The Sonnet Lover (41 page)

But I’m not to have it. He notices first that the commotion rising from the
teatrino
is not according to script.

“Something’s happened,” he says, sitting up and reaching for his shirt.

“Come on, Zoe!” I hear someone shout. “That’s enough.” And another voice, shrill and hysterical: “She’s not breathing—someone call an ambulance!”

Bruno’s already in his slacks and I’m struggling to get my damp dress over my head. “She has allergies,” I say. “Do you have a first aid kit? Something with epinephrine in it?”

He rushes to the kitchen and I hear a clatter of metal pans. “I keep something for scorpion bites…yes, here.” And then he’s running across the room and down the stairs. I follow, barefoot. The gravel of the lemon walk bites into my feet, but then I’m on the soft grass running full tilt down the slope where a circle of actors and spectators has closed around Zoe. For a moment I feel as if I’m flying directly above the scene, suspended in time as well as space. I even have time to notice how beautifully
blocked
the scene is, the actresses with their Renaissance gowns spread out around them as they kneel beside Zoe, and the eighteenth-century statues of Shakespearian heroines in an outer ring behind them, like pale ghosts of the characters onstage. It all feels too quiet as I burst onto the stage—Fortinbras arrived at the Danish castle only to find the kingdom peopled by corpses.

There’s only one corpse, though, a Juliet who’s died before the fifth act, the only color in her face a strand of bright pink hair that’s escaped from her headdress.

CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE

I
’
M SO SURE THAT
Z
OE IS DEAD THAT
I’
M SURPRISED TO SEE
B
RUNO INJECTING
the epinephrine into her arm and Daisy Wallace administering CPR. I’m amazed, too, at the strength with which frail, thin Daisy pummels Zoe’s chest—and the ardor. I have the ungenerous thought that she is thinking of lawsuits, but when Zoe stirs and Daisy bursts into tears I rebuke myself for ever disliking the lawyer.

Bruno carries Zoe up to the villa to await the paramedics, and Daisy and I follow. By the time Bruno settles Zoe on the love seat in the library, Zoe has latched onto Bruno like a baby chick imprinted on the first face it sees upon hatching. When the paramedics arrive, she begs him to go with her to the hospital. He glances at me and I nod my agreement. Someone trustworthy has to stay with her, I think. At least neither Orlando nor Claudia would be able to do anything to her with Bruno there.

The thought of someone trying to hurt Zoe reminds me of the vial that was used to hold the sleeping potion in the play. Someone must have put something in it—with Zoe’s allergies, all it would have taken was some ground-up peanuts or peanut oil. When Bruno and Zoe have left for the hospital, I go back down to the
teatrino
and look for the vial on the grassy stage, but there’s nothing there. I ask some of the stage-hands who are dismantling Juliet’s balcony whether they’ve seen it, but they tell me they haven’t. “Usually the props manager collects all that stuff at the end of the play,” a girl with flame-red pigtails and a tattoo of a fork on her bicep tells me, “but who knows if she did with all the chaos. Is Zoe going to be okay?”

“I think so. Do you know who handled the vial before the play?”

“We keep the props in a shed behind the greenhouse,” she says, pointing toward the
limonaia,
“which is used for costume changes, too. But no one watches that stuff. Cindy—that’s the props manager—is probably there now.”

I thank the redhead and before I go I give in to an idle urge and ask, “Why a fork?”

She shrugs. “I just like forks,” she tells me. “I collect them.”

“Oh, okay.” I’m halfway up the hill before I think of a more pertinent question. “Why are you taking down the balcony? Isn’t the performance tomorrow?”

“It’s supposed to rain,” she says, “or at least President Abrams said it’s going to, so we’re having the performance in the chapel at the little villa. It’s not as cool as being outdoors like this, but it’s kind of moody. It will be great for the final tomb scene. I only hope Zoe’s well enough to be in it. She’s a great Juliet. When she drank the potion she looked like she really thought it might kill her—who knew it almost would?”

I shiver, thinking I may never be able to watch the final acts of
Romeo and Juliet
again. I find Cindy—a bleached blonde with a nose ring—in the garden shed counting swords and stacking lanterns on a shelf above a row of the huge Impruneta earthenware pots used for the lemon trees. I wonder whether this is where Orlando hid as a child. I ask Cindy whether she had the vial before the rehearsal.

“I had it with me until act four, scene one, when I gave it to Friar Lawrence,” she tells me.

“Who was played by Orlando,” I say.

“Yeah. I had filled it with water myself before the play—bottled water. I can’t imagine how anything could have gotten into it that Zoe was allergic to.”

“And you don’t know where the vial is now?”

She shakes her head. “No, I remember Zoe dropped it to the ground after she drank. That’s why we used a silver vial, so it wouldn’t break. I didn’t see it on the ground after everyone cleared the stage.”

I thank her and start back to the villa, crossing through the
pomerino
and to the library. I can’t resist, though, a wistful backward glance at Bruno’s apartment, but the window is dark now. I turn away from it, remembering how it had been the lit window that had earlier drawn me to Bruno’s apartment…and then I turn back. The light
had
been on earlier, and we hadn’t at any point turned it off. Certainly Bruno hadn’t had time to turn it off when we heard Zoe’s screams, and he’d left directly from the library to take Zoe to the hospital. Someone else must be in the apartment.

Twenty years ago, Bruno had always kept a spare key under a flowerpot by his door—a practice that even I, a suburban Long Islander, had found overly trusting. Apparently he’s still as trusting. I find the key there and let myself in. I come up the stairs as quietly as I can, but I needn’t be so careful. The sound of my approach is easily disguised by the sound of running water in the kitchen. Even when I stand in the kitchen door Orlando doesn’t hear me, he’s so engrossed in scrubbing the silver vial with steaming hot water and a toothbrush. The scene—lit only by moonlight—reminds me eerily of Lady Macbeth trying to clean the blood off her hands.

“Wouldn’t it have been better to leave it?” I say, startling him so badly he splashes water in a wide soapy arc when he wheels around to face me. “I mean, everyone will know it must have had something with nuts in it and that you had handled it. What were you planning to do with it after you cleaned it?”

Orlando stares at me with such wild, haunted eyes—the same unbridled look I’d seen on his face when he rushed from the party after Robin’s death—that I almost feel sorry for him. Then he looks down at the vial in his red, puckered hands and bursts into tears.

“You’re right,” he says, hurling the vial against the wall. “I have no idea what I’m doing. I’m no good at this at all. Go to the police. Tell them that I poisoned Zoe Demarchis.”

“With what?” I ask.

“With some amaretto,” he says with a little laugh. “She was always making such a big deal over not drinking it. She made it quite easy.”

“And why?”

“Because she was ruining my chance at inheriting my share of the villa,” he says. “Because she took Robin away from me…because…Oh, what does it really matter? You’ve caught me.” He holds his hands up over his head in a gesture I’m sure he learned from watching American TV—which is what tips me off to the fact that it’s all an act.

“Not because she knew you pushed Robin off the balcony?” I ask.

The mask slips from his face and he looks genuinely shocked. “Pushed Robin? But I loved Robin—”

“And he left you for Zoe, which must have made you very angry, and he’d stolen the poems you were both going to turn into a screenplay.”

“No, you have it all wrong. I’ll confess to poisoning Zoe Demarchis. What more do you want?”

“For you to tell the truth. It wasn’t you who put the amaretto in the vial—it was your mother, wasn’t it? That’s why you’ve washed it, so no one would find her fingerprints. And it was your mother who pushed Mara down the steps last night.”

Orlando shakes his head. With his dark curls and his eyes gleaming in the moonlight, he looks suddenly very young, like that boy who had hidden in the lemontree pot, afraid of incurring his grandmother’s wrath. “No,” he says, “you have it all wrong. You Americans always think you know everything, but you don’t understand
anything.
You accuse my mother of these crimes so that you can get my father to yourself, but do you really think he’ll stay with you when he knows what you’ve accused me of?”

He must see that he’s hit a nerve, because he smiles. “That’s why you haven’t told him what you think already, isn’t it?” He shakes his head. “And to think Robin admired you so much! You’re just as willing as the rest of them to shield his murderer to get what you want. Go ahead, then”—he wipes his damp hands on the rough brown cloth of his friar’s robe and then, noticing that he’s still in costume, peels the heavy robe over his head. He’s wearing jeans and a tight, damp T-shirt underneath—“tell everyone what you think happened on that balcony in New York. See how far it gets you.”

He leaves then, stomping loudly down the steps and slamming the door. When I try to follow him, I trip over his discarded friar’s robe and come down hard on the tile floor. The shock of the impact brings tears to my eyes, the minor physical pain unleashing the dawning sorrow that things can’t last between me and Bruno. I angrily bundle the robe into a ball to toss it out of my way, but instead of relieving my pain I find another. Something sharp inside the fabric sinks deep into my palm. A safety pin to hold the robe closed, I think, withdrawing the pin from my hand, but then I notice that something’s attached to the pin. I hold it up into a shaft of moonlight and see a brass button threaded onto the pin. When I turn it around, two eyes stare out at me beneath a crown of coiled snakes.

For a moment, sitting on the tile floor in the moonlight, I feel as frozen as if I had looked into a real Medusa’s eyes. But that’s only because I recognize where I’ve seen this button before—on Robin’s vintage Versace jacket, which he wore like a good luck charm nearly every day after he returned from Florence last winter. I can picture him in it, the collar turned up against the early spring evening chill as we walked across Washington Square Park, the sun glinting off the brass Medusa head buttons as we stood outside the Graham townhouse and he asked me to come to his rescue at the film show. I’m nearly positive that all the buttons were there. Only someone who had grappled with him in the last minutes of his life would have this button. And only someone who loved Robin would have kept such an incriminating piece of evidence. It makes me almost want to spare Orlando, but then I remember Saul Weiss.

I attach the safety pin back onto the robe and bundle it up, holding it close to my body because I still feel cold. As I’m getting up, I notice something glinting in the moonlight: the silver vial. I slip it into my pocket and then I leave Bruno’s apartment for what I’m pretty sure will be the last time.

Back at the villa, I stop at Daisy Wallace’s room to see whether she’s heard anything from the hospital. Yes, she tells me, Zoe was expected to make a full recovery. Luckily she’d taken a big dose of Benadryl just before the performance, so the allergic reaction was lessened. She should be able to come back to La Civetta tonight. “She begged to come back because she said she hates hospitals. Professor Mainbocher and Professor Brunelli are going to ride back in a taxi with her, but I don’t think she should stay in the dorm. I was just going to ask Claudia Brunelli if she could get a room ready for her—”

“You know, that’s not necessary,” I say quickly. “I’ve got that extra room attached to mine. Why don’t we put Zoe in there? That way if she needs anything in the night I’ll be able to hear her.”

“Well, if you’re sure you don’t mind…”

“Not at all. I’ll go make sure it’s ready, but I think the bed’s all made up.”

Before I go to the little convent room, though, I stop in mine and deposit Orlando’s robe into the
cassone
and lock it. Then I go into the other room and turn down the bedcovers and lock the window. When I go down to the
ingresso
to see whether Bruno and Zoe have returned yet, I run into Daisy, Frieda Mainbocher, and Zoe on the steps coming up. “Professor Brunelli stayed in town because he had something he had to do at his wife’s apartment,” Frieda explains when I ask where Bruno is. “So I brought Zoe back in the cab. Oh, and what an adventure we had! The driver went the wrong way and drove us up and down the hills. We saw some beautiful old convents in the moonlight, didn’t we, Zoe?”

“Yes,” Zoe answers with what looks like genuine interest despite the exhaustion in her face. “Professor Mainbocher’s going to take me to see one in a few days when I’m feeling better. After working with the nuns’ chronicles in the archives, I’d like to see where the nuns actually lived.”

“There’s a beautiful cloister just outside the city…” Frieda and Zoe happily chat about convents all the way up the stairs and down the hall to Zoe’s new room, Daisy joining in to say she’s always been fascinated with convents, too. By the time we get Zoe settled in the little room (“Why, it looks just like a convent room,” Zoe chirps, “and look at the view!”) the three women have made plans for a dozen excursions to convents, monasteries, and abbeys in Florence and the surrounding Tuscan countryside.

“I had no idea you were so interested in convents,” I say to Zoe after Frieda and Daisy have left and I’m making sure that the door to the hall is locked.

“Well, it’s not like I want to be a nun,” Zoe says, giggling. It’s good to see her laugh and to see color back in her cheeks. “But, you know, our dorm used to be a convent and I’d like to see what one looks like that’s still got nuns in it—like the one where the nuns who lived here moved to. There was a field trip there last year. I missed it because I was sick, but Robin came back from it all excited, and then he read me one of Ginevra’s poems, which was so beautiful and sad—”