The Sonnet Lover

by Carol Goodman

  “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 wher
e 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—”

  “So he did show you the poems?” I say, sitting down on the side of her bed. I’ve tried to say it as gently as possible so she won’t think I’m accusing her, but she still colors deeply.

  “I didn’t mean to lie to President Abrams, honest. When Robin read me the poem I thought it was one he made up. He’d printed it up on the Web site he made for the film—”

  “Web site?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know if it’s still up. He’d gotten some computer major to design it and paid for a few months’ maintenance. He thought it would generate interest in the film. Do you have a computer?”

  I go into my room and retrieve my laptop and hand it to Zoe. I watch over her shoulder as she types in GinevradeLaura.com. The screen turns deep lilac—the color of the evening skies the last two nights—and then a rosebud unfurls on the screen. To the strains of Elizabethan lute music the rosebud opens, blooms, and fades, and then, one by one, the petals fall off the stem.

  “You click on one of the petals and…ta-da!”

  The screen fades and resolves into a schematic rendition of an ornately furnished Renaissance bedroom. “It’s my room,” I say, amazed at the detail of the drawing. There’s the cassone and the wall paintings and the tapestry. The only difference between this rendition and the room next door is that the carpet’s been removed in the virtual room. Instead the floor is covered by the pietre dure rose pattern.

  “It’s not finished,” Zoe says, clicking on the bed and tapestry and getting a window that reads “Site Under Construction.” “His idea was to have a poem connected to each object in the room and then if you clicked on the window you’d go outside and find poems in the gardens. Only Robin ran out of money. Here, I think there’s a poem in one of these petals on the floor.”

  Zoe drags the cursor over the rose petals on the floor until it turns into a hand, and then she clicks. The room fades and a page opens that’s the color and texture of old parchment. The poem is written in flowing script, which I follow as a voice—Robin’s, I realize with a pang—reads aloud.

  Be not dismayed at winter’s icy breath,

  At jagged winds that tear and whirl fresh snow,

  Revealing rock as chill and still as death,

  Since balm of rose awaits thee soon below.

  The very wind whose frigid hands thou feelst,

  Those daggered enemies of flesh and bone,

  Transforms to sweetness, hands that soothe and healst,

  When thou descends into the southern sun.

  Here other hands await, mine dewed with love

  As roses are asplash in April’s rays,

  Their petals plucked by breezes on the move

  From icy Alps to open-windowed days.

  Our bed awaits thee, strewn with wisps of rose,

  My longing more than any the wind knows.

  “Those last two lines are inscribed on the fountain in the garden, so it really is by Ginevra de Laura, but where did he find them?”

  “Honestly, I don’t know. Not in the archives—I told President Abrams that—because I had the key and he was only in there when I was in there, but I do have an idea.”

  “Yes?”

  Zoe blushes again and tilts her chin toward the door to my room. “In there. We sneaked in there a few times—only I didn’t like those creepy pictures, so I refused to go there anymore. Robin kept going there, though, and I think he’d gone there with Orlando, so maybe that’s where—” Zoe interrupts herself by yawning and I feel instantly guilty that I’ve kept her up.

  “You need to get some rest now,” I say, taking my laptop and closing it on Robin’s clever Web site. “I’ll leave my door open. Don’t be afraid to call me if you wake up and need anything.”

  “S’okay,” Zoe slurs, her eyes already closed. “I feel safe here,” she says, and then her mouth falls slack and her breathing deepens.

  I turn off her light and close the door partially so that the light from my room won’t disturb her. I plan to keep my lights on for a while so that I can thoroughly search the room.

  First, though, I reopen Robin’s Web site and search the virtual room, making a note of every place that’s been marked to hold a poem. I end up with a list that includes almost every object in the room: the cassone, the bed, each of the wall paintings, the tapestry, the window, the dressing table (although in the picture the place taken up by Lucy Graham’s art deco table is filled with a Renaissance curio cabinet—itself decorated with pietre dure panels, each one of which hides a window where Robin planned to include a poem), and many of the scattered petals on the floor. When I’ve completed my search of the virtual room, I start looking through the real one.

  I start with the cassone, removing Orlando’s robe and feeling along the bottom, sides, and top, wincing at the feel of Ginevra’s nail marks and the sight of the dark stains on the bottom while I search for a secret compartment. But there doesn’t seem to be anyplace to hide anything. After I’ve put back the robe and closed the cassone, I roll back the carpet and creep over the bare floor on my hands and knees (my knees still tender from my fall in Bruno’s apartment), feeling for loose stones in the floor pattern. I even crawl under the bed, stifling the feeling I have of being entombed while I’m under there. Then I search the walls, starting on the right side of the bed and going over every inch of painted wall, looking for a hidden compartment. When I get to the tapestry of the two courtly lovers, I lift it and stare at the disgusting picture underneath, forcing myself to inspect it closely for cracks or openings. I find nothing. None of the furniture in the room except for the cassone dates from the Renaissance, but still I search the bed frame and the bottoms of the chairs and go through the bureau drawers. In the dressing table I find a drawer filled with letters, but they all date from the 1940s and ’50s and comprise the correspondence of Lucy Wallace Graham. I flip through this depressing compendium of the life of a bored socialite: invitations to teas and dinners, responses from garden societies in England concerning Lucy’s attempt to get a rose named after herself, and Lucy’s own letters to Cyril at boarding school, which she must have collected back from her son. There’s nothing in any of these even remotely about love or poetry. The only person I can imagine being interested in them is Daisy Wallace, and so I put them all in an Hermès shopping bag and write her name on it to give to her tomorrow. By the time I’ve searched the entire room, the sky outside is getti
ng light and I suddenly realize how exhausted I am.

  Before going to bed, though, I check on Zoe one more time (I’ve peeked into her room several times over the night), unable to banish the idea that she’s in danger. In the pearl light of dawn she looks very young and innocent—not so different from the young novices who once lived in the convents she’s suddenly so interested in visiting, although I doubt any of them ever had Zoe’s exact shade of hair. Nor do I imagine that Zoe’s fascination with convents would last more than a couple of nights in a real one (although the idea of locking her away in one, out of harm’s way, doesn’t seem so bad right now).

  I go back to my room and crawl into bed, my head a jumble of impressions from the day: the tall gloomy cypresses of the English Cemetery, the red roofs around Santa Croce, Ginevra trapped inside the cassone at the foot of my bed, Zoe’s pale face when I thought she was dead…and running through all of these images are flashes of the moments I spent with Bruno on the couch in his apartment, each of those brief moments seeming to swell over the other events of the day. Each time I remember a touch, a sigh, a glance, I feel him near me.

  Just before I fall asleep, though, I recall what Zoe said about missing the field trip to Santa Catalina last year. Robin had come back from the trip “all excited,” and soon after that he had read one of Ginevra’s poems to Zoe. I’d been more interested in Zoe’s inadvertent confession to seeing the poems then, but now I think about that trip to the convent. Had he found the poems there? Is that why no one’s found them here—because they’re at the convent in the Valdarno? I remember taking a field trip there myself twenty years ago. It was a long trip, but doable in one day and worth the journey. I remember the convent as pretty and peaceful. I close my eyes, imagining an old stone building by a river in the undulating hills of the Valdarno, and for the first time in three nights I fall into a dreamless sleep.