Authors: Carrie Bedford
Tags: #Murder mystery, #Mystery, #cozy mystery, #London, #England, #English fiction, #Europe, #UK, #Paranormal, #ghost story, #Suspense, #female sleuth, #Women Sleuths, #auras
The Aura (33 page)
Two days later, Josh and I stood together at the back of the small chapel. It was packed with mourners. The sheep-wool smell of damp clothes was interlaced with the stronger fragrance of incense and the odor of lilies. Lamps suspended from the vaulted ceiling, formed pools of greenish light on the travertine floor, while a bank of votives flickered at the entry to the side chapel. The dark walnut wood coffin gleamed in the glow of the altar candles. Vases of pink and white flowers sat on the altar top.
Italian funerals were somber affairs and took a long time. After a few minutes, my attention wandered to a pretty fresco on the wall of the apse behind the altar. Finally, when a rustling and shifting signaled the end of the service, everyone stood to follow the coffin to its resting place in the cemetery.
Memorial plaques, stacked three high in the walls, each bore a photo of the deceased, and a small votive that was lit day and night. The congregated mourners were silent while the coffin was pushed carefully into the long, narrow niche in the wall. Two nuns placed vases of flowers on the sill; later, when we’d left, the opening would be sealed closed and a marble plaque fixed into place.
I had struggled to make sense of it all for three days now and was no closer to understanding. But it didn’t matter. I had to accept the fact that I had sat on the bench in the maze and talked with Sister Chiara several hours after she had died.
The priest turned away, his work done, and a nun knelt briefly for one last prayer. Tears trickled down my cheeks, warm on my cold skin. Josh reached out to brush them away. He gave me an encouraging smile. He’d smiled a lot since we arrived in Tuscany, although he was suitably solemn for the funeral.
The convent bells began, ringing out over the valley, and startling a murder of crows that flew up in a noisy panic from the old oak tree in the center of the convent grounds. I linked my arm through his for the short walk back to my father’s house.
***
That night, Leo and Olivia arrived with the boys and the house was full of voices and laughter, warm with crackling log fires, festive with Christmas lights. Presents were piled up under the tree that Josh and Dad had cut and trimmed.
I could tell that Dad liked Josh. Only Josh was allowed into his study to look at the draft of the Book, as we called it, the gardening book he’d been working on. Huddled over drafts and layouts, they closed the door after me when I took in cups of tea or glasses of wine.
I spent most of my time in the kitchen. Paolo had volunteered to be my assistant; we baked, rolled out pasta sheets, and cooked multi-course feasts, while Olivia sat at the kitchen table, drinking tea and flipping through recipe books for new culinary challenges to give us. Leo and the boys kicked a ball around on the frosted lawn, or played video games with the volume turned as high as it would go.
On Christmas Day, flutes of prosecco in hand, Leo and Olivia announced their engagement. Olivia said they planned a quiet wedding ceremony in the early spring and were hoping to get away for a week to somewhere exotic like the Seychelles or the Maldives. Sister Chiara had been right when she referred to Olivia as Leo’s fiancée.
After dinner that evening, while Leo, Josh and the boys played Gabe’s new video game, I sat with Olivia to tell her about my visit to the maze and my unearthly meeting with Sister Chiara.
When I’d finished, she nodded, as though agreeing with something I’d said.
“It makes sense. You had to puzzle your way through the maze to get to the revelation at the center.”
“I spoke to a dead nun, Olivia.”
“I don’t think you did, actually. You received her message, of that there’s no doubt.”
“You mean she wasn’t there? I imagined sitting on that bench with her and talking?”
“Perhaps. But that doesn’t mean that what she told you isn’t real. That’s what you have to focus on. It’s what Leo’s been telling you too, if you think about it, that you have to let all that guilt go. Get on with your life. Put it all behind you. It doesn’t mean you have to forget those you’ve lost, just that you have to accept they’ve gone and that it wasn’t your fault.”
She gave me a mischievous grin. “Josh is lovely. Be happy, enjoy being with him. Don’t let him slip away.”
“And the auras? What do I do about those?”
She leaned over and took my hands in hers. “You’re going to be all right, Kate, I’m sure of it. One day these auras will make sense to you. Meanwhile, I have a plan. I’m going to keep you totally engrossed in wedding planning. I have a zillion ideas, but I need your organizational skills to execute them. We’ll have fun, don’t you think?”
She stood up, went to the dining table, and came back with a white three-ring binder and a bottle of wine.
“Let’s get started.”
THE END
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CARRIE BEDFORD grew up in London and has since lived in Switzerland, France, Spain and Italy. An enthusiastic traveler, she draws on her experiences in her writing. She wrote her debut novel,
Nobilissima
, while living in Italy, where she researched the life and times of the Empress Placidia.
The Aura
is set in London and Florence.
Carrie now lives in California with her husband, their two daughters, two yellow labs and a calico cat who assists in edit cycles by taking random walks on the keyboard.
After winning a Greater London Essay Competition in her teens, Carrie has written for both pleasure and for business. Over the last twenty years, she’s published many articles in leading computer and technology magazines. She was editor for a small magazine publisher for several years, and more recently co-owned and managed a public relations and marketing firm in Silicon Valley. She has an Honors degree in English Language and Literature from Manchester University in England.