Page 125 of The Unraveling of Julia

She looked around, desperate for a weapon. The face sculpture provided light. She needed something,anything, to defend herself with. She spotted sticks, all too thin. She spied a rock, grabbed it on the fly, and kept going.

She fought panic to plan. She would surprise him with the rock. Hit him in the face. Break his nose. Do anything to buy time.

The sirens got closer and closer. Red lights flashed in the night sky. She was losing hope they’d get here. Hoodie would kill her and get away. It didn’t take long to kill somebody. He’d murdered Mike in the blink of an eye.

Julia felt a stark cold terror. The man was ten feet away from her, then six.

“No!” Julia tried to run faster, but he grabbed her by the hair, yanked her back, and hurled her to the ground.

Julia landed hard, the wind knocked out of her. She tried to get up, fighting for her life. He jumped down and straddled her, laughing and breathless. He cuffed her in the face, stunning her. Her brain rattled. She almost lost consciousness. She flailed and kicked, writhing, trying to get out from under.

He slid out a large hunting knife. Its lethal blade caught the light from the sculpture. He was going to kill her the way he killed Mike.

She was going to die.

70

Julia felt a new resolve, aknowingthat she couldn’t let him kill her. She was going to fight back and save her own life. It was another premonition, one she knew as surely as the night Mike had been murdered. The knowledge gave her a preternatural calm, even under the point of a knife.

Suddenly a faint blue aura materialized around her, enveloping her in a shimmering cerulean haze. Julia didn’t know if it was a hallucination, a psychedelic, a surge of adrenaline, or even her channeling Caterina. A vibrant new energy coursed throughout her body, rushing through her circulatory system like a transfusion of something otherworldly, empowering her.

Julia marshaled every cell of her newfound strength and shoved the man off her, getting to her feet. He staggered backward, dropping the knife, his mouth agape. She didn’t know if he saw the aura or if she was hallucinating his reaction, but it didn’t matter now. She squared off against her husband’s killer.

The man turned to get away, but Julia grabbed him by the arm and whipped him at the base of the sculpture. He stumbled toward it, losing his balance, his arms windmilling. He fell into the sculpture. His head slammed its base with a solidthud. He groaned on impact, then slid to the ground, writhing in pain.

Police sirens blared at the garden entrance, and Julia heard them as if from another place and time. Her blue aura began to dematerialize around her, blurring into a spangled mist that rejoined the etherand the spirits, of which she was but a part. She felt herself coming into herself again, tingling all over, nothing less than a woman in full, possessing an array of powers, a strength of her own, one profoundly human and powered by love. She was a wife, avenging a dearly beloved husband.

Sirens screamed into the garden, filling the air with deafening sound, followed by flashing red and white lights. Julia looked over to see police cruisers bounding across the grass, their high beams bouncing as they headed toward her. She waved them down, and the cruisers lurched to a halt.Carabinierijumped out, shadows racing to her and her attacker, who was still groaning at the base of the sculpture.

Behind the police ran Courtney and Fiamma.

Julia’s heart soared, and she ran toward the women. All three opened their arms, meeting and hugging each other. Julia managed not to cry, feeling an outpouring of gratitude for a best friend who was closer than any blood relation, as well as a blood relation who was a total stranger, but who somehow, in that moment, felt like the most remarkable of everyday miracles.

A loving mother.

71

Julia and Courtney sat across the desk in the office, a bright white room lined with framed official certificates and group photographs ofcarabinieri. They’d been taken to the Comando Provinciale, the Florence police headquarters near the Arno, and Julia had given a complete statement to Marshal Vernio, a sixty-something precinct captain with refined features and wavy gray hair. His white shirt was crisp even at this late hour, and he looked born into a navy jacket trimmed in red around the epaulets.

Julia told him everything, starting with her husband’s murder, going through her vision of Gianluca being run off the road, and ending with how she was attacked by White Fiat and Hoodie in the Boboli Gardens, even about her premonition, being microdosed with psychedelics, and the blue aura that she thought may have been Caterina, if it wasn’t a hallucination.

Marshal Vernio lifted an eyebrow as he typed on his desktop computer, and Julia felt her anxiety coming back when he questioned her further, about the night that Hoodie murdered Mike in Philly. When she was finished, Marshal Vernio checked his desktop screen. “Now, Ms. Pritzker, I have your statement, and its gravamen is that you believe there was a conspiracy to buy your property in order to resell it to Adamo Bucci and the Romagna Group, to develop into a hospitality complex. You believe that your realtor Franco Patelli was part of the conspiracy and that your housekeeper Anna Mattia Vesta and her husband Piero Fano were also involved, drugging you in order to makeyou think you were crazy or that the villa was haunted, so that you would sell it and go back to America.”

“Right. When it looked like I wouldn’t sell, or at least not fast enough, they upped the ante.”

“I understand.” Marshal Vernio nodded. “You believe that Marshal Torti and twocarabinierifrom Savernella were also involved. The conspiracy, and at this point we are unsure who in the conspiracy, attempted to murder Gianluca Moretti because he didn’t want you to sell the house and because you and he were beginning a relationship that might incline you to stay in Tuscany. Then, when they saw they could not convince you to sell, they attempted to kill you, which was their motive for the attack tonight in the Boboli.”

“Yes.”

“So, both the attempted murder of Gianluca Morettiandthe murder of your husband Michael Shallette were in furtherance of the conspiracy. Is that your belief?”

“Yes,” Julia answered, though it was hard to hear. She felt a wave of guilt that she knew would never go away. “What are your next steps, if I may ask?”

“Obviously we will investigate these allegations starting tonight, via many means. Our goal is to identify the bottom rung of the putative conspiracy and hope we gain confessions and cooperation to indict whoever is giving orders at the top rung.” Marshal Vernio checked his phone. “I will share with you that we now have the name and identification of the two men who assaulted you in the Boboli. The man you call White Fiat is Bernardo Vitali and Hoodie is Ciro Nardini.”

Julia felt her chest tighten at the name of the man who killed Mike, and Courtney looked over at her, sympathetic.

“Both men are in custody at the hospital. Vitali is in stable condition. Nardini’s condition is critical but he is expected to survive. Hesustained a skull fracture and a broken collarbone.”

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