“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 for Billie 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 labeled Lady 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 in the 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.