The Woman in the Castello

by Kelsey James

Genres: Family Life; International Crime & Mystery

Synopsis

"You'll get lost in the pages of this lush, entertaining story." —Ellen Marie Wiseman, New York Times bestselling author of The Lost Girls of Willowbrook



Perfect for readers of Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Kate Morton, this sophisticated, atmospheric debut spins a bewitching web of ruthless ambition, family secrets, and the consequences of forbidden love, as an ambitious American actress snags the starring role in a mysterious horror movie shooting on location in a crumbling medieval castle outside Rome . . .



Rome, 1965: Aspiring actress Silvia Whitford arrives at Rome's famed Cinecittà Studios from Los Angeles, ready for her big break and a taste of la dolce vita. Instead, she learns that the movie in which she was cast has been canceled. Desperate for money, Silvia has only one choice: seek out the Italian aunt she has never met.



Gabriella Conti lives in a crumbling castello on the edge of a volcanic lake. Silvia’s mother refuses to explain the rift that drove the sisters apart, but Silvia is fascinated by Gabriella, a once-famous actress who still radiates charisma. And the eerie castle inspires Silvia's second chance when it becomes the location for a new horror movie, aptly named The Revenge of the Lake Witch—and she lands a starring role.



Silvia immerses herself in the part of an ingenue tormented by the ghost of her beautiful, seductive ancestor. But when Gabriella abruptly vanishes, the movie's make-believe terrors seep into reality. No one else on set seems to share Silvia's suspicions. Yet as she delves into Gabriella's disappearance, she triggers a chain of events that illuminate dark secrets in the past—and a growing menace in the present . . .



"Like Jess Walters's Beautiful Ruins, the glamour and heady indulgence of the era take center stage in this captivating, multilayered story that will keep you guessing to the end." —Susan Wiggs, #1 New York Times bestselling author



"Mystery, romance, and an enchanting cast of characters with a plucky heroine at its heart. Against the richly drawn backdrop of post-war Italy, in a castle brimming with secrets, Kelsey James explores the enduring and sometimes destructive power of love, family, and ambition." —Amanda Skenandore, author of The Nurse's Secret

Release date: July 25, 2023

Publisher: Kensington Books

Print pages: 288

Sample

By the time I reached Cinecittà Studios, I was footsore and dry-throated. I squeezed my purse tightly between my fingers, keenly aware that the small wad of wrinkled lira notes it contained was the very last money I had in the world. But I’d made it here, finally. Cinecittà beckoned me cheerfully, its stucco exterior the color of Roman sunshine, the chrome letters of its name glinting.

A uniformed guard gave me general directions of where to go, and I stepped through the open gate with my heart skipping. The lot was more peaceful than I expected, with green grass and tall umbrella pines dotting the grounds. It was a relief, after the crowded bus ride alongside white-socked children and kerchiefed Italian grandmothers and a blotchy-faced man who’d made sucking noises at me. I got the tingling sensation I always got in proximity to greatness—just over there was the famous Stage 5, where Cleopatra had filmed a few years ago with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.

Eventually I found the building where I’d be filming Five Days in Roma. Only four lines, but plenty of background scenes, too, and the studio had flown me here all the way from Los Angeles and put me up in a hotel. It was a third-class establishment, with a shared bathroom where you had to pull a cord to activate the hot water, but even so. My mother and Lulu—short for Lucy, but we almost always called her Lulu—were there now, not that the studio needed to know that. I pictured them when I’d left that morning, still curled up together in the bed we all shared, a half-smile on Lulu’s sweet little face and her eyelashes curling against her cheeks.

I’d received instructions to report to the director’s office today, even though production wasn’t officially starting for a few more days. Perhaps Roger Albertson wanted to give me a little pep talk before we began. I walked through the antiseptic hallway lined with offices and knocked on his door, smoothing the skirt of my white cotton dress, scoop-necked, belted, and patterned with bouquets of flowers. It was the best dress I owned and had cost fifteen dollars at Hudson’s, an extravagance I couldn’t afford, but my mother had insisted, determined I should look the part of the blossoming Hollywood starlet. It was a little more prim and feminine than my usual style—I wasn’t big on dainty florals, preferring a younger mod look—but I couldn’t deny her anything, not in her condition.

“Come in.”

The man sitting behind the desk wasn’t Mr. Albertson. He looked like another one of the actors. He was blond and sun-beaten and square-jawed, with the sort of roguish good looks that would make him perfect to cast in one of the Westerns that were so popular right now. I could easily picture him as the gunslinging cowboy riding a horse.

“I’m looking for Mr. Albertson?” I made my voice soft and girlish, my consonants feathery light, the way the casting directors seemed to like. It hadn’t quite become a habit yet, and I still forgot to do it sometimes.

“Yes. He’s gone already, I’m afraid. Slunk off like a coward.” The man who wasn’t Mr. Albertson lit a cigarette and came around to lean back against the front of the desk. He acted as if the office were his, and I frowned.

“Do you know when he’ll be back?” My consonants hardened, and my voice deepened. There was no point pretending for a stranger, and an impertinent one at that.

“Oh, that’s much better. You shouldn’t try to be a Marilyn. You have more of a Natalie Wood thing going on.” I stared at him blankly before I realized he was talking about my voice. And then I winced at the reference; I’d adored Marilyn and been devastated by her death. His rudeness shocked me into silence. “One of the actresses, I suppose?”

“Silvia Whitford. I’m playing the secretary.”

“You better sit down.” He gestured toward a chair. I considered refusing him, but he spoke with such authority that it occurred to me he might actually be in possession of some, so I sat. I’d stay only as long as it took to learn who the hell he was and what had happened to Mr. Albertson. He let out a billow of smoke and crossed his feet at the ankles. “I won’t beat around the bush. The picture’s over. The producer and his investors, well, had a falling out, I suppose. There’s not enough money left to shoot a single foot of film.”

I swallowed around something sharp that seemed to have stuck in my windpipe. I tightened my grasp around my ivory patent leather purse. It couldn’t be true. Perhaps this was an elaborate joke, a prank to play on the new arrivals. After all, I didn’t know this man from Adam.

“Who are you?”

“Oh, right. Sorry. Paul Rudderman. Assistant director. Or I was supposed to be, at any rate.”

My throat constricted further, and my head grew light. It was a hot July day, but the air-conditioning in the room didn’t seem to be working, and a fan rattled uselessly in the corner. My thighs stuck to the vinyl, and a bead of sweat trickled down my neck. I thought I might faint, but I didn’t want to do it in front of him.

“If you phone Sam, he can get your return airfare sorted out for you. Your room is booked through the end of the week.” He bumped his cigarette against an ashtray and recrossed his ankles. His insouciance infuriated me. He’d just delivered the most devastating news imaginable—he couldn’t begin to fathom how devastating. “That’s all. You can send in the next one, if someone else is lurking out there.”

I didn’t move. I couldn’t; my muscles had atrophied in the stuffy little office. My stomach had bottomed out after growing heavy with fear.

“What about money? I was promised a hundred dollars a week.” It wasn’t a fortune, but it was the best paycheck I’d had in a while and had felt like a windfall, given they had also promised to pay for my room. Three weeks of shooting, they’d said.

“Yes, well. Not if there’s no film, I’m afraid. You can check your contract.”

And suddenly it was all too much. I burst into tears. Through my sobs, I could see that Mr. Rudderman had grown positively alarmed. His rough-and-ready exterior softened a touch.

“Hey there, it’s not as bad as all that. You’ll find work on another picture. It’s what I’m going to try to do. We’re in the same boat, you know.”

I hiccupped into my hands. “No, you don’t understand. I needed that money.” It was more honest than I’d intended, but it was the truth. I was near to broke. My mother wanted to be buried in Italy, where she’d grown up, and had spent the last of her savings on airline tickets for herself and Lucy. She’d sold her little house in San Diego years ago so she could be with me in Los Angeles, and our apartment had been a month-to-month rental. We’d packed everything we needed into suitcases, and we weren’t planning to go back. This picture had seemed like a miracle; my big break. And in Rome, with free accommodations for three weeks. It would have been enough to get us settled here and get me on my feet.

Now I had until the end of the week before we were out on the streets. I pictured my darling Lulu, probably at the breakfast table right now, singing half-pronounced nursery rhymes for her nonna and littering the floor with crumbs.

Mr. Rudderman looked sorry for me, which only made me angrier. “Hey, if I hear of anything, I’ll keep you in mind. Miss Whitman, right?”

“No. Silvia Whitford.” My words were acid. I finally found my strength and got to my feet. “No wonder this lousy picture is over, when you couldn’t even bother to learn the names of the cast. I suppose you figured since you were firing everyone, you didn’t need to remember who any of us are. That we’re real people. That would have been too much courtesy to expect.”

My face grew hot, and I turned to go.

“Hey, hey, hey. I’m sorry, all right? This isn’t my fault.”

I walked out of the office and slammed the door. Then I put my face in my hands and cried some more, and wondered how I’d ever be able to tell my mother the news.

I finally made my way back to the hotel, after another bumpy, crowded bus ride. I was nauseated at the end of it, but I didn’t know whether that was due to the journey or my anxiety. I found my mother and Lulu playing with her toy cars in the hotel lobby, while the lone receptionist snoozed behind the counter. The terrazzo floor wasn’t the cleanest, and I pursed my lips. But poor Lucy needed to play somewhere. My mother was crouched next to her and laughing. She was having one of her good days. They were still mostly good days.

“Mommy!” Lulu ran over and hugged my legs. I bent down and kissed the top of her silky dark curls, breathing in her sweet toddler scent.

“Back already?” my mother asked. I adored my mother, but we were opposites in every way—fire and ice, my father had called us. Where I could never hide what I was feeling, my mother was always calm and collected. She placed great importance on her ability to fare la bella figura—literally, to make a good figure, but really meaning to put up a good front and make a good impression.

“Yes. Just a quick check-in before we start.” I didn’t like lying. But I couldn’t tell her, not yet. Not until I had a plan. I refused to put this weight on her shoulders, on top of everything else.

“I was thinking of taking Lucy to the park.”

I knelt to hug Lulu properly, and she wrapped her chubby little arms around my neck. And then yanked on one of my earrings.

“No, no, sweet pea. We don’t yank.” I looked toward my mother. “Oh, let’s. She needs to run around.”

And so we toddled over to the Villa Borghese gardens, Lulu between us holding each of our hands and punctuating our journey by pointing out the cars and naming their colors, with mixed accuracy. The gardens were only a few blocks, really, but with Lulu, we went nowhere quickly.

When we finally reached the rolling green lawns and cypress trees, some of the tension left my body. I found Rome’s frenetic pace exciting, the Vespas and the horns blaring and the shouted Italian, but it was very different than Los Angeles, with its low-slung sprawl and laid-back California vibe. The humiliation of the morning and the terror about the future dissipated the tiniest fraction. I saw it in my mother’s face, too, the worry creases in her forehead smoothing a little. My mother was pale and fair, with clear blue eyes—again, the opposite of me, with my dark hair and big brown eyes—although there was similarity in the shape of our faces, our high cheekbones and classic Roman noses. My lips were fuller than hers, and I had straight hair with flipped ends that I teased into a bouffant, whereas hers was almost always up. I was supposed to favor an aunt I’d never met, who still lived in Italy, and I balanced the topic on the tip of my tongue.

“Did you plan to see your sister?”

My mother gasped. Her sister was a taboo topic, and only my current desperation had made me broach it. “No. Why would you ask this?”

They had had some kind of falling out during the war and never spoken again after my mother moved to America. My father had been one of the soldiers who helped drive the Germans out of Italy, and somehow found time to fall in love with and marry my mother when they marched through. I’d been conceived during their whirlwind romance, and after the war, my mother and I had journeyed to join him in California. I’d always found it terribly romantic.

Lulu tugged her hand out of mine and darted across the grass to investigate a squirrel, then watched in awe as it scampered up a tree. “Squirrel! Squirrel, Mommy!”

“Yes, darling. The squirrel is in the tree now.”

I adjusted my sunglasses. I couldn’t tell my mother the real reason. That when she was gone, it would just be me and Lulu, and I was scared. One of my neighbors in our Los Angeles apartment building was a single mother, and I’d seen the social workers arrive unexpectedly to harass her, and I could still hear her screams the morning they took her sweet baby away. I didn’t know if I’d be able to provide for Lulu by myself. I needed help. I swallowed around that sharp thing in my throat again. “I just thought I’d like to meet her. We are here in Italy, after all.”

“She won’t give you any money for Lucy. I know that’s what you’re thinking. Why don’t you ask her father?”

Now it was my turn to be shocked. Lulu’s father didn’t know she existed, and I’d make sure he never would. He was a struggling musician whom I’d moved in with impulsively, whose moods ricocheted between charming and cruel. He’d hit me when he’d been drinking, more than once, his dry, guitar-player’s hands lean and callused. Aside from Lulu, my improved skills with makeup were the only thing of value I took away from that relationship.

“How dare you suggest such a thing.” I studied my mother, who retied her chic white-and-blue floral headscarf around her chin and smirked at me. She favored ladylike swing dresses that accentuated her wasp waist, one feature we both shared. I was partial to shift dresses with contrasting colors, especially black and white, big button accents, and big sunglasses. Soon, we might have to sell off our nicest items. The headscarf was real silk, and I wondered what price it might fetch.

“You see? Now you understand. Some people we cut out of our lives for a reason, Silvia. We won’t speak any more about this.”

I nodded, but it was another lie. Because I’d seen the letter my mother received from Italy three months ago, the one she’d tried to keep hidden. She’d saved it, packing it in her worn leather suitcase for our journey, the envelope creased and the ink smeared. I’d found it when going through her things looking for something of Lulu’s, and I hadn’t read it—I wouldn’t invade her privacy so deliberately—but I had noted the return address. Gabriella Conti, Castello del Lago. I’d looked on a map and found that it wasn’t so far from Rome: a little town about forty miles outside of the city.

I didn’t want to go against my mother’s wishes, but just knowing there was another person in the world who might help, whatever my mother said, made our circumstances slightly more bearable. Even the name of the town sounded alluring, and it seemed to beckon me.

If my mother wouldn’t go see her sister, perhaps I would.

On what would have been the first day of the movie’s production, I kissed my mother’s sallow cheek and squeezed Lulu before leaving our charmingly worn hotel room, with its wrought-iron bed and old wooden armoire and big windows facing the street. My mother wished me good luck as I left, and the bitterness of the lie nearly made me confess. Instead, I smiled at her and reminded her I’d probably be back quite late.

Then I headed to the nearby Via Veneto, the most fashionable street in Rome, its sidewalk crammed with cafés where Americans smoked and laughed and drank in the open air. I passed the Excelsior, the city’s best hotel, and caught a blast of air-conditioning and expensive scent as a rich American woman pushed through the elegant revolving door. The movie stars sometimes stayed here when they came to town to film, and I’d glimpsed someone last night, although I couldn’t have said who. All I’d really seen was the insect-like swarm of aggressive photographers they called paparazzi waiting outside for her, camera bulbs flashing in the dark.

I had imagined they might be waiting for me, someday. But I hadn’t come here to daydream. Instead, I entered one of the cafés and asked a harried, skinny male waiter in my sweetest Italian if I could speak to the manager. Luckily, I spoke fluent Italian, thanks to my mother.

I’d spent the last few days pursuing acting and modeling opportunities, to no avail. So now it was time for plan B. I needed money, and I wasn’t above waiting tables to get it. I’d waited plenty of tables in Los Angeles. When I’d been heavily pregnant with Lulu, I’d had to trade my modeling work for a steady waitressing job, and I’d never forget my swollen ankles at the end of the day, the body-deep exhaustion that made me fall asleep the moment my head hit the pillow.

“Mi scusi,” I tried again, but the man just shrugged me off and continued serving customers, delivering a tray of Pellegri-nos and caffè Americanos to a large and boisterous group. At another table, an Italian man read a newspaper attached to a wooden pole and asked the waiter to bring him stamps.

“You look like you could use help,” I offered as the waiter passed. “I’m looking for a job.”

He just laughed derisively. “There are no jobs here, little girl.”

I bristled. I was twenty, but looked older; I was hardly a little girl. My throat constricted. It was a popular café, maybe too popular. I hadn’t necessarily expected to find an opening on my first try, but I thought I’d at least get a nicer rejection.

“I speak perfect English. Like an American.”

The waiter kept walking into the interior of the café and ignored me.

I sighed and decided to try the café next door. Surely with so many American customers jamming themselves elbow to elbow, filling up the ashtrays and tipping more than was expected, someone would find use for another pair of hands.

Maybe hiding I was an American was a mistake. I’d been told the Italians were wild for our magazines and our movies; perhaps being an American model would carry some weight. I’d even seen a peeling old poster on a brick wall of John F. Kennedy, the sad sight of his ripped paper cheek giving me a little pang of sadness at the memory of his assassination two years before. Our country’s first Catholic president had been very popular among the Italians, according to my guidebook.

I tried several more spots on the Via Veneto and made it clear, this time, that I was an American expat, but that went over even worse. Maybe it had been foolish to think I could just waltz in and get a job. It had always worked back home; managers usually liked a pretty face. I couldn’t think about what would happen if I failed. Being penniless in a strange city was too awful to imagine.

I’d probably aimed too high, going to the Via Veneto. I moved on to the side streets, consulting the little map in my purse as I made my way toward the Piazza del Popolo, and tried all kinds of places—cafés, boutiques, a grocery store. I paused out on the sidewalk after my twentieth inquiry, my mouth tasting of failure and my cotton dress damp with sweat. Cars and Vespas zoomed by, and two nuns passed around me as if I were a stone in their path. Just beyond them was a young Italian woman wearing a miniskirt with a daring hemline and red lipstick; the contrast of her against the nuns distracted me a little from my concerns. If I’d been in a better mood, it might have made me smile. Rome seemed to be like that, the modern and the ancient, the carnal and the godly all mashed up together.

By the time I reached the Piazza del Popolo, I was hot, and tired, and depressed. There was a large church on one side of the square, its facade weathered and pockmarked travertine, a set of grand shallow steps leading to its door. Despite my worries, I marveled at it for a moment. Rome wore its history carelessly, its ancient churches and Roman temples and fountains as commonplace as the cats who wandered them. But I was astonished by it all. There was nothing even close to this old in Los Angeles, where everyone seemed obsessed only with what was new. I hadn’t been inside a church in about a year, and the idea of its cool dark interior tempted me to enter.

I sat in one of the pews for a while, resting my feet, gazing reverently at the vaulted ceilings and stone pillars. I offered up a quick prayer for guidance, inspired by the setting and guessing it couldn’t hurt, even if I was hardly the most attentive Catholic.

After I’d regained some energy, I took a moment to walk around the church, and in one of the side chapels, a couple of tourists were pointing at the paintings and consulting a guidebook. I peeked and was struck by the dark moodiness of them, the dramatic lighting of the figures. In one, a man was about to be crucified. Not Jesus—Saint Peter, maybe. The startling violence of the scene sent a chill down my spine.

I emerged again into the bright sunshine, unsure what to do next. I felt the full force of my foreignness, and ignorance, and wished my mother still had friends here who could help us.

I heaved a breath. She may not have friends, but she did have a relative. Maybe the church had given me some clarity after all, because I could see only one path left open to me. It would mean another long walk, since I didn’t want to waste any money on the tram, but it was still morning. I had time.

My path to the railroad station took me past the Trevi Fountain, and I paused in awe of its baroque beauty, admiring the grotto-like rock formations and cascading water. A group of laughing young girls sat on its stone edge, eating gelato, letting it melt onto their fingers, and I envied them. It was a hot day, and my dress stuck to my skin. Tourists milled about, and for a brief moment I almost felt like one of them. This was a sight I’d longed to see: the very water Anita Ekberg had waded into wearing her busty evening dress in La Dolce Vita, a moment that had made her an international icon. The right movie, and the right scene, could do that for you, and it made this spot magic for me. I watched as a happy couple tossed coins over their shoulders, making wishes, and the illusion shattered. I had a lot I’d wish for, but I couldn’t spare the money.

I kept walking.

The local side streets interested me, too. Electrical wires overhead crisscrossed between weather-worn stone buildings, and I wrinkled my nose as I passed a fish stand, where silvery bellies flashed in the sun. Another vendor hawked luscious piles of shiny eggplants, bright-red tomatoes, and velvety apricots, which were carefully assessed by a stout matron in sensible square-heeled shoes. I jumped out of the way as a man on a Vespa sped through the alley, heedless of the foot traffic.

The railroad station was a stark contrast to the rest of Rome: a modernist glass and concrete structure. I didn’t like to go behind my mother’s back, and guilt sliced into me. But I didn’t see what choice I had. I pressed through the crowds, overwhelmed and a little lost, until I located a ticket counter. A helpful agent explained the timetables to me and booked me a second-class ticket on the local train to Castello del Lago. He told me conversationally that the town had a castle, one of a number in the region that had become popular filming locations for gialli, a type of Italian thriller.

I headed toward the track he’d pointed out and tucked away the tidbit as interesting. Maybe I could ask around up there to try and find some work. Mostly I was preoccupied with the ticket price: I did the lira conversion in my head and figured out that the roundtrip fare had cost me less than two dollars. Even two dollars was precious now, when every cent counted. After the hotel reservation ended, we only had enough money for a few nights at a hostel.

But this was a chance I had to take.

The crowded train journey took about an hour, and then I found myself slightly disoriented on a lonely platform without a station house. I walked toward the road and considered my options: the steep downward slope to a strange green-blue lake, perfectly round and still, at the bottom of a bowl of trees. Or up to a little medieval town crested by the castle. The uphill road forked toward the surrounding countryside, and a lonesome donkey made the return journey, its saddlebags stuffed with wilting vegetables. It must have known where to go, since no one attended it. It looked hot, and flicked its tail.

I followed it toward the town, and soon my calf muscles burned from the steep climb. Thankfully my shoes were flat, but the Mary Jane straps dug into my skin.

The moment I entered the town itself, the air seemed to shift, growing weightier and more silent. Even the clacking of my soles on the cobblestones grew muffled. It was more humid than in Rome, and I could almost taste the warm moisture, tinged with earth and must. The contrast to the city was jarring.

I lost track of the donkey, who certainly knew its way better than I did. There hadn’t been a street address on the envelope, just the name of the town, but I was sure that a local resident could help direct me. In a tiny community like this, someone was sure to know who my aunt was and exactly where she lived. So I crept through the warren of narrow streets and tried to shake off my growing sense of claustrophobia. My mother called these little alleys. . .