Sheila Connolly - Reunion with Death

by Sheila Connolly

  “Sure,” Valerie said. “I didn’t know you spoke Italian.”

  “I don’t, not really. I have a vocabulary of about twenty words—dessert being one of them, you notice. But I’m good at imitating accents.”

  “I’m terrible at languages,” Denise said. “Remember we had to take at least one at college? And two if we were headed to grad school? You must have done that, Laura.”

  I nodded. “Two years of German, which I’ve never used. Funny, the hoops they made us jump through in those days. Now I hear you can make up whatever major you want—my daughter did something like that.”

  “How old is she?” “What’s she doing now?” And we were off on a tangent, discussing our children, or our siblings’ children, until the coffee appeared—a couple of mouthfuls of intensely dark brew. I was getting very fond of it. And I needed my wits about me now, so the jolt of caffeine helped.

  Time to get down to business. “Terrible thing about Professor Gilbert, wasn’t it?” I said. “Did any of you know him?”

  “I told you, Laura, I took a class from him,” Denise said. “I thought he was too full of himself. He loved to quote Dante in Italian, which none of us understood at all. It sounded pretty, but what were we learning? It was more about him showing off his noble profile against the backdrop of autumn leaves.”

  Valerie gave a bark of laughter. “You’ve got that right. But I guess that style served him well—he had a long career, didn’t he? I mean, he was tenured, back when that meant something.”

  “He sure did,” Denise said, her voice surprisingly sharp with bitterness.

  We all turned to look at her. “Why do I think there’s a story behind that?” Cynthia said quietly.

  Denise looked away. “I was a Romance languages major, so I ended up taking a couple of classes with him. Plus he was my senior thesis advisor, which was cool at first—until I found out he was ripping off my ideas. A year after we graduated I saw all my thesis arguments laid out in an article in a prestigious journal, and I didn’t even get a footnote. I’d put money on it that the article counted heavily on his tenure application, that publish-or-perish thing.”

  “What did you do?” I asked.

  She shrugged. “What could I do? It was published, with his name on it. If I’d complained after the fact, he could have said that I had absorbed my ideas from him. It would have been my word against his, and he was the professor while I was a lowly first-year grad student. So I did nothing. In the long run it didn’t hurt me much—I found other areas of interest to work on, and I got tenure about ten years later.”

  “It doesn’t seem right, though,” Cynthia said.

  “All’s fair in love and tenure battles.”

  Her last statement might have left the door open to talk about the “love” side of things, but the waitress chose that moment to present il conto, and we got sidetracked trying to figure out how much of a tip to leave. In the end we were generous—that waiter had been very cute, and he’d had to carry that really heavy hot bowl.

  I was coming to realize that it was not going to be easy to get the answers we needed, or at least not quickly. We gathered up our possessions and descended the steps, letting our meal settle. I was going to remember that risotto for a long time. At street level we stopped to look around and found several more of our classmates wandering around and checking out the nearby shops. We came together, then split apart again in different configurations—Xianling to take more pictures of the shoreline, now that some of the mist had cleared, Denise and Valerie to shop for souvenirs.

  Cynthia and I found ourselves alone again. “Well, that was interesting,” I said, when we were out of earshot of the others. “I had never considered that Professor Gilbert might be a plagiarist as well as a letch.”

  “My opinion of him shrinks by leaps and bounds,” Cynthia replied. “But Denise has had a successful career in her field. She holds a named professorship at a major university. Do you think she’d risk all that just to get back at him now?”

  I knew that Cynthia had already collected the information on the post-college paths of our classmates—she must have a good research team back home. “I’m not going to guess about what she might do. I suppose it’s another kind of violation, having your brainchild stolen from you. But I agree—it seems unlikely that she’d nurse a grudge for forty years, when she’s clearly moved past it.”

  “Obviously she recovered professionally. But for others … sexual violation has more lingering effects,” Cynthia reminded me. “It can create real problems in establishing emotional intimacy in relationships. Once the damage is done, it’s hard to repair—not like forgetting about a purloined paper.”

  “You sound like you speak from experience,” I said. There were areas of Cynthia’s life I’d never probed too deeply.

  She shook her head. “Not personally, no. But the more you learn about people, particularly the way I do, the more you recognize patterns. Anyone who’s been raped or molested—too many never quite get over it. And in that area, I doubt even Wellesley women are exempt.”

  I was pretty sure she was right. And while I’d never been a victim myself, I’d been part of any number of late-night dorm conversations where women had admitted to being forced to go further than they had wanted. Oh, usually they would put a brave face on—after all, we were all newly liberated women then, and the rules we’d grown up with were changing fast. But sleeping with a professor would have been in a whole different league.

  “It’s a lot harder to lead a conversation toward asking ‘Did you sleep with Professor Gilbert?’” I said.

  “I know. But we have to try. Anyway, I’d put a ‘probably not a suspect’ label on Denise, and Valerie claims not to have had any personal interactions with the man, so if I don’t find anything from the background checks to contradict that, I’d let her off the hook. And we think Xianling is in the clear. Which means we have only ten or so left to go. Shall we shop?”

  “Of course—as long as there’s gelato.”

  So Cynthia and I played tourist for a while, poking around little shops, looking for nothing in particular. While most of the stores seemed reasonably authentic, the price tags suggested they knew their clientele, and it wasn’t local. I recalled that large yacht anchored in the harbor. I didn’t find much to tempt me, until I wandered into a small shop specializing in silver jewelry. I tried on a few rings, but when I slid one particular one onto my hand, I spontaneously said, “Perfetto. Quanto costa?” The girl named a reasonable price, and I walked out with the ring on my finger. An ideal souvenir—distinctive, yet very easy to pack. And I would remember when and where I bought it every time I wore it.

  After another hour or so, a group of us kind of drifted together in the middle of one of the plazas. “Time to head back to Monterosso?” someone asked.

  “We thought we’d try hiking it,” someone else said, and others nodded enthusiastically. I shuddered at the thought of trying to hike those high rocky crags.

  “If you’re not back by sunset, we’ll send someone out to look for you,” Xianling said.

  “Don’t worry,” Donna, apparently speaking on behalf of the hikers, dismissed her comment. “Dinner’s at seven thirty, right? We’ll see you there.”

  The rest of us dutifully trooped back to the train station, stopping every twenty feet or so to take more pictures.

  Maybe I could ask my questions at dinner. Not subtle, but we had to move this forward somehow.

  Chapter 17

  It was late afternoon when we all straggled back to Monterosso. Most people cheerfully trotted to their hotel to stash their new acquisitions. We came across Connie and Donna, who had actually beaten us back and were now raving about the incredible UN community they had found along the hiking trail, meeting people from an amazing range of countries in a short distance. Cynthia and I looked at each other.

  “It’s a long way up that hill to the vineyard,” I said.

  “I know.”

  “B
ut it’s a long time until dinner,” I went on.

  “Yes, it is.”

  “So what are we going to do to fill two-plus hours?” I demanded. Cynthia was being suspiciously agreeable but not contributing to this conversation.

  “Internet café,” she said firmly.

  Not my first choice, but I didn’t have the energy to argue. “Will there be pastries?” I asked hopefully.

  “If you want. Come on.” She led the way back to the café where we’d stopped in the morning.

  We sat down and ordered—this time I had a large caffè Americano and a plate of biscotti—and she logged on quickly. When the coffee arrived I took a large swallow, then dunked a biscotto in the coffee and munched on it. “Have you noticed how much time we spend eating on this trip?” I mused. “Or talking about eating? Or planning for eating?”

  “Well, the food has been extraordinary, wouldn’t you say? Luckily we spend even more time hiking up and down hills, which more than makes up for it,” she said absently, her eyes fixed on the screen of her tablet.

  I gave up trying to make conversation with her and let my mind drift, watching people walk by outside the café. A couple of our classmates wandered past but they didn’t see us, and I didn’t try to attract their attention. I could see the façade of the boldly striped church from where I sat, and catty-corner from it a smaller church that someone had said was dedicated to the victims of local shipwrecks. I had peeked in briefly to catch a glimpse of the rather gruesome skeletons among the carvings inside. Time seemed to slow and I had to catch myself from nodding off.

  Finally Cyn gave an exclamation of disgust.

  “Bad news?” I asked.

  “No news at all. I think we’ve mined all the online data we can for the moment. Now, if we wanted to know something about someone who graduated ten years ago, and her history at the college, we’d have much better luck.”

  “Oh, poor us,” I drawled. “We’re going to have to rely on actually talking to living, breathing people.”

  “That’s not my strong suit,” Cyn said.

  “It’s not mine either, but do you see any choice? We could drop this whole thing and let the Tuscan polizia do their thing—but that could take weeks or months, unless Loredana and her important husband can divert them, or maybe pay them off, or give them a few cases of wine. Maybe that’s the best case, because if the police are honest, we might be stuck here for a while until this is settled. On the other hand, we can try to solve it ourselves in the tried-and-true fashion of Miss Marple, using the subtle interrogation techniques we’re so bad at. And we’ve got only two more days to do it.”

  “Don’t be so cheerful,” Cynthia replied.

  “Don’t be sarcastic,” I retorted. “What do we do?”

  She sighed. “We do our best, for the next two days, and if we haven’t sorted it out by then, it’s out of our hands. Oh, and we run hither, thither and yon sightseeing like crazy all the while, stopping for enormous meals accompanied by lots of wine. Sounds like some weird kind of relay race, doesn’t it? Solve a murder while collecting as many souvenirs and photos as you can. The clock is ticking.”

  “Not exactly ideal conditions for heart-to-heart talks.”

  “Nope. But it’s what we’ve got.”

  We sat silently for a couple of minutes, drinking our coffee, thinking of something—or nothing. I signaled the waitress for another coffee. After all, I still had a couple of biscotti left.

  Cynthia grabbed a clean paper napkin and fished in her bag for a pen. “Okay, here’s what we’ve got,” she began as she sketched out what I recognized as a Venn diagram. “This circle”—she poked her pen in it—“is the group that we know took a class or had some other direct association with Professor Gilbert, and we know this either from them directly or from what my people have found. This circle”—another poke—“is the people who had access to some means to brew poppy tea while we were at Capitignano. I refuse to contemplate anyone finding the right poppies back home and sneaking the potion into the country, especially when nobody knew that the professor would be speaking.”

  “Agreed. Would a microwave work?”

  “Damned if I know. But the only places with microwaves are the ones with kitchens anyway, so it’s moot. The third circle is the people who knew enough about medicine or herbs to know what to do with those poppies at all.”

  Her diagram did add a certain clarity to the muddle we faced. “And if you want to make it a pyramid, there’s a circle—or do I mean a sphere?—of those people who were in physical proximity to the professor that evening and had the opportunity to slip him the tea, no matter who made it. Which we hope to learn from the pictures we want to collect. You know, it could have been a couple of people working together—one to brew and one to slip it into the drink.” I had to laugh. “Have we managed to narrow down any one of these categories?”

  Cynthia looked frustrated. I suspected she had thought her information hunt would yield a fast result. “Not a lot. We’ve got the list for Circle A, although we’re assuming there are no outliers, like he seduced someone because he saw her from afar in Schneider and fell in lust. We can ask Jean or Jane about Circle B, because there was a limited number of rooms or buildings that had any sort of a kitchen, and I refuse to believe that anyone cooked this up over a campfire. We have a list of professions, which will help with Circle C—who had the relevant knowledge. And as for Circle D, you’re supposed to be collecting the pictures, remember?”

  “I told you, I think Xianling is our best hope. I’ve never seen her when she didn’t have that tablet in her hand, taking pictures, so she should have just about everything covered. Otherwise, when have I had the time?” I protested. “And we’ve got only two days. That’s just not going to happen.”

  “Then mine whatever Xianling has, and then focus on anyone else who was taking a lot of pictures. Otherwise we’re going to be stuck asking around to see if anybody noticed what cologne the professor was wearing.”

  It took me a moment to figure out what she meant, and then I looked at her and burst out with giggles. “Yeah, that’ll work. Or maybe something like, did he have that mole in the shape of Sicily behind his left ear removed?”

  “Ooh, you’re good. Was there a mole?”

  “I have no idea. Fine pair of sleuths we make.”

  “Speak for yourself. Besides, you started this, you with your innocent little phone call to the higher powers.”

  I almost expected her to stick out her tongue at me. But she was right: I felt responsible. Of course, I was the one who had found the body, but I could have handed it off to the local authorities and left it there. But noooo, I had to get in touch with my contacts and make sure the autopsy was thorough. My instincts had been bang on, but I had created a lot of complications for a lot of people, and now I had to wonder if I had done the right thing. “How about we look at that list of professions? That might be the shortest.”

  Cyn eyed another page on her tablet. “We’ve got five current or retired MDs, but only Christine and Valerie admit to knowing the professor.”

  “Specialties?”

  “Ob-gyn, no surprise, given the times.”

  “A medical doctor might not be the only category to look at. What about people who are pursuing alternative medicines? A late-life conversion? They could know about herbal remedies, if they’re into holistic medicine or natural remedies. Although they might not be familiar with poppies that grow only in Italy. Unless they’re the same as California poppies.”

  Cynthia tapped a few more keys. “Close enough, although it’s not clear whether the California ones are strong enough to have much effect. The Tuscan variety has a much longer track record for medicinal uses. Anyway, neither of the MDs lives in California where the poppies grow.”

  “But they might have, once. Or gone to school there. You can check that.”

  “Yes, I can.” More tapping. “Nope, neither one, at least not that I can tell from the information I have. What el
se you got?”

  I was coming up empty. “You know the Amanda Knox case, right?”

  “Who doesn’t? Face of an all-American angel, but the Italian authorities tarred her as a sex-crazed slacker. And they’re still arguing over whether she did it.”

  “Exactly. And in that case they had physical evidence, even if they bungled it. What do you think they’d make of our case?”

  “I’d rather not find out. It could take years, and there’d be a cloud hanging over all of us. We don’t want that.”

  “No, we don’t. So we’ve got to make this right.”

  “I’m with you on that. What next?”

  “You’re asking me?”

  “Yes, I am. I’m the info gatherer.”

  “I thought I was!”

  “Nope, I’m Watson. You found the professor—he’s your problem. I stand ready to be awed by your brilliant deductive reasoning. So?”

  Funny, in our past years together, Cynthia had always taken the lead. When had that changed? Now I was in charge? I had to think this through. “If this were a crime novel, we’d gather all the cast together in the last chapter and make the big reveal. Or hope that the culprit gave herself away as we led up to it.”

  “Well, worst case, you’ve got the setting all lined up—the big dinner in the vineyard on our last night. All the suspects gathered together. If we haven’t figured this out before that, you can stand up and announce, ‘The killer is …’ and see who runs screaming into the night.”

  “That might be a bit extreme, especially if I have nothing to back it up. But if all else fails, I can throw the question on the table and see what happens.”

  Cynthia looked at me sadly. “I wish I could say I had a better idea, but I don’t.”

  “Okay, then I’ll talk to Xianling and ask her to put together whatever she can, and we’ll see if that adds anything to what we know. If we’re lucky we’ll have something before the banquet.”

  “Big if,” Cynthia said. “You know, being Watson isn’t as easy as it looks. You want more coffee? Or you want to shop?”