Sheila Connolly - Reunion with Death (6 page)

Cynthia tilted her head at me. “What’s even more interesting is how some of these women have reinvented themselves, some more than once.”

“Like me?” The shift from art history to my present career was not an obvious or a likely one. But once I’d found my path, I hadn’t swerved from it. On the other hand, I hadn’t risen very far, but I was content with that.

“Yes, you’re one example, but not the only one. Take a look at this group. Do you see any scary power brokers? Any divas? We all seem quite ordinary. So far we’ve talked about partners and children and where we live, but nobody is throwing her weight around and demanding, ‘Look at me!’ So I’d say it’s not an ego thing. Maybe we’ve reached a point where looking back is more important to us than looking forward. Or maybe we just want to reconnect somehow.”

“And we had to cross an ocean to do it?” I protested.

Cynthia nodded, once. “Maybe. Here
everybody
is out of their comfort zone. Maybe it’s easier to be yourself that way.” Her gaze shifted to the building down the hill. “Hey, look, people are arriving. This crowd likes to drink.”

“With tonight’s entertainment, that might help.”

Cynthia stood up. “You are such a cynic. Keep an open mind and see if you can find your sense of humor. You did pack it, didn’t you? You packed everything else you own.”

In a mature fashion I stuck out my tongue at her.

Cynthia wasn’t about to give up. “It’ll be fun. You ready?”

“I guess so.”

Once again I made sure I had my camera and my cell phone cum flashlight in my pockets, and then we went down the hill to join the growing crowd.

Inside, armed with a glass of white wine and some more lovely prosciutto, this time curled around
grissini
, I checked out the main area. A long banquet table had been set up at the far end of the room, perpendicular to the axis, and all I could think of was Leonardo da Vinci’s
Last Supper
. Maybe that wasn’t too far from appropriate: after all, this was a Medici murder mystery, and someone at the table would end up dead, and someone else would turn out to be a killer. Or maybe more than one someone—since I had stayed out of the planning I had no idea what the plot was. The designated players started drifting in, garbed in a motley collection of items that could loosely be labeled costumes. I guessed that the players had hauled some of them along with them, squandering precious suitcase space, or had scrounged once they arrived. The members of the group didn’t quite match, nor did they hew to any known Renaissance standard, but it looked like people were having fun dressing up, particularly those with outrageous wigs. One person sported a bushy mustache that kept falling off. Nobody seemed to care.

It was close to eight fifteen when people started drifting to tables, including those at the “head” table. I picked a table with yet a different group of people. Cynthia, at a different table across the room, winked at me and turned back to her companions. Food started appearing and more wine bottles circulated. Everything tasted wonderful—nothing like tramping through castles on hilltops to work up an appetite.

And then the entertainment began.

Chapter 5

The performance started gradually. At first, the cast at the large table at the head of the room had been enjoying a meal just like most of us, but at some point they started speaking more loudly and more clearly, and the rest of us slowly realized that something was happening and maybe we should pay attention. The general din in the room diminished but did not stop entirely, and I had to strain to understand what was being said. Our cohort of actors displayed a lot of enthusiasm but a rather uneven range of acting capabilities. As I understood it—in the absence of any sort of playbill or guide—the person in the middle, who had the fanciest outfit on, was the count of something or other (names were particularly hard to decipher); the dumpy lady to his right was his wife, and the woman on the other side was his daughter, who giggled and simpered a lot, even though she declared herself to be an accomplished scholar. The rest of the table, as near as I could figure out, was made up of guests and hangers-on, both male and female, who spoke up in turn to describe themselves and explain their presence. I had a fleeting vision of all of us writing down what we thought was going on and then comparing notes later—I was pretty sure the results wouldn’t match well. A couple of servants attended to the head table, dispensing food, drink, and the occasional side comment. Everybody appeared to be having a very good time.

An offstage knocking drew one actor away; she (or he?) returned to say there were callers at the gate or portcullis or whatever the heck the imaginary castle had out front. The Big Cheese in the middle of the table went out to deal with them—and didn’t return. Nobody seemed to notice, as they went on emoting in all directions, carrying on real or fake conversations with their neighbors while they tried to keep the pieces of their costumes together. More wine was distributed, to the actors and to the audience. Several more people at the head table got up and wandered around, one or two finally following the missing count (it took them long enough!). Then all hell broke loose when one of them returned and announced that the count was lying dead outside, which resulted in much energetic shrieking from the ladies at the high table. They rose en masse and headed out the front door, followed by half the bewildered audience. Yes, there was the count, lying on the flagstones, liberally sprinkled with ersatz blood, a blood-smeared knife lying next to him. Poor count. At least s/he could stop worrying about remembering his lines.

We trooped back inside and resumed our seats, where the honored guests at the high table seemed only moderately concerned that their host the count was now dead. The head servant (I thought—or maybe it was a guest) came back in clutching a piece of paper, which was apparently a clue to something, but the chatter in the room was so loud that it was hard to tell what it was or what it meant. We’d only begun to digest that information when one of the other guests, a young woman who was apparently pregnant, stood up, flailed around a bit, then collapsed with great gusto in front of the table, apparently also dead (although she seemed to be having a little trouble getting into her role, because she kept twitching with barely suppressed laughter). Some people—including the late count’s wife, who was still at the table rather than weeping over the body of her husband—seemed less than concerned that a guest had just dropped dead. The body count was rising fast. Including the count. Had to count the count. I was beginning to wonder how many glasses of wine I’d had, and I was fighting to suppress a bad case of the giggles. I had completely lost the thread of the plot. Was anybody else going to end up dead?

Since the recumbent damsel bore no wounds and hadn’t been whacked on the head (unless I’d missed it), someone declared that she had been poisoned by someone at the table. It also turned out that the baby was really a pillow, and that was part of a grand scheme to usurp something from someone, which apparently someone else thought was worth killing for. I wondered if this had made sense on paper, because it didn’t make much sense to me. The murderer finally revealed himself: he declaimed for several minutes, explaining everything (only partially audibly), and then all the cast, including the dead ones, stood up and bowed to raucous applause from the audience. And a good time was had by all.

But it wasn’t finished yet. One member of the audience, Rebecca, whom I vaguely recalled was a drama critic in the real world, stood up and gave a blow-by-blow analysis of the performance—tongue in cheek, of course—that had many in the room laughing helplessly, including the dead count, who had rejoined the party.

The evening wound down until Jean (not Jane) reminded us that we were catching an early train to Florence in the morning and probably needed our rest. That occasioned another toast to the now-tipsy players. Finally we straggled out into the cool night air and Cynthia and I made for our room.

“That was fun,” Cynthia said. It was too dark to tell if she was being sarcastic, and I was watching the path in front of us.

“Well, it was something,” I said.

“Oh, lighten up, Laura—everybody had a good time. Isn’t that what matters? I for one think it’s refreshing to see our gang acting silly. There’s not enough silly going around these days.”

“If you say so. I think there were a few plot holes.”

“Of course there were. So what?”

We arrived at our door. I sighed. “You know, Cyn, I miss having you around to keep me silly. Sometimes I bore myself.”

“I’ll keep trying. To be fair, I thought the playwrights did a good job of catching the flavor of the era—lots of intrigue, and people pretending to be something they weren’t.”

“Don’t forget the murders, plural.”

“Well, that went on too. Why the two, I wonder?”

“Well, if I understood it, maybe, the baby that didn’t exist was supposed to be the heir to the count’s riches and worldly goods, which means that the pillow stood to inherit a fortune. Wonder how they would have handled that a few months down the line when no baby appeared?”

“So who killed her? I mean, she was killed, right? She didn’t die of a stroke or heart attack or the vapors?”

I squinted at Cynthia. “Do the vapors kill? No, don’t answer that. I think somebody fed her belladonna, although from what I’ve heard, the dying part of belladonna poisoning takes more than a minute or two and is a lot messier. You know, vomiting and stuff.”

“Hard to stage, on short notice. Consider it artistic license: she was poisoned. So who slipped it to her?”

“Either the count’s son—there was a son there, wasn’t there?—or his faithful servant, or somebody he paid to do it to throw us all off course. Which worked very well.”

“So who killed the count, outside?”

“Uhh …” For the life of me I couldn’t come up with an explanation.

Cynthia laughed at my confusion. “Oh, come on—admit you enjoyed it.”

“Kind of. It was fun watching the actors enjoy themselves. I didn’t expect it from a few of the people up there.”

“People can change over time. And fun never gets old. What’s the agenda for tomorrow?”

“Firenze,” I said, rolling the syllables on my tongue. “I haven’t been there since right after my senior year. I always thought I’d go back, but then life kind of happened.”

“I know what you mean. I haven’t done half as much traveling—I mean as a tourist, not just for business—as I always thought I would. I was in Florence once too. What I remember is the Duomo, which you could see from everywhere. The Ponte Vecchio and the goldsmiths there. A place that made incredible lasagna …”

“You don’t remember the museums?” I asked.

Cynthia smiled. “I remember them as being very large, with lots of art hanging everywhere, most of which was boring. Oh, sure, there were a few high points, but beyond that I was hot and my feet hurt.”

“Sounds like the Uffizi,” I said. “It’s huge. You kind of have to pace yourself and not try to look at everything. If you don’t, you burn out fast and then you miss the good stuff.”

“Now you tell me. I don’t know how many museums I can take tomorrow. I may just find a table out of the sun and a cool drink, and sit and watch the world go by.”

It sounded like a nice idea, but I thought I owed it to the former me to visit old friends—Botticelli, Bronzino, Michelangelo—and see if they still meant anything to me. “Dibs on the first shower.”

And so we settled in for the night, with a busy day ahead of us.

Chapter 6

I awoke before Cynthia again the next morning and lay there fuming at myself. Why couldn’t my body take advantage of this rare opportunity to sleep late? And if I couldn’t sleep, what was I supposed to do with my time? Read? It seemed wrong to travel all the way to Italy to read a book that I could read at home. If I practiced yoga this would be a good time to do that, but I’d never taken it up. A stroll around the grounds? Maybe. There were parts I hadn’t seen, like a swimming pool someone had mentioned. I could go study an olive tree or a grapevine up close. There was said to be a church dedicated to a local martyr—St. Cresci, was it?—at the top of the hill beyond; he’d achieved his status when somebody cut his head off.

Mostly I wished there was a way to get a cup of coffee without disrupting the staff’s preparations for our breakfast. At least today the time for breakfast had been moved up to seven thirty so we could all shuttle to the nearest train station and catch an early train to Florence, where we had a marathon day ahead of us. I was glad we didn’t have to drive into the city, at least on behalf of the drivers.

All right, I was looking forward to it, and Cynthia’s scoffing the night before had made me see that. Sure, I’d done the museum thing in my distant academic youth, but I was looking forward to seeing some things again, with forty years’ worth of experience and wisdom to temper my views. What I wasn’t looking forward to was wading through crowds of tourists, and June was prime time for them. But as I remembered it, one could escape the masses by taking small side streets—the ones with no museums or historic monuments lurking on every corner. Florence oozed history in every alleyway, so peace and calm were hard to find.

The queue at the coffeepots wasn’t as long today since people had figured out that there was plenty to go around, and they arrived at different times. Nor did the servers mind if we showed up early, bless them. No croissants, though. People were a bit more subdued today, as though saving their strength to tackle the city. Or absorbing as much caffeine as possible in a short time.

The weather looked unpromising, spitting rain, but I chose to believe that it would be better in Florence, which lay … somewhere. Inland, I was pretty sure. Maybe south? After breakfast we caravanned to the train station, where Jane and Jean handed out individual tickets. We filed onto a train car and grabbed seats, taking up most of a train car and no doubt terrifying the local population (well, not the teenagers, who regarded us mainly as an impediment to plugging in their cell phones and music players). We emerged into the San Lorenzo station in Florence after a fairly short ride and huddled together like a flock of sheep, getting our bearings, until Jean and Jane gathered us up and marched us toward an exit. Then we survived crossing several streets while dodging cars and buses and trooped to our first stop, the monastery of San Marco. The rain had almost, sort of stopped, which was a good omen.