A Curse in the Family by Alex Wagner

Author:Alex Wagner [Wagner, Alex]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2024-02-05T04:00:00+00:00

17

Penny woke up early the next morning. Alex was still in a deep sleep, but she felt restless, even if she was also exhausted. I wonder if I could get a nice cup of hot chocolate in the breakfast room?

Martha was indeed already up and busy with preparations, and as she served Penny's favorite drink she dropped a useful remark.

"Poor Mr. Benedikt," she moaned, "he's practically been living on tea for the last two days. And he's always walking up and down his tomb road. Like a man possessed! That's certainly not healthy! Isn't there anything you can do for him?"

Penny didn't point out that she was a detective and not a grief counselor, even though the two professions were in some ways more closely related than one might have thought at first glance.

"His tomb road?" she asked instead. After the Staircase of Curses, various skulls, statues of vengeful deities and demons, voodoo dolls and three-headed dogs, hardly anything surprised her … but a street of graves?

"It's in the basement," Martha explained, as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "Haven't you been there yet?"

"No," said Penny, but she decided that would change immediately. The opportunity for a one-on-one conversation with the grieving widower was too good to pass up.

She emptied her cocoa cup, savoring the creamy, bitter taste for a moment, then let Martha explain to her which staircase was the best way to get to the tomb road.

The term it seemed was to be taken quite literally. Penny realized this when she reached the villa’s basement. There were no walls in the western part of the cellar, just a few very massive pillars. A path, or rather a road, meandered between them, and it was paved with large cobblestones.

Originals from Roman times, Penny suspected. What else would be in the Obrists' house?

Some of the stones were crisscrossed with deep grooves, while others were marked by the traces of thousands of feet that must have worn away the pavement even before the birth of Christ.

On both sides of this street there were rows of grave monuments. Not the tombstones that were familiar to her from Christian cemeteries, but huge monuments decorated with statues and reliefs, and even some smaller mausoleums. Penny came across Benedikt Obrist in front of one of them—a huge cuboid on which a ship with grapes and wine barrels was enthroned.

"Our most outstanding piece down here," he said when he caught sight of Penny. He pointed to the stone ship. "Isn't it wonderful?"

"The tomb of a wine merchant?" Penny asked. You didn't have to be a detective for that, even if she couldn't make sense of the Latin inscription on the plinth. It consisted of heavily abbreviated words with no recognizable spacing or punctuation.

Benedikt nodded. "Wine has been grown here on the Moselle for two and a half thousand years. Back then, at least after the Romans arrived, people still drank the wine diluted with water," he explained. "Anyone who consumed it straight was considered a drunkard.

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