Diavola

by Jennifer Marie Thorne

The villa looked much less elegant from this angle. The great glass extension blocked the original architecture, creating the effect of something amputated and replaced with the wrong prosthesis.

Wendell Rook Silver was a very old, venerable ad agency. Nobody from the old guard remained among the partners, but they still operated as if the ghosts of the founders were watching over their shoulders, ready to toss them out the thirty-fourth-floor window if they stepped out of line.

Anna heard the girls laugh behind her, but when she turned, they weren’t there. Nicole was right. Sounds carried strangely here.

Just before she drifted off, in the in-between between consciousness and oblivion, she realized what had bothered her about her nieces whispering in the hall. They’d been speaking Italian.

“Here and there,” he answered, and with that, she met the limits of her curiosity.

“I’m the driver,” Benny said ruefully. “And I’m already feeling iffy. This is strong wine, right?” It did seem to be, but Anna couldn’t figure out why. “Can I have yours?”

At one point, he stood up from the sofa—we were at his place—and he backed away from me like he was scared, and he goes … I shit you not, he goes, ‘There is a darkness in you, Anna.’ And I started laughing! I mean, how could you not?

She did like the game, though, still fished for potential lovers, but now it was catch and release.

She shrugged, game enough. “When is what coming?” “The train wreck.” The lingering wine in Anna’s mouth turned to vinegar. She kept her vacation smile in place, though.

“That is really really not how I put it,” Benny said, avoiding Anna’s eyes in a way that confirmed that his boyfriend was quoting him almost verbatim.

Christopher regaled them with stories of summers he’d spent in Montauk as a teen, all of which had slipped loose from Anna’s memory by the time they piled back into the car, laden with bottles from the shop.

They were never going to forgive her for Hilton Head.

Mom was a human sponge designed to absorb and spread anxiety.

She felt the strongest itch to break something, hurt something. Hurt them, all of them, have the revenge that she deserved, take—

It seemed to Anna that the concept of “vacation” was antithetical to the concept of “family.” Vacation required vacancy. The abandonment of all scraps of everyday life.

A rat had died inside her apartment wall a few years back. The feeling she’d gotten from smelling its decay—this, now, was the same.

Downstairs, a bedroom door slammed shut. Anna flinched, gripping the hanging for balance.

Her step faltered as she headed back down poolside and she let out a startled cry. There were two people floating in the water. Facedown. A blink, and they were gone, merely the shadows from the surrounding trees.

Anna felt she must have seen her in another painting, which tracked; the Renaissance masters used to pass the same models back and forth, society denizens—debs from rich families, or popular courtesans—transmuted from party girl to holy virgin through oil and canvas.

“Can we go play with the neighbors?” Waverly called. “Yeah, sure, have a blast,” Justin said, then turned to Anna, conspiratorial. “There are no neighbors, right? I’ve got weird kids.”

Benny set the sketch aside and Anna slid it out of sight before anyone could spot the corpse of an old woman she’d drawn sprawled between rows of vines, her blood seeping deep into the soil like tentacles.

“Mommy says I’m like you,” Waverly said behind her. “But she only says it when she’s mad at me.”

And in that instant, Anna felt it. Heaviness seeping into the villa. The space around her crawling closer, squirming around her, loaded, conscious. More biological than chemical.

She gripped Anna’s leg like a pole in a flash flood.

Christopher walked in first. He moved his head straight to them, sensing the tension like a shark tastes blood, and a smile of sheer malicious delight stretched over his smug face. When’s the train wreck?

Her nakedness felt like a liability. Like her skin was tissue-thin.

No one else was there in the clear reflection—just her, looking like a ghost herself. A drowning victim.

Justin started a slow clap. Tucked his hands away at Nicole’s glare.

She clicked away from the page, from the increasingly vile comments, and googled the blogger’s name, hoping against hope for that TikTok account. Instead, a brief obituary.

“We shouldn’t stay here.” All her thoughts were caveman sentences now, blunt with fear. “Not here. I found something. I’ll tell you. Just not … Let’s just go.”

Why did she want to hear it? Validation, proof she was right? She could leave, herself, she could go pack and take off, but they’d stay and fume and rant about her. It was more than that, though. She owed it to the rest of them to drag them out of danger. They were her family. Everybody kept telling her how important that was.

It was definitely Christopher’s bag, though. Tumi. Brand-new. Ditched in the grass.

Yeah, his boyfriend left him, and he was smarting, lashing out, but he didn’t have to take the wine.

The shutters to the bedroom were opening themselves, slowly, one a little wider than the other. “Nope.” Anna flung wide the bedroom door, choosing Risk Number One over remaining in this tiny enclosed space with a ghost that could now, apparently, move things. “Nope, nope, nope.”

It was bland. It would probably sell in a gallery in some beachfront tourist town, that’s how bland.

when she turned to the central gallery of glossy repros and saw La Dama Bianca smirking back at her. Florentine Woman. c. 1500, Tempera on wood. It was as if a cockroach had crawled onto the page. She wanted to chuck the book off her lap and grab a dishrag and beat the crap out of it.

Anna had gone back to sleep on the sofa, and now, according to her phone, it was close to noon. She let the call go to voicemail, slept a little more inside the comforting ray of sunshine falling across her cheek,