She was taken aback by his brusque tone. “Of course. I’m writing my thesis on nineteenth-century women poets. I lead a discussion section for a summer poetry lecture course, and my graduate seminar focused on Christina Rossetti.”
“Ah.” There was a thoughtful pause. “I’m supervising the creation of a computer game,” he went on. “A mystery quest, with clues encoded in maps, books, poems, etc. I need a writer for the texts.”
“Sounds good,” Nell said. “The flyer says flexible hours. How flexible?”
“I don’t know yet.” He sounded irritated. “I’ve never done this before. It’s actually my brother’s project. I have meetings all afternoon, so come to the office tomorrow at six, and I’ll interview you.”
His master-and-commander tone pissed her off. “I’m free at seven-thirty,” she said crisply, although she could have probably done six, with a little switching and trading of shift hours. But phooey on him.
“That’ll work. Tomorrow, then. My receptionist will give you directions.”
Nell wrote down the directions. Strange, but interesting, even if Duncan seemed bossy and arrogant. And tomorrow was Friday. She had nothing better to do after her shift than to go home and jump at the shadows. She shoved a pile of midterm essays into her bag. That’d keep her too busy to work herself into a paranoid frenzy over every sound. Or climb the walls with futile lust, which was almost as bad. No, worse.
Nell armed the infrared alarm as soon as she went into her apartment. Any breach of the door or window would be instantly reported to the police. It made her feel safer as she heated and ate a dinner of leftovers. She cooked when Vivi was there, but didn’t bother when she was alone.
She was nibbling a stale Oreo that she’d found in the cookie stash when the ringing phone made her practically bounce off the ceiling. She had to concentrate hard to slow her breathing and control the shake in her voice as she picked it up. “Hello?”
“It’s just me,” said her sister Nancy.
Nell sank onto the futon couch, knees trembling. “Oh. Great. How are things? Viv told me you guys were still in Denver.”
“We are, with Liam’s dad, and his dad’s lady friend. I have news. Remember when Liam’s friend Charlie Witt told me about that eighty-year-old guy with the designer clothes? The one they found in Jamaica, with his throat snapped?”
“The one they called the clotheshorse? That was just after Lucia died, right?”
“Right. The time of death they determined was roughly the same time that Lucia died.”
Nell doubled over, pressing her hand against the nervous twisting in her stomach. “So? What about him?”
“Well, after what happened to me in Boston, Detective Lanaghan decided to take this a little more seriously.” Nancy’s voice had an edge. “She had his prints compared to the ones found on the coffee cup in Lucia’s apartment. As I suggested they do weeks ago.”
“And they match?” Nell asked.
“They match,” Nancy echoed quietly. “She just called me.”
The sisters were silent. Nell forced out a shaky sigh. “It’s Marco,” she said, with absolute conviction. “Lucia’s long-lost husband.”
“Yeah,” Nancy said. “It must be. He came to find her and got murdered that same night. By the same person who killed Lucia.”
Nell squeezed her eyes shut, and pressed her hand against her forehead. It felt clammy. “That poor old guy. How awful.”
“At least they’re together now,” Nancy pointed out, her voice soft. “I think, probably…that she loved him. To the very end.”
“You could look at it that way,” Nell agreed. “If you believed in love and eternity and all that good stuff that’s dusted with sparkly haze.”
“And you don’t?”
“Not right now,” she admitted, her voice cracking. “You’re madly in love, Nance. You’ve got sparkly haze happening by the bucketful. But in the real world, it’s actually a pretty rare commodity.”
Nancy paused for a long, painful moment. “I’m sorry,” she whispered. “I was just trying to cheer you up.”
Nell felt guilty. Scrooging on her poor sister, whose only crime was in getting lucky in love. “Don’t be,” she said. “I’m glad for you. Really. So did you tell Detective Lanaghan about the letter in the picture frame?”
“Yes, and she said it’s a great lead, but since all we have is the guy’s first name and the name of his town, it’s going to take a while. She has to contact the local police in Italy, find an interpreter, et cetera. So I started to think, in the meantime…since you speak Italian…”
“You want me to call the cops there?”
“Would you?” Nancy asked eagerly. “Just to facilitate things?”
Nancy looked up at the clock, calculating time zones. “I can do it tomorrow morning, before I leave for work,” she said.
The sisters went through their now obsessive routine of admonishing each other to be careful. When they finally hung up, Nell stared at the wall for a long time, her hand pressed against her mouth.
She was grateful for a job to do. Something that might help, a move that might actually yield some answers. But whatever answers she might find were not going to be comforting. This thing kept getting scarier and scarier. But dwelling on that fact would not help matters.
Nothing to do now but get her ass busy.
A thick sheaf of essays later, she rubbed her eyes, stretched, and flopped onto her bed with a groan. The surface of her bed was covered with books. There was just a narrow strip the size of her body to sleep in. It made her smile, grimly. What a perfect metaphor for her life. She could never take a lover. Where would she put him? Between her complete Riverside Shakespeare and her twenty-pound annotated Dante’s Divine Comedy?
The black-haired man popped into her mind, predictably enough. He was her default mode, whenever she wanted to avoid an uncomfortable thought. She pondered him, wondering why she was so pathetically obsessed with the man. It was weird. She wasn’t the type.
Probably because he was so clueless. Emotionally inaccessible to the point of being practically autistic. What could be safer for a coward like herself? She knew nothing about the guy, except that he had a stunning capacity for concentration, and he really, really liked strip steak. And thinking about him was more fun than thinking about that poor old guy, still lying in the morgue in Jamaica. Nameless, unclaimed, unmourned. The cold, stark loneliness of it made her roll over onto her belly and shove her hot face against the pillow.
Maybe tomorrow, she could put a name to the old man who may or may not have been Lucia’s husband. Recognition, the dignity of a name. The best she could hope for.
Her eyes started to close, and sometime later, she woke from a dream of the black-haired man. In her dream, weirdly enough, he was smiling at her. A really beautiful smile. His face practically shone.
She’d never seen the guy smile in real life. As she drifted to sleep again, she wondered if he even knew how.
“What is she doing now?”
The sharp tone, loaded with tension and implied criticism, made John Esposito flex his fingers until his knuckles popped. Bloody, murderous fantasies flashed through his mind, red tinged and wet.
He carefully did not turn his head from the monitor, and kept his voice very flat. “She appears to be reading papers,” he said.
“Reading? Reading what papers?” Ulf Haupt came hobbling over, his cane tap-tap-tapping against the floor. He leaned down to peer over John’s shoulder. John had a fantasy of jabbing an elbow into the decrepit asshole’s gut. Hard enough to cause internal hemorrhaging.
“Students’ essays,” he said, with grim patience. “She’s a teacher.”
“Essays?” Haupt leaned lower, his head bobbing far too close to John’s face, and he leaned away to keep his space.
“Keep watching,” Haupt snapped. “She might get another phone call. You must let nothing slip through the cracks. Nothing. Tomorrow, she will make that call to Italy, and identify Barbieri’s corpse. This is already a disaster, John. A disgrace.”