Michelangelo's Ghost

by Gigi Pandian

  “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. I heard about what you’ve been up to.”

  “I already told you I was in Italy. How else would you have known to meet me at this place?”

  “I know the rest. Ava called.”

  At the mention of her name, my hazy divided focus snapped back to Lane. If I’d been in front of a mirror, I wouldn’t have been surprised to see smoke coming out of my ears.

  “She told me the lie she told you,” Lane continued. “It was to throw you off balance for long enough that she and your brother could get away.”

  “The lie?”

  A look of anguish passed across his face. “You believed her story that Carey was my son? And you thought I wouldn’t look after him, or talk about him, or even tell you about it? I thought we knew each other. I thought you trusted me.”

  “You’re turning the tables and acting like you’re the one who’s been wronged?” My throat felt constricted. I needed fresh air. I pushed open the sliding door to the balcony and stepped through to a view of sprawling vineyards.

  “She let me believe she was dead, Jaya. For all these years.”

  “Does it matter to you?” Wind blew my hair around face. The Paekaathu ghost winds were picking up. Between my expression and my swirling hair, I must have looked like Medusa. “Do you still love her?”

  “Of course not. That doesn’t mean it’s a pleasant sensation to think that someone you used to be close to has been murdered.”

  I did know the feeling. “It’s easier to love a memory,” I whispered. “A ghost. They can be anything you want them to be. You’re the one who told me that once, Lane.”

  “I remember. On a train heading from London to Aberdeen.”

  “A memory won’t lie to you. Or act foolish because of jealousy.”

  “Or run off to Italy without you.” The corners of his lips turned up.

  “Or let them be fooled by a charming Englishman.”

  The smile reached his eyes. “You think North is charming?”

  I jumped into Lane’s arms. He caught me and held onto me. He smelled of sandalwood and…“Have you been eating pickled herring?”

  He laughed and let me go. “Guy in the seat next to me on the flight. You don’t really believe Ava, do you?”

  “I didn’t believe her. But I didn’t not believe her either.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “For what? I thought you said it wasn’t true.”

  “If I’d told you more about Mia in the first place, she wouldn’t have been able to pull off this con.”

  “Can you please call her Ava?”

  “With pleasure.” The wind whipped his jacket collar up around his neck and tousled his hair. “Mia is dead. It’s Ava we have to figure out.”

  “Why did she name Carey after you?”

  “His name isn’t Caravaggio. Carey is his full name. In Gaelic, it means ‘love.’”

  I groaned. Had she played me yet again? I wanted to believe that. I looked into Lane’s eyes, no longer hidden by the long hair he’d worn when I met him, but partly obscured by the thick frames of his glasses. I pulled the glasses off.

  “If I have pickled herring on my face, I’m going to be terribly displeased with that gentleman on the flight.”

  “No herring. Just you.”

  “You’re wondering if you can believe me. I get it. This is all so much to take in.” He took his glasses from my hand. “You need time. But you can believe me when I tell you Ava wouldn’t have killed anyone. She’s a good person. If you don’t count the larceny. And deceit. Oh, and grand theft auto.”

  I may have groaned again.

  “But as I understand it,” Lane continued, “we have more important things to deal with than us.”

  “We do.”

  I sat in the stone cutout window inside my abandoned suite looking out at the Paekaathu ghost winds blowing the olive trees below. Lane twirled a pencil in his hands as he leaned against the back arm of the couch and watched the wind with me.

  “Do you need a cigarette?” I asked.

  “I’m fine.” He tossed the pencil onto the pad of paper where Ava had left her note. “But I’ll be better if I understand what’s going on here.”

  “Sanjay had the craziest theory,” I said, wondering how I could look into the supposed heart attack of Wilson Meeks. Could Sanjay be right about Lilith? Not only did it not ring true, but Sanjay didn’t have all the facts.

  “Don’t tell me his theory,” Lane said. “You’ll bias what I think. Tell me the facts.”

  “Here’s what I know,” I said, hopping down from the window. “You already know a lot of this from when you saw the sketchbooks in San Francisco. Lilith Vine, a scholar thought to be crazy, or at the very least obsessive, found a letter from a cousin of Lazzaro Allegri, written in 1570, that suggested a set of ‘blasphemous masterpieces’ were left behind by the artist after his death. This information was buried in a paper by Wilson Meeks, an elderly scholar who recently died of a heart attack. Lilith’s research into Lazzaro indicated he was a protégé of Michelangelo.”

  “Have you substantiated that?” Lane asked.

  “No. It was one of the things I wanted to ask Lilith, but then she died. A local scholar had heard that the men were friends, but again, there’s nothing to back it up. What we do know is that Lazzaro traveled to India in 1528, where he made paintings of Indian royalty in the Renaissance style. Upon his return to his home of Italy in 1550, he was ostracized by his family for embracing Indian culture, but found a kindred spirit, or at least someone who didn’t judge him, in Vicino Orsini, the Bomarzo nobleman who envisioned the Park of Monsters.”

  “And we think Vicino gave Lazzaro a space on his land to do his art,” Lane said.

  “That’s another speculation, if we’re sticking to facts. At this point, after looking at the Park of Monsters, I think there might be a clue there, but not the studio itself. What we know for certain is that after Lilith saw the letter from Lazzaro’s cousin Felix Rossi, she found more evidence that supported the idea that Felix’s wife insisted on saving Lazzaro’s artwork after his death. Lilith traveled to Italy to follow this line of research. She located Enzo and Brunella Allegri, descendants of the Allegri clan, living in their ancestral home.”

  “They sold her three sketchbooks they found in their attic.” The spinning pencil was back in Lane’s hand. “Which she gave you and you showed me.”

  “It turns out she lied about buying them. She paid to borrow them. And there were four sketchbooks. Not three.”

  “But you only had—”

  “Lilith lied to me about that too.” Was it really a stretch to think she’d tried to fake an attack as well? “She kept one of them from me. My guess is that there’s a key piece of evidence in that fourth sketchbook.”

  “Why enlist your help if she wasn’t going to give you everything?”

  “Presumably so she could make the discovery herself, after I got her the rest of the way there. That’s why I think there’s something in these three sketchbooks I do have. She saw the same clues we do. Pointing her to the Park of Monsters, where it looks like Lazzaro has an art studio in a covered grotto. She mistranslated some of the Italian, because she thought she knew it well enough to not enlist help. It pointed her toward the Proteus sea monster, but she wasn’t able to locate a hidden cave nearby. She returned home empty-handed and reached out to me. Unfortunately, I get a lot of email because of that reporter who made the public think I wanted their treasure-hunting ideas. So Lilith’s email was buried in my junk mail, and I didn’t see it until weeks after she wrote to me. In the meantime, she contacted my colleague Naveen Krishnan.”

  “You don’t think he’s following you again—”

  “I don’t. It looks like all he did was fail to tell me Lilith Vine had contacted him in search of me.
I spotted Lilith’s email without him. She entrusted the sketchbooks to me, asking me to pick up the search where she left off, because her health no longer made it easy for her to traipse through overgrown forests. She asked me to go back to Italy and give her some of the credit when I located Lazzaro’s paintings.”

  “Which you both believe survived for nearly five hundred years.” Lane shook his head. “Even though there’s no way hidden paintings would have survived the test of time, untended out there in the woods, even inside a sheltered grotto.”

  “Which is exactly what you told me when I showed you the sketchbooks. Ye of little faith. Someone out there believes the paintings survived. We know that because—” I stopped myself. I was going to say because someone was willing to kill for them, but did I really know that someone had drugged Lilith? Ava was the one who searched my office, and it was impossible for her to have gone to see Lilith. Was it really a coincidence?

  “Because what?” Lane prompted.

  “Right after Lilith gave me the sketchbooks, she died of a drug interaction. Once the drugs were already taking effect, she called me to tell me about the fourth notebook. Oh, and the guy whose research turned her on to this discovery died of a heart attack.”

  “You’re here in the lion’s den with someone who doesn’t think twice about killing people.” Lane snapped the pencil in half.

  I’d tried to select my words carefully so as not to bias his impression, but he’d jumped to the same conclusion I had. Not the same one as Sanjay. “Sanjay had a different interpretation of the facts.”

  Lane took off his glasses and rubbed his hands across his face. “He thinks it was a hoax?”

  “How did you—”

  “He’s a magician. It’s the type of thing that would be great to confuse things in a stage show. But in real life, it doesn’t make sense. Nobody rational would put themselves in danger like that.”

  I grabbed my phone and looked up something online, just to be sure.

  “The date of this obituary,” I said. “Wilson Meeks didn’t die of his heart attack until after Lilith emailed me. I didn’t see the email until later, but she really did hope I would be able to talk with him. That means Lilith didn’t do anything to him.” Sanjay’s theory didn’t work. My shoulders relaxed and I let out a sigh of relief. “But you realize that brings us back to Ava.”

  “Who wouldn’t hurt anyone.”

  My shoulders tensed again. “Ava is the one who planted the seed of an idea in Mahilan’s mind that the three of us should come to Italy together, under the pretense of spending time together as a family.”

  “Who else knew what you were up to?”

  I swore. “Stefano Gopal.” My old advisor who was nowhere to be found.

  Chapter 46

  I paced through the suite, watching the wild wind through the windows and scrunching a water bottle in my hands.

  “Before I left for Italy,” I said, “I met with my old advisor, Stefano Gopal. But I trust him. Plus I didn’t talk to him until after Lilith died.” But where was he now?

  “If Lilith’s death was an accidental overdose, the person who’s following you here in Italy isn’t connected to her death. It could still be Stefano.”

  “All right. Let’s take the ghost impersonator as a separate question. Stefano is too old to climb on boulders and rooftops and impersonate a ghost. I think.” I thought of ninety-year-old Sébastien, who could have done it. I tugged at the ends of my hair. There was no way to rule out anyone.

  “We’re getting off track. You’re a historian, not a detective.”

  “You’re right. History is the thread we need to follow. It’s impossible to figure out what’s going on right now without understanding the history. That’s what we’ve got to get back to.”

  “The missing history of Lazzaro Allegri.”

  “Exactly. I met with Stefano because he has an interest in cross-cultural Indian history and speaks fluent Italian, so I wanted to get his opinion. He pointed out Lilith’s mistranslation of Lazzaro’s notes and told me I needed to be looking for running water, such as the fountain not far from the Ogre hellmouth carving, not the Proteus sea monster statue. Once I arrived in Italy and visited the Park of Monsters, I learned his translation might not be right either. There was no running water near the Ogre. The Pegasus statue is a fountain, but there’s no secret grotto there either.”

  “I wonder how he kept it so secret.”

  “Once you see the land here, you’ll understand how the forest reigns supreme. Everything is surreal. The wind, the forests, the stone monsters. One of the first things I did here, after visiting the Park of Monsters, was meet with Enzo and Brunella Allegri, Lazzaro’s descendants who loaned Lilith the sketchbooks. The Allegris told me they gave Lilith four notebooks, not three, and that’s when I realized that’s what Lilith had been trying to tell me before she died.”

  “What did you think of them?”

  “Are you asking if it’s possible the Allegris are after Lazzaro’s treasure and could be the culprits? They’re less likely suspects than anyone. They’d own any art left by their ancestor, and Lilith had explained to them her interest was in making the discovery to study the art. They have no motive. If anything, they’re worse off if I can’t find Lazzaro’s paintings.”

  “And they’d have no reason to tell you about the fourth sketchbook if they were the ones hiding it.”

  “Exactly. Plus, they were helpful. They pointed me in the direction of a local historian, Francesco. He told us the famous local ghost story from the 16th century involving Marguerite and Antonio Allegri.”

  “You can skip the ghost story and get back to relevant history,” Lane said.

  “The ghost story is relevant.”

  Lane laughed. He stopped after I didn’t join in. “You’re serious?”

  “The person following us is impersonating a ghost.”

  Lane’s eyes flicked to the windows. “To try to scare you?”

  “I haven’t figured out if they’re trying to scare me off or if they’re spying on me. But the creepiest thing about the ghost is what it did long before I arrived. Someone has been impersonating a ghost for centuries—and in the 1960s, they killed someone.”

  “I take back my objection. I think you’d better tell me the ghost story.”

  “In the ghost story the locals know, Marguerite Allegri is a ghost who haunts an area of the woods when it rains. She died of grief in the 1500s, upon news of her husband Antonio’s death, which she learned of during a fierce rainstorm. He was killed at war, by the hands of foreigners, so in the 1960s it’s said she exacted her revenge on a foreign actor who was filming a movie at the Park of Monsters.”

  “How did he die?”

  “After hearing her wail during a storm, he was curious and went in search of her. When he emerged from the woods, he was possessed. He died about a week later with his body frozen in terror.”

  “You don’t really believe—”

  “I don’t. But there’s something going on. Lazzaro’s notes about his hidden art studio and this ghost story are both related to the rain. And a local librarian, Orazio, found me a 16th-century account of the ghost story, in which Antonio is the ghost, not his wife. The story changed over time.”

  “That’s not unexpected. Why do you think it matters?”

  “It’s the incongruities of history that can reveal what really happened. I’m so close to seeing it, Lane. I can’t quite grasp it, but I have to believe there’s a rational explanation.”

  “How can you even question that?”

  “The locals told us about the superstition that only once a person has heard the ghost story will they hear the ghost when it rains.” My throat felt dry. I took a swig from a water bottle on the side table. “We saw a ghostly figure, and heard an inhuman ghostly wail. All of us.”

  “The atmospher
e. It has to have been the atmosphere. And it was only because you’d heard the ghost story that you equated a sound with being a ghost.”

  “But we saw it too.”

  “Where?”

  “Mahilan, Ava, and I snuck into the Park of Monsters in the middle of the night so we could look for Lazzaro’s hidden studio. I can’t believe I thought I bonded with her that night.” I cleared my throat and told myself to focus. “We didn’t find a secret hiding place, because the ghost chased us off.”

  “The Park of Monsters around midnight? It’s enough to make normally sensible people imagine animal sounds and shadows are ghosts.”

  “It wasn’t an animal. And it was terrifying. I don’t believe it was a ghost. But that sound…It was difficult for me to believe it was fake.” I shivered at the memory. “After that, I wanted answers even more than before. I wondered if Francesco, the actor who works at the park and who knows about local history, could be the ghost. Unlike the Allegris, he could do with the money. But he doesn’t fit the evidence. Neither do the other locals I’ve met. If you insist Ava is innocent—”

  “She is.”

  “As much as I hate to admit it, I know you’re right. She has an alibi for both ghost appearances. What am I missing?”

  “Ava’s involvement complicated what would otherwise have been more straightforward. She seized the opportunity to get Lazzaro Allegri’s paintings for herself, but she didn’t hurt anyone.”

  “Except my brother.”

  “She’s not going to hurt him.”

  “Emotionally. She’s going to break his heart. He doesn’t deserve that. But I’ll accept she’s not playing the ghost. Which I know isn’t a ghost.”

  “Then what are you so afraid of?”

  I stopped pacing and faced Lane. “I’m not afraid.”

  “You are, Jones. I know you.”