Death Of A Sad Face (A Serafina Florio Mystery) by Susan Russo Anderson Page A

teacher said he’d gone, to where she didn’t know, just left with his family, no goodbyes. After that, school made his stomach ache. Not the teacher, she was fine and liked the way he read aloud, but that made it worse because after he read real good that one time, the kids hated him.
    Working for Vicenzu, that was better than going to school, especially in the morning because Vicenzu made a bench for him in the front of the store where he could mend customers’ shoes, and when his fingers worked the leather, it was just like he was back in his father’s shop. The men talked to one another while he fixed their shoes. They rolled their hands and laughed and gave him tips, and it was fine, but now Donna Fina said he couldn’t work in the mornings, he must make friends at school.
    Maria didn’t like him anymore, he knew, because she wouldn’t walk with him to school. She wasn’t mean all the time—too smart and beautiful for that. She loved her piano the way he loved books—that had to count for something—and she didn’t start out bossy. He didn’t know why she crossed over to being with the mean kids. Maybe the specter cast a spell on her. He tried not to mind her mood too much, and when he stood quiet and closed his eyes and thought hard about the books and mending the shoes, it was fine. But other times, like when Maria wouldn’t look at him, he felt like yanking her pigtails so hard they’d come off, but he didn’t.
    He dressed and tiptoed across the hall to where his brother slept. His brother looked red tonight. Trouble keeping down the milk, that’s what the wet nurse told him, so he kissed him and put his nose close to his face. He rubbed the hair on his scalp, and his brother smiled and moved his arms and legs fast. Teo was the only one who could make his brother smile, his mother told him that, but he couldn’t think about her now or about leaving his brother, and anyway, he’d be back after he made himself a fortune.
    His room faced the front and the sea, and he went to the window for one last look at the waves, and he wondered what was on the other side. Maybe the souls of the dead, like his mother and father, and now Falco who wasn’t dead, not as far as he knew, but who’d left without saying goodbye, which was as good as dead. He stood at the window and waited until the moon was high and the stars pricked the sky before he wrapped himself in Vicenzu’s old cape and stuffed a book into his sack. After kissing his brother once more, he nodded to the wet nurse and crept down the stairs and along the hall, opening the door as softly as he could, and slipped out into the night.

Butler Dead, Jewels Missing

    Early Thursday morning, October 29, 1868
    Serafina bit into a brioche. “Colonna’s on the front page declaiming again, as if he were the commissioner.” Had she spoken that aloud? She listened for sounds of stirring, but heard nothing, only a solemn emptiness from the floors above and the domestic banging about in the next room, keeping time to the sweep of the wind under the eaves. She went to the stove, poured herself another caffè. Returning to her newspaper, she pursed her lips and flicked the image of the simpering inspector photographed next to a twisted body in situ. The headline read, “Butler Dead, Jewels Missing.” Another crime in sleepy Oltramari. Well, she was having none of it, not that the commissioner had asked for her help yet. Instead, she set the paper aside and let her thoughts wander.
    Lately, life had been filled with dead bodies, and she wasn’t in the mood for another one. First, it was her husband’s death over two years ago, followed by a bloody uprising in town, and a slew of other killings, too many to count. Most of all, she remembered the look on the faces of those weighted with sudden loss. Teo’s eyes swam into view.
    She worried about them, Teo and his baby brother, ever since their arrival for a stay of indefinite duration, and hadn’t anticipated