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By Root 859 0

a hilltop. A drift of church bells, such a beautiful sound, Phoebe thought, like wind chimes, like singing angels. Gradually she, too, began to drift, back to the moment when finally she’d gone inside the church where her father’s casket lay and sat in a front pew, next to Faith. Try as she might, Phoebe couldn’t feel the weight of the disaster. The sound of birds kept distracting her, lighthearted, fatuous, flapping outside the church’s stained-glass windows and luring Phoebe out of its darkness, away from the dour intonations of the priest. Did no one notice? Faith’s eyes never strayed from the priest, as if her gaze were one strand in a fragile, delicate web whose slightest disruption would bring the world crashing down upon her. Phoebe leaned forward to look at Barry, on Faith’s other side. He, too, watched the priest, but after a moment Phoebe saw her brother steal a glance at the windows, then glance again, reluctantly, as if helpless against their gleam of liquid color, the beating of wings behind them.

Wolf followed a wisp of road up a hill and parked the car outside the thick walls of a town. The bulk of the day had gone. Phoebe wondered if this town had been their destination all along, or if Wolf had simply tired of driving. She didn’t ask. All but the most practical conversation had ceased between them, jettisoned like heavy cargo from an unstable ship. Phoebe stepped from the car and looked down at the surrounding sprawl of hills, whose white, shimmering grass made them look like heaps of sand. Here and there stood a yellowy farmhouse with green shutters, a vineyard beside it. The only sound was the wind.

They left their luggage in the car and passed through an old gate to a steep cobblestoned road. Phoebe heard sounds of children playing, but couldn’t see them. She and Wolf walked like people in a trance, not even near each other. Wineshops lined the road, colored bottles tilted in their windows. An old woman sold bunches of red flowers wrapped in white paper. Apart from the noisy, absent children, the town was silent.

They reached a sloped rectangular square paved with a herringbone pattern of narrow yellow bricks. Here were the children, eight or nine little boys attacking a soccer ball with such naked aggression that its leaps and jumps looked like desperate attempts to escape them. Houses ringed the square, interspersed with a few old towers and three restaurants, whose empty tables and chairs appeared to have wandered from their doors. It was a quiet hour, between meals.

Wolf guided Phoebe into a restaurant and negotiated with a man behind the bar, handing him their passports in exchange for a key on a leather thong with a block of wood attached. The bartender offered directions, tilting his hand to indicate a turn. When his eyes met Phoebe’s, she looked away in shame.

Only as they crossed back through the square did Phoebe notice the birds, hundreds of small black birds circling the square, their wings curved backward like arrowheads. Crazily they swooped and dipped, uttering shrill, squeaking cries not unlike those of mice, only more restless, more plaintive. Like something from the Bible, Phoebe thought, a portent of earthquakes or walls of fire, droughts to last generations.

They turned onto a side street. Though the boys were no longer in sight, Phoebe clung to the sounds of their play, the tinny thung of ball against brick. Flowers tumbled from overhead boxes. Wolf stopped at a curved wooden door marked 4 and fiddled with the key. He seemed lost in these practicalities, as if he’d forced from his mind all thoughts of where they would lead. Phoebe felt a kind of vertigo. Wolf held open the door and reluctantly she went in. The dark house smelled of dust and something sweet, ashy, like old flowers. Wolf found a light switch, and an archaic, medieval-looking entry hall sprang into view, cast-iron fixtures, throne-sized chairs. Heavy curtains extinguished any suggestion of sunlight. At one end of the hall was a room filled with covered furniture heaped into teetering piles. Phoebe glanced fearfully