Free The Light in the Ruins by Chris Bohjalian Page B

After a moment Serafina sensed the attention. She met the marchesa’s eyes briefly but then glanced down at her notes.
    “Serafina,” Beatrice said, not so much speaking to the young detective as rolling the name around on her tongue as if she were tasting a new wine. “That’s a beautiful name.”
    “Thank you.”
    “I presume you know what it means.”
    “The burning one,” Serafina answered.
    “Interesting,” Beatrice said. “I would have said the fiery one. I guess it’s a small difference.”
    “But a meaningful one,” Paolo said. He regretted the offhand remark instantly. Already Serafina was looking down at him, her eyes a little wide with anger.

    “You can spend all the time you want on jilted lovers,” Milton was saying to Serafina after dinner, leaning against the restaurant’s brick wall at their corner table. Before them both were small blue glasses filled with limoncello. “A jilted lover doesn’t cut out a human heart. That’s just … depraved.”
    “But what about a jilted depraved lover?” she asked, only half kidding. “Think of what the heart means. It’s a message.”
    “It’s a message, all right. It’s a message that you’re dealing with a crazy person.”
    “So if it’s not a lover, where would you look?”
    He sipped the liqueur and smiled. “Seriously, if I am ever asked to transfer back to the United States, I’m quitting. I’m sorry, but you cannot find alcohol like this in Pelham or New Rochelle.”
    “You didn’t answer my question,” she said to him.
    “Well, she knew whoever killed her. You said that she let him into her apartment.”
    “That’s what we believe, yes.”
    “And nothing was stolen?”
    “We don’t know that for a fact, but it doesn’t look like anything was. There was a jewelry box on the vanity, right beside the ashtray with the heart, and nothing appeared to have been taken.”
    “Appeared?”
    “There was a pair of beautiful ruby earrings right there. Extremely valuable. Also a diamond ring she had worn when she was married to Marco Rosati. If this were a robbery, they would have been gone.”
    “Well, then, devil worship, perhaps? Satan? I’m kidding, but not by as much as you think.”
    “Wouldn’t they have taken the heart if it were for a ritual?”
    “Damned if I know.”
    She looked around at the other couples that remained in the restaurant. It was after eleven and the women and men who were still there all struck her as young and in love. She counted diners at four other tables, each with but two people. She tried to decide which couples were married and concluded, in the end, that none of them were. Two of the pairs were holding hands across the tablecloth.
    “But it does seem to me,” Milton was saying, “it’s someone who clearly feels that Francesca wronged him—and who is not especially good at managing his temper.”
    “So you’re positive the killer is a man.”
    “Yes, I think my gender can take responsibility for this one. Women don’t cut out other women’s hearts.”
    “We can.”
    He thought about this. Then: “Look, you and I both did things in the war that, in hindsight, we may not be especially proud of. I know that. But I would not view your personal history as emblematic.”
    “No, probably not. But you may be on to something.”
    “That the killer is a man with a bad temper? Somehow I don’t think that’s a particularly brilliant insight.”
    She shook her head. “Maybe this has something to do with the war. For someone to kill someone in such a … a dramatic fashion suggests a deep connection. A defining connection. And all the defining moments in Francesca Rosati’s life seem to go back to the war.”
    He raised his glass in a toast. “You may be spot on,” he said. “But then again, you could probably say that for all of us. For our whole generation.” Then he swallowed the last of his limoncello and reached into his breast pocket for his wallet.

    Cristina and her mother