Juliet

IX.I

WE DROVE FOR AN ETERNITY along dark country roads, up hills and down hills, through valleys and sleeping villages. Janice never stopped to tell me where we were headed, and I didn’t care. It was enough that we were moving, and that I wouldn’t have to make any decisions for a while.

When we finally pulled into a bumpy driveway at the edge of a village, I was so tired I felt like curling up in the nearest flower bed and sleeping for a month. With nothing but the headlamp of the bike to guide us, we wound our way through a wilderness of shrubs and tall weeds before finally pulling up in front of a completely dark house.

Killing the engine, Janice took off her helmet, shook out her hair, and looked at me over her shoulder. “This is Mom’s house. Actually, now it’s ours.” She pulled a small flashlight out of her pocket. “There’s no power, so I got this.” Walking ahead of me up to a side door, she unlocked it and held it open for me. “Welcome home.”

A narrow hallway took us directly into a room that could only be a kitchen. Even in the darkness, the dirt and dust were tangible, and the air smelled musty, like wet clothes festering in a hamper. “I say we camp out here tonight,” Janice went on, lighting a few candles. “There’s no water, and everything is kinda dirty, but the upstairs is even worse. And the front door is totally stuck.”

“How on earth,” I said, briefly forgetting how tired and cold I was, “did you find this place?”

“It wasn’t easy.” Janice unzipped another pocket and took out a folded-up map. “After you and what’s-his-face took off yesterday, I went and bought this. Of course, try to find a street address in this country-” When I didn’t take the map to see for myself, she pointed the torch right at my face and shook her head. “Look at you, you’re a mess. And you know what? I knew this would happen! And I told you so! But you wouldn’t listen! It’s always like this-”

“Excuse me!” I glared at her, in no mood for her gloating. “You knew what, exactly, O crystal ball? That some esoteric cult would… drug me and-?”

Instead of shouting back at me as she was undoubtedly dying to do, Janice merely tapped my nose with the map and said, seriously, “I knew the Italian Stallion was bad news. And I told you so. Jules, I said, this guy-”

I pushed the map away and covered my face with my hands. “Please! I don’t want to talk about it. Right now.” When she kept pointing the flashlight at me, I reached out and pushed that away, too. “Stop it! I have a splitting headache!”

“Oh dear,” said Janice, in the sarcastic voice I knew so well. “Disaster narrowly avoided tonight in Tuscany… American virgitarian saved by sister… but suffers severe headache.”

“Yeah, go ahead,” I muttered, “just laugh at me. I deserve it.”

Expecting her to carry on, I was puzzled when she didn’t. Uncovering my face at last I found her staring at me, quizzically. Then her mouth fell open, and her eyes turned perfectly circular. “No! You slept with him, didn’t you?”

When there was no rebuttal, just tears, she sighed deeply and put her arms around me. “Well, you did say you would rather be screwed by him than by me.” She kissed me on the hair. “I hope it was worth it.”

CAMPING OUT ON moth-eaten coats and cushions on the kitchen floor, way too wound up to sleep, we lay for hours in the dwindling darkness, dissecting my escapade at Castello Salimbeni. Although Janice’s comments were peppered with the odd, knee-jerk buffoonery, we ended up agreeing on most things, except the issue of whether or not I should have-as Janice phrased it-made whoopee with the eagle boy.

“Well, that’s your opinion,” I had finally said, turning my back to her in an attempt at closing the subject, “but even if I had known everything I know now, I would still have done it.”

Janice’s only response had been a sour “Hallelujah! I’m glad you got something for our money.”

A little while later, still lying there with our backs turned to each other in stubborn silence, she suddenly sighed and muttered, “I miss Aunt Rose.”

Not really sure what she meant-these kinds of exclamations were completely unlike her-I very nearly made some snarky remark about her missing Aunt Rose because Aunt Rose would have agreed with her, and not with me, on the issue of me being a sap for accepting Eva Maria’s invitation. But instead, I heard myself simply saying, “Me, too.”

And that was it. Minutes later, her breathing slowed, and I knew she was asleep. As for me, alone with my thoughts at last, I wished more than ever that I could conk out just like her and fly away in a hazelnut shell, leaving behind my heavy heart.

THE NEXT MORNING-or rather, well past noon-we shared a bottle of water and a granola bar outside in the sun, sitting on the crumbly front step of the house, occasionally pinching each other to make sure we weren’t dreaming. Janice had had a hard time finding the house in the first place, she told me, and had it not been for friendly locals pointing her in the right direction, she might never have noticed the sleeping beauty of a building hiding in the wilderness that was once a driveway and front yard.

“I had a heck of a time just opening the gate,” she told me. “It was rusted shut. To say nothing of the door. I can’t believe that a house can sit like this, completely empty, for twenty years, without anybody moving in or taking over the property.”

“It’s Italy,” I said, shrugging. “Twenty years is nothing. Age is not an issue here. How can it be, when you’re surrounded by immortal spirits? We’re just lucky they let us hang around for a while, pretending we belong here.”

Janice snorted. “I bet immortality sucks. That’s why they like to play with juicy little mortals”-she grinned and ran her tongue suggestively along her upper lip-“like you.”

Seeing that I still couldn’t laugh, her smile became more sympathetic, almost genuine. “Look at you, you got away! Imagine what would have happened if they had caught you. They would have-I don’t know-” Even Janice had a hard time imagining the horror I would have been put through. “Just be happy your ol’ sis found you in time.”

Seeing her hopeful expression, I threw my arms around her and gave her a squeeze. “I am! Trust me. I just don’t understand-why did you come? It’s a hell of a drive to Castello Salimbeni from here. Why didn’t you just let me-”

Janice looked at me with raised eyebrows. “Are you kidding me? Those rat-bastards stole our book! It’s payback time! If you hadn’t come running out the driveway the way you did, ass on fire, I would have broken in and searched the whole goddamn castello.”

“Well, it’s your lucky day!” I got up and went into the kitchen to grab my overnight bag. “Voilà!” I threw the bag at Janice’s feet. “Don’t say I wasn’t working for the team.”

“You’re kidding!” She unzipped the bag eagerly, and started rifling through it. But after only a few seconds she recoiled in disgust. “Eew! What the hell is this?”

We both stared at her hands. They were smeared in blood or something very like it. “Jesus, Jules!” gasped Janice. “Did you murder someone? Eek! What is this?” She smelled her hands with great apprehension. “It’s blood, all right. Please don’t tell me it’s yours, because if it is, I’m gonna go back right now and turn that guy into a piece of modern art!”

For some reason, her belligerent grimace made me laugh, maybe because I was still so unused to her standing up for me like this.

“There we go!” she said, forgetting her anger as soon as she saw me smiling at last. “You had me scared there for a while. Don’t ever do that again.”

Together, we took my bag and turned it upside down. Out tumbled my clothes, as well as the volume of Romeo and Juliet, which had-fortunately-not suffered too much damage. The mysterious green vial, however, had been completely crushed, probably when I threw the bag over the gate during my escape.

“What is this?” Janice picked up a piece of the shattered glass and turned it over in her hand.

“That’s the vial,” I said, “that I told you about; the one Umberto gave to Alessandro, and which really pissed him off.”

“Huh.” Janice wiped her hands on the grass. “Well, at least now we know what was in it. Blood. Go figure. Maybe you were right and they were really all vampires. Maybe this was some kind of mid-morning snack-”

We sat for a moment, pondering the possibilities. At one point I gathered up the cencio and looked at it with regret. “Such a shame. How do you get blood off old silk?”

Janice picked up a corner, and we held out the cencio between us, looking at the damage. Admittedly, the vial was not the sole culprit, but I knew better than to tell her that.

“Holy Mary, Mother of God!” said Janice suddenly. “That’s the whole point: You don’t get the blood out. This is exactly what they wanted the cencio to look like. Don’t you see?”

She stared at me eagerly, but I must have looked blank. “It’s just like the old days,” she explained, “when the women would inspect the bridal sheet on the morning after the wedding! And I’ll bet you a kangaroo”-she picked up a couple pieces of the broken vial, including the cork stopper-“this is-or was-what we in the matchmaking community refer to as an insta-virgin. Not just blood, but blood mixed with other stuff. It’s a science, believe me.”

Seeing my expression, Janice burst out laughing. “Oh yes, it’s still going on. You don’t believe me? You think people only looked at sheets in the Middle Ages? Wrong! Lest we forget, some cultures still live in the Middle Ages. Think about it: If you’re going back to The-Middle-of-Nowherestan to be married off to some goatherd cousin, but-oops-you’ve already been fooling around with Tom, Harry, and Dick… what do you do? Chances are, your goatherd groom plus in-laws are not gonna be happy that someone else ate the cheese. Solution: You can get fixed in a private clinic. Get everything reinstalled and go through the whole goddamn thing once more, just to please the audience. Or you can simply bring a sneaky little bottle of this to the party. Much cheaper.”

“That,” I protested, “is so far out-”

“You know what I think?” Janice went on, eyes gleaming. “I think they set you up big-time. I think they drugged you-or at least tried to-and were hoping you would be totally out after tripping the light fantastic with Friar Lorenzo and the dream team, so that they could go ahead and fish out the cencio and smear it with this stuff, making it look like good old Romeo had been driving the love-bus into cherry-town.”

I winced, but Janice didn’t seem to notice. “The irony is, of course,” she continued, too absorbed in her own lewd logic to notice my extreme discomfort with the subject and her choice of words, “that they could have saved themselves the whole friggin’ trouble. ’Cause you two went ahead and stuffed the cannelloni anyway. Just like Romeo and Juliet. Shazam! From the ballroom to the balcony to the bed in fifty pages. Tell me, were you trying to break their record?”

She looked at me enthusiastically, clearly hoping for a pat on the head and a cookie for being such a clever girl.

“Is it humanly possible,” I moaned, “to be any more crass than you?”

Janice grinned as if this was the highest praise possible. “Probably not. If it’s poetry you want, crawl back to your bird man.”

I leaned back against the door frame and closed my eyes. Every time Janice referred to Alessandro, even in her unspeakably vulgar way, I had little flashbacks to the night before-some painful, some not-and they kept distracting me from present reality. But if I asked her to stop, she would most certainly do the exact opposite.

“What I don’t understand,” I said, determined to have us both move on and catch up with the big picture, “is why they had the vial in the first place. I mean, if they really wanted to end the curse on the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis, then presumably the last thing they would do would be to fake Romeo and Giulietta’s wedding night. Did they actually think they could fool the Virgin Mary?”

Janice pursed her lips. “You’re right. It doesn’t make sense.”

“As far as I can see,” I went on, “the only one who got fooled-apart from me-was Friar Lorenzo. Or rather, he would have been fooled, if they had used the stuff in the vial.”

“But why the hell would they want to dupe Friar Lorenzo?” Janice threw up her hands. “He’s just an old relic. Unless”-she looked at me, eyebrows raised-“Friar Lorenzo has access to something that they don’t. Something important. Something they want. Such as-?”

I snapped upright. “Romeo and Giulietta’s grave?”

We stared at each other. “I think,” said Janice, nodding slowly, “that’s the connection right there. When we talked about it that night at Maestro Lippi’s, I thought you were crazy. But maybe you’re right. Maybe part of the whole undo-your-sins thing involves the actual grave and the actual statue. How about this… after making sure Romeo and Giulietta finally get together, the Tolomeis and the Salimbenis have to go to the grave and kneel before the statue?”

“But the curse said kneel before the Virgin.”

“So?” Janice shrugged. “Obviously the statue is somewhere close to a statue of the Virgin Mary-the problem is that they don’t know the exact location. Only Friar Lorenzo does. And that’s why they need him.”

We sat for a while in silence, running through the math.

“You know,” I eventually said, fondling the cencio, “I don’t think he knew.”

“Who?”

I glanced at her, heat rising in my cheeks. “You know… him.”

“Oh, come on, Jules!” moaned Janice. “Stop defending the creep. You saw him with Umberto, and”-she tried to soften the edge in her voice, but this was new to her, and she wasn’t very good at it-“he did chase you out the driveway and tell you to give him the book. Of course he knew.”

“But if you are right,” I said, feeling an absurd urge to push back and defend Alessandro, “about all this, then he would have followed the plan and not-you know.”

“Engaged in physical relations?” Janice suggested primly.

“Exactly,” I nodded. “Plus, he would not have been so surprised when Umberto gave him the vial. In fact, he would already have had the vial.”

“Honey!” Janice looked at me over the rim of imaginary glasses, “he broke into your hotel room, he lied to you, and he stole Mom’s book and gave it to Umberto. The guy is scum. And I don’t care if he has all the balls and whistles and knows how to use them, he’s still-excuse my French-a shyster. And as for your oh-so-friendly mobster queen-”

“Speaking of lying to me and breaking into my hotel room,” I said, staring right back at her, “why did you tell me he had trashed my hotel room when it was you all along?”

Janice gasped. “What?”

“Are you going to deny it?” I went on. “That you broke into my room and blamed Alessandro?”

“Hey!” she cried. “He broke in, too, okay! I am your sister! I have a right to know what’s going on-” She stopped herself and looked sheepish. “How did you know?”

“Because he saw you. He thought you were me, crawling down from my own balcony.”

“He thought-?” Janice gaped in disbelief. “Now I’m insulted! Honestly!”

“Janice,” I sighed, frustrated with her for sliding right back into her old sassiness, pulling me along. “You lied to me. Why? After everything that has happened, I would totally understand if you had broken into my room. You thought I was scamming you out of a fortune.”

“Really?” Janice looked at me with budding hope.

I shrugged. “Why don’t we try honesty for a change?”

Swift recoveries were my sister’s specialty. “Excellent,” she smirked, “honesty it is. And now, if you don’t mind”-she wiggled her eyebrows-“I have a few more questions about last night.”

AFTER GETTING SOME provisions from the village store, we spent the rest of the afternoon poking around in the house trying to recognize our childhood things. But it didn’t help that everything was covered in dust and mold, that every piece of textile had holes from some kind of animal, and that there was mouse shit in every possible-and impossible-crevice. Upstairs, the cobwebs were as thick as shower curtains, and when we opened the second-floor shutters to let in some light, more than half of them fell right off their hinges.

“Whoops!” said Janice when a shutter came crashing down on the front step, two feet from the Ducati. “I guess it’s time to date a carpenter.”

“How about a plumber?” I proposed, peeling spiderwebs from my hair. “Or an electrician?”

“You date the electrician,” she shot back. “You need some wiring done.”

The high point came when we discovered the wobbly chess table, hidden in a corner behind a mangy sofa.

“I told you, didn’t I?” Janice beamed, rocking it gently, just to make sure. “It was right here all along.”

By sunset, we had made so much progress mucking out that we decided to move our camp upstairs to what had once been an office. Sitting across from each other at an old writing desk, we had a candlelit dinner consisting of bread, cheese, and red wine, while we tried to figure out what to do next. Neither of us had any desire to return to Siena just yet, but at the same time, we both knew that our current situation was not sustainable. In order to get the house back in some kind of livable shape, we would need to invest a lot of time and money in red tape and handymen, and even if we succeeded, how would we live? We would be like fugitives, digging ourselves further and further into debt, and we would always be wondering when our past would catch up with us.

“The way I see it,” said Janice, pouring more wine, “we either stay here-which we can’t-or we go back to the States-which would be pathetic-or we go treasure hunting and see what happens.”

“I think you’re forgetting that the book in itself is useless,” I pointed out. “We need Mom’s sketchbook to figure out the secret code.”

“Which is precisely,” said Janice, reaching into her handbag, “why I brought it. Ta-daa!” She put the sketchbook on the desk in front of me. “Any further questions?”

I laughed out loud. “You know, I think I love you.”

Janice worked hard not to smile. “Easy now. We don’t want you to pull something.”

Once we had the two books side by side, it did not take us long to crack the code, which was, in fact, not even really a code, merely a cunningly hidden list of page, line, and word numbers. While Janice read out the numbers scribbled in the margins of the sketchbook, I leafed through the volume of Romeo and Juliet and read out the bits and pieces of the message our mother had wanted us to find. It went like this:

MY LOVE

THIS PRECIOUS BOOK

LOCKS IN THE GOLDEN STORY

OF

THE DEAREST

STONE

AS FAR AS THE VAST SHORE WASH’D WITH THE FARTHEST SEA

I SHOULD ADVENTURE FOR SUCH MERCHANDISE

GO WITH

ROMEO’S

GHOSTLY CONFESSOR

SACRIFIC’D SOME HOUR BEFORE HIS TIME

SEARCH, SEEK

WITH INSTRUMENTS

FIT TO OPEN THESE DEAD MEN’S TOMBS

IT NEEDS MUST BE BY STEALTH

HERE LIES JULIET

LIKE A POOR PRISONER

MANY HUNDRED YEARS

UNDER

QUEEN

MARIA

WHERE

LITTLE STARS

MAKE THE FACE OF HEAVEN SO FINE

GET THEE HENCE TO

SAINT

MARIA

LADDER

AMONG A SISTERHOOD OF HOLY NUNS

A HOUSE WHERE THE INFECTIOUS PESTILENCE DID REIGN

SEAL’D UP THE DOORS

MISTRESS

SAINT

GOOSE

VISITING THE SICK

CHAMBER

BED

THIS HOLY SHRINE

IS

THE STONY ENTRANCE

TO THE

ANCIENT VAULT

O LET US HENCE

GET ME AN IRON CROW

AWAY WITH THE

CROSS

AND FOOT IT GIRLS!

When we had come to the end of the long message, we sat back and looked at each other in bewilderment, our initial enthusiasm on hold.

“Okay, so I have two questions,” said Janice. “One: Why the hell didn’t we do this before? And two: What was Mom smoking?” She glared at me and reached out for her wineglass. “Sure, I get that she hid her secret code in ‘this precious book,’ and that it is somehow a treasure map to find Juliet’s grave and ‘the dearest stone,’ but… where are we supposed to go digging? What’s up with the pestilence and the crowbar?”

“I have a feeling,” I said, leafing back and forth to reread a few passages, “that she is talking about the Siena Cathedral. ‘Queen Maria’… that can only mean the Virgin Mary. And the bit about the little stars making the face of heaven so fine sounds to me like the inside of the cathedral dome. It is painted blue with little golden stars on it.” I looked up at her, suddenly excited. “Suppose that’s where the grave is? Remember, Maestro Lippi said that Salimbeni buried Romeo and Giulietta in a ‘most holy place’; what could be more holy than a cathedral?”

“Makes sense to me,” agreed Janice, “but what about the whole pestilence thing and the ‘sisterhood of holy nuns’? That doesn’t sound like it has anything to do with the cathedral.”

“‘Saint Maria, ladder’-” I mumbled, riffling through the book once more, “‘a house where the infectious pestilence did reign… seal’d up the doors… mistress saint… goose… visiting the sick’… and blah-blah-blah.” I let the book fall shut and leaned back on the chair, trying to remember the story Alessandro had told me about Comandante Marescotti and the Plague. “Okay, I know it sounds crazy, but”-I hesitated and looked at Janice, whose eyes were wide and full of faith in my riddle-solving skills-“during the bubonic plague, which was only a few years after Romeo and Giulietta died, they had so many corpses lying around that they couldn’t bury them all. So, in Santa Maria della Scala-I think scala means ladder-the enormous hospital facing the cathedral, where ‘a sisterhood of holy nuns’ took care of the sick during the ‘infectious pestilence’… well, they simply stuffed the dead into a wall and sealed it off.”

Janice made a face. “Eek.”

“So,” I went on, “it seems to me that we’re looking for a ‘chamber’ with a ‘bed’ inside that hospital, Santa Maria della Scala-”

“… in which slept the ‘mistress’ of the ‘saint’ of geese,” proposed Janice. “Whoever he is.”

“Or,” I said, “the ‘mistress saint’ of Siena, born in the contrada of the ‘goose,’ Saint Catherine-”

Janice whistled. “Go, girl!”

“… who, incidentally, had a bedroom in Santa Maria della Scala, where she slept when she worked late hours ‘visiting the sick.’ Don’t you remember? It was in the story Maestro Lippi read to us. I’ll bet you a sapphire and an emerald that this is where we’ll find the ‘stony entrance to the ancient vault.’”

“Whoa, wait!” said Janice. “Now I’m confused. First, it’s the cathedral, then it’s Saint Catherine’s room at the hospital, but now it’s an ‘ancient vault’? Which is it?”

I pondered the question for a moment, trying to recall the voice of the sensationalist British tour guide I had overheard in the Siena Cathedral a few days earlier. “Apparently,” I finally said, “in the Middle Ages there used to be a crypt underneath the cathedral. But it disappeared during the time of the Plague, and they’ve never been able to find it since. Of course, it’s hard for the archaeologists to do anything around here, since all the buildings are protected. Anyway, some people think it’s just a legend-”

“I don’t!” said Janice, jumping at the idea. “This has to be it. Romeo and Giulietta are buried in the crypt underneath the cathedral. It makes sense. If you were Salimbeni, isn’t that exactly where you would have put the shrine? And since the whole place-I assume-is consecrated to the Virgin Mary… Voilà!”

“Voilà what?”

Janice held out her arms as if she was going to bless me. “If you kneel in the cathedral crypt, you ‘kneel before the Virgin,’ just like the curse says! Don’t you see? It has to be the place!”

“But if that’s the case,” I said, “we’ll need to do a lot of digging to get there. People have been looking everywhere for this crypt.”

“Not,” said Janice, pushing the book towards me again, “if Mom has found a secret entrance from that old hospital, Santa Maria della Scala. Read it again, I’m sure I’m right.”

We went through the message once more, and this time, the whole thing suddenly made sense. Yes, we were definitely talking about an ‘ancient vault’ underneath the cathedral, and yes, the ‘stony entrance’ was to be found in Saint Catherine’s room at Santa Maria della Scala, right across the piazza from the church.

“Holy crap!” Janice sat back, overwhelmed. “If it’s this easy, then why didn’t Mom go tomb raiding herself?”

Just then, one of our candle stumps extinguished itself with a small puff, and although we still had other candles left, the shadows of the room suddenly seemed to close in on us from all sides.

“She knew she was in danger,” I replied, my voice oddly hollow in the darkness, “and that’s why she did what she did, and put the code in the book, the book in the box, and the box in the bank.”

“So,” said Janice, trying to hit a bushy-tailed note, “now that we’ve solved the riddle, what’s preventing us from-”

“Breaking into a protected building and wrecking Saint Catherine’s cell with a crowbar?” I made a face. “Gee, I don’t know!”

“Seriously. It’s what Mom would want us to do. Isn’t it?”

“It’s not that simple.” I poked at the book, trying to remember the exact words in the message. “Mom tells us to ‘go with Romeo’s ghostly confessor… sacrificed before his time.’ Who is that? That’s Friar Lorenzo. Obviously not the real one, but maybe his new… incarnation. And I bet that means we were right: The old guy knows something about the location of the crypt and the grave-something crucial, which even Mom couldn’t figure out.”

“So, what are you suggesting?” Janice wanted to know. “That we kidnap Friar Lorenzo and interrogate him under a hundred-watt bulb? Look, maybe you got it wrong. Let’s do this one more time, separately, and see if we get the same result-” She began opening the drawers in the desk one by one. “Come on! There’s gotta be some pens kicking around here somewhere!… Wait! Hang on!” She stuck her whole head into the bottom drawer, struggling to liberate something that was trapped in the woodwork. When she finally got it loose, she sat up triumphantly, her hair tumbling over her face. “Will you look at that! A letter!”

But it was not a letter. It was a blank envelope full of photographs.

BY THE TIME we had finished looking at Mom’s photographs, Janice declared that we needed at least one more bottle of vino to get through the night without going totally insane. While she went downstairs to get it, I turned to the photos again, putting them out on the desk side by side, my hands still shaking from the shock, hoping I could somehow make them tell a different story.

But there could only be one interpretation of Mom’s exploits in Italy; no matter how we sliced it, the main characters and the conclusion remained the same: Diane Lloyd had gone to Italy, had started working for Professor Tolomei, had met a young playboy in a yellow Ferrari, had become pregnant, had married Professor Tolomei, had given birth to twin girls, had survived a house fire that had killed her elderly husband, and had proceeded to hook up once again with the young playboy, who, in every single photo, looked so happy with the twins-that is, with us-that we both agreed he must be our real father.

That playboy was Umberto.

“This is so unreal!” wheezed Janice, returning with bottle and corkscrew. “All these years. Pretending to be a butler and never saying a word. It’s too friggin’ weird.”

“Although,” I said, picking up one of the photos of him with us, “he always was our dad. Even if we didn’t call him that. He was always-” But I couldn’t go on.

Only now did I look up and see that Janice was crying, too, although she was wiping away her tears angrily, not wanting Umberto to have that satisfaction. “What a scumbag!” she said. “Forcing us to live his lie all these years. And now suddenly-” She broke off with a grunt, as the wine cork broke in half.

“Well,” I said, “at least it explains why he knew about the golden statue. He obviously got all that from Mom. And if they really were… you know, together, he must have known about the box of papers in the bank as well. Which explains why he would write a fake letter to me from Aunt Rose, telling me to go to Siena and speak to Presidente Maconi in Palazzo Tolomei in the first place. He obviously got that name from Mom.”

“But all this time!” Janice spilled some wine on the table as she hurriedly filled up our glasses, and a few drops fell on the photos. “Why didn’t he do it years ago? Why didn’t he explain all this to Aunt Rose while she was still alive-?”

“Yeah right!” I quickly wiped the wine from the photos. “Of course he couldn’t tell her the truth. She would have called the police right away.” Pretending to be Umberto, I said in a deep voice, “By the way, Rosie-doll, my real name is Luciano Salimbeni-yes, the man who killed Diane and who is wanted by the Italian authorities. If you had ever bothered to visit Diane in Italy-bless her heart-you’d have met me a hundred times.”

“But what a life!” Janice interjected. “Look at this-” She pointed at the photos of Umberto and the Ferrari, parked on some scenic spot overlooking a Tuscan valley and smiling into the camera with the eyes of a lover. “He had it all. And then… he becomes a servant in Aunt Rose’s house.”

“Mind you,” I said, “he was a fugitive. Aless-someone told me he was one of the most wanted criminals in Italy. Lucky for him he wasn’t in jail. Or dead. At least, working for Aunt Rose, he could watch us growing up in some kind of freedom.”

“I still don’t believe it!” Janice shook her head dismissively. “Yes, Mom is pregnant in her wedding photo, but that happens to a lot of women. And it doesn’t necessarily mean that the groom is not the father.”

“Jan!” I pushed a few of the wedding photos towards her. “Professor Tolomei was old enough to be her grandfather. Put yourself in Mom’s shoes for a second.” Seeing that she was determined to disagree with me, I grabbed her by the arm and pulled her closer. “Come on, it’s the only explanation. Look at him-” I picked up one of many photos of Umberto lying on a blanket in the grass with Janice and me crawling all over him. “He loves us.” As soon as I said the words, I felt a lump in my throat and had to swallow to keep down the tears. “Crap!” I whimpered, “I don’t think I can take much more of this.”

We sat for a moment in unhappy silence. Then Janice put down her wineglass and picked up a group photo taken in front of Castello Salimbeni. “So,” she said, at last, “does this mean your mobster queen is our… grandmother?” The photo showed Eva Maria juggling a large hat and two small dogs on a leash, Mom looking efficient with white slacks and a clipboard, Professor Tolomei frowning and saying something to the photographer, and a young Umberto off to a side, leaning against his Ferrari, arms crossed. “Whatever the hell it means,” she went on, before I could answer, “I hope I’ll never meet him again.”

We probably should have seen it coming, but didn’t. Too busy unraveling the knot that our lives had become, we had forgotten to pay attention to things that go bump in the night, or even to sit back and use our common sense for a moment.

Not until a voice spoke to us from the door to the office did we realize how moronic we had been, seeking refuge in Mom’s house.

“What a nice little family reunion,” said Umberto, stepping into the room ahead of two other men I’d never seen before. “Sorry to keep you waiting.”

“Umberto!” I exclaimed, jumping from the chair. “What on earth-”

“Julie! No!” Janice grabbed my arm and pulled me back down, her face contorted with fear.

Only now did I see it. Umberto’s hands were tied in the back, and one of the men was holding a gun to his head.

“My friend Cocco here,” said Umberto, able to maintain his cool despite the muzzle burrowing into his neck, “would like to know if you ladies are going to be of use to him, or not.”