I’m not sure what that actually means—the L.A. part, that is, I get the obnoxious bit—but I nod along anyway. “They’re not always my favorites,” I say, “but there are only a couple of podcasts about the murder at the villa, and this one is a lot better than the three-part series by Fedora Dude that I told you about.”
Chess’s earrings jingle as she swings her head to look at me. “That’s two,” she says, holding up two fingers. “You are now halfway through your allotted murder mentions.”
Laughing, I wrap my own fingers around hers, pulling her hand down as the funicular shudders to a stop. “You’re going to have to give me some leeway on it because it’s actually super interesting, Chess.”
“Super macabre,” she counters, and I can’t argue with that.
I don’t tell her that I already finished reading Lilith Rising, that I actually read it all in one day, and that ever since I saw that M carved into the window upstairs, I’ve been thinking about the book and the woman who wrote it.
“Think of it this way,” I tell Chess as we step off the funicular and into a picturesque piazza. “We’re now part of the history of this house, and that whole thing was also part of the history of the house, so it’s almost like we owe it to … I don’t know, fate or history or something to learn more about other people who stayed there.”
Chess gives me a skeptical look. “I like how you’ve summed up a brutal murder with”—she makes air quotes—“‘that whole thing.’”
Then she turns, taking in the view around us, making me stop and appreciate it, too. It’s another sunny day, all electric-blue sky and puffy white clouds, and from up here, the entire valley below spreads before us.
I rest my arms against an ornate metal railing, taking a deep breath, and next to me, Chess does the same. “Best idea,” she says, and I nod.
“Best.”
The day is the best, too. We wander the city, which is every bit as quaint and medieval as I’d hoped it would be, quintessentially Italian, but so different from the hustle and bustle of Rome. Cobblestone streets crook and curve up hills, the buildings close enough together in some places to almost blot out the sky.
Chess and I stop at a little trattoria adorned with window boxes of bright pink flowers, sitting in a cozy corner inside to devour a pasta dish I can barely pronounce, but know that I’ll probably dream about for the rest of my life.
We also split two bottles of wine between us, so by the time we’re back out in the square, the massive duomo towering over us, we are both in a very good mood.
Chess pauses in front of the church, tilting her head back to look at it. It’s huge, almost overpowering in the small square, and I realize that anywhere you went in the area, your eyes would be drawn back to it over and over again. It’s that big, and also that beautiful. Graceful spires, stained glass windows, gilded mosaics …
“Take a picture of me,” Chess commands, handing me her phone.
She poses herself on the wide steps leading up to the doors, and I see it, the instant she transforms from my friend Chess into Chess Chandler .
It’s almost eerie, really, the subtle change that comes over her. You’d never guess that ten minutes ago, she was draining a wineglass and laughingly telling me a story about the last guy she dated trying to go down on her in the greenroom at one of her events.
The Chess looking soulfully at the camera now would never tell that story. She’d never have that story because this Chess would have been sitting alone in that greenroom, drinking tea and journaling her feelings. Thinking Big Thoughts About the Universe.
I take the picture, then a couple more so that she can pick the best one and then hand her phone back to her.
“I expect at least a two-paragraph caption on this one,” I tell her. “Be sure to use the word ‘spirit’ at least twice, okay?”
The last picture she’d posted on her official Instagram had been of the field behind the villa at sunrise, and my eyes had actually glazed over at all the New Age speak in the caption, stuff about truth and light and “the inner core.”
Chess gives me a tight smile, and her movements as she puts the phone back in her purse are a little stiff.
Apparently, we can talk shit and tease each other about some stuff, but the Chess Chandler brand is a sore spot.
Which is why you keep poking at it, a little voice in my head says.
A voice I choose to ignore.
“So, what now?” I ask, still looking up at the cathedral. “We’ve done window-shopping, we’ve done boozy lunch, we’ve done god … what else should we explore here in Orvieto?”
“Let’s just wander for a little while,” Chess replies, sliding her sunglasses back on. “I tend to find the best stuff that way.”
Once again, the tension between us gradually eases. The more we walk and talk, the more quintessentially Italian things we see that make us stop and gasp.
We’re about to make our way back to the Piazza Cahen and the funicular station when we pass a short line of people outside a round stone building, and Chess draws up short.
“These people clearly know something we don’t,” she says, and a young woman with bright red hair and a battered leather bag slung across her body turns around.
“It’s the Pozzo di San Patrizio,” she says, and it’s clear she’s a fellow American. “St. Patrick’s Well.”
“People line up to see a well?” I ask, and she shrugs.
“It’s apparently a really famous well? I don’t know, I’m just hitting the guidebook highlights.”
She opens her bag, and I see she’s actually got several travel guides packed in there, their spines cracked with use, names of countries stamped on their covers in bold letters. AUSTRALIA, THAILAND, VIETNAM, ITALY.
Riffling through them, she picks out a smaller, thinner book, barely a book at all, more like a slightly thicker brochure, and hands it to me.
It’s got the Duomo di Orvieto on the front, and “Day Trips in Orvieto” written across the top. “You can have it,” she says. “I’m headed out to Florence tomorrow.”
“Thanks,” I reply, turning around to show the book to Chess, but she’s got her phone out, thumbs moving across the screen at a furious pace, and I look back at the travel guide, flipping it open to the part about the well.
Begun in 1527 and completed in 1537, Pozzo di San Patrizio is a marvel of Renaissance engineering. Double helix staircases allowed for easier access and constant traffic both down into the well and up from the well.…
My eyes skip over other details about the well’s dimensions, the sophistication of its architecture, the number of windows inside allowing in light. That’s the kind of stuff Matt would’ve been interested in, I’m sure, but he’s not here, and I am, so I’m not reading up on Renaissance building practices.
In fact, I’m thinking Chess and I can just skip this altogether when I see something a little further down the page.
The well’s name comes from the legend of St. Patrick’s Purgatory in Ireland, a cave that was so deep, it was said to reach to the underworld.
Something about that description seems familiar to me, and I wrack my brain, trying to remember where I had read it. Recently.