"Find anything interesting?" Frank said, joining us in the room. In that place, three was definitely a crowd.
Cybil handed him the slip of paper. "What's Calvaria mean?"
"Beats me," Frank said.
"I'm trying to remember," I said. "It sounds familiar. Isn't Calvaria Latin for something?"
"Latin?" Cybil said. "How would I know?"
"Skull," I said. "Calvaria is Latin for skull."
"The skull club?" Cybil said. "Weird."
"She was a very strange woman, I'm afraid," Frank said, crumpling the paper and looking about for a wastebasket. "Very strange. Nice desk, though," he added, opening the drawers.
"See the little shelves," Cybil said. "Aren't they neat?"
"They are," I said, as Frank wandered off. "In any event, yes, I think it would be a very nice idea to save the desk for the girls."
"I'll talk to Brad, that's Anna's ex—did you see him in the church?—about coming to get it."
"It's nice of you to take such an interest," I said.
"Nice? Anna was a good friend, you know. She maybe didn't go out of the apartment, but she wasn't, like, bonkers, or anything. Raving, I mean, or incoherent. She just wouldn't go outside, that's all. She read, she took Internet courses, she watched TV. She didn't turn into a vegetable. She was even working on her master's thesis from home. She did the course work, but got married and had kids before she got around to doing the thesis. She was really trying to get better, maybe get her husband and kids back."
"What happened to the little boy, do you know?" I said.
"He fell off an apartment balcony. Several floors. He was visiting his other grandmother with his sisters. I guess the three of them were too much for her. The baby was crying and the grandmother went to look after her, and the little guy just went up and over. It shouldn't have happened, but it did.
"I keep thinking about her being out on that bridge. All that open space. Maybe she just couldn't stand it, or maybe because the little guy fell, she just sort of fell, too. I don't know. What I do know is that I should have gone home with her instead of letting her go off by herself like that. She said she didn't want me to come with her, but I should have insisted. She might still be alive now, wouldn't she?"
It was a good question, of course, but a futile one. "Don't think about that. She wasn't bonkers, as you say, but she wasn't well, either. It is tragic, but not your fault."
"I'm trying for my own sanity to believe that," Cybil said. "I really am." Me too, I thought. Me too.
We stood around a few minutes outside the apartment building until Grace suggested we all go for a drink. Frank declined, and after some debate it was determined we'd go back to the bar where we'd last seen Anna. Everybody ordered a Scotch except me. I was still on a mineral water regimen.
"Good idea," Grace said as I ordered.
"Look, I know I behaved badly the other night," I said to the group. "But I don't usually drink that much. In fact, I don't actually remember drinking too much."
"You always had a drink in your hand when I saw you," Grace said.
"We're not here to talk about that," Diana said. "We have to put our plan into operation. We're counting on you, Lara."
"What plan?" I said.
"This from the woman who doesn't actually remember drinking too much," Grace said, rather sarcastically.
"Our plan to bring down the high and mighty Karoly Molnar, of course," Diana said.
"By stealing the Venus. I thought someone had tried that already."
"We'll need a little more time to put the material together, now that I'm no longer employed there," she said, ignoring my comment.
"You're not?" Cybil said.
"No, I'm not. As Lara apparently knows, I got sacked at the party."
"No!" Morgan said. "Why?"
"I was fired on an entirely trumped-up charge of stealing from the till. Please be assured I did no such thing. Now to get back to the plan."
"You must have done something," Grace said.
"I believe Dr. Molnar has figured out what I was up to, which will make our plan more difficult, but not impossible, to carry out."
"You mean he knew what you were researching," Cybil said.
"That's the only explanation I can come up with," Diana said.
"The worm," Morgan said. "Is everybody thinking what I'm thinking?"
"Pretty much," Grace said. The others nodded.
"What are we thinking?" I said.
"That Anna killed herself because of something Karoly said to her at the party, of course," Cybil said.
"Isn't that a bit of a stretch?" I said, but in my mind I was back to the bridge and the overturned stone.
"You were there. You saw how she went right up to him at the bar."
"You can't actually say that," I said. "She went up to a large group of people at the bar, and I for one couldn't tell which of them she was shouting at."
"Don't tell me you're still infatuated with him," Grace said.
"Hardly," I said. "And even if I had been, that night would have cured me. He didn't even know me."
"I'm afraid you told us that already—several times in fact—in the bar afterwards," Diana said.
"I did?"
Diana made a face at the others. "The plan?" she said. She'd pulled a copy of the previous day's newspaper and was tapping the front page of the arts section, which prominently featured Karoly and his Magyar Venus. As Frank had pointed out the evening of the unveiling, Karoly could charm the birds out of the trees, and the interviewer, a woman, was obviously besotted. She made it sound as if Toronto were singularly blessed to have such a dynamic individual in our midst. There was, of course, a great deal about how he'd tracked down the Venus and how extraordinarily perceptive the Cottinghams had been in snaring both Karoly and by extension the artifact.
"Would somebody please tell me what this plan is?" I said. Were they going to make me beg?
"Okay, let's take it from the top, as they say," Diana said. "Several of us have reasons to dislike, dare I say loathe, dear old Charlie. I have already mentioned mine."
"That scum," Cybil said. "I just know he said something awful to Anna. I just know he did."
"If it makes you feel any better, Lara, he didn't seem to remember much about me when I got the assignment at the museum, either," Diana said. "I reminded him, though. I suppose that's what put him on his guard. I was responsible for his expense accounts, and I found something there that would probably get him fired. That's why I got sacked. I leave it to the others to decide whether they want to talk about their reasons for disliking the man enough to take part in this endeavor, but in a nutshell, the plan is as follows: we, with your help, Lara, are going to prove that the Magyar Venus is a fake."
"How are we going to do that?" I said.
"I don't know. That's what you're going to tell us. We'll have to check the whatever you call that thing, you know, who owned it when, who sold it to whom."
"Provenance?"
"Provenance, right. We'll need to establish that the Venus's provenance is a fabrication. Dr. Molnar's reputation will be in tatters, something I for one will enjoy."
"Hold it!" I said. "I don't much like Charlie these days either, but what makes you think it's a fake?"
"The Piper diaries, of course. Have you read them?"