Phần I
"Mama?"
Claire's voice went into the bricks and nowhere else.
"Mama, I know it's you. I can smell your cigarettes."
Nothing. Not a footstep. Not a breath. She pounded the bricks with the flat of her hand until her palm burned, and the damp mortar left grey prints on her skin, and still nothing came back but the hum of the new hall through the stone.
Ines came down the steps at a run twelve minutes later, headlamp on, a crowbar in her hand.
"It's hollow," Claire said. "This whole section. It's a door with bricks on it."
Ines knocked on it with the crowbar. A wooden sound under the brick. She ran the light along the edges and found it: a seam, a quarter-inch wide, hidden in the mortar line, running up one side and across the top of a door-sized panel.
"Latched from inside," Ines said. "You'd need to rip half the wall out." She stepped back, breathing hard. "But whoever's in there didn't walk through rock. There's another way out."
"The caves."
The Bellandi caves had been dug into the hillside behind the winery in 1889 by Chinese laborers with picks and shovels - four long tunnels, each two hundred feet deep, lined with barrels. Claire and Luca had played hide-and-seek in them until a cellar worker found Luca asleep behind a barrel at midnight and their mother had screamed for an hour.
"Tunnel Three," Ines said. "There's an iron gate at the back. My dad called it the library gate. Your father kept the key on his own ring and nobody else touched it." She paused. "Then one year the key was gone and the gate was locked and nobody ever talked about it again."
They went out and up around the side of the hill in the dark. The great wooden doors of the caves were shut. But the small door cut into the bigger one, the one for people, was standing an inch open.
In the dust of the cave floor just inside, in the beam of Ines's headlamp, were footprints. Fresh. Small. Narrow. Walking out.
They followed them to the cave mouth, and onto the gravel, and then they were gone.