«What is her alibi? Do we know what she said?»
«She said she came home very late, because she has been to dinner in a restaurant downstream, and that, when she approached her home, she spotted the reddish light of the fire. She called 115 on her cell phone while she was still a couple of miles away.»
«Well, well do the necessary checks. But tell me about the people who disappeared previously.»
«It would take a lot to tell everything in detail. Ill try to keep things brief, then we will have the opportunity to go through all the material that has been sent to us by the police headquarters and the court. There is a nice file to study, and its already on your desk. The first person whose traces were lost is the one who lived in the same house as Aurora and who went by the same name. In 1989 this sixty-year-old lady, known as a fortune teller, herbalist, healer, seer, and sorceress, decided to go to the mountains of Nepal to reach a temple where she could regenerate her spirit, body, and soul. She reached Kathmandu with her follower, a young Romanian woman, a certain Larìs Dracu. The two women hired Sherpas, who accompanied them up to a certain extent. When they insisted on going to an unexplored area, barred to the Sherpas for their religious beliefs, the latter left them alone, saying that they would wait for them for three days, after which they would hold them for missing. Nothing was ever known about the two, but a few months later a twenty-year-old who claimed to be Auroras granddaughter showed up in Triora. Appealing to the homonymy, she claimed the right to take possession of her grandmothers house. This young Aurora also seemed to have supernatural powers, but far more powerful than those of the alleged ancestor. The few locals, who had known Aurora in her youth, could not do anything else but notice the extraordinary resemblance of the young woman to the elderly one that disappeared, so much that many were convinced that the witch had found, on her trip to Nepal, an elixir for youth and has managed to rejuvenate her appearance until she became a girl again. But apart from that, strange episodes began to occur in the woods around Triora. It was said in the village that, on full moon nights, the witches had started practicing their Sabbaths, organized by the young Aurora. Aside from the Sabbaths, Aurora had many visits to her home. In addition to the postulants who requested herbal remedies for the treatment of sicknesses, or elixirs of various types to resolve love troubles, occasionally special people came, hosted by her as followers of an esoteric sect, whose name I do not remember now. These subjects, essentially women, reached the place in order to draw knowledge in the ancient library, which had always been jealously kept in Auroras home by her ancestors, and gradually enriched by them over the centuries. One of these young women, Mariella Carletti, called La Rossa, in 1997 left from a small town in Abruzzo, where she was already known as a healer and seer, leaving said that she would reach Triora in order to pass the arduous tests that would allow her to become an adept of the seventh level, one of the highest, and that she would return with powers that no one could ever imagine. She never went back. In Triora, this beautiful girl, tall, with flowing fiery red hair, light blue eyes, a pale complexion full of freckles, did not go unnoticed. At dusk on June 21, the day of the summer solstice, she headed for the woods where the Sabbaths were said to take place, after which she disappeared. An interesting detail is that there was a beginning of a fire that night, but very limited. Apparently, a long-disused truck had caught fire, but the fact could not be connected in any way to the girls disappearance. The burnt carcass of the truck is still there, it was never removed. The case, in its time, was dismissed as the work of thugs. In 2000, three journalists, two men, and a woman, from a well-known national monthly magazine which has its headquarters and editorial office in Genoa, wanted to carry out their own little investigation into the girls disappearance, which had taken place three years earlier. With the excuse of a reportage on witches and witchcraft in Triora, they placed themselves with a small tent right in the woods where the witches gathered, near the Fonte della Noce, with the hope of glimpsing some satanic ritual or something. For a few days, they collected information on the trial put in place against the witches of Triora towards the end of the 16th century. They also tried to get an exclusive interview from Aurora, who however did not grant it. On the night between the 20 and 21 August, the three journalists disappeared under mysterious circumstances. Inside the tent, found empty the following morning, some notebooks with the collected material were found. These notebooks were returned to the magazine which, to honor the three, published an eight-page article about the witches of Triora. The last sentence written in the notebook of one of the three journalists was in large capital letters and it was also underlined: MY GOD! Something or someone had definitely scared him to death. Nothing was ever heard again about the missing journalists.»
In the meantime, we had passed Imperia, left the highway at the Arma di Taggia toll gate, and took a provincial road that went up a beautiful valley floor, running parallel to the course of a river. It was the first time I was seeing places that would later become familiar. We were traveling through the Argentina Valley, crossed by the river of the same name, a narrow valley with few human settlements. The green of the luxuriant woods stood out against the intense blue of the clear sky on the warm day of early July and, within me, the old passion for the mountain was awakening. I was already dreaming of walking on the paths that went into those woods. We went up past a small town, Molini di Triora, to reach Triora, a village with medieval features, perched on the top of a summit. After passing the center, the road descended and, after a while, we stopped in an open space, where a couple of police cars, a jeep of the firefighters, and a truck of the forestry body equipped to put out the forest fires were parked.
«Well,» I said, «what you told me is very interesting and actually one can really glimpse the paw of the sects, besides that of something really thorny! It is now a question of how much esotericism has to do with all this and what is the responsibility of the followers in the disappearance of the people you mentioned and in the murder of this night if it was a murder and not a simple accident. »
«Caterina, please, caution is never too much here. Aside from witches, during this investigation, we may find ourselves faced with unscrupulous criminals. Take the gun and lets memorize each others PDAs number, so we can call each other if necessary. Let's go!»
I grabbed the PDA but left the pistol in the glove compartment of the car, as I thought I wouldnt need it at the time.
Chapter 3
Aurora Della Rosa
Larìs was not afraid of crossing the suspension bridge. She looked for Auroras blue-green eyes, which transmitted her all the strength and energy she needed. She had known her for a short time, but she trusted her and her esoteric powers.
Larìs Dracu was from Transylvania, a region in Romania, that was still ruled by a communist dictator in the late 1980s. By the age of eighteen, she had already gained the fame of an anti-communist witch and, in order not to fall into the hands of General Ceausescus secret police, she had headed to Italy with considerable difficulty. She had gone to a village in Liguria, where she knew an adept of her own sect lived, who would help her and guide her in continuing her journey towards the highest level, the one beyond the seventh, that of universal knowledge. When she arrived at Auroras house, on the day of the spring equinox, at midday, she noticed that her hostess was waiting for her in the doorway with the door open. She was not surprised, as she knew the sorceresss seer powers. She felt herself being watched with complacency. Larìs was a beautiful girl, with shiny black hair, pulled back and gathered in a short pigtail, dark eyes, almost black, delicate facial features. The sinuous lines of her body allowed to imagine, under tight clothes, a rare to be seen perfection of breasts, buttocks, and legs. The sorceress appeared to her as a sixty-year-old in excellent shape, with blond hair slightly streaked with white, her eyes changed their color from blue to green, depending on the brightness of the environment. Her body still had the strength of a forty-year-old and her skin was smooth, tight, and not furrowed by obvious wrinkles. Her gaze was magnetic and, when her eyes met Auroras, Larìs felt a strong sexual impulse towards the sorceress. Aurora spoke a few words in a language incomprehensible to ordinary mortals. She had not expressed herself in the Occitan language, typical of that border area between Italy and France, but the young woman had been able to understand it, having learned it as a child, when her mother had started her to magical and esoteric practices. The Semants was the ancient language of the adepts, whose origin was lost in the mists of time, an idiom already known at the time of the Egypt of the Pharaohs by magicians and shamans, but which had even more ancient origins. Larìs was invited by Aurora to enter the house and was led into a squared room. One of the walls of the living room was occupied entirely by a mirror, so it seemed that the room was much larger than it actually was, while on the other three walls there were shelves, where there were many books and manuscripts and some porcelain vases, like the ones used in the past in pharmacies and herbalist shops.