The Christmas List by Richard Paul Evans

Author:Richard Paul Evans
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER

Twenty-five

Estelle Wyss

Estelle and Karl Wyss. Estelle was a friend of Sara’s: from church. You entered a deal with the Wysses using their land as collateral. When things went bad they took the loss. They still live in the back of the Il Pascolo subdivision. I’m sure you remember where that is.

It had been many years—he couldn’t remember how many exactly, but more than a decade—since Kier had driven through Il Pascolo, Italian for “the pasture.” The name of the development was Estelle Wyss’s idea. Estelle Zito Wyss was second-generation Italian, though she never actually set foot on terra Italiana until her late twenties when she was on her honeymoon. It was everything she had fantasized. She never wanted to leave the country and forever afterward referred to herself as a “displaced” Italian. From then on she and her husband, Karl, spent most of their summers in Genoa or near Lake Como or sometimes south along the Windex blue waters of the Amalfi coast.

The pretentious development was designed to evoke the Italian countryside; its entrance was marked by a gargantuan round stone from an authentic olive press (from California, not Italy) and an Italian fresco painted on the entrance’s stucco wall, flanked on both sides by grapevine-covered trellises.

Under Kier’s direction the homes had been marketed as villas—overpriced, stucco-slathered homes built on lots barely large enough to accommodate them. The streets all had Italian names: Via Masaccio, Santa Maria del Fiore, Giuseppe Garibaldi, Via Di Sera, Bagno a Ripoli; names difficult to pronounce and even harder to spell, forevermore the bane of every homeowner who moved to the subdivision.

Three blocks from the entrance, at the furthest end of the development, was a house that didn’t fit in with the others. It was a small red-brick ranch that looked more like it belonged in Tulsa than Tuscany. The only thing Italian about the home was the faded tricolor flag that hung from the garage and a sign in the driveway that read, PARKING FOR ITALIANS ONLY. It was ironic that the only house that didn’t look indigenous to the development was the only one that was. It was the Wysses’ original home and at one time all sixty-four acres of Il Pascolo had belonged to them.

The first time Kier saw the Wysses’ property it was an operating dairy with more than a hundred black and white Holsteins contentedly roaming the grounds. Estelle Wyss had told Sara that she and Karl were getting too old to run the dairy and, unable to compete with the larger, more high-tech dairy operations, were looking at selling or developing the land. Unlike her husband, Karl, a Swiss immigrant, Estelle had never liked the dairy life (too many flies and cow pies, she told Sara) and looked forward to finally fulfilling her dream of retiring to the northern Italian countryside. It was because of Kier that her dream never came true.

Kier recognized the underdeveloped land in the middle of an established suburb as a rarity and, a gold mine.

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