In case anybody else starts asking questions,” she said, lifting it in my direction. She tucked it under her arm as the man disappeared back among the three tents—Mom’s white one, flanked by two khaki peaks from the Societa Archeologico team. “Let’s go,” she said.
    Hidden by dense scrub oak, we climbed up the hill. At the clearing, where the twelve tombs rose from the soil in grass-covered domes, we paused and caught our breath, waiting for those two dudes we’d spotted earlier to turn their backs. Any minute now, Manero would go back into the tent and realize we had escaped.
    “Now,” Lia whispered when we all saw them turn the corner of the tomb.
    We hurried over to Tomb Two and scrambled through the narrow igloo-like entrance, Lia and me slower than Mom, since we were in the long gowns. At the end, we stood up, and Mom flicked on the small flashlight she kept in her belt. I pointed to the two handprints.
    “I’ve wondered about those,” Mom said. “So unlike any other fresco motif we’ve ever run across…”
    Lia backed up a couple of steps, as if she didn’t want us cascading back in time by accident.
    “Go on, Mom,” I said. “Pull out a glove and touch the prints. See if they’re warm.” She had a thing about letting the oils of our skin touch ancient frescoes, given that it was her job and all to preserve them.
    Mom frowned, then pulled on a pair of cloth gloves from her belt. After a second’s hesitation, she touched one, and then the other. “No. Nothing. Cold stone. Why did you expect heat?”
    I could tell from her expression that I was losing her. I lifted my hand for a glove. “Let me try.”
    “Gabi,” Lia growled.
    “Calm down. I’m just checking. You know that nothing will happen without you,” I said. “I tried, remember? We both tried.”
    I put on the glove and touched her print first, then mine. Even through the fabric I could tell that