David Hewson: A Season for the Dead

He shivered in his thin jacket. The wine wasn’t enough to keep him warm. He looked around for her. Bea had moved into the house in the weeks before his father died, caring for them both. He took her for granted, he knew. There seemed no other way.

“Bea!” he yelled. “Bea!”

She didn’t come. Maybe she was watching him from the house, thinking about what Falcone had said. Maybe she was wondering why a woman in her mid-fifties should be looking after a man almost thirty years younger, a cripple who refused his own chance of redemption. Maybe she was thinking Falcone was right.

“Bea,” he cried, one last time. There was no reply.

It was cold now. The light was fading. If he had one more drink he knew what would happen, where his mind would go. To the bedroom upstairs and the night, the single night, he would spend with Sara Farnese.

This was important. He hoped she was watching.

He grasped the alabaster urn with his right hand then, with his left, took hold of the gnarled grapevine that wormed its way up the patio pillar. Struggling, short of breath, feeling a distant sensation run down his injured spine and press a little movement into his half-dead legs, he dragged himself upright and looked at the field.

It was immaculate. Bea had called in men to help her. The green heads of cavolo nero were rising in spite of the season, forcing themselves upright, working toward the sky.

His fingers shook as he fumbled at the lid. Then, with a fierce determined movement, he tipped the urn upside down. Gray ash and dust spilled out onto the rising wind, gathered in a fleeting gray cloud then vanished, scattering across the land a lifetime of memories, an abundance of love and shared grief, gone in the blink of a disbelieving eye.

He clung tightly to the vine, watching this mortal smoke disperse. It was nothing. It was everything. It was gone. It would never leave him.

Then the breeze stiffened. The page on the table, with its five words written in a firm, elegant hand, fluttered in the wind, rose and began to tumble through the air, flitting across the arid ground, turning and turning before it disappeared into the scrub by the road.

He watched it vanish, wishing he could run again.

Nic Costa felt no wiser. Just a little stronger, perhaps, and that,in the circumstances, was as much as he could bear.

About the Author

DAVID HEWSON has written five novels as well as several travel books.

A weekly columnist for the Sunday Times, he lives in Kent, England, where he is currently working on his next novel featuring Nic Costa,

The Villa of Mysteries. Look for his stand-alone novel of suspense Lucifer’s Shadow, coming from Dell in summer 2004.'