Windy City Blues
GRACE NOTESGABRIELLA SESTIERI OF PITIGLIANO. Anyone with knowledge of her whereabouts should contact the office of Malcolm Ranier.
I was reading the Herald- Star at breakfast when the notice jumped out at me from the personal section. I put my coffee down with extreme care, as if I were in a dream and all my actions moved with the slowness of dream time. I shut the paper with the same slow motion, then opened it again. The notice was still there. I spelled out the headline letter by letter, in case my unconscious mind had substituted one name for another, but the text remained the same. There could not be more than one Gabriella Sestieri from Pitigliano. My mother, who died of cancer in 1968 at the age of forty-six.
"Who could want her all these years later?" I said aloud.
Peppy, the golden retriever I share with my downstairs neighbor, raised a sympathetic eyebrow. We had just come back from a run on a dreary November morning and she was waiting hopefully for toast.
"It can't be her father." His mind had cracked after six months in a German concentration camp, and he refused to acknowledge Gabr ...
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