Her Sugar Mask

Chapter Ten — The Millstone

The storm came in from the sea at four on Saturday afternoon and by seven there was no power anywhere in the valley.

The sagra was postponed. Chiara stood in the square filming it anyway, holding the phone under the church doorway with one hand and her hair out of her face with the other, shouting over the wind.

Giulia watched from the window of Nunzia's son's house for two minutes and then sat down and opened the notes app.

She did not change the list. She moved the first line to the top of her head and kept it there.

At twenty past ten she put the knife inside her belt, behind her left hip, and went out into the rain.

· · ·

She went down the valley road with the torch off.

The rain was not the rain of Wednesday night. This was the rain that comes off the sea in September and does not stop, and the gravel had become a stream. Twice she went down on one knee. The second time she stayed down for a moment with her face to the water and then got up.

The mill was dark. No car.

She went up the track to the door and put the torch on it for one second.

The chain was cut. The cut ends were bright, new metal, not rusted, not grey. Cut that day.

She went round the back, through the window, into the smell of wet stone and oil.

The steel door was open.

The cupboard behind it was empty. The box, the ledgers, the letters, the photograph: gone.

In the middle of the cupboard floor, on the bare stone, there was one lemon.

Giulia stood in the doorway of the cupboard and looked at it.

Then a voice behind her said, in Sicilian, "Rosa Amato."

· · ·

She turned round.

He was standing by the press with a torch in one hand and a knife in the other, and he was the man from the square in the grey jacket.

"Sit down," he said. "On the floor."

Giulia did not move.

"I've been watching you since Monday," the man said. "Wednesday you came here at midnight. Thursday you went up to the dottore's house with a jar. Friday you sat in the square for an hour doing nothing. You are not careful. You are only quiet. Those are different things."

Giulia said nothing.

"Don Salvatore has been very patient."

Don Salvatore. Turi.

"Where are the books," the man said.

"I don't know what you're talking about."

He moved the torch so that it was not in her eyes. She noticed that. She had learned that one a long time ago: men who want to hurt you keep the light in your eyes. Men who want something keep your eyes lit.

"That's for later," he said. "First: are you alone."

"Yes."

"Say it again."

"Yes."

"Who else knows about this place."

"Nobody."

He thought about that.

"He said you'd be cleverer than this," the man said. "Turi. He said, don't look for her in the cities, look for her where the money is. He was right, wasn't he. You went straight to the money."

Giulia's throat was dry. She swallowed.

"How many of you are there," she said.

He smiled. "Just me tonight."

· · ·

He told her to put her hands on the wall and she did not.

He came across the floor at a walk, because the floor was wet and he did not want to fall either, and he put the torch down on the granite wheel with the beam pointed at her, and he said, "Last time."

She backed into the press. The iron column was cold against her spine.

He cut her right forearm on the outside, a long shallow line that opened at once and ran, and the pain was not like the shoulder, it was clean and hot and it made her hand open.

The knife fell. She went down on her knees into the circular stone bed of the press, into a shallow layer of water and grit.

He came over her.

She got her right foot into the gap between the wheel and the frame and pushed with everything she had left in her right leg.

He went backwards. The back of his head hit the granite rim of the press bed.

He went down.

· · ·

The sound he made was wet.

Giulia lay in the stone bed with the rain coming through the missing roof onto her face and waited for the noise in her head to stop.

Then she got her hands under her and pushed up onto her knees.

He was on his back with his eyes open and his mouth working. Blood was coming out of him into the water in a way she had seen once before, in a courtyard, two weeks earlier, from a different direction.

He was not going to die from this in the next minute. He was going to die from this in the next ten, if he died at all.

She knew what happened next if he lived. He would tell Turi where she was, and what she had taken, and what she looked like now. Turi would come himself. Turi would bring the baby, because Turi understood what people were for.

She thought about page nine of the newspaper.

The only survivor of the m******e, four-month-old Carlo Vitali, remains in the care of his great-uncle.

Giulia got up.

There was a loose granite block at the broken edge of the press bed, where the rim had cracked off in 2003 or whenever. It was the size of a loaf of bread. She had to use both hands to lift it, and her left hand did not close, so she had to carry it against her chest like a sack of flour, and she staggered two steps with it, and she dropped it.

The second time she did not miss.

· · ·

She was sick behind the mill, in the brambles, holding on to the wall with her right hand.

Then she sat down in the rain with her back against the stone and waited for her hands to stop.

They did not stop. Her left arm had gone completely numb from the shoulder down, which had not happened since the sea. Her right hand was shaking the way it had shaken since the night on the mountain, only now it would not stop for anything, and she could not make a fist.

After a while she got up and went back inside and searched his pockets with her right hand.

Driving licence, in the inside pocket of the jacket.

Nello Sciacca. Born 10 April 1982, Trapani.

She read it twice and said it out loud, because her father had taught her that too: a name is a name and a body is a body and if you ever mix them up you will not last a year.

"Nello Sciacca," she said.

Then she sat down again in the doorway of the mill with the rain coming down into her face and waited.

· · ·

The torch beam came along the road at a run.

It stopped at the door. Then it came round the side of the building and into the window, and Matteo came through it with a shovel over his shoulder and water running off him in sheets.

He saw the body. He saw her.

"I'm late," he said.

She did not ask why he was there. She asked the other thing.

"How did you know I was going."

"The lemon jar." He set the shovel down against the wall. "Nobody leaves a jar of lemons on a man's step unless they're saying goodbye."

"You followed me."

"I followed him," Matteo said. "Since Monday."

He went to the body and knelt down and put two fingers against the throat under the jaw, and stayed there a long time, and then sat back on his heels.

"He's dead," he said.

He did not ask what had happened. He did not ask why. He turned the shovel over in his hands and looked out through the window at the rain, and the look on his face was not shock, and that told her more than anything he could have said.

She was shaking so hard her teeth were making a sound.

"Sit down," he said, "before you fall down."

She sat down.

He waited.

Then he said, "Do you know how to dig."

"Yes."

He stood the shovel up and drove the blade into the earth floor of the mill, where the floor was softest, between the press and the wall.

"Tomorrow," he said. "You start working for me."