Day Of Confession

57

Lake Como, Italy. Sunday, July 12, 8:40 p.m.

The sound of the motors changed from a whine to a low drone, and nursing sister Elena Voso could feel the hydrofoil slow as the boat's hull settled into the water. Ahead, a great stone villa sat on the lake's edge, and they were moving toward it. In the twilight, she could see a man on the dock looking toward them, a large rope in his hand.

Marco stepped down from the pilot house and went out onto the deck as they neared. Behind her, Luca and Pietro stood up to unhook the safety straps that had held the gurney secure on the twenty-minute trip from shore. The hydrofoil was large, able to seat, she guessed, maybe as many as sixty passengers and was used for public transportation between the towns sitting on the edge of the thirty-mile-long lake. But this trip, they were the only travelers – she, Marco, Luca, and Pietro. And Michael Roark.

They had left the house in Cortona just after noon the day before. Going quickly, leaving almost everything but Michael Roark's medical supplies behind. A telephone call had come for Luca, and Elena answered. Luca was sleeping, she'd said, but the male voice told her to wake him, to tell him that it was urgent, and Luca had taken the call on the upstairs extension.

'Get out, now,' she'd heard the voice say as she'd returned to the kitchen to hang up. She'd started to listen, but Luca knew she was there and told her to hang up. And she had.

Immediately Pietro had driven off in his car, only to return three-quarters of an hour later at the wheel of another van. Less than fifty minutes after that they were in it, all of them, leaving the vehicle they'd come in behind.

Driving north, they'd taken the Al Autostrada to Florence and then gone on to Milan to a private apartment in the suburbs where they'd spent the night and most of that day. There Michael Roark had his first real food, rice pudding Marco had bought at a local store. He'd taken it slowly, between sips of water, but he managed, and it had stayed down. But it hadn't been enough, and so she kept him on the IV.

The newspaper she'd bought, with the photograph of Father Daniel Addison, had been left behind in the rush to depart. Whether Roark had seen her hide it away behind her as he'd so abruptly turned toward her she didn't know. All she did know was that the comparison had been inconclusive. He might be the American priest, he might not. Her entire effort had been in vain.

There was an abrupt roar as the propellers reversed, then a gentle bump as the hydrofoil touched the dock. Elena saw Marco toss the mooring line to the man onshore and turned from her musing to see Luca and Pietro lift the gurney and carry it forward to the steps. As they did, Michael Roark raised his head and looked at her, more for comfort and the assurance she was coming with them, she thought, than for anything else. As far as he had come, he could talk only in hoarse, guttural sounds and was still extremely weak. She realized she had become his emotional anchor as well as his caregiver. It was a tender dependency, and for all her nursing experience, it touched her in a way she'd never felt before. She wondered what it meant, whether somehow she was changing. It made her think, too, and ask herself, if he were the fugitive priest, would it make any difference?

Moments later they had him up and out, with Marco leading them up the gangway to bring him ashore. And then Elena was ashore as well, listening as the engines of the hydrofoil revved up, then turning to see the boat pull away in the enveloping darkness, its running lights glowing on the stern, the Italian flag above the pilot house flapping in the wind. Then the vessel picked up speed, and its hull rose out of the water so that the boat stood up on stilts like a huge, ungainly bird. And like that it was gone, the black water closing behind it, washing over its wake. As if it had never been.

'Sister Elena,' Marco called, and she turned to follow them up the stone steps toward the lights of the immense villa above.