Death of an Obnoxious Tourist (2 page)

“And then Beth talked me into coming,” Lettie said. Lettie and Beth were sorority sisters.

“And then Lettie talked
me
into coming,” I said.

“And Meg has also talked a few acquaintances into coming,” Amy added.

“Just like old home week!”

“Oh, dear. Geoffrey and I are like interlopers.” Victoria peered over her sunglasses with questioning eyes.

“Not at all. When we get to the hotel, you’ll find we have people from all over.” Tessa signaled for the check. “Speaking of that, I’ve run off copies about the folks in our group for each of you. Remind me when we get back to the car.”

As we headed for Venice, Tessa drove, and the rest of us studied our copies of the list she had given us. It was arranged, she said, with roommates listed together. I read mine, mentally matching up spouses, siblings, friends, and parents with children as well as I could:

I decided that Shirley and Crystal Hostetter were mother and daughter, rather than sisters, based purely on their first names. I knew a lot of Shirleys my own age, but hardly anyone over twenty-five named Crystal. I knew that the first three, the Bauer sisters, wanted to share a triple room so that meant that the next two, Richard Kramer and Michael Melon, were roommates. Friends? Gay? Don’t know each other, but got put together because they were both single men? Singles who wanted to have their own rooms had to pay a single supplement. And what about Walter Everard and Elaine King? I asked Tessa about them.

“They’re a couple. I suppose she just still uses her maiden name.”

“That’s done a lot these days,” Lettie said.

“Not by me, I was glad to get rid of my maiden name,” Victoria said.

“Why? What was it?”

“Crapper.”

“I see what you mean.”

I folded the list and tucked it in my purse, then scratched around for a bottle of aspirin for my stubborn headache. I guess it was the combination of thinking about my head and, at the same moment, seeing Amy slip her list into her own bag that made me remember the four words I had read on that little piece of paper before she snatched it away. It said “. . . crushed the baby’s skull.”

We had an hour to settle into our room before the pre-dinner welcome party. Beth Hines bounced in just as Lettie and I were making a momentous decision regarding who got which bed. Beth was a trim little elfin woman with dancing brown eyes. She and Lettie indulged in the requisite squeaks, squeals, and hand-holding, along with the usual, “Turn around; I want to see your hair!” I, myself, have never been able to do the squeak-squeal thing without feeling like an absolute fool, but it doesn’t mean I’m not just as happy to see folks as anyone else is.

“Wait ‘til you meet the group,” said Beth, perching on the end of one bed. “A more . . . what’s the word I want . . . eclectic? A weirder conglomeration of people you’ll never meet.”

“Weird, how?” I asked.

“Oh, I don’t mean . . . well, it’s just that you’d hardly think of such a . . .
diverse
bunch traveling together.” Beth sounded like she ombproud of herself for thinking of the diplomatic word “diverse.”

Tessa had commandeered the Laguna Room, a small bar room near the hotel’s restaurant, for a happy hour sponsored by our tour company. Before I could even get a drink, Beth introduced me to Meg. Never in my life have I taken such an instant dislike to anyone. A large, pinch-faced woman with a beaky nose and close-set eyes, she looked down her nose at me like an eagle watching a mouse. She offered me a limp hand, cold and wet from her gin-and-tonic, and muttered, “Dotsy Lamb? Oh, yes. You’re the one whose h . . .”

She almost said it. She came within an inch of saying, “You’re the one whose husband just left her for a younger woman.” I got the distinct impression that it wasn’t a slip of the tongue at all; that she meant to get right up to the word “husband” and then quickly change to the ridiculous, “ . . . who’s known Lettie since she was a child.” I was not shocked that she knew about it. I assumed Lettie and Beth had discussed my troubles at length, and that Meg, who shared a house with Beth, would have heard about it. I certainly had bent poor Lettie’s ear for untold hours over the past year. Dear thing, she never once picked up the phone and said, “You again?” although I’m sure she wanted to.

I snatched a glass of red wine from a waiter’s tray with my shaking hands, oblivious of the peril it held for my white blouse. I leaned forward and sucked in enough wine to lower the level in the glass to a region of relative safety. Alone near the bar, a woman in a pristine white blouse sipped a white wine spritzer. She looked as though she could use some company, so I introduced myself, thus escaping further slashes from the talons of Meg Bauer. The spritzer woman turned out to be Shirley Hostetter, and the Crystal I had seen on the list was, as I had guessed, her daughter.

“Crystal is up in our room, brooding,” she said. “She’s fifteen, and since she’s too young to drink, she didn’t want to come down and ‘hang around a bunch of old people,’ as she put it.” Shirley managed to dash out air quotes with her fingers while spilling not a single drop of her wine. I was impressed. “Crystal is going through a phase—you know what teens are like—do you have children?”

“Five,” I said. I love that look I always get when I say that. “Four boys and one girl, but they’re all grown now.” People usually want my advice when they hear I’ve raised five kids. It seems to make me some kind of authority or something, but the fact is, teenagers confuse me as much as they do anyone else.

Over Shirley’s shoulder, I noticed a man standing by the door with a professional-looking camera around his neck.
He’s really playing the tourist role to the hilt
, I thought. A tall man with a coarse shock of salt-and pepper hair pushed past him, head down, and out through a door into the hall. The man with the camera immediately jerked to attention and left by the same door. Somehow, I knew those two exits were not unrelated. There was something about the way the camera-toting man’s face tightened. What was going on here?

“That was Paul Vogel,” said Shirley. Apparently, she’d seen me watching him.

“Who was the other man who just left? The tall one with the hair?”

I almost said, “shagg fiir,” but every time I say something like that, I get an answer like, “My fiancé.”

Shirley looked around as if assessing who was absent. “Must have been Dick Kramer. He’s head of some kind of company, and he’s traveling with that rather handsome young man over by the window. His name is Michael.”

So that, I deduced, must be Michael Melon, and “rather handsome” was an understatement.

“What sort of company?” I asked.

“Something to do with furniture, I think. Home décor—that sort of thing. I talked to him at breakfast this morning, and he was kind of vague, but I got the idea they import things and do renovations.”

“Doesn’t this seem like a strange way to go about importing things? I’d think they would just come over and visit manufacturers. Why waste time with a tour?”

“I don’t know.”

A little woman who looked like one of those Russian nesting dolls, but with bowl-cut black hair instead of a babushka, jostled Shirley aside and surged onto the bar. “Scotch and water,” she ordered. “Easy on the water.”

Shirley held her tongue until the woman had backed away with her fresh drink and then muttered, “Pellegrino Tours won’t make any money on her; that’s her fifth drink in . . .” She checked her watch. “In less than forty minutes.”

“Who is she?”

“Lucille Vogel. She’s a nightclub singer or something like that. Or used to be. I get the idea that her career is a thing of the past.”

“Wife of Paul Vogel? The man with the camera?”

“Yes, or at least I assume they’re husband and wife. But maybe not. Yesterday afternoon, shortly after most of us arrived, she was out in the hall yelling at Tessa because they had a room with a double bed, and she had specifically asked for twin beds.”

“Yelling?”

“Oh, yes. Very unpleasant. I was embarrassed for her. Don’t you just hate it when Americans go to another country and act like asses? It makes us all look bad.”

“Do you travel a lot?”

“No, I didn’t mean to give that impression at all. No. I had to save up for this trip. I ran into Meg Bauer—do you know her?” I nodded and Shirley went on. “I ran into Meg at her hospital in Baltimore this spring. I’m a nurse, too.”

“Oh, Meg is a nurse?” I didn’t recall Lettie ever telling me what Meg did. If she was a nurse, I’d like to nominate her for the Worst Bedside Manner award.

“Yes. Anyway, I’m head nurse in the neonatal unit of my hospital in Philadelphia, and we’ve just adopted a new scheduling system—new computer program to keep track of schedules—so I had to go to Baltimore for a few days because they were already using that program. I remembered Meg from when we had worked at the same hospital some, oh, I guess, fifteen years ago. Meg moned that she was going with her sisters to Italy in early summer, and I said to myself, ‘That’s just the thing for Crystal and me.’”

“Oh?” I slid my empty glass onto the bar and grabbed another red wine.

“Crystal is so hard for me to talk to now. It’s like she’s rebelling against everything that’s important to me. The kids she hangs around with are just . . .” Shirley left that sentence unfinished. “Well, my husband was all for us taking this trip, although he couldn’t take time off from work himself, so he couldn’t come. But I thought it might be good for Crystal and me to have some time together, away from her friends.”

“And you’ll see new things together. New experiences.” I glanced around the room. “Can you help me put any more names with faces? I just got here, you know, and so far I only know my friend Lettie, the three Bauer sisters, and the Reese-Burtons.”

“You haven’t met Tessa yet?”

“Oh, yes. She came to Milan and picked us up.”

Shirley nodded toward a man standing at the window near the handsome Michael Melon. “That’s Walter Everard. His wife, Elaine, is . . . well, she must have gone to the bathroom or something. She was here earlier.”

“Our list said Elaine King.”

“Right. See the couple over by the wall?” She nodded toward a sort of dull gray couple who sipped their drinks in solitary contemplation of their own napkins. They didn’t appear to be mixing a lot. “They are the Kellys. Jim and . . . I forgot . . . oh, Wilma. They’re from Canada. Somewhere near Toronto. Farmers.”

“I see.”

“And the man with his elbows on the bar is Achille—sounds like Achilles, the Greek hero, doesn’t it?—our bus driver.”

I tugged at Shirley’s sleeve quickly to keep Lucille Vogel from flattening her. Lucille was back for another scotch-and-water-easy-on-the-water. The door to the hall swung open again, and a woman with tons of dark blonde hair pulled back in a scrunchy slipped in and quickly located Walter Everard with her eyes. “That would be Elaine?”

“Yes. And it looks like they’re calling us in to dinner, now.”

Behind the black-jacketed maître d’ in the doorway, a halo of fluorescent pink radiated out from a clump of black leather. The magenta mass turned, and on the other side, a face burdened with several pounds of hardware poked painfully through holes in the brows, nose, lips, and ears, starred blankly at a display case full of Venetian glass. The eyes were heavily ringed with black pencil that exactly matched the lipstick and the nail polish. This was Crystal.

———

Lettie waved me into the dining room and to a table she had already selected. Meg, Beth, and the Reese-Burtons were already there, and the table was set for six. I decided I was strong enough to have another go at making Meg’s acquaintance, and the Reese-Burtons might help to soften the experience. I rather liked them. As I planted my purse beside Lettie’s chair, Meg shouted across the table in a voice that could have been heard back in the kitchen, “We’re having chicken tonight, Lettie. Careful you don’t lose your teeth in it!” She followed this outrage with the sort of laugh I hadn’t heard since I caught the neighborhood bully, Frankie Joe Norton, teasing my Brian about his stammer. I had taken care of Frankie Joe in a manner that I couldn’t possibly use on Meg. I took a deep breath, edged shakily around to Meg’s place, and bent over her shoulder.

“That was mean,” I hissed through gritted teeth. “You need to apologize to Lettie, and I want to be there when you do it. Not now, though, there are too many people watching, no thanks to you. Don’t even try to say you didn’t mean to embarrass her, because you did! Before you go to bed tonight, I want to hear you apologize. You got that?” I don’t think anyone heard what I said, but if they did, I didn’t care. I reclaimed my seat with as much dignity as I could, as dozens of eyes cut sidelong glances toward our table.

Geoffrey Reese-Burton broke the awkward silence with, “Owd jufine yarum? Oll?”

“I’m sorry?”

“He said, ‘How did you find your room? Is it all right?’” Victoria explained.

“Oh. Yes, it’s just fine.” I put my hand over my wine glass to keep the waiter from pouring any for me. “I’ve had two glasses already, and I’m diabetic, so I keep myself on a two drink limit.” I wondered how Meg would manage to throw that back in my face. There’s nothing embarrassing about diabetes, but I felt certain Meg would find a way to use it.

Beth tossed out a question to the table in general: “What are you most looking forward to?”

I said I couldn’t wait to see the museum of archaeology in Florence. Their collection of Etruscan artifacts is the best in the world. Of course, everyone but Lettie had to be told that I teach ancient and medieval history in a community college, so my interest in Etruscan civilization was not as strange as it might have seemed.