Michelangelo's Ghost

by Gigi Pandian

  “I never wanted to associate with thieves who were willing to use violence. That’s why we split up. She didn’t have the same reservations about the people she worked with. There was a museum heist that went wrong. Her partner killed a security guard. The next day, he took care of the only witness to the crime.”

  “Mia,” I whispered. “She trusted the wrong man.”

  “She didn’t know he was dangerous. But she should have guessed. Real life isn’t like in the movies. There’s no black and white distinction between gentleman thieves and gangsters. Well-intentioned people do what they need to do when things go wrong.”

  “Not all of them.”

  “No. But you can’t be certain.”

  “Who—”

  “You already know more than you should. I’m only telling you this now so you’ll truly believe me about how risky it would be if we told people about us.”

  “You’ve never—” The words caught in my throat and I couldn’t finish my question.

  Lane pulled me close to him and rested his chin on my head. “No. Of course not. I never backed myself into a corner where it was my only option. But the fact that North found you through me showed me I can never truly escape my past. I’m so sorry, Jones. I completely understand if you never want to see me again after I get on that flight.”

  I wrapped my arms around him more tightly. “I don’t think I’m ready to lose you.”

  “Then can’t we just be here like this, enjoying the moments we can steal?”

  I didn’t seem able to form words. I needed to think. The fact that I was under time pressure didn’t help. Lane was leaving soon, I had a class to teach at the university later that morning, then lunch plans with my brother.

  Lane extricated himself from my arms and stood up from the table. A moment later he held up my running shoes. “Go. But make it a quick run. That way I can see you before I catch my flight.”

  “You don’t make it easy for me to kick you out of my life, Mr. Mind-reader.”

  I ran through my neighborhood, not wanting to waste time getting to Golden Gate Park. It was early enough in the day that Haight Ashbury tourists weren’t in full force, so there was room on the sidewalk. The locals were already off to work or safely ensconced in one of the dozens of cafés that dotted the history-filled neighborhood.

  Lane was right. We had no future together. I didn’t want to live my life in hiding. I couldn’t see a solution. Either way, I lost.

  I returned twenty minutes later drenched in sweat. I was back soon enough that Lane was still there. His smile didn’t reach his eyes, so I knew he was having the same internal dilemma.

  After I took a quick shower and was ready to leave for the university, he helped me put everything Lilith had given me back into the box. He kissed me goodbye on the doorstep, saying he wanted to finish cleaning my kitchen before he caught a cab to the airport.

  As my tires screeched yet again, I knew I should have taken a longer run to work out my frustration. Lane was right that there was more danger than I wanted to know about.

  I locked up the box of materials in my office file cabinet before teaching a graduate seminar. I was left with a little over half an hour until my lunch with Mahilan. It wouldn’t take that long to drive to the restaurant. With plenty of time, I let myself succumb to the pull of Lazzaro Allegri’s sketchbooks.

  Despite Lane’s point that the paintings couldn’t have survived, I knew in my gut Lazzaro had left behind something worth finding. He’d given his soul to his work. He wouldn’t have left it to be destroyed. He said so himself.

  I unlocked my file cabinet and eased the notebooks carefully onto my desk. I could feel the life in the faded pages. Love had been poured into every sketch.

  Twenty minutes until I was due at the restaurant.

  I ran my fingers along the edges of the textured, gently crackling parchment pages that had breathed in the elements for centuries. As soon as Lilith and I were done following the sketchbook’s clues to find Lazzaro’s true treasure, the sketchbooks would go to a museum. I knew Lilith would agree with me. She’d paid the family thousands of Euros for these old notebooks after convincing them she was a scholar who only wanted to bring their ancestor’s achievements to light.

  Ten minutes until I was supposed to be at the restaurant.

  I stacked the materials carefully into the banker’s box and locked the box in the file cabinet. I was locking my office door when my cell phone buzzed.

  I expected it was my punctual brother checking on me, but when I looked at the screen it wasn’t his number. No number showed on the screen. Perhaps Mahilan’s cell phone had fallen into a vat of wine while he and Ava were wine tasting and he was calling from the restaurant’s blocked landline. I picked up. The only sound was a faint breathing.

  “Hello?”

  “The sketchbook.” The words were slurred, but I could tell it was Lilith. I winced as I realized she was drunk. It wasn’t even noon.

  “I’m on my way to lunch right now. Thanks for calling me back, but I thought you’d be calling later—”

  “Sketchbooks,” she slurred again.

  “Yes, I’ve had a chance to look at them.” I talked as I hurried down the hall. “You’re right, they’re incredible. And I have a few questions. I’m on my way somewhere right now, but can I call you later this afternoon?”

  “You must…know therefore…I’m sorry…”

  I stopped walking so quickly my messenger bag slammed painfully into my hip. “Are you all right? Do you need me to call someone? Is anyone there with you?”

  A rattling laugh, followed by a whisper. “No. Not alone…”

  Oh no. “Who’s there with you, Lilith? Is someone—”

  “The ghost…Here with me…Should have known…couldn’t escape…past.”

  “I’m calling 911.” One thing was becoming abundantly clear. Lilith wasn’t drunk. She was terrified. Was she having a heart attack? Or was there something more going on?

  “Already called…for help…Come to…hospital.” Her breathing was labored and her words more slurred than they had been a minute before.

  “I’ll be there.”

  “You need to know…You must know therefore…”

  “I’m here.” I held the phone between my shoulder and ear and fumbled with my car keys.

  “You must know therefore…You must find…”

  “Lilith?”

  There was no answer.

  Chapter 10

  From the faculty parking lot, I spoke to the emergency operator.

  I was worried both that Lilith hadn’t been coherent enough to reach them, and that someone who wished her harm might still be there with her. I stayed on the line with the saintly operator until the paramedics arrived, then peeled out of the lot and headed north to Sea Ranch.

  As I drove, I replayed Lilith’s jumbled words in my mind. Was someone there with her? What had she been trying to tell me? What must I therefore know?

  The buzz of my phone sounded from inside my messenger bag. I rummaged for it with one hand and groaned when I saw my brother’s face on the screen.

  “I’m so sorry, Fish,” I said, putting him on speakerphone. “An old professor of mine has just been taken to the hospital, and I need to meet her there. I’m not going to make it to lunch.”

  “It’s not Stefano, is it?”

  “No, Lilith Vine.”

  A few seconds of silence followed before Mahilan spoke. “Are you nervous about meeting Ava?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve never mentioned being close to this Lilith Vine person before,” Mahilan grumbled.

  “It’s not an excuse.” I shifted gears and passed a tour bus on the approach to the Golden Gate Bridge. “Lilith is the professor I knew my first year of grad school. Remember the one who wanted me to follow her to her ne
w university?”

  “The crazy alcoholic flake who you felt guilty about for ages?”

  “She’s not crazy.” Why was I so vigorously defending her? “She got in touch with me because she made a big discovery—a real one this time—and she needed my help. Two days ago she gave me a set of 16th-century sketchbooks of an Italian artist that point to a treasure of lost Renaissance paintings connected to India. But then just now…”

  “You’re breaking up, JJ. I didn’t catch the last bit. What happened just now?”

  “The connection is fine.” My hands felt clammy on the steering wheel, and my mouth as dry as the brush of the coastal hills I was about to drive through. “I didn’t finish my sentence.”

  What had happened just now?

  I hadn’t stopped to think about how big a discovery this truly could be. Lazzaro Allegri’s lost masterpieces were interesting to me personally because of a possible new revelation about a cross-cultural influence between Europe and India. And the artwork was compelling to Lilith because it was an academic discovery that could redeem her reputation. I tried to focus on breathing. If the paintings truly existed, they’d be worth a fortune. It was all too believable that someone would threaten and hurt Lilith to get the sketchbooks that led to the paintings.

  Lilith’s words had been slurred, but it hadn’t sounded like she was drunk. Had she been drugged? Had someone been trying to get the truth out of her? Had she told them she’d given the sketchbooks to me? My chest constricted. An SUV honked at me as I accidentally swerved.

  “JJ?” my brother prompted. “Are you all right?”

  “I’m driving on my way to the hospital. I should concentrate on the road.”

  “After you bring flowers to the hospital, you should join us for dinner. I’ll call you later with details.”

  “Sounds good,” I lied. I clicked off the phone and stared at the highway. What was so important that Lilith would call me while waiting for help to arrive?

  I didn’t know which hospital Lilith would be taken to, so once I reached the vicinity, I pulled over and began calling the regional hospitals. I found the right one on the second try. At the reception desk of the right hospital, I said I was Lilith’s niece, assuming that was the only way I’d get to see her. Instead of being given the number of a hospital room, I was asked to wait a moment.

  “You’re Lilith Vine’s niece?” a sad voice said from behind me.

  I turned and saw a uniformed police officer.

  “The thing is…” I began.

  “You’re not actually her niece, right?” the officer said. I wondered how long he’d been on the force. He didn’t look older than my college students. His questioning brown eyes held the same intelligence as my brightest students.

  “Not exactly. I care about her though,” I added quickly, “and I thought that would be the only way to see her.”

  The officer took my name and led me away from the crowd of the reception area. “I’m sorry to tell you this, but she didn’t make it.”

  “She didn’t make it?” I repeated. He couldn’t mean Lilith was dead. She was a force that couldn’t be stopped. She’d survived malaria, a plane crash, and decades of faculty meetings. How could she be dead?

  He shook his head and gave me a few moments to recover. “You want some water?”

  “I’m fine.” I couldn’t seem to breathe, and my legs were shaking. I sat down, then stood back up. “Shouldn’t you be asking me questions? Do you have the person who killed her—”

  “Whoa. Say that again.”

  “You’re a police officer. Doesn’t that mean I’m right and somebody did this to her?”

  “We get called in when there’s an overdose. But it looks like she overdosed on legal narcotics. They pumped her stomach and found alcohol and Xanax.” He reddened and swore.

  “What?”

  “I don’t think I was supposed to tell you that.”

  “She was a functioning alcoholic. She had been for decades. She’d never overdo it.”

  He clenched his jaw and furrowed his brow, causing his young face to transform into that of a much older man. “I haven’t been at this job for long, but the things I’ve seen.” He sat down in a waiting room chair next to a table filled with wrinkled pop culture magazines. “People don’t know each other as well as they think they do.”

  “I’m not psychoanalyzing her. I was on the phone with her when she was waiting for the ambulance. Something was wrong. She wasn’t alone.”

  “She told you someone did this to her? Why didn’t you say so?”

  “I couldn’t understand much of what she was saying,” I admitted, “but she said someone was there and she was trying to tell me something important.”

  I told the detective about Lilith’s research and how it could be worth killing over. He seemed genuinely interested, gave me his undivided attention, and jotted down a few notes.

  “Well?” I said once I’d concluded.

  “That’s quite a story. I wish I’d had history teachers like you two.”

  “And the murder?” I said through gritted teeth.

  “Oh, that. I didn’t buy that part.”

  “But after everything I told you—”

  He snapped his notebook shut. “You’ve told me the story of a lonely widow who achieved academic fame in her twenties, had been trying to recapture her former glory for forty years, and who self-medicated her depression with alcohol. A normally reserved woman who, when she was wasted and could barely think straight, reached out to the person giving her a last shot at a big discovery, thinking it was important to tell you the last thoughts on her research going through her mind. Tell me again what you heard her say?”

  “She talked about someone being there with her—”

  “A ghost. You said it was a ghost.”

  I scowled at him. “And that I needed to know something important.”

  “People often have epiphanies when they’re dying. She could have felt like she was seeing her beloved husband you said died recently, and she wanted to urge you to carry on her research to make the discovery for her once she was gone. It’s a tragedy, yes. But it’s not murder.”

  The young officer made a decent case, but a niggling feeling tugged at me. I was missing something. Yes, it was a tragedy that Lilith’s brilliance had been wasted by her inability to move beyond recapturing the rush of her early fame. But there was more to it.

  In the hospital parking lot, I pulled my car keys from my messenger bag. There was nothing else I could do here. I’d taken off without thinking, and even though I didn’t have classes to teach, I was most likely going to miss the entirety of that afternoon’s office hours. I called the department secretary and asked if she could put a sign on my door that I was rescheduling.

  The long drive gave me a chance to calm down. Was it possible I was creating intrigue where there was none? Was I following in Lilith’s footsteps? Did I want danger, fame, and glory, instead of rigorous research, fact checking, and the security of a cozy office I’d have for decades?

  My doubts dissipated as soon as I walked into my office. This was where I belonged. In my office I could always trust that I was safe, secure, and damn good at what I did. I closed the door and unlocked my file cabinet.

  When I opened the lid of the box, my breath caught. The contents had been moved. While I was on my way to see Lilith Vine, someone had rifled through Lazzaro Allegri’s sketchbooks.

  Chapter 11

  “You’re sure?” Tamarind asked, her strong hands on my shoulders. “You’re absolutely certain someone went through the box since you looked at it earlier today?”

  “Positive.” I scrunched and unscrunched my toes in my shoes and tried to focus on breathing. It wasn’t working. My heart thudded in my chest. Someone had violated my office. In my not-very-well-organized life, my office was a beacon. I was
finally finding my footing there.

  Once I’d seen that someone had broken into my office and file cabinet, I called Sanjay. As a stage magician he knew a thing or three hundred about locks, so I thought he could check to see if someone had picked them. He didn’t answer his phone, so I called one of my other close friends, who also happened to be one of the smartest people I knew. She worked a few hundred feet from my office and arrived within five minutes of my calling.

  Tamarind wrinkled her nose as she examined the opened box. “How can you tell? Seriously, it’s a bunch of papers and old notebooks.”

  “I’m sure the contents aren’t how I left them. I’m sure I left the burgundy notebook on top. And now it’s on the bottom. But I’m the only one with a key to both my office and the file cabinet.”

  “You look way more freaked out than I’d expect over hypothetical academic espionage.”

  “This is a big deal.” I may have shouted the words. It was a good thing we were such good friends. In addition to being almost a foot taller than my five feet, Tamarind Ortega was big-boned and strong. She got her job as a librarian at the university because of her brains, but her ability to deal with San Francisco’s more colorful characters who made their way into the library was a bonus. We became close friends when she helped me with a research project that turned out to be much bigger than the confines of the library.

  “Uptight much?”

  “I haven’t told you the whole story.” I sank down into my squeaking desk chair and looked from the maps that adorned my office walls to the menagerie of gifts on the corner of my desk to the solid door I always locked. “I think the person who broke in here just murdered a woman. Lilith Vine, a history professor, died of an overdose this afternoon. I think—” My voice broke. “I think they coerced her into telling them who had these documents. Me.” I was glad I hadn’t had time to eat lunch. I felt queasy.

  “Shut. Up. Did you call the police?”

  “Not about this burglary, but I talked to the police about Lilith. They didn’t believe me.”