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her was gone. A few olive leaves fell slowly from the lower branches. One settled gently on her hand, but she hardly felt its touch.
    “Rosa?”
    She turned, still fighting to keep her balance.
    “I was looking for you everywhere,” said her sister. “What are you doing here?”
    Don’t say a word, Rosa told herself. Don’t say a word about the tiger. Or they’ll think you’re even crazier than everyone claims and send you straight back to New York.
    “Oh, fuck, Rosa—you’re not wearing that T-shirt to the funeral, are you?”
    Black limousines followed one another along the narrow mountain road. The luxury cars made their way around the bends at walking pace, as slowly as if they were part of some huge public spectacle.
    Looking out the window, Rosa watched the endless line of vehicles crawl higher over the brown crest of the mountain, gleaming against the deep blue sky.
    “They’re coming from all over the island,” said Zoe. She was sitting next to Florinda in the spacious back of the limousine. Rosa sat facing them.
    “Why don’t they come by helicopter?”
    “Obviously your mother never taught you anything about piety,” said her aunt.
    “I’m supposed to learn that from you and your friends.”
    Florinda and Zoe glanced through their gigantic sunglasses at Rosa. They looked like a couple of devout churchgoers. More than ever, she felt like a stranger who accidentally happened to find herself in this car, in the middle of the wild, ancient landscape. There was no mistaking the close bond between the other two women. Although Zoe looked so like their mother, at that moment she and Florinda, clad entirely in black and with identical pairs of sunglasses, could have been twin sisters.
    Rosa saw herself reflected four times over in the black lenses. Her long hair was too unruly for any brush to control it. She had tied it behind her head with a scarf, so that Zoe would leave her in peace instead of delivering lectures about appropriate clothing and respectful behavior. Respectful—two years ago she’d have thought it impossible for that word to ever pass her sister’s lips.
    The driver, one of the villagers whose family had worked for the Alcantaras for generations, steered the limo around the next bend. Genuardo and the Castello Carnevare must be quite close now, but she hadn’t seen either yet. They must be behind one of the bare, sun-baked hills, she supposed. There was nothing here but scrubby grass with cattle grazing every once in a while, looking up in surprise as the column of cars passed by.
    They reached the mountaintop in a cloud of dust. Rosa slipped over to the other side of her seat and saw the graveyard. It was surrounded by a wall nine feet high, and stood on the steep rise like an angular, compact fortress, white and pale yellow like the wide landscape they had been crossing for the last hour. Behind the top of the wall rose the pointed roofs of countless family vaults, a forest of stone crosses and figures of saints. It was a south Italian custom for prosperous families to build expensive chapels as the last resting place of their dead, and many such lavishly decorated buildings stood side by side in this graveyard.
    A warm wind bowed the tops of the cypress trees on the other side of the wall. For a rural area like this, the cimitero of Genuardo was surprisingly large.
    Ten thousand dead in ten years, Rosa remembered. There were probably a whole lot of large graveyards on Sicily.
    The procession of cars continued on. Rosa’s eyes passed over the flaking plaster of the walls. Now and then there were gaps, gateways covered with gratings through which she could look down the avenues between the tombs. Several of the simpler ones were strikingly decorated with playthings hanging from them, dolls faded by the sun, weather-beaten teddy bears. Apart from the cypresses there were no other trees. The sun drained all color from the walls and the landscape.
    “Look at that,” said Zoe.
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