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  She virtually led him out the door.

  I said, “I’ll stay with Tessa,” but I’m sure they didn’t hear me. I didn’t shut the door the whole way because we needed the cross draft, but I wanted to keep the crowd out. I pulled up a chair near Tessa’s inert form and talked to her softly.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  “Your brother was horribly brain damaged at birth because of Meg Bauer’s carelessness, wasn’t he? I can certainly understand why, over the years, watching your mother grow old caring for him, yu would have built up a seething hatred of Nurse Bauer. I’d bet that name was never spoken in your home without a curse to go with it.

  “I had already considered that it could have been Meg who gave your mother the syntometrine while she was still in labor. The doctor at the hospital this morning told me it is only given after birth, to make the uterus contract. Given during labor it would crush the baby’s skull, I think.”

  I shuddered as I recalled those same words on the little piece of paper Amy had dropped in the Milan airport. Tessa’s face had gone from red to purple.

  “The thing that threw us off, of course, was the time. I eliminated both you and Amy from my list of suspects early on because you had an alibi for the time of Meg’s murder. What nobody understood was that you, acting as translator between all of us and Captain Quattrocchi, were easily able to translate the times wrong. It’s easy to change ‘quarter to’ or ‘quarter of’ to ‘quarter after.’ The Captain wouldn’t notice, would he? The English-speaking person wouldn’t know the difference, would he? But the interviews were taped, remember? All Captain Quattrocchi has to do is play back those tapes.”

  Like a shot, Tessa was up and out the open window. By the time I could crawl across the chaise longue and stick my head out, she was past the fountain and heading for a side street.

  “Catch her! Catch that girl!” I yelled to whomever might understand me.

  Tessa ran fast, but Marco had a man on every corner. I rolled my aging butt over the windowsill and dropped to the pavement below. It was a bit more of a drop than I was prepared for, but on twisted ankle, I dashed across the plaza in time to see two of Marco’s men grab Tessa. With carabinieri on each arm, she hung, suspended, while her legs pumped away at thin air.

  In less than a minute, the men had her in the back of an unmarked car. She glared through the window at Gianni, who was already in the back of an adjacent car.

  Good thing Marco and his men had brought two cars.

  * * * * *

  I anticipated the bus ride home would be a grim affair, but was I ever wrong. Tension relieved, it was party time. Well, that plus the fact that most of our group had had a snoot full.

  Beth was relieved and therefore Achille was relieved. For them, it was the best possible outcome to a horrible situation.

  Lettie happy-danced in the aisle until I made her sit down. I hadn’t realized how heavily the suspicion surrounding Beth had been weighing on Lettie, too.

  I carefully avoided saying anything that would betray my promise to Paul. I took an aisle seat so I could prop my swelling ankle on the seat arm in front of me. There, I held court. People knelt with their knees on the seats and faced me, while those behind me formed a solid line of standees, all leaning over the seat backs.

  Jim Kelly said, “So there was nothing wrong with the wine?”

  “Apparently not. Shirley took her pulse,” I replied.

  “It was perfectly normal,” Shirley said, “but she wasn’t breathing. I guess she was holding her breath.”

  “Which would account for the purple face. I didn’t know, when she first fell, if she’d fainted, been poisoned, or was faking,” I said. “Then it became obvious that she was faking.”

  “How did you know she killed Meg, Dotsy?”

  “I’ve raised five kids. I know when someone’s playing possum, so I merely suggested that this whole mystery made sense if one assumed the alibi times she translated had been translated wrong. Tessa and Amy had an ATM receipt marked with the time, and it established that they were downtown at five thirty. Tessa created the false impression that Meg was killed at about that time by changing the times she was translating to Quattrocchi and, I suppose, changing them back the other way when she translated his words to us. Meg was dead by five o’clock, I’d bet.”

  Wilma Kelly held up her hand like a school kid. “So when I said I had seen Meg at quarter to five, Tessa translated that to the Captain as . . . what? Quarter after?”

  “Yes. Something like that. But it’ll all be on the tape.”

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  “Amy Bauer was dead before her feet went over that balustrade,” I said, looking out at the Gulf of Naples from a sunny terrace on the Isle of Capri. “Tessa’s father was in the U.S. Army, a Green Beret. He probably taught his daughter twenty ways to kill a man with a sock—green berets know that stuff—and she used those skills to kill Amy by vertebral compression.”

  More precisely, Lettie and I were sitting at the top of the Isle of Capri, having taken a funicular train from the harbor down below. Walter and Michael had taken off for the shops to do a little celebrity spotting. Famous faces were as ubiquitous as tans and sandals around here.

  Dick Kramer was no longer with us. He had gone home to straighten out his life. He confided to me before he left Florence that his first step would be to end his marriage, and then he would work on saving his business. He didn’t mention Elaine.

  Joe Bauer would be leaving for the States soon. He and Beth planned to have a large memorial service for Amy and Meg. Beth and Achille told him of their plans to marry. Joe hadn’t been overjoyed. But he accepted it, rather than alienate the only sister he had left. Achille and our new guide, Sophia, had brought us to Capri, bypassing a couple of other places on our itinerary.

  Jim Kelly had drawn me aside on the boat, after we left the mainland. “Wilma and I didn’t tell you the whole truth,” he said. His words were blown back, and it was hard to understand him.

  “We weren’t together during Amy’s murder,” he continued. “I had gone down to the lower level and she had stayed up above. But I’m afraid neither of us was absolutely sure the other one hadn’t done it. We bth hated Meg Bauer. She had, on more than one occasion, told some vicious lies about Wilma. Two lies even made it to the newspapers. I knew Wilma had been the last person to see Meg alive, but I didn’t question her and she didn’t question me. When Amy was killed—poor dear girl—we both thought it was because she knew who murdered Meg. Since Wilma and I weren’t really together, I thought Wilma might need me to cover for her, and she thought the same thing about me.”

  “So you were both covering for each other,” I said.

  Now Jim and Wilma stood at the terrace rail, his arms around her waist. Geoffrey, Victoria, Lettie, and I sat at a table. We all sipped red fruit things.

  “How much trouble is Gianni in?” Victoria asked. “Is he guilty of anything other than a little blackmail?”

  “Harrumph,” Geoffrey said.

  “A little blackmail is all it was,” I said. “That young man was out of his depth when he tried to blackmail Tessa. He drove up to the Piazzale Michelangelo in hopes of meeting up with Amy because he’d gotten off work early. Of course, he was horrified when he saw what Tessa had done, but he figured he might as well make a little money out of the murder. What he didn’t know was that Tessa had no way to get blackmail money except from Cesare. Cesare gave her an envelope full of cash and she took it out to Gianni in the parking lot. I saw that part from the roof.”

  “Given the looks of Cesare’s associates, the ones I saw at the festival the other night, I wouldn’t bet a whole lot that Gianni would have lived long enough to collect another installment,” Jim Kelly said.

  Shirley leaned against the terrace railing. “If he’s lucky, they’ll put him in jail until the heat’s off.”

  “What kept throwing me off were all the other things that were going on at the same time,” I said. “Things that
had nothing to do with Meg’s murder. But I started seeing motives and mysterious behavior everywhere I looked. I hate to admit it, but I suspected Paul because he was asking odd questions. I suspected Wilma when Amy showed me a photo of Meg in a white fur coat, because I knew how Wilma felt about the slaughter of baby harp seals.”

  Wilma winced. “If I’d seen that picture, I probably would have killed her!”

  “Then there was that note,” I said. “When Amy dropped it in the Milan airport, the only words I saw were ‘crushed the baby’s skull’ and that fit right in with the clubbing of baby seals. I saw the note again when we were waiting for the ambulance. The word ‘seal’ was on it.”

  “I would have thought the same thing,” Shirley said.

  “I suspect that word referred to the malpractice case being sealed after the hearing,” I said. “But we’ll never know for sure, because we’ll never see that note again. Tessa must have seen me reading it and slipped it out of Amy’s pocket when they were loading her body into the back of the ambulance.”

  Shirley cringed. “Too many things Meg did were sealed. Our lips were sealed.”

  “And you, Shirley. I heard that you had left your post at Meg’s hospital some years ago, before Crystal was born, because you were blamed for a mistake Meg herself committed.”

  “But that’s ancient history. If I were going to kill her over that, and I’ll admit it crossed my mind, I’d have done it long before now.”

  “When Crystal disappeared, and you disappeared too, I began to imagine—”

  “I was trying to save my daughter, that’s all.” Shirley looked at Crystal, whose hair color today was aqua.

  “And all I was doing was furthering my education along nontraditional lines.” Crystal leaned over the terrace railing far enough to elicit a quick shirt-grab from Victoria. The drop on the other side was at least a hundred feet.

  “Furthering your education? The sort of education you received at that Gypsy camp is the sort you can do without,” Shirley fired back.

  “I learned some good stuff, Mom. Useful stuff.” Crystal had a strange half-smirk around her mouth.

  “So,” Shirley said, “Amy put two and two together and discovered the awful secret about her college friend and her sister.”

  “Right,” I said. “We’ll never know who Amy got her information from, but the way it was written, with words scratched out and misspelled, I suspect she was on the phone when she wrote that note. She may have seen something in Tessa’s face when Tessa saw the name ‘Margaret Bauer’ on the list. We know that Amy and Meg had a big argument after they reached Venice. I’d bet it was over what Amy had learned. The knife was pure luck. Tessa could have used another knife, but since Beth happened to buy that one and showed it to everybody, it fit Tessa’s plan beautifully.”

  “How cruel,” Lettie said. “What had Beth ever done to hurt Tessa?”

  “Nothing. But Tessa knew that Beth would be blamed. My guess is that Tessa rubbed her prints off the knife, although she tossed it out the window and it landed in the fountain, so the prints would have washed off anyway. She had one of those thin disposable raincoats and a pair of latex gloves, which she probably donned when Meg wasn’t looking. She killed Meg, emptied Meg’s purse on the bed, and tucked her plastic coat and gloves into the purse until she could get out the side door of the hotel. She dumped the bloody coat in a large industrial-sized dumpster behind a butcher shop—Quattrocchi’s men found it on Thursday—and a few blocks farther on, she dumped the purse.”

  “But she forgot to wipe off the gelato,” said Lettie.

  “She ordered flowers using Meg’s credit card number,” I continued, “which she copied from the extra excursion form Meg filled out for the gondola ride. Using a thick Italian accent, she called Beth’s room. She pretended to be the girl at the reception desk and said there was an urgent message. She then walked by as Beth was reading the message about the flowers and suggested Beth could pick up the flowers. She led her to believe the florist shop was close by, but it was almost a mile away. Next, Tessa asked Lettie to sit by the elevator and pass along a message to everyone she saw, telling them we would be leaving an hour later. That gave Tessa a witness to her own departure, and to the comings and goings of others as well. She went out the front door and in the side door to the stairwell. She dashed upstairs and killed Meg. Then she exited through the side door and visited the ATM machine in order to establish her handy-dandy alibi.”

  “Amy was with Tessa at the ATM, wasn’t she?” asked Victoria.

  “I don’t know if Tessa planned to meet Amy or not,” I said. “But it served to strengthen her alibi, didn’t it? Oh! Those green bridesmaids’ shoes. I would bet Tessa had already purchased or ordered the shoes in all the right sizes from the shoe store. She had one pair in her closet, which she showed to Lettie. I’m sure her story about postponing our departure so she could run downtown was pure fabrication.

  “And then poor, poor Ivo. What luck. He had Beth’s room card, so he breaks in to do a little burglary and sees a corpse on the floor. And a bunch of stuff on the bed, including a nice wad of cash. If Ivo had looked more like a hotel guest, more like a tourist, I’m sure he would never have been noticed or caught.”

  “And if it hadn’t been for me, they’d have convicted him of the murder,” Crystal said.

  “Yes, dear, I’ll admit that was one good thing that did come from your little disappearing act,” Shirley said, “but it was the only good thing. And don’t you ever do that again.”

  “Oh, my God! My passport!” Lettie, who had opened her bag, had lost every stitch of color in her face. “My passport’s gone, Dotsy! How will I ever get home? What can I do?” She was shaking and her eyes were teary. “I saw this man on TV. He had to live at the airport in Paris for ten years because he lost his passport and they wouldn’t give him another one.”

  “I’m sure there was more to it than that, Lettie,” I said.

  “Think, darling,” said Victoria. “When did you see it last?”

  “When I bought my ticket for the funicular, at the bottom of the hill. Oh, I remember now. There was a man behind me and he was standing uncomfortably close. He wore a red and white striped shirt and he had short brown hair, but he didn’t look like a Gypsy. He looked like a ordinary tourist.”

  I grimaced. “What makes you think a tourist can’t be a pickpocket?”

  Crystal drew her own string bag open. “That particular tourist was definitely a pickpocket,” she said, “because I saw him take the passport. Don’t forget, I’ve had lessons in that stuff and know what to look for.” Pulling out a dark blue passport, she handed it to Lettie. “And I also know how to pick a pickpocket’s pocket.”

  About the Author

  Maria Hudgins is an avid traveler and mystery lover. Until her recent retirement, she taught oceanography, earth science, biology, and chemistry at the high school level. She holds a bachelor’s degree in natural science eation and a master’s in plant physiology. Like Dotsy, she is an empty nester with a grown daughter. She lives in Hampton, Virginia with her dog, Skippy, and her cat, Elvis.

  Table of Contents

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

 

 

 
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