Thorne Diavola

1. Auflage 2024
ISBN: 978-1-83541-003-5
Verlag: Titan Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 304 Seiten

White Lotus meets Hereditary in this uproarious and unsettling dissection of a dysfunctional family and their ghosts, both literal and metaphorical. Perfect for fans of Grady Hendrix and Ronald Malfi Anna only has one rule for the annual Pace family vacations: tread lightly, and survive. It isn't easy when she's the only who doesn't seem to fit in. Her twin brother Benny goes with the flow so much he's practically dissolved, and her high-strung older sister Nicole is so used to everyone-including her blandly docile husband and two young daughters-falling in line that Anna often ends up chastised for simply asking a question. Her Mom is baffled by Anna's life choices (why waste her artistic talent at an ad agency?), and her Dad-well, he just wants a little peace and quiet. The gorgeous villa outside a remote Tuscan town seems like the perfect place to endure so much family time-not to mention Benny's demanding new boyfriend, Christopher. If her family becomes too much to handle, then at least Anna can wander off to a wine tasting or lose herself in an art gallery. That is, until strange things start to happen-strange noises at night, food rotting within hours, dreams that feel more like memories. Then, the unsettling warnings from the locals: don't open the tower door. But Anna does open it. And what she releases threatens to devour her family-that is, if her family doesn't tear itself apart first.

Jennifer Thorne is the author of Lute, The Wrong Side of Right, The Inside of Out, Night Music, and (with Lee Kelly) The Antiquity Affair. American by birth, she now lives in rural England with her husband and two sons.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Thorne, Jennifer

Leseproben

YOUR FLESH AND BLOOD

Anna kicked off the annual Pace family vacation with a lie. It was the only smart move, and she didn’t feel the least bit guilty about it.

Benny had wanted to maintain their usual twin-dependent status by meeting up on Friday and flying together to Florence from Newark, a compromise between New York and Philadelphia, but doing so would have involved her sharing a row with his newish boyfriend for the better part of nine hours, and besides the natural human inclination to avoid torture, Anna had better plans.

So she made her excuses—last-minute client meeting Friday afternoon, stupidly important one, ugh, her agency was such a pain, she really needed this vacation—and Benny rolled his eyes with her, not at her, a crucial difference.

Anna arrived in Florence early Thursday morning and stayed alone in a shoebox Airbnb apartment near Piazza Santa Croce.

In the afternoon and into the evening, she sat on a precariously thin half-moon balcony with her sketch pad stretched across her bare legs, trying to capture the soul of the skyline, until the wine she’d been drinking blurred the lines, and she set it all aside and went out to simply stroll.

La passeggiata, they called it. She liked it—the flow, the freedom, the cacophony of the people around her, and beauty absolutely everywhere she looked.

Friday was travel day for the rest of the Pace family, and although the Florence airport was miles away, she woke up feeling their arrival like a to-do-list item she’d been trying to ignore, a psychic tap-tap-tap on the shoulder. Hey! Remember us? Your flesh and blood? Don’t you care at all?

Mom and Dad’s flight from Ohio, via a changeover in Gatwick, landed at 7:28 A.M. Central European Summer Time—they’d forwarded her the itinerary—then they’d wait for Benny and the New Boyfriend, whom they’d not yet had the pleasure of meeting, and shuttle them in their rental car south into the Chianti region to the medieval hilltop village of Monteperso. Nicole and her circus would roll into town around the same time and make their own way over to the villa. A joyful, almost complete, Pace family reunion would be underway by lunchtime.

Anna doubted her absence would be felt all that acutely, despite what they were sure to say to her later.

She hit the galleries on Friday. L’Accademia. The Uffizi. Molto bene. Overwhelming in the best way.

She’d been careful not to tell the family when her fictional Saturday flight was arriving, which gave her time for a brioche and an espresso and one more stroll Saturday morning before she grabbed her shoulder bag and hauled herself out of Florence. She hopped a southern train into the town nearest Monteperso, then sat on a curb in the station’s parking lot and booked an Uber.

The driver, a young guy with mussed, curly hair and a sparse mustache, spoke a little English.

“You sure you want to go to Villa Taccola?” he said as he cut off another car on a sharp right turn out of town. “I could take you . . . anywhere else.”

“Should I be worried?” Anna asked, watching the landscape scroll past her window, one lovely postcard after another. Skinny cypress and squat olive trees, tidy lines of vineyard hills, beautifully crumbling walls, villages that had been clinging to their rocky brown hillsides for a thousand years or more. The occasional jarring modern sight: a massive satellite dish on a house, a fence plastered with ads for a summer funfair.

Her brain would filter those images out later, she knew. People tended to remember only the pretty parts of their vacations, and Anna was no different.

“No, no, I’m joking,” the driver said, but he watched her through the rearview mirror, eyes tracking downward, and she wondered idly whether it was him she should be worried about. She envisioned the possibility. Uber driver with a few of his local buddies, a different car parked down a dirt track, waiting to find her alone.

“Where do you live?” she asked him in Italian. Dove abita?

In the mirror, his eyes slid back to the road, just in time for him to avoid oncoming traffic driving too centrally on a switchback.

Her heart thudded with the near miss. She bit her lip, adrenaline pulsing upward.

He replied in Italian. “Not far from where you’re staying.”

Anna stretched. “What’s fun to do around here?”

“Everything is fun if you are fun,” he answered. At least, she thought he did. Her actual facility with Italian wasn’t nearly as good as her accent.

“Good point,” she said. In English.

Up ahead, she saw a small wooden sign too overgrown with ryegrass to read. A narrow country track stretched along it to the right. The driver turned so abruptly she nearly fell over, and she heard him chuckling from the front seat as she rearranged herself.

They passed a field where a gangly goat stood tied to a post, next to a sagging soccer ball. From the long grass beside him, an orange cat emerged, stretched its back, and lazily trailed the car. Anna craned her neck to peer through the back windshield, tracking its path along the road.

By the time she’d straightened again, they were there.

Villa Taccola.

“I can come back, take you out, have some fun,” the driver started to say as he stopped the car, but she hurried out, mumbling, “Grazie mille, arrivederci.” She slung her bag onto her shoulder and stepped through the iron gates of the villa.

Anna heard the car idle on the drive for a full minute before it crunched a turn and left her behind. I’ll keep a rock in my pocket when I go for walks here alone, she thought, even while knowing she’d never bother.

There were two excessively large SUV rentals parked just to the right of the iron gates, signaling that the gang was all here, but as Anna approached the villa, she felt entirely alone. Unnaturally so. There was something careful about the energy here. Not calm, exactly. More . . . preserved in amber. Crickets twitched their relentless song around her, unseen. A brown lizard on the sunny courtyard tiles lay so still that Anna assumed it was dead until it twitched at her approach. There was a perfect circle of dirt surrounding the house and drive, inside of which even weeds didn’t grow. Not well-tended gravel. Dirt. Remnants of dead plants poking up in places. The sky was solid cerulean blue and the day was hot. Hotter by the minute. Breezeless.

Anna slowed her step, allowing the sense of this place to wind tight around her. The sunlight and shadow, the isolation. Something else she couldn’t yet name. She’d have taken out her sketch pad and plunked down right there, cross-legged in the front courtyard, capturing her first impression of this six-hundred-year-old villa—the afternoon light stretching across the pale brown stones of the flat façade, casting shadows that looked like teeth—if she didn’t think she’d be caught. Somebody would spot her, take offense, mention it to the others, setting the combative script for the rest of the week.

Not this time. Anna wanted this vacation. She’d actually looked forward to it.

She set down her shoulder bag and looked around, making a mental sketch instead, marking the gently worn tile roofline, the square tower that rose elegantly from the western wall. There was a single tall window set high in the tower, thick curtains drawn, obscuring the view inside, but as Anna peered up, hand shading her eyes, she saw the fabric move like someone had been spying but had darted away to hide.

Hi, girls.

Anna wasn’t surprised her nieces were up there. If she’d been the youngest of the group and gotten here first, she’d have bagged the tower bedroom too.

In any case, she’d been spotted. Time to join the party.

She rapped on the front door. Listened for footsteps.

A movement at her feet startled her into stumbling. The orange cat. She’d nearly trampled the poor thing. A tom, she saw now, not even remotely neutered. He’d walked all this way from that field to greet her with a dance around her ankles, but apparently these ubiquitous, feral Italian cats were the same as American cats—as soon as she bent down, he slinked out of reach, no longer interested.

Anna opened the front door.

Her eyes picked out the old before the new, everything quotidian blurring past notice. She saw smoke-blackened wood beams, stone walls, a frayed wall hanging with a pastoral image woven into it—dancing nymphs dangling clumps of grapes from their joined fingers.

Anna walked through the large, recessed entry hall now doubling as a living room, and mapped a kitchen off to the right through a wide archway, as well as a dim corridor to the left, leading to bedrooms, presumably. There was an extension out beyond the living room, with steps descending into a brighter space—a contemporary build-out?

“Heya,” she called to the house, mostly out of a sense of obligation. She was constantly being accused of sneaking up on people. Her voice echoed faintly against the stone walls. Nobody answered. The villa sat silent, apart from a dull hum she couldn’t quite identify as insect or electric.

Someone’s in here, Anna thought. Listening.

She turned slowly, taking in the weathered wooden floorboards in the entryway, the stones lining the kitchen arch, the terra-cotta tile on the walls and kitchen floor. One of the ceiling’s long wooden beams had a large divot, as if something had bitten a chunk out of it at some point in the past five hundred years. A few items of furniture looked nearly as old as...