Sheila Connolly - Reunion with Death

by Sheila Connolly

  “I will happily look for souvenirs that weigh less than two ounces, until it’s time for dinner.” Anything was better than hiking up that hill, only to turn around and come back in an hour or two.

  So we shopped, and I allowed myself to buy one deliciously scented bar of soap. And after shopping we wandered over to the restaurant, where people were already congregating. Once inside, we were divided among different tables in different rooms, and even if I’d wanted to ask some discreet questions, the noise level made it impossible. When I’d figured that out, I relaxed and just went with the flow. It was a pleasant dinner, not as good as some, but tasty. It was nearly dark when we finally exited the restaurant, and I could hear the sea nearby.

  Cynthia and I looked at each other. “Ready for that hill?” I asked.

  “I guess. Where are our sister vineyardites?”

  “Is that even a word? I think they’re still inside. You want to wait?”

  “Not really. You and I are pretty evenly matched—we both start panting at the same time.”

  “Yeah, about halfway there. All right, let’s go.”

  We passed the church, now dark, although some of the cafés on the plaza in front of it were still doing a good business. We continued up toward the hotel, passing under an arch. At the carabinieri station, a lone tabby cat sat on a low wall and washed its face. It ignored us. Then came the long dark hike, and I swear it was at a forty-five-degree angle. Or at least an angle that grew steeper each time we climbed it. We huffed and puffed our way to the top, then dropped into the chairs on our little patio.

  “What … about … mosquitoes?” I panted.

  “Haven’t … seen … any … here,” Cynthia replied.

  We waited a minute until our breathing leveled out. “Another thing nobody mentioned: bring bug spray. Think we could have gotten it into the country?”

  “If it was small enough. The more important omission was mentioning the hills.”

  “You’ve got that right. I wonder if anybody would have bowed out if they had known how much climbing they’d have to do. I mean, unless you have a topographic map, you don’t even think about it. Unless you’re visiting Switzerland. Or Nepal.”

  “Maybe the lazy and the feeble ones self-eliminated and are sitting at home patting themselves on the back and knitting.”

  “Hard to do both at once,” I commented. “Damn, I don’t want to get old.”

  “We aren’t old, we’re mature. Wise. Seasoned.”

  “Yeah, right. I hope somebody shoots me if I get too decrepit to do something like this. I had a friend back at college whose grandparents kept taking grand trips abroad into their nineties. I still have their old steamer trunk in the attic, and it’s covered with shipping labels for wonderful places. I think it’s full of my mementoes now—nothing as grand as theirs, I’m sure. Anyway, I always thought that’s the way I wanted to live, just keep going and doing the things I enjoyed until I dropped in my tracks.”

  “How does the gene pool in your family look?” Cynthia asked.

  “So-so. My grandmother was ninety-four, but my mother died of cancer in her seventies. My father was eighty.”

  “Not bad. You’ve got a few good years left in you.”

  “I hope so. You?” I asked.

  “My mother’s still alive, and living on her own. My father’s been gone for a decade. But I take care of myself, when I’m not glued to a computer monitor.”

  I could hear the sounds of our hilltop companions making their way up the path. I looked at Cynthia, but she was lost in her own thoughts. I was too comfortable to move, so I remained silent and waited to see what the others would do.

  Chapter 18

  I had expected the others to peel off to their rooms on the far end of the patio, but instead they kept coming until they were directly below where we sat.

  “Ahoy? Permission to come aboard?” Valerie called out.

  “Aren’t you mixing up your metaphors? The sea’s the other direction. But sure, you’re welcome to join us.”

  Valerie appeared first, clutching a bottle of wine, which she held up. “I come bearing offerings.” She turned to her lagging companions. “Come on, guys—it’s only a few more steps.”

  Connie and Pam appeared next with Denise, and when we were all seated, the little table was crowded. Xianling wasn’t with them. The newcomers exchanged glances.

  Then Valerie spoke. “We know what you’re doing.”

  Now Cynthia and I looked at each other, alarmed. “What are we doing?” I asked cautiously.

  “Trying to figure out who killed Professor Gilbert. We want to help.”

  Well, that cat had escaped its bag and was now howling for attention.

  “Who else knows?” Cynthia asked.

  “Just us—as far as we know. We haven’t talked about it to anyone else. It’s hard to find a quiet place and enough time to talk privately, as I’m sure you’ve noticed.”

  “Believe me, we’ve noticed,” I said. “So you think someone killed the professor?”

  “Don’t you?” Valerie asked. “I’m just not buying the idea that he just fell down the hill and died. Too many people in the group hated him.”

  So it had been that obvious to her? Had it been to any others? I wondered. “You know who?”

  Our companions shared looks. “I can guess,” Pam said. “I’m a pretty good observer. And I have a near-photographic memory. By the way, I’m a lawyer.”

  I glanced at Cynthia. She nodded.

  “I think there’s a question I need to ask, before we go any further. Which of you took a class with Professor Gilbert? Or had any interactions with him in any other way?” I thought it would be kind of a test. I still wasn’t sure I had complete confidence in these women, but on the other hand, we were running out of time and we had to trust someone.

  Valerie spoke first. “I was in one of his classes.”

  Then Connie. “I didn’t take one, but my roommate did, and it wasn’t a good experience for her.”

  “That’s putting it mildly,” Pam said. “I took a couple of classes with him, and I thought he was slime. But you already knew that, Cynthia, didn’t you?”

  Cynthia waited a few moments before answering, studying Pam’s face. Finally she said, “Yes, I did. We did. Denise?”

  “You’ve heard my story,” Denise said. “He plagiarized my research and called it his own.”

  “You checked us all out,” Pam stated bluntly.

  “Yes. I wanted to narrow down the list of suspects,” Cynthia said. “And I wanted to see who would lie about it.”

  While Connie and Valerie looked unsettled by the revelation, and Denise just nodded once, Pam seemed pleased. “Fair enough,” she said. “Yes, I took one of his classes. I thought it was fluff. I thought he had an ego the size of Texas. I got a respectable B-plus in the class and never took another one in that department. He never made a pass at me or bullied me or made fun of me—I might as well have been invisible. Hey, I know what I look like, and what I looked like then. I wasn’t his type, and that was fine with me.”

  She looked like an ordinary and, yes, forgettable person, as she had forty years ago. “But you knew back then that there were others who did get that kind of attention from him?” I prompted.

  “Sure there were, and it was obvious to anyone who was looking for the signs. Some of the women in the class were practically drooling over him. Most of them found an excuse to stay after class and ask him some really important questions, alone, of course.”

  “You aren’t suggesting they were asking for it and they got what they deserved, are you?” Cynthia demanded.

  “Of course I’m not,” Pam snapped. “We were all young and stupid and impressionable, and he was hot. Things happen. People move on.”

  “Well, it looks like somebody didn’t,” I countered.

  “Quite possibly. Look, do you know the dropout rate for freshmen in our year?” Pam demanded.

  “I do,” Cynthia said, an
d named a number. “And that doesn’t include the transfers to the men’s colleges that went co-ed around that time.”

  “Okay. Some of those women left for academic reasons—they just couldn’t cut it. Some for social reasons—they felt like they didn’t fit in, or they couldn’t hack being at a college with only women. Some for financial reasons. And some—a small percentage—bailed because creeps like Gilbert messed with them. But having said that, most of the women he, uh … well, you know what I mean—most of them got over it and him and went on to graduate and lead happy and successful lives. How many of our class do you think had or have the potential to be killers?”

  “Two,” Cynthia fired back promptly. “One spousal abuse, case dismissed, and one psychotic break.”

  “Damn, you are good, given what you have to work with here,” Pam said admiringly. “So how do you profile someone who waits forty years to seek revenge? Was it planned? Was it a spur-of-the-moment thing, where just seeing the guy again unexpectedly brought back a whole lot of repressed memories and she just snapped? Who knew where he was, the night he died?”

  “Hold on—you’re going too fast,” I said. “Let us tell you what we’ve worked out so far, and then you can tell us what you can add and what the next steps should be.”

  Cynthia slid her napkin diagram across the table and outlined what we’d been discussing since we returned from Vernazza. Pam nodded, looking impressed, then passed it to the others. “Good start,” she said. “If you eliminate the two of us here who took a class—that’s Circle A—then you’ve narrowed it down to fewer than ten people. I can’t answer for B, because I didn’t spend any time visiting around other people’s rooms when we were in Capitignano. I saw people at meals and in the vans, and that was pretty much it. As for C, the poppy stuff, ask Valerie.”

  Cynthia eyed her. “Right, you’re a doctor.”

  “I was,” Valerie nodded. “I retired three years ago.”

  “And now you’re a holistic medical therapist,” Cynthia said.

  “You know about that?” Valerie looked startled.

  “You need a license, don’t you?”

  Valerie nodded once, processing the fact that Cynthia knew.

  Cynthia pressed on. “From what I’ve read, the poppies haven’t changed in the last three years, or even three millennia. What can you tell me about their effects? Assume I’ve read a Wikipedia article and take it from there.”

  “The petals of the Tuscan poppy contain substances that aid insomnia,” Valerie explained, “and that red poppy we’ve been seeing everywhere—the same one the Impressionists loved to paint—is very slightly narcotic. The amount of active ingredients is minimal, so to determine an exact dosage is next to impossible. It could be kind of hit or miss. It has a long history, as you’ve observed, and has been used in herbal treatments for a wide range of ailments, mainly to treat the respiratory system and the nervous system.”

  “I’d say you know quite a lot,” I said. “It sounds pretty benign. Does it have any toxic effects?”

  “There’s no morphine in it, if that’s what you’re asking. Ingested in a moderate dose, it would make you sleepy. If you took too much, it would make you sluggish and might cause trouble breathing.”

  “How much would it take to incapacitate someone?” Cynthia demanded.

  “Without an underlying condition? More than he or she would be willing to ingest. Certainly more than the amount someone could sneak into a drink. I assume that’s what you’re thinking.”

  “So it’s not a poison per se,” I said. That squared with what the autopsy had shown. “If it was just a moderate dose, what would the symptoms be?”

  “Sleepiness. Lack of alertness. Maybe physical clumsiness. Nothing dramatic like vomiting or fainting.”

  “Okay,” Cynthia finally spoke, after a long pause. “Let’s lay this on the table. The autopsy shows that Professor Gilbert had the active ingredient from Italian poppies in his system when he died. Somebody knew how to extract that ingredient from those widely available poppies, although it probably doesn’t take anything more sophisticated than hot water and maybe some vinegar. Somebody managed to slip it to him without anyone noticing. It could have been enough to make him thick-tongued and clumsy. Would you agree so far?”

  “That sounds about right,” Valerie said, meeting Cynthia’s gaze.

  “And we know the professor was a vain man and would have been embarrassed to be stumbling and mumbling in front of a group of ladies. How long does this stuff take to work?”

  “I’d say there would be symptoms within the hour, although there are a lot of variables.”

  Connie spoke up suddenly. “Cynthia, you’re suggesting that somebody gave it to him in time to make him look like a fool at the dinner?”

  Cynthia nodded. “Maybe. Or that could have been the idea. Did anyone notice him acting unusual, or different after than before?”

  “Since we hadn’t seen the man in forty years, how were we to know what ‘normal’ was for him at his age?” Pam demanded.

  “He seemed to be fine when he gave his talk in the late afternoon,” I threw in. “So this poppy cocktail had to have been given to him either right before then, or not long after, say, during cocktails.”

  “Which narrows our timeline, right?” Connie said.

  “Exactly,” Cynthia said. “All right, Pam, you say you’ve got a good memory: who was sitting at the head table with him?”

  Pam looked up at the ceiling and shut her eyes. “Barb and Gerry, of course. Jean and Jane—Jane took at least one course from him, but you probably already know that. That’s five. Uh … okay, it was a table for eight, so the rest were Brenda, Rebecca, and Virginia. Does that sound about right?”

  Nobody contradicted her.

  “None of whom had taken a class with the professor,” Cynthia grinned. “Now I’ll make it harder. Who was hanging around him before dinner who didn’t end up at the table?”

  We all looked at each other. “A lot of people,” Connie said.

  “There were forty of us, not including Barb and Gerry and the waitstaff,” Pam said. “Are you talking a quarter of us? Half?”

  “Closer to half than a quarter,” Cynthia replied, “but not everyone was close enough to put something in his drink. So call it a quarter.”

  I noticed that Cynthia didn’t mention our quest for photographs of the appropriate times. Maybe she still wasn’t sure she trusted the women in front of us?

  “Are we eliminating the employees?” Pam asked. “I mean, Horny Tony Gilbert could have been sneaking over to Capitignano from wherever he lived and getting it on with the cook.”

  I said slowly, “I thought someone said that Gerry was the one who invited him, and he’d only recently learned of both the Wellesley connection and the fact that he was living nearby. That kind of rules out the staff. Agreed? Look, if we don’t eliminate somebody, we’ll never sort all this out,” I said with asperity.

  “Okay, okay—we’ll assume the most likely scenario, in the interests of expediency,” Cynthia said.

  “Cyn, you can talk plain English, right?” I said. “We have only enough time to explore the most obvious solutions. Somebody slipped Professor Gilbert a Mickey, probably during the cocktail hour, with the goal of making him look like a doddering old fool. A few hours later, he fell off a hill and died. What happened in between dinner and kaboom?”

  “That other bottle of wine,” Cynthia said. When our vineyard-mates looked blankly at her, she explained about the chilled bottle of wine and the two glasses that had been delivered to the professor’s room after dinner. And that I’d seen him on the way up to his room, which further narrowed the killer’s window of opportunity.

  “So … what? Wouldn’t he have had to drink the poppy juice earlier than that?” Pam asked. “How did he seem to you when you saw him, Laura?”

  “I didn’t know the man, but I would have said he’d had a little to drink—most of us had. He was walking steadily enough, but
he was kind of … effusive? He was talking to me in Italian, and he called me pretty lady.”

  “Inconclusive,” the lawyer responded. “What about the combined effect of wine and the drug, Valerie?”

  Valerie said, “I wouldn’t recommend it, but the combination wouldn’t be toxic, if that’s what you’re asking. From what Laura says, he seems to have been in control right after dinner, or maybe slightly drunk. Maybe the stuff simply didn’t work. Or the dosage was wrong. Or maybe it hadn’t had time to work. Or maybe he’d drunk less than someone expected because he knew he had a late date.”

  Cynthia turned back to Pam. “Do you remember who left the dining hall when? Alone or with a group?”

  “Sure.” Pam proceeded to recite the list, in order of exit. I decided that if I ever needed a lawyer, I’d call her first. “Which is not to say that they didn’t go out again later.”

  I glanced at Cynthia, who nodded. “Cynthia did.”

  “Did you see anyone else?” Connie asked eagerly.

  “Yes, but no one connected to the professor or his death—I went in a different direction,” Cynthia said. “Besides, we were together for … quite a while, which covers the period of the fall.”

  Connie waited a moment, but Cynthia did not elaborate.

  “What about you, Laura?” Valerie asked. “Wasn’t he staying in the room right above you? Maybe Cynthia wasn’t there, but did you hear anything?”

  “I heard some footsteps overhead—tile floors, you know, and the sound carried. But I crashed pretty quickly. I didn’t even hear Cynthia leave, or come back. I certainly never heard any voices. I couldn’t swear whether he had a guest.”

  Pam picked up the thread again. “Do you think you would have heard the sounds of a struggle? Or a scream? After all, he fell not far from your window, and sound carried at night at that place. Did you take a sleeping pill or anything to knock you out?”

  I shook my head. “Believe me, I didn’t need anything—all this exercise is plenty to knock me out. But I want to think I would have heard anything like a scream. I didn’t hear anything, ergo he went quietly.”