by Gigi Pandian
“She’s been like this forever?” Lane asked.
“Afraid so.”
“JJ and Fish,” Lane said with a smile on his lips.
“So you’ve been keeping my sister safe while I went on ahead to the new hotel with my girlfriend,” Mahilan said. He’d been subtly taking in Lane’s appearance since he’d noticed his presence.
“Why did you two take off without me?” I asked.
“Ava told me your boyfriend was coming and you went to get him at the airport,” Mahilan said. “I wish you’d waited for me to get out of the shower to tell me, but I understand.” He looked from me to Lane. “Is something wrong? Did you mean for us to wait for you? Oh, God. It’s not the ghost, is it? JJ, this is exactly why I wanted us to get out of here.”
If I hadn’t known Lane so well, I wouldn’t have detected the awkward emotion that passed across his face.
“Mahilan, you’d better sit down. We need to get you up to speed.”
Lane and I were on the same page: We weren’t ready to reveal Ava’s secret to Mahilan. Aside from pursuing a crime of opportunity, we didn’t think Ava was involved. Instead, we told him how I’d figured out the ghost’s secret, which would point to the hidden location of Lazzaro’s paintings the next time it rained. My brother was visibly relieved to learn that there was no ghost.
“What’s the plan?” he asked.
“We draw out the ghost,” I said.
“How do we do that?”
“By publicly searching for Lazzaro’s hidden mechanical stone garden.”
Mahilan frowned.
“We’re not going to find it without more information,” I said, “at least until the next time it rains. This area is so overgrown. That’s why the Park of Monsters was lost for so many centuries. Even searching a few square miles will take forever. We looked up weather reports, and that storm front has passed. Since it’s summer, there’s not going to be another rainstorm for quite some time. Without more information, there’s too much ground to cover to find the spot. We need to find out what our ghost knows.”
“And we can’t wait that long,” Lane said.
“Why not?” Mahilan asked. “Why can’t we just leave right now, and come back when it’s rainy season?”
“The person following us in the Park of Monsters may have killed Lilith Vine. If we leave them here, justice won’t be served, plus they might be methodical enough to find Lazzaro’s grotto. Who knows what they’ll do with his paintings.”
“This plan is our best hope,” Lane added.
“I don’t like it, JJ,” Mahilan said.
“Without at least a few hours’ sleep,” Lane said, “we’re not going to be any good at figuring this out.”
“You’re staying here?” Mahilan asked him.
“He can stay in my room,” I said. “What? I’m thirty, not thirteen.”
In the morning, we were awoken by the shrill sound of the hotel room’s phone. I was the first to reach it.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” an Italian-accented voice said. “This is the front desk calling. There’s a man here to see you. Normally we would never think to disturb a guest before eight o’clock, but this man…he is quite insistent.”
“Who is it?” I asked.
“He did not give his name, but he says you will want to see him. He says he has a 16th-century sketchbook.”
Chapter 53
I roused Lane and my brother. We quickly dressed and went to the front desk.
Francesco, the white-haired actor, was waiting impatiently, pacing the length of the small lobby while the desk clerk kept a veiled eye on him. He clutched a worn notebook in his hands.
“Is that—?” I began.
“I did give my name,” Francesco insisted, shooting a look of disdain at the desk clerk.
The clerk clicked his tongue. “I do apologize if it was wrong to wake you. The villa will provide you a discount voucher for a future visit—”
“It’s fine,” I said.
“We’ll take the discount,” Mahilan said.
I elbowed my brother. “Let’s all go outside.”
I introduced Lane to a distracted Francesco and led us to one of the many secluded tables perched throughout the grounds. Nobody sat, but it gave us the privacy we desired.
“You found Lazzaro’s notebook?” I asked. “How did you—”
“All these years,” Francesco said, shaking his head. “All these years I thought I was simply a character actor, playing a role.”
Lane and I exchanged a look. His expression told me I should let Francesco continue at his own pace. It was difficult not to interrupt. Seeing that notebook in his hands and not being able to look at it was killing me.
“I admitted to you,” Francesco continued, “that I did not truly believe I was the reincarnation of Pier Francesco ‘Vicino’ Orsini, the creator of the Park of Monsters. I learned this morning that I was wrong.”
The three of us stared at him. Mahilan gave a hesitant laugh.
“Yesterday,” Francesco said, “I would have laughed too. But not today.” He waved the worn leather-bound notebook in his hand. “The only way I could have found this notebook is that I, as Lazzaro Allegri’s friend Vicino Orsini, knew where to find it.”
He must have given the desk clerk the unbelievable name of Vicino Orsini. Everyone in these parts knew the famous man.
“Where did you find it?” Lane asked.
“I had the most vivid dreams last night,” Francesco said. “I believed at the time they were simply dreams, but now I know the truth. They were a vision. The vision led me to sleepwalk through the forest. When I awoke, my shoes at the foot of my bed were coated in mud, and Lazzaro Allegri’s missing sketchbook was on my nightstand.”
He was a great actor, I’ll give him that. I couldn’t tell that he was lying. But it was far too convenient.
“It was you,” I said. “With what you knew about local history, you knew Lazzaro Allegri’s paintings would be an incredible find. So when you learned that Enzo and Brunella had Lazzaro’s old sketchbooks, and that they sold them to Lilith Vine, you teamed up with her.”
“No, signora, I am not acting now. You must believe—”
“But there’s not enough information in there to find Lazzaro’s hiding spot, is there? His sketches, even in this notebook, must not explain the hydraulic mechanics, probably because it was an engineer who built it for him. He was an artist and possibly an architect, but that’s it.”
“Yes, this is true,” Francesco said. “But what do you speak of hydraulic mechanics?”
“You needed someone who could correctly interpret the sketchbook,” Lane said. “That’s why you started following Jaya around when she got here.”
Francesco looked furtively between us. Was he gauging how difficult it would be to run, since we hadn’t believed his ploy?
I groaned. “And you’re an actor. You must know lots of people in California. You could have offered to split the profits of the paintings with a confederate who drugged Lilith Vine, accidentally leading to her death.”
Francesco’s face turned bright red. I knew we’d discovered how he’d done it.
We all stood stock still for a few seconds. Then Francesco bolted. He crashed into Mahilan’s shoulder as he rushed past us, and his steps faltered. Mahilan cursed and grabbed Francesco’s collar. The elderly actor took a swing at my brother, clipping his nose. Lane pulled Francesco off of Mahilan, who grabbed his injured nose with his left hand and balled his right hand into a fist, connecting with the side of Francesco’s head. The actor crumpled to the ground.
I lifted Lazzaro Allegri’s sketchbook from the dewy grass.
“Well,” I said, standing over Francesco’s prone form, “I guess that answers the question about who was playing our ghost.”
Chapter 54
&n
bsp; “This is it,” I whispered, turning the pages of the sketchbook. “This sketchbook has a map that shows where Lazzaro’s hidden grotto workshop was located. That’s where he left his paintings.”
“Why didn’t the ghost use this to find them, then?” Lane asked. “If this is what he needed, why did Francesco show it to us?”
Mahilan moaned and clutched his injured nose. I handed him a packet of tissues from my bag.
“Look at the map,” I said, turning back to Lane. “It’s not clear where it starts. The missing clue was the ghost wail. The nearby section of woods on Allegri land where everybody was scared to go because of the mechanism that squealed in the rain and sounded like a ghost. Lazzaro’s studio isn’t inside the Park of Monsters.”
“Anyone following the map would have assumed it started in the Park of Monsters because of Lazzaro’s drawings of the park’s sculptures,” Lane said. “But now that we have a notion of where the hydraulic device is, we can find the real location of his paintings. If there are any paintings to find. The preservation techniques he learned in India might help things last, but in this overgrown rainy forest, I still have my doubts.”
“Spoilsport.”
“I think my noth ith broken,” Mahilan said, holding a stack of tissues to his nose.
“Let me take a look,” I said. He whimpered as I lifted his hand away. “Lane, do you know anything about broken noses?”
“I don’t think it’s broken,” Lane said, “but it’s going to give you a black eye.”
Mahilan gasped. My brother was vain. A black eye wouldn’t be good for his looks.
“And we should clean up your knuckles,” Lane added.
Mahilan gasped again, noticing his bloody knuckles for the first time. We all looked from his hand to the crumpled form of Francesco.
“I had no idea you had it in you, Fish,” I said.
“He hith me.”
“You two stay with Francesco,” I said. “And get Mahilan some medical attention.”
“Where are you going?” Lane asked.
“To find Lazzaro’s paintings, of course. What? Why are you two looking at me like that? We have our ghost. You two can give a statement to the authorities. With Italian bureaucracy, that will take forever. There’s no way I’m staying here for that, now that we have the answer.”
“She’s always been like this?” Lane asked Mahilan.
“Yeth.”
I took my brother’s rental car, which he’d had washed since I’d last been inside.
To follow the map in the sketchbook, I first had to get back to Enzo and Brunella Allegri’s land. All the roads around Bomarzo were small and winding, so I picked the one my phone’s GPS suggested, which took me close to the Park of Monsters.
Sirens sounded behind me.
That’s all I needed. A speeding ticket. Or worse. I hoped my brother had added my name to the registration on the rental car. I gripped the steering wheel and glanced in the rearview mirror. It wasn’t a police car. It was an ambulance. I gripped the wheel even harder. Could Mahilan or Francesco be that badly hurt? Francesco had still been unconscious when I’d left him. Had Mahilan hit him harder than he meant to?
I slowed and pulled over, letting the ambulance pass me. It wasn’t going toward the villa. It was heading toward the Park of Monsters.
I shifted the Fiat into gear and followed the ambulance.
Five minutes later, I pulled into the Park of Monsters parking lot, empty except for two police cars and the ambulance. We’d been woken up early by Francesco, and it wasn’t yet eight o’clock, the hour when the park opened. Whatever had happened here, it wasn’t a tourist who’d had an accident.
A police officer emerged from the main entrance and began speaking urgently in Italian to me. I couldn’t understand him, but his gesticulations made it clear he wished for me to stand back. A moment later, a man and a woman carrying a stretcher came into view. On the stretcher was Orazio, the helpful librarian who’d shared wine and history with me.
My hands flew to my mouth as I saw that Orazio’s head was covered in blood. His eyes were wide open, staring upward but not seeing the new morning sky.
Chapter 55
The kindly librarian’s lifeless body was loaded into the ambulance.
Had he come here on his own in the night in search of Lazzaro’s hidden grotto and fallen off a rock in the darkness? He might have pieced something together with his historical knowledge and what Niccolò and I had told him.
But Orazio hadn’t seemed like a careless man. Nor was he particularly interested in what I’d been seeking at the library. It seemed more likely that Francesco forced the old librarian here to use his knowledge, thinking Orazio would be able to read the map in the missing notebook.
I called Lane, but his phone went straight to voicemail. So did Mahilan’s. They must have already arrived at the police station.
The police officer in the Park of Monsters parking lot continued to gesture at me. This time, I’m fairly certain he wanted me to leave. I was happy to oblige.
My hands shook as I steered the car out of the parking lot, away from the stone monsters that had claimed the librarian’s life. Poor Orazio. He’d been so friendly and eager to help. Lazzaro Allegri’s treasure had taken another life.
I didn’t know where I was heading. I had no idea where Lane and my brother were, and didn’t have the Italian to find out. While Lane and Mahilan sorted out Francesco with the police, there was only one thing I knew I could do.
I held up the sketchbook to the landscape in front of me, double-checking that this was the right spot.
Centuries of overgrowth had changed the details of the cypress, pine, and chestnut trees, but a violin-shaped boulder at the edge of a rocky hillside was unmistakable. This was it. Somewhere right here I would find Lazzaro Allegri’s art studio, where he painted in secret after returning from India in disgrace.
I traced my hand along the rock. I could see the inlet where centuries of rainwater had smoothed it into the violin shape. As my fingers felt the alternatingly smooth and rough surface that Lazzaro’s hands had touched four hundred and fifty years before me, his secret spoke to me.
My breath caught as I found a piece of rock that wasn’t connected to the rest. A lever that had been smoothed by centuries of rainwater. The map had also been difficult for Francesco to follow because even if he’d passed this very spot, if he didn’t know he was looking for a hidden lever he never would have seen this.
I laughed out loud. “Lazzaro Allegri’s ghost!”
Should I go to the main house and get Enzo and Brunella to share the discovery with them? No, I wasn’t sure yet that I was right.
There was something else that wasn’t right about this whole situation.
A twig snapped behind me. I was suddenly very aware that I was in the middle of an overgrown forest, following a secret path only known in a five-centuries-old notebook.
“Lane?” I called. Had he caught up with me already?
A gaunt figure stepped out of the shadow of a tree.
“Enzo,” I said, breathing a sigh of relief. “You startled me. I’m so sorry, I know I’m on your land. I should have come to see you first, but I was going to come see you as soon as I found…” There was something in his face that made my voice falter.
“No need to apologize,” Enzo said with a smile. His eyes were bloodshot and dark circles hung under them. “This is fantastico. You found it. I thank you for finding Lazarro’s studio.”
Though the words themselves were friendly, my senses screamed at me. I’d made a grave mistake. I thought I was safe on my own because the ghost, Francesco, was in custody. But Francesco hadn’t confessed. He’d gotten scared and tried to run.
“Why don’t we go get help before we open the lever that leads to the grotto?” I said to Enzo. “We don’t know if it’s da
ngerous inside after all these years.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I wish it had not come to this.”
A knife gleamed in his hand.
Chapter 56
I stepped backward and stumbled over the overgrown knotted roots of a chestnut tree. I steadied myself on the boulder, wishing I wasn’t in my heels.
Enzo gripped the knife tightly in his hand, but he wasn’t moving toward me. There were still several yards between us.
He motioned with the knife. “You push the lever.”
“Lever?” I rubbed my knee.
“I have been watching you. I know what you have found.”
“Don’t you want to do the honors yourself?”
“Push.” He jabbed the knife in my direction.
I edged my way along the boulder, back to the rock lever. I followed the water-worn crevice with my fingertips, knowing it would lead me to the lever that could be manually operated when it wasn’t pressed open by the rain. The barely visible lever was covered in rust that had poisoned the American actor.
I cringed. “I can’t—”
“Push,” Enzo said again.
I lifted my foot. Slowly, so as not to agitate the knife-wielding aristocrat. I took off one of my high heels. “To reach the lever,” I said quickly.
I used the shoe’s heel to push through the narrow opening that contained the lever. The cold stone gave way, pushing downward. I braced myself for what might follow. Would the rock crush my hand instead of opening a section of stone?
A high-pitched wail pierced the air. A dozen birds in the vicinity scattered. At a moss-covered juncture that had looked like a natural crack, especially because of the moss, the boulder split apart, revealing a two-foot passageway.
“Fantastico,” Enzo murmured again. “I am truly sorry, Professoressa Jones.”
“I don’t understand,” I said. “This is your fortune. I’m a professor, not a thief. I’m not going to steal the artwork in Lazzaro’s studio. It belongs to you. There’s no need for you to do this.” Or to have done any of this, I thought to myself. He had no reason to drug Lilith and kill Orazio.
