Free Good Blood by Aaron Elkins

fronted a wide stone courtyard that extended to a quay at which two gleaming wooden launches were tied up. Behind the handsome house and covering the rest of the island were formal gardens that were smaller but almost as elaborate as those they’d seen on Isola Bella. There were fountains, terraces, colonnades, statues, mazes, rows of orange trees, mimosas, and tamarinds, and pungent aromatic shrubs that they could smell from the boat.
    “Yup, that’s it,” Phil said. “Home, sweet home.”
    Julie was flabbergasted. “But it… it really is a palace… and those grounds!”
    “I told you.”
    “You said it was practically a palace. You made it sound-”
    Phil rolled his eyes. “Oh, God, now she’s starting. What is it with you people, you have something against adverbial constructions? Is it some kind of a life mission?”
    “Of course not,” Julie said, laughing. “It’s just that it’s a little hard to imagine the Phil Boyajian we know-”
    “And love,” Gideon assured him.
    “-growing up in a place like that. Oh, look, isn’t that a peacock?”
    “Oh, yeah. They’ve got monkeys too, for Christ’s sake. There’s a whole goddamn menagerie wandering around the gardens. And yes, I grew up there, or at least I lived there for a few years. But I was born back in Stresa.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. “The house isn’t there anymore. It’s a parking lot for the railroad station now. My mother got my no-good father a job as some kind of a watchman or maybe a gamekeeper on the de Grazia property up north, and I lived in town till I was three. That’s when my father decided he wasn’t a family man after all and took off for good, never to be seen again, and my mother took me to live on the island, in the villa, till I was six or seven, which is when we came to the States and she got married again. Let me tell you, that place always spooked me,” he said, looking at the house. “I still come here every few years, kind of in memory of my mother, I guess. And it still gives me the creeps.”
    “It’s gorgeous, fantastic,” Julie said. “It must cost a fortune to take care of.”
    “Oh, I think Vincenzo can afford it,” Phil said with a laugh.
    “Vincenzo’s the owner?”
    “Well, there really isn’t any ‘owner.’ The de Grazia family owns the estate in perpetuity. They got it in the fourteenth century-along with the titles of ‘Count’ and ‘Countess,’ if you can believe it-when somebody’s great-uncle-twice-removed was Holy Roman Emperor for about five minutes. But Vincenzo de Grazia is the current padrone. He’s my cousin. Well, he’s my mother’s cousin, what does that make him? My uncle, I guess, but we’re the same age.”
    “He’s your first cousin, once removed,” Gideon said, shaking his head. “What kind of a cultural anthropologist are you, anyway? Didn’t they teach you about kinship systems?”
    Phil shrugged. “Sure. You want to know about the exopatrilocal kinship structure of the Arunta? That I understand perfectly. Ours I never got straight; too complicated. Anyway, Vincenzo’s father-my uncle Domenico-was the previous padrone, and Vincenzo’s son Achille will be the next one, and so on, yeah, into the far-distant future. So he gets this humongous inheritance and he gets to live there- he has to live there, actually; that’s in the covenant, if I understand it right. If he doesn’t, he forfeits the inheritance.”
    “Not too bad a deal.” Gideon said, more and more taken with the island’s beauty as they came nearer. “I think I could live with that.”
    The boat had slowed down now and was steering toward the stone quay, which led up to the courtyard by a wide flight of stone steps with two full-size palm trees in enormous pots at their head. The fabric of the building, the windows, the worn steps themselves, the many statues and plants they could see-all looked meticulously cared for, as if cleaning and pruning crews had been out that