Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (28 page)

“And tomorrow?”

Tessa looked at Marco, as if asking permission. “Tomorrow we go to Rome. Pack your bags tonight.”

Marco said, “I have your itinerary, if I need you.”

“Ready to do the pictures?” Walter asked, having walked up behind me.

While I rented the good computer, Walter told Marco what we planned to do.

Marco hustled a key from the receptionist and set us up in the small conference room.

As Walter plugged in his camera and clicked on some icons, Marco pulled up a chair beside me. He was so close I could smell his toothpaste.

“Are these in the same order they were taken?” he asked Walter.

“Yes. They’ll include the date and time.”

Walter scrolled through the shots. There were several that preceded the three I had copied yesterday, but only two pictures taken after those. The first was a shot of all of Florence, with the Duomo and the Church of Santa Croce looming above hundreds of rooftops. For the last photo, Walter had apparently swung his camera down and to the west, across the overlook where Lettie and I had been standing. Both pictures were labeled 17:47, so they had been taken in rapid succession.

The last shot showed the top of Lettie’s red hair and the front end of a blue Fiat.

I said, “Wow! Do you see what I see?”

Walter downloaded all the photos from the piazza, unplugged his camera, and left me alone with Marco. I could feel his breath on my neck.

“We can get this blown up,” he said. “We might be able to read the license number, but first let’s make a print of all of the pictures, just in case.”

Marco took the computer with him when he exited. He still didn’t trust me. I’d have to earn his trust. But the smile he gave me was as soothing as a hot cappuccino on a cold winter day.

———

Jim Kelly was leaving my room when I arrived. He tipped a non-existent hat, then stepped back to let me pass through.

“I expected to find you in bed, recuperating,” he said. “I dropped by to see if there was anything I could do for you and found, much to my amazement, that you’re already out running around. How are you feeling?”

“I’m fine. A little embarrassed at having put you all to so much trouble.”

Beth lay on my bed, staring at the ceiling, and Lettie sat at the desk, her bare feet crossed on top of the morning newspaper.

“Jim and Lettie were catching me up on everything that’s happened since I was so unavoidably detained,” Beth said with a wry grimace.

“But now, if you’ll excuse me, ladies, I have to hurry if I’m to catch that bus.” Jim backed out of the room.

“Jim had an interesting tidbit of information he just happened to throw out,” Lettie said, as soon as the door closed. “While most of us were running around looking for you, Jim saw Cesare in the lobby. Jim spoke to him, but Cesare ignored him and strolled over to the bar next to the restaurant. Jim says Cesare handed Tessa an envelope and left. Didn’t stay for a drink, or anything, as if he was in a big hurry, or he was ticked off.”

“Well, well, the plot thickens,” I said. “Beth, what are your plans for the day? Lettie and Elaine are shopping for gold, at least I think Elaine plans to join Lettie, and I plan to visit the archaeology museum. Any of that interest you?” I figured Beth would be happy to have something touristy to do for a change.

“I’m washing the cigarette smoke out of my hair,” she replied, “and then I’ll take a short nap. I almost had to take up smoking myself last night, in self-defense. But that jail puts out a good breakfast, Dotsy. I have to give them credit for that.”

“Did they treat you okay?”

“Oh, they were quite nice. I can’t complain. But I’m not out of the woods. I can’t leave town, and they’ll probably call me in again.”

“I’ve been downstairs with Walter, looking at the pictures he took up on the plaza. We hooked his camera up to a laptop.”

“Oh, please don’t tell me he took one of Amy.” Beth sat up quickly, her face slack. “I couldn’t bear to see that.”

“No, no. He didn’t. But apparently he shot a picture immediately before Amy fell. Did you say you heard her scream, but didn’t see her fall?”

“That’s right. I walked up those steps and was looking for a water fountain when I heard the scream.”

“Are you sure it was Amy?”

“Yes.”

When Beth left for her room, I thought about her certainty that the scream she had heard was Amy’s. A voice is distinctive, and one would recognize one’s sister’s voice in a normal conversation. But a scream? If you could tell anything more than whether it was male or female, you’d be lucky.

Lettie slid her feet off the desk and tied her shoes. “What do you and Walter think you’ll find out from those pictures? I mean, if he didn’t actually get a shot of Amy falling, what’s the use?”

“We hoped we’d see where the other people were. His camera puts the time on the pictures.”

“Okay, so who can we eliminate from our list of suspects? If we are, as you suggested, looking for one killer, who can we say for sure did
not
kill Amy?”

“Absolutely nobody.”

“Except you and me.”

“Except you and me.”

———

I found a seat near the Etruscan bronze sculpture called the
Chimera
and studied it. The word itself was strange because I remembered a biology teacher in college using it to refer to something like a hybrid, inferring that it should not even exist. I had seen the famous sculpture in a dozen books, but because I had known, before I left home, that I would be visiting this museum and viewing the real sculpture, I had looked up the word “chimera.”

The statue was beautifully wrought. A lean and hungry she-lion with paws splayed and mouth agape, she had a goat twisting, writhing, emerging from the middle of her back. Her tail was a snake. Like most of mythology, the legend probably grew with time and retelling. Etruscan civilization had always been hard for me to teach, because I didn’t understand it myself. The civilization flourished in Italy, in Tuscany—in fact the word Tuscan comes from Etruscan—before and during Greece’s golden age. Obviously, the Etruscans were influenced by the Greeks, but in my mind, they were strangers while the ancient Greeks were my friends.

This last semester I had taught Ancient and Medieval Civilizations, and was rather proud that enrollment in the course had doubled since I started teaching it. I wanted to give my students their money’s worth.

But the problem with the Etruscans was their writings. A people became “real” to me, like the Velveteen Rabbit, when they spoke to you through their writings. That’s called being
historic
as opposed to being
prehistoric
. The Etruscans didn’t write down nearly enough stuff. They used the Greek alphabet, sort of, but we don’t know enough of their words to read what little they did write.

Now I looked around the hall and thought:
Speak to me
!

But the ancient Etruscans were an enigma. To me, they were an illusion, a fabrication of the mind.

Hey,
I thought.
Do I perceive a theme here
?

A fabrication of the mind brought to mind Meg’s murder. On the face of it, we had a number of possibilities and a number of solutions to our mystery, but none of them satisfied. None of them felt right. On the other hand, if there
was
a satisfying solution, we would have to twist something to reach it. So if I could figure out which assumption or “fact” was false, I could twist it and everything would fall into place.

I could assume with some certainty that the murderer lied. But there were so many people saying “I was here” or “I was there,” if one person lied, the whole thing made no sense.

When I have a problem like this, I find the best thing is to sleep on it and let my mind wander freely around it, but it was a little past noon and I didn’t need a nap. So I wandered around the Museo Archeologico, enjoyed the Egyptian mummies and sarcophagi imported by Leopold II. I bought a little replica of the
Chimera
and did
not
think about murder until the museum closed at two.

The bus was hotter than the hinges of hell. Achille had let it sit in the blazing sun in the middle of the parking lot, ever since the Siena group returned. I was the first one there, but changed my mind about waiting on the bus until everyone else arrived, and took up my vigil in the shade of a stone wall. Victoria and Geoffrey Reese-Burton joined me while Achille cranked up the bus’s air conditioner.

“Hop hafstar . . . bisk some, eh?” Geoffrey burbled, as he mopped his brow.

Victoria translated. “He says, ‘I hope they have some starters, biscuits, or something at this party.’ I told him already, I said, ‘You’d better grab a bite of something, because we won’t get back here before half-nine or so,’ I shouldn’t think.”

There was that funny British expression again. “Half-nine.” She meant nine-thirty.

We watched as the group members convened around the bus, but avoided climbing aboard until the last minute. Lettie popped over to show me a gold box-chain necklace she had just bought for her daughter.

“I couldn’t resist,” she said. “The price was too good, at least I think it was a good price, hard to tell, isn’t it? When you go from dollars to Euros, and this is fourteen karat, and they use millimeters instead of inches, it’s hard to tell. I may have paid too much. Oh, look, there’s Beth! Are you going with us, Beth? Oh, I’m so glad.”

I was surprised to see Beth, too. She crept over to our little group by the wall like a kitten at the Westminster dog show.

“But I didn’t think . . .” Lettie face flushed. “I mean, I thought the Captain said you couldn’t—”

“Leave town? I asked him about this little outing. He said I could go. I don’t think he considers this ‘leaving town.’”

I watched Beth walk to the bus, to Achille, and slip her hand in his. He gave her a quick peck on the cheek before she climbed aboard.

Shirley Hostetter shuffled across the street from the hotel. She walked almost normally now. “Have you seen Crystal? Oh, my Lord, I told that girl. She promised me she’d be here by quarter to five. If she’s not here by the time the bus leaves, I’ll have to stay here. I am
not
going to leave her to her own devices all evening. She’ll run right out to that Gypsy camp again.”

But Shirley needn’t have worried. Crystal tramped toward us, across a flowerbed.

Shirley heaved a deep sigh, then said, “I told you to be here by quarter of five, young lady!”

“So, I’m a little early. Is that a problem?”

“It’s five after five.”

“Wait a sec. What does ‘quarter of five’ mean? Fifteen minutes after five, right?”

I quickly stuck my head in my purse to hide my laugh. Victoria and Geoffrey were less discreet.

Shirley arched her back and looked skyward, imploring the heavens. “Oh, my God! What are they teaching in schools these days? ‘A quarter of’ means fifteen minutes before, not after.”

“Then you should have said four forty-five. I’m from the digital age, mother.” A little grin wiggled out the corner of Crystal’s mouth.

Shirley caught it, laughed out loud, threw her arm around Crystal’s shoulders, and steered her toward the bus.

Lettie took a seat beside Beth in the front, just behind Achille. Looking back through the bus, I made a quick assessment and saw that Elaine was alone. Walter and Michael sat together on the row in front of her. I supposed they felt less compelled to maintain the façade, with Dick gone.

“May I sit with you?” I asked Elaine. She smiled and moved her bag to make room for me.

Across the aisle from me, Lucille sat by herself. Victoria and Geoffrey took the seats in front of her, with Crystal and Shirley in front of them. There were a few empty rows on that side, behind Tessa’s jump seat. On the left side, in front of Walter and Michael, were Wilma and Jim Kelly, then Lettie and Beth in front of them. Paul Vogel hopped on, panting, just as the bus pulled out. He took the seat behind Tessa.

“Poor Beth.” Elaine peered down the row of seats, her head against the window.

“You knew her before this trip, didn’t you?”

“Yes. It was Beth who told me about the tour. She works for a lawyer who’s handling a case for my firm. Beth and I had a working lunch one day last winter and we talked about how desperate we both were to get away. She’s had it rough the past year or so. Do you know about her—what her husband did?”

“Lettie told me.”

“Of course. Well, Beth said her sister Amy had run into Tessa at a travel convention. They knew each other in college, I believe. Tessa said she was a travel guide in Italy now, and she told Amy about this tour. So Amy talked it up with Meg and Beth, and they all decided to go. To me, in the dead of a Washington, D.C. winter, Italy sounded like paradise. So I told, um, Walter about it, and, um . . .”

“I know, Elaine,” I whispered. “You needn’t pretend with me.”

Walter’s head snapped around. He peeked through the crack between the seats. Elaine seemed to tense up, then relax, as if glad to drop the charade for a little while.

“How did you find out?” she asked.

“I guessed. Combination of things, like you and Dick at the museum, and some other little things I noticed. Hey, I raised five kids. I can pick up on non-verbal stuff like gangbusters.”

I certainly didn’t want to tell her that Paul Vogel filled me in, but the whole fake show exhausted me and I didn’t want to ride all the way to Cesare’s village listening to Elaine filter her every word through a veil of deception.

“Then you know that Dick has left me. Not the group. Me.”

Achille veered onto a country road off the main highway east of town, into the Tuscan hills where patchwork farmland in a hundred shades from amber to emerald green receded into rows of blue hills, then pale blue mountains, then sky. Silver-black olive groves, dark green vineyards, and medieval walled towns with watchtowers. Tall, thin cypress trees, like exclamation points between fields. It was as if man and nature had worked from an idealized dreamscape design.