That, at least, was a good sign: he was willing to do anything to make amends.

Parisi made to remove the special footwear he’d donned for the search and pass it on to his bedraggled colleague, but Teresa stopped him.

They watched together as the inspector’s shoes were sucked once more into the mud, sinking into the fetid remains of rotting leaves and God knows what else.

Teresa almost felt sorry for him, though it was an amusing sight.

“What am I looking for?” he asked after poking about blindly for several minutes.

So finally he’d managed to ask for help. Progress.

“The eyes,” Teresa replied. “We haven’t found them yet.”

-4-

-4-

AUSTRIA, 1978

People in town often spoke about the School, though few knew much about it, and even fewer had actually been there. The stories told about the institute tended to be flights of fancy encouraged by the air of mystery around it.

At dawn on certain days the building, constructed in the Mitteleuropean tradition, seemed to emerge from the low clouds like a mirage of flickering lights. Its rectangular base rested on a mount of solid rock that had been quarried nearby, and on top of that rose the first floor, veneered in carved concrete. A series of intertwined beams separated this floor from the upper stories, built out of finely cut stone. The front façade, from which the east and west wings branched out, was enhanced by four columns of the Ionic order, with gabled windows between them. The third and final floor was topped by a semi-dome. Its central arch held a turret clock that had been broken for as long as anyone could remember; it was rumored that the time it displayed—three o’clock on the dot—was the exact moment when the building’s designer, a young architect from Lienz, had died, struck by lightning as he stood near the lake admiring his creation. Nearly two hundred years later, the elderly locals still spoke of that moment as the day God made his wrath manifest, punishing man for his pride, for daring to violate a landscape intended solely for silence, for gales, and for mountain flowers.

Now that she stood closer to the School than she had ever been, Magdalena understood the meaning of this rumor. Everything about the building felt wrong, completely ill-judged, the whim of an aristocratic class that never seemed to know when to stop.

She had walked up the road that led from the town to the plateau; from there, she’d taken a shortcut, climbing along the path that went over the opposite side of the mountain. The bitter smell of lichens and slimy depths rose from the lake. It looked like the earth’s own eye.