“No, I mean window. The rooms on this side don’t have balconies.”
“Aren’t we special.”
“Contain yourself, Lettie. Now think. How can you keep Tessa distracted?”
“Well, I could ask to see her clothes . . . no . . . wait! Isn’t Tessa planning a wedding?”
“Good! I’ve noticed she reads bride magazines every chance she gets. Brides can go on for hours about weddings.”
Lettie and I traipsed down the hall and rapped on Tessa’s door. She held her unbuttoned blouse around her as she let us in.
“I’m so sorry, but I dropped a scarf off the roof last night,” I said. “And I couldn’t, for the life of me, find where it fell. I need to peek out your window, if you don’t mind.”
Lettie lit into a perfect song-and-dance. Really, I’m afraid I underestimate her sometimes. I had to bang on the window, the paint on the frame having been melded by the summer sun into something like glue.
“Oh, that green blouse, Tessa,” Lettie gushed. “Green is your color! Tell me, have you picked out the colors for your wedding yet?”
Good going, Lettie,
I thought. After the third pop, the window shuddered up. I stuck my head and both arms out and pulled the silk scarf out of my left sleeve with my right hand. I peeked around my shoulder to make sure Tessa was not watching me—she wasn’t, she and Lettie were examining a pair of green shoes—then reached into my pocket for the knife I had stolen from the restaurant. I threw it as hard as I could in the general direction of the fountain, drew my head back in, and flourished the scarf. “Ta da! Got it. It was stuck on the rough stone outside this window.”
Absorbed in the fabulous green shoes had bought for her bridesmaids, Tessa evinced no more than a passing interest in my scarf.
It took a while, tramping back and forth from the northwest side of the hotel to the fountain, but we found the knife under a bush about twenty feet from the edge of the fountain. I looked up and, by counting, pinpointed the correct third-floor window. “So, it could have been done,” I told Lettie. “I’m not very strong, so any number of people could have flung it farther than I did. As far as the fountain. I think I could have done it myself, if I could have wound up and given it all I had. As it was, I had to do it with my elbow and wrist.”
“But the killer would not have been at that window. He—or she—would have been at the next one on the left.” Lettie’s gaze darted left, then right. “But from here, there doesn’t seem to be much difference.”
“That’s what I think, too.” I tucked the knife into my bag. “Are you ready for our next investigation?” Lettie knew she didn’t have much choice. “I want to visit the shop where Beth picked up those narcissuses—or should that be narcissi? What street did she say it was on?”
“Via Nazionale,” my little data bank answered.
I opened my city map. The via Nazionale started on the opposite side of the church we were facing and ran off to the northeast. “It’s right there,” I said, pointing to the right of the church, “but Beth said it was a long walk, and we might find there are dozens of florists. I don’t feel like checking out a bunch of wrong stores.”
We returned to the hotel and found Beth in her new room on the second floor. She didn’t remember the name of the florist and had dropped the offending card, along with the entire pot, on the floor when she saw her sister’s body. It seemed a lost cause until I remembered the note. “I suppose you wouldn’t have saved the note you picked up at the front desk.”
“I think I did, in fact. Let’s see, it might still be in my purse.” Beth rooted through her purse. “Not here,” she muttered as my hopes sank. She unzipped a side pocket and ran her hand around inside. “Oh, here it is.” She handed me a printed note that directed her to pick up an order at Fioretoscana, a florist on via Nazionale. “But why do you need to know the name of the florist, Dotsy?”
“I want the name of any good florist, and the flowers you carried looked nice and fresh.”
Beth raised one eyebrow, as if she’d rather not think about those flowers at all.
It was a long hot trek to Fioretoscana. I could understand why Beth’s nose had been out of joint yesterday. But the long walk gave Lettie and me time to rehearse my plan for finding out who sent those flowers. “It’s a little too handy, don’t you think? It’s as if the flowers were someone’s way of getting Beth out of the hotel.”
“As if
who
was getting Beth out of the hotel?” Lettie asked.
“That’s what we want to find out.”
“You mean you think that Gypsy ordered the flowers?”
“Possible, but it doesn’t seem likely, does it?”
“No. I’ve never had a Gypsy send me any flowers.”
Sometimes I can’t tell if Lettie is joking or not. I think of her as living in a simple, concrete world where everything is just what it seems to be, but when she comes out with something like that last statement, I suspect she’s putting me on. I laughed and glanced quickly toward her in time to catch an almost-successfully-suppressed grin. “I guess it’s possible,” I said. “After all, he had her credit card. If we find the flowers were ordered by Beth Bauer Hines, we’ll have our answer.” I dodged around a workman who was jackhammering the sidewalk. “Lettie, if you saw a long row of numbers, how many do you think you could learn in, say, fifteen seconds?”
“I don’t know. Maybe seven or eight?”
My plan was to get the florist to show us the sales ticket for Beth’s flowers. If they had been ordered by phone or online, there’d be a credit card number. But if they had been ordered in person, they might have been paid for by check, cash, or credit card, and we might not find out anything unless the person who waited on us could give us a description of the purchaser. If they were ordered by anyone in our party, since we were all foreigners, they could not have been paid for by check. I said, “A credit card number usually has sixteen digits. You take the first eight, and I’ll take the last eight.”
“Do they all have sixteen?”
Lettie and I stopped and counted the numbers on the cards we had with us. All of them had sixteen except one, which had fifteen. “You have a better memory than me. So I want you to count the digits
and
remember the first eight. If it’s only fifteen, your last number and my first will be the same.”
We had come to the end of a block. I threw out my arm to keep Lettie from walking out in traffic, and she rolled her eyes like my kids used to do. Heat radiated off the pavement as we crossed the street.
“Slow down a minute,” I said. “I need to look up some words in case they don’t speak English in this place.”
Lettie guided me around a couple of oncoming pedestrians as I flipped through my little English-Italian pocket dictionary.
“I want to buy . . .
vorrei comprare . . . vorrei comprare
.” I practiced it a few times. “Pot . . .
pianta
. . . my friend . . .
mi amica.”
“There it is.” Lettie spotted the sign.
Fioretoscana might as well have been any florist back home in Staunton. The carnation-funeral smell hit my nose as we burst through the door into the blessed coolness. Condensation water ran down the glass doors of their refrigerated display cases. Behind the wet glass, gladioli, roses, birds of paradise, baby’s eath, and carnations in a dozen unnatural colors leaned in their containers on slatted wooden shelves. Tortured arrangements in dish gardens, ceramic bunnies, and turtles nestled in moss or perched on fake driftwood. I felt as if I was back in Virginia. A young girl behind the counter, painting her toenails, jerked her left foot off the counter when she saw us.
I said, “
Per favore, vorrei comprare un
pot
. . . pianta di narcissus . . .
white
. . . bianco
.”
The girl hobbled to the back room on one shod foot and one bare heel. She reappeared with a pot quite similar to the one Beth had yesterday. “
Piace questo
?” she asked, but I frowned and shook my head.
After several more tries and disappointed shakes of the head, although I was pretty sure everything I had seen had come off the same truck, I took out a piece of paper and wrote “Beth Hines” on it. “
Mi amico
. . .
amica
. . . yesterday . . .
ieri,
” I said. I considered pressing my fingers together and thrusting the back of my hand at the girl, thinking that perhaps Italian gestures would make it clearer. “
Vorrei vedere
the ticket . . .
vendita
. Beth Hines
vendita
.
Per favore
?”
The girl looked confused, but I assumed my most desperate expression and, eventually, she began thumbing through a stack of tickets on the work counter behind her. She pulled one out and placed it on the counter in front of Lettie and me. I flashed a look that I hoped conveyed absolute rapture and—holding one corner of the ticket in a vice-like grip, so that if the girl tried to take it away she would have to rip it—quickly committed the last eight digits to memory and prayed that Lettie could see the first eight. When I had burned them into my brain, I let my eyes wander up the page a little and discovered that the entire exercise had been unnecessary, because the ticket also listed the card’s expiration date and the name of the cardholder . . . Margaret Bauer.
Having made so much fuss, I felt obligated to actually buy. Lettie and I both smiled as we left with a pot of narcissus identical to any of the half-dozen pots I had just rejected. As I opened the door onto a blast of city heat, I turned and caught the salesgirl’s gesture to somebody in the back; forefinger pointed at temple and rotated clockwise. I imagine that means the same thing in Italian as it does in English.
“So Beth was right. Meg did send those flowers. What a great sister!” Lettie said sarcastically. “Sorry, I know it’s wrong to speak ill of the dead, but . . .”
“Is it possible that Beth was carrying Meg’s credit card in her fanny pack? That the Gypsy got hold of Meg’s card?” I asked.
“No chance. Meg wouldn’t have let anyone else have her card. She was as tight-fisted as an old Scrooge.”
Lettie and I wad back to the hotel the same way we had come—a route that took us past the Church of Santa Maria Novella and the fountain I now thought of the as the Fountain of the Bloody Knife. We passed a building with a glass-fronted bakery and a stairwell on one side, which I gathered led to an upstairs apartment—a deduction I based on the line of laundry that stretched from an upstairs window to the building next door. “Just a minute, Lettie.” I stopped and used my pocket phrasebook to jot “
un ammiratore segreto
” on the little card the girl had stuck in the potting soil. “That says, ‘from a secret admirer.’ Might brighten someone’s day, huh?” I ducked into the stairwell and left the flowers on the bottom step.
Lettie turned sideways, looked back toward the stairwell, and stepped on a cat. “Or it might start a big fight.”
Shirley Hostetter rounded the corner of our hotel as we strolled past the fountain. She glanced toward us but didn’t stop or speak. Shirley looked like she was in a parallel universe. Her face had assumed a vaguely haunted expression, as if she were about to embark on a voyage into the unknown, as if she had psyched herself into a state where she could walk on hot coals barefoot. She wore a beautiful green silk blouse and multi-colored skirt with a gold rope belt.
Lettie said, “Not your typical Shirley outfit, is it?”
“Not at all,” I replied. “It’s the first thing I’ve seen her in that isn’t ultra-conservative.”
“Not her usual tan and navy.”
“Very nice, though . . . obviously expensive,” I said. “The way that skirt moves, it’s not from a discount store. You know what? It looks like a skirt she’d normally wear with a simple shell top. And a blouse she would wear with tan or white slacks. It’s as if she decided to throw on all her bright stuff at the same time.”
“Maybe she needs it to keep up her spirits,” Lettie said. “This has got to be pure hell for her. Do you suppose she’s called her husband?”
“I imagine she has, but what can he do? Do you suppose he’s on his way here?”
“What good would that do?”
“None, probably, but if it were me, I’d want to be on the scene,” I said. “Come on. She’s headed toward the train station. Let’s follow her.”
“Your antenna’s beeping again?” Lettie stopped and looked at her watch. “I promised Beth I’d meet her at the hotel at eleven. Oh, well, I guess I have enough time. Let’s go.”
We lost sight of Shirley in the crowd outside the station. The majority of people seemed to be milling aimlessly about and a lot of them were young—teens in groups of three or four. I watched two teens, a boy and a girl, walk unobtrusively toward a man in an orange and blue T-shirt that said MIAMI DOLPHINS. The boy draped a newspaper over his own right arm. The girl moved directly in front of the man, talking rapidly and pointing to her wrist as if she needed to know the time. The Miami fan moved back slightly and looked at his watch as the boy asked something and gesticulated with his empty left hand. Apparently aware that something was wrong, the Miami fan dodgedsideways but was blocked by the girl. Beneath the newspaper, the boy’s right hand darted into the man’s hip pocket, but the man jumped back, chopped downward with both hands and yelled, “
Va via
!” The wallet skidded across the sidewalk, and the Miami Dolphins fan pounced on it a microsecond before several other hands closed in.
Lettie, wide-eyed and incredulous, said, “It’s like a shark feeding frenzy! It’s absolutely awful. I never . . .”
“Are you up for going inside? Looks like we can’t get in the door without running the gauntlet. See? Over there are some more of them—” I pointed “—and over there.” Approaching the main entrance, I felt like Tippi Hedren driving through the flock of devil-possessed seagulls in
The Birds
—one false move and I’d be pecked to death.
“Let’s stick together,” Lettie said, “and shoot through the middle.”
“Remember what that man said? ‘
Va via
.’I guess that means ‘Go away.’ I’ll try to remember that.” I checked to make sure the clasp on my shoulder bag was next to my body, locked my hand around the strap and forged ahead.