He liked the house instantly, especially the scent of hay, mint and sage that rose through the evening air to meet the flight of the last swallows of the season, still reluctant to abandon their empty nests. Fabrizio set his suitcases down at the threshold and decided to stretch his legs on the pathway that crossed the property from one end to another, dividing it into two nearly equal parts. Then he sat on the stone wall and took in that twilight moment of peace and serenity, suspended in time, a little unreal, as he idly waited for night to fall.

Fabrizio was thirty-three but he still couldn’t count on a steady position, like so many of his friends and colleagues who had embraced the science of the past with a passion, not realizing how difficult it would be to make a living out of archaeology in a country with 3,000 years of history. And yet he was neither discouraged nor demoralized. All he could think of, actually, was that he might soon be encountering the object of his most recent enthusiasm and interest: the statue of a young boy housed in the Etruscan museum at Volterra.

A great poet had given the statue a haunting, evocative name: the ‘shade of twilight’. Right, poets can dream, mused Fabrizio, but not scholars. Time to get down to work. He shook himself out of his reverie and walked back towards the house that he would be calling home, at least for a couple of weeks. Long enough to finish his research and to gather the information and materials necessary for a publication that might, with luck, even cause a bit of a stir in the field.

His interest in the piece had come about totally by chance. He’d been in Florence at the National Restoration Institute, studying the most recent techniques in treating and conserving ancient bronze, when he’d happened upon a set of X-rays of the Etruscan statue, perhaps taken in view of a possible restoration. The X-rays had been stuck into a file at the bottom of a drawer and would have remained there who knows how long, waiting perhaps for financing from some ministerial project. Fabrizio had been struck by a strangely shaped shadow that showed up in the plates right where the boy’s liver would have been. From a certain angle, the shadow took on the shape of a longish, pointed object.