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We said our good-byes inside the house before slipping out in pairs. We had learned through experience that anything more than two women traveling together attractedattention, and it seemed easier just to split up rather than sort out a group disguise for all six of us. Akiko and Minka left first, taking a cab to the airport with Kevin for their flight to Toronto, changing for London Gatwick, where they would pick up a rental car and follow Helen’s directions to Benscombe. Helen and Natalie left next, flying to Newark and on to London Heathrow. Mary Alice and I sat on opposite sides of the departure lounge before catching our flight to Boston en route to London Heathrow. We staggered off the plane at seven in the morning, pretending we were traveling solo until Mary Alice collected the rental car and I met her at the curb. Helen and Nat took a train as far as Basingstoke, where we nipped off the M3 long enough to grab them. We were bleary-eyed from spending the night slumped in coach seats, and the weather was predictably awful for January in England—cold and grey and pissing with rain.
But in spite of our fatigue and the weather, we were almost giddy with excitement. Mary Alice checked her tracker messages and Akiko had confirmed their arrival at Gatwick. She tapped a message back and flipped on the satellite radio, punching buttons until she found a ’70s station with ABBA. She banged out the piano part of “Waterloo” on the steering wheel while we sang the chorus at the tops of our voices. Helen mapped our route although we’d been there before. It had been a lifetime ago, I realized, and much had changed—mostly us. We weren’t the same girls who had been driven down this highway in 1979.
There were no motorway services where we were going, but we found places to stop twice to pee and get cups of tea and thickbacon sandwiches slathered with brown sauce. We kept the car pointed southwest, eventually looping around Southampton and changing from the big motorway to smaller highways and finally to country lanes. We were deep into Dorset, following the signs for Swanage and eventually the Purbeck coast. Finally, we turned off near Worth Matravers, a village whose name sounded like the perfect place for Miss Marple to find a murdered vicar.
“Turn here!” Natalie yelled suddenly, and Mary Alice stomped on the brake, yanking the wheel to the left. The gate was open, each side hanging from a tall brick pillar topped with a stone finial. Thick ropes of ivy wove between the bars of the gates, anchoring them in place. One pillar still held a bronze plaque that was discreetly lettered.benscombe house.The drive was washed almost clean of gravel, leaving a wide swath of mud and puddles for Mary Alice to navigate as she edged the car in towards the house.
It was late Victorian, modeled, we had been told, after Thomas Hardy’s house of Max Gate. The red brick had been homey and welcoming once. Now it was austere and grim, the roof just a little too peaked, the chimneys just a bit too ominous.
Mary Alice stopped the car in front of the house and we stepped out, making various noises as we stretched out our sore backs and rubbed feeling back into our sleeping legs.
“Don’t we need a key?” Mary Alice asked.
Helen stood on the doorstep, looking around helplessly. “I didn’t think of that.”
I tried not to remember how good Helen used to be at details in the old days. A small matter like how we weregetting into the house would never have slipped her mind then. But age and grief are both blunt weapons and they’d worked her over pretty well. I turned to Natalie. “You want to take care of the lock?”
“Sure.” She picked up a stone from the driveway and tossed it through a window.
“I meant pick it, but okay,” I told her. She grinned as she wrapped her hand in her sleeve and reached through the broken pane, feeling for the lock. She flipped it and slid the window open. “I’ll come around and open the door,” she told us, disappearing into the shadowy interior.
When she opened the front door, it gave way with a shriek of the hinges that scared the birds out of the overgrown laurel bushes next to the front steps. Helen took a deep breath and followed Natalie inside, but Mary Alice hung back, grabbing my sleeve. She pointed to the dark windows, the trim paint peeling off in long fingers. Through the grimy glass I could just make out the shapes of furniture shrouded under white dust sheets.
“Doesn’t it look haunted to you?” she demanded.
I took a deep breath and smelled the odor of damp decay and long neglect from inside the house. And something else, much fainter, but still there—the familiar note of beeswax and lavender.
I shrugged. “Well, if it is, at least we know the ghost.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
APRIL 1980
It is a sunny morning in Rome, and the apartment in Trastevere has its windows thrown wide open to the spring breeze rolling in from the Tiber. It is chilly in the small kitchen, but the fresh air is necessary and Mary Alice is wearing gloves as she surveys her handiwork.
“What do you think?” she asks Billie.
Billie looks over the pans of fruitcake, careful not to touch them. “I think they look like fruitcake.”
Mary Alice has baked them as tiny tea cakes in four small pans and eases the miniature loaves onto a cooling rack. They are dark with molasses and studded with dried cherries and apricots, the tops shingled with thin slices of almond. While Billie watches, Mary Alice opens a sealed bottle of Tennessee whiskey and pours a generous amount into a bowl. There is a small jar of white powder at her elbow, and before she opens it, she fits a respirator over her mouth and nose, motioning forBillie to do the same. The door to the rest of the apartment is closed, and the others know better than to disturb them.
The white powder looks a little like granulated sugar. It has been brought into the country in a flowered jar labeledLady Fresh Intimate Powder, tucked into Billie’s toiletry bag. In the airport, she is prepared to flirt with the Customs official who processes her, but he never unzips her suitcase. It has been Constance Halliday’s idea that the foursome should travel under the cover of flight attendants, and Billie is wearing the blue Pan Am suit, cut just a little bit too snug. The Customs officer is on the point of asking her for a date during her layover when Günther Paar, dressed in a snappy pilot’s uniform, puts a casual arm around her waist. The Customs officer makes a mournful face and waves her through with her poison.
They go directly to their rented apartments, a small studio for Günther and a larger one for the women. For two days they play tourist, trudging dutifully from the Colosseum to the Forum, tossing coins in the Trevi and paying too much for pasta in a rowdy café on the Piazza Navona. They take the kind of photos that casual travelers always take, posing with their hands inside the Bocca della Verità or arranging themselves by height on the flower-decked Spanish Steps. They buy postcards and tea towels stamped with the sights, and they drink cheap red wine from bottles wrapped in straw.
But the third morning, Mary Alice goes into the kitchen to put their plan into motion. She bakes the cakes according to the recipe she has been given, one she has practiced a dozen times in preparation for this moment. The pantry inthe apartment has been stocked with everything she needs—even the American ingredients that will make the cakes unique. Through the respirator she can no longer smell them, but the aroma of spice and orange wafts out the window to the city beyond.
Taking the jar from Billie, Mary Alice stirs the powder carefully into the bowl of whiskey. When the granules are fully dissolved, she fills a syringe and injects the cakes with the poison-laced whiskey. It was Mary Alice’s idea to use thallium, and she is pleased at how well it disappears into the cakes. It is a heavy metal, odorless and tasteless, but deadly if inhaled or absorbed through the skin.
When she finishes injecting the four cakes, she wraps them carefully in waxed paper and fits them into a cardboard box stamped with the gilded logo of a vaguely Gothic-looking convent. Billie sets a fan to blow any lingering fumes out the kitchen window, and they discard their gloves, wrapping them up with the empty jar, the syringe, the pans, and the respirators. The rest of the whiskey is poured down the sink and the bottle is added to the rest of the trash. It all fits tidily into a single garbage bag and there can be no traces left of American ingredients in this small Roman kitchen.
The cakes neatly packaged, they call for the others. The four are dressed identically in the simple habits of an order of nuns that does not exist. Their dresses are modest and dark grey, covering them from mid-calf to neck, their cuffs and collars white. They have scrubbed their faces of makeup and their hair is hidden under light grey veils. They wear thick dark stockings and sensible shoes. They have stripped off alljewelry except thin wedding rings and wristwatches with expensive mechanisms hidden in cheap Timex cases. They look nothing like the glamorous quartet of stewardesses who arrived three days before, but the change is not as superficial as clothing and makeup. They have been strictly schooled in how to present themselves as modest young Brides of Christ. They walk slowly, hips held tight, gazes downcast, as they have mastered the custody of the eyes. When Günther arrives, dressed in a black suit with a white dog collar and a modest cross on a chain, they are waiting, prim-mouthed and demure.
“The four of you are scaring the shit out of me,” he tells them as they collect the box of cakes and follow him out the door.
He is in high spirits, mostly because he has nothing to do on this mission. He is window dressing, necessary because a group of nuns is unremarkable in Rome, but a group of nuns under the supervision of a priest will be completely invisible. After the success of their French mission, they have been allowed to plan and undertake this job, one requiring a good deal of ingenuity. Every step has been reviewed and approved by the Board of Directors. Their only interference has been the addition of Günther, a minor annoyance to the quartet, who hoped to complete their mission from start to finish without anyone’s help. But his smile is infectious, and he spends the short walk to Vatican City telling them about what he plans to do with the considerable bonus he is due to receive when the job is complete.
“I am taking the waters in Courtempierre-les-Bains,” hesays, sketching a map of Switzerland with his hands as he walks. “I go after the Christmas holidays to give myself a complete detoxification process for the new year. And I go again after every job. I am Swiss-German, so you would think I would go to Bern, but no. I am devoted to Courtempierre-les-Bains. It has the thermal baths where you can soak away your troubles and repair your liver,” he tells them, listing the various other treatments he intends to indulge in. “Massage, sauna, therapeutic wraps. These missions are very taxing, and the body must be restored.”
