15
I wanted to charge after him, buck him up about the oil production space. It was only for the duration of Marinara Misteriosa, I wanted to remind him. That’s all. Beyond that, we were under no obligation to provide any more kitchen instruction, not for these four remaining students. And the next workshop was a whole month down the road. If ever, considering there were as yet no registrations. Two days, Pete, just two days. Then back all the rented kitchen equipment could go, and he could store the harvested olives there again, and press what we needed at the villa, take the rest to market—no changes. I watched him disappear with the deliveryman and the two-wheeler around the far side of his cottage.
But I understood.
No matter how much sense I could make to Pete Orlandini, the dream was being invaded, by philistines, no less. A Brooklyn waiter, a Jersey girl—all right, all right, make that two, since at the moment he was none too happy with me for giving the Brooklyn waiter a free hand—and a gloomy Baltimore barista. Even the Bari sisters, full of bustling competence and Billy Joel. The oil production space was the dream incubator for Pete, a private space. I should have been more sensitive to it and told George Johnson he could set up our makeshift kitchen anywhere but there. No explanations needed. There are just some spaces that need to be safe from intrusion. Just a few weeks ago, Pete had spoken softly of saving money to enlarge the business.
I didn’t know him very well then, but I was excited for him, for his vision.
Maybe I just identified with that kind of soft, shy love of an idea. It was what landed me in cooking school design. I could bring better cooking to millions. Or maybe just thousands. Or a couple hundred. As raindrops spattered noisily on the path, I watched Nina heading my way under an umbrella sporting poor Van Gogh’s Starry Night. Face it, Valenti. Given these last few days, you can’t even bring better cooking to five. One’s dead from poison, one’s putting Annamaria out of a job, one’s working undercover for your domineering daddy, one’s spreading sunshine all over the place, one’s out a spouse, and one’s doing very unacceptable things with mushrooms.
Nina informed me Detective Batta awaited me in the common room.
Oswaldo picked that moment to arrive in his farm truck. Losing no time, he made his awkward way across the grass and asked where to put the produce if the kitchen was out of bounds, and when he might expect payment.
Annamaria stared past me in a stained apron and asked if we’d be needing her.
Rosa asked for the day’s agenda. I smacked my forehead. The agenda.
Jenna, with Stella on a leash, asked if she could keep Stella in her room. (Stella averted her eyes from me, showing plainly she didn’t give a pig’s foot what I thought.) Vincenzo was still sick and if she hunted tartufi with Stella (she actually said tartufi as though it was her first word after “mama”) Vincenzo would share profits with her.
Chef had no actual questions. Instead, as he tucked in his shirt, zipped his pants, and groped his baldness, he let me know we needed to add bocce lessons to the day’s agenda back there—he gestured vaguely—somewhere.
I meted out my answers.
To Nina: “I will speak with Signor Batta at eleven, when I am free. Go.”
To Oswaldo: “Find Pierfranco. Ask him. Find me and I’ll pay you cash. Then go. No, wait. The commissario might want you.” Our farmer hailed Jenna, and patted Stella.
To Annamaria: (mad and with plenty of gestures) “You are the sous-chef! Of course we need you!”
To Rosa: (with wide eyes and my most demonic smile) “No agenda. Let’s just see what happens, shall we?”
To Jenna: “Yes.” (When might we expect you to buy the villa with your truffle profits?)
To Chef I made a speedy change of course. I nearly said Over my dead body, but I didn’t want any one of these possibly homicidal people to take that for an invitation. So I told him, instead, “Qualunque cosa, Chef.”—Best I could do in Italian for “Whatever.” I added, since I was in a banishing mood, “Now go.” Bocce lessons, for all I knew, might well be a better, more lucrative choice for the Orlandinis than a benighted cooking school that invites homicide. Maybe, when it came right down to it, a bocce school was more a dream for this unmanageable chef than a cooking school. Pete had his olive dreams. Chef may well have dreams very different from what had brought the likes of Nell Valenti to Tuscany.
Why had he hired me?
Why had I accepted?
Suddenly, the last two months of my life seemed baffling.
Ordinarily, I would have taken Chef aside out of earshot of the others and quietly schooled him in being fully dressed before leaving his apartment because—oh, we could argue it back and forth—doing so would make a better impression. And we could have a big old laugh together about old stick-in-the-Tuscan-mud Ornella Valenti. But today I stepped out farther into the misty rain and didn’t particularly care about governing the ungovernable. I was young enough not to be very attuned to when I was wasting my time.
Maybe by the time I hit Chef Claudio Orlandini’s age, the signs of disinterest were writ large across the side of the barn where Bob Gramm had been locked in a death struggle with Amanita phalloides. Maybe I’d still be quacking to well-paying customers about the need for high-end cooking schools, all the while really just wondering when my sky blue inkpad kit would turn up for my latest scrapbooking project.
They dashed off in different directions, Stella receiving pats and ruffles from everyone she passed. I’d have to work on her. Or myself. Unleashing the truffle-hunting Lagotto, who promptly tore off in the direction of the woods—I let out an evil little laugh—Jenna grabbed the sack and the vanghetto and ran full-out after her. It was the most energy I had seen from our resident grudge-bearer that had nothing to do with making off with cutlery or yelling over the roadside into Cortona. Just then George and Zoe came along, effortlessly carrying one of the stainless steel worktables between them, like old hands, George walking forward, Zoe backward.
“Buongiorno!” piped Giorgio.
I muttered.
Zoe was bright-eyed even at a distance of twenty feet. “Have you seen Chef?”
“Yes,” I said helpfully. “He was just zipping up.” I drilled her searchingly.
“What a character,” she roared. “Best part of the whole Tuscan experience.” She wasn’t naming the murder, I saw. Then, all business: “Your turn, George.” Then she did a 180-degree turn, leaving George the backward half of the trip to the makeshift kitchen.
He was unfazed. “Oh,” he called to me, “I took the liberty of ordering a couple of Genesis Basecamp cooking systems, Nell. I figured you probably just want electric on some hot plates, right?”
I stood mute, goggling at him. That he had guessed correctly and gone over my head and was so disarming about it. Then: “Basecamp cooking system?” I said it like we were talking about an unpleasant discharge. Jersey girls are very clear on this sort of thing.
His smile made a lovely arc from twenty feet away. “You’ll love it. It’s propane.” As he kissed his fingertips, the table angled toward the ground and Zoe yelled, “Oops!”
Still trying to get the picture, I said, “Like . . .” I didn’t even know the right word. “Backpacking equipment?”
“You bet. You’ll love it.”
Zoe piped up with a grin, “They’re coming sometime this morning.”
“Who?” I pictured Everest guides.
They went merry on me. “The Basecamp cooking systems,” called George.
Zoe added fondly, “Silly!”
“Until then,” explained the Brooklyn waiter who might just as well have dumped wine and lit candles in my lap, “we’ll carry on with the little, well, hot plates you got.” He wrinkled his nose at me. “Stop by later.”
“We’re in with the olives,” shouted Zoe over her shoulder.
“Owning our education,” added George, and I could swear he winked.
Backpacking, Mr. Johnson? You don’t know what you’re up against. I had half a mind to go and make him as humanly miserable as I could. As Zoe started guiding him around little hills and divots on the way to Pete’s sacred olive oil production room, I shot him a sickly smile. I watched until they grew smaller and smaller, and then I caught sight of something amazing. Coming toward me, slowly, unbothered by the light rain, was Glynis Gramm.
I went to meet her. From what I could tell, her face was scrubbed, but her usual artful makeup was nowhere to be seen, and she was wearing what looked like some of Sofia’s clothes—the closest Bari sister in size to Glynis herself. Gray pants, a long-sleeved heather crewneck, a green rain jacket, unzipped. “Nell,” said the new widow carefully, “can you spare some hair clips”—she rotated one hand—“or something.”
I rubbed her shoulders. The neoprene jacket actually rasped. “Come on.” While I tried to come to some “best practices” determination about how to handle this poor woman, I jerked my head toward the Abbess’s room. “I’ve got something.”
“Also,” she added softly, “some lipstick would be nice.”
“Can do, Glynis.” I pushed open my door and let her pass me inside. As she stood still and blinked, turning a little, I asked, “Barn room off-limits?” No doubt she had left all her things in there when she and Pete dashed off with Bob in the middle of the night, not expecting the worst. And why should they have expected the worst? A big dose of wheat flour was about as bad as it got in anyone’s imagination. No need for makeup or prescription meds or clean underwear. Or toothbrush.
Glynis lowered her head. “No,” she told me. “I just can’t go back in there.” She pressed her lips together.
As I moved her gently toward the bathroom, she glanced around. “Oh!” she exclaimed. “The birdcage!” She walked right up to it and peered inside, her fingers lightly on the gilded bars. “All those feathers.” I explained how it had belonged to Pete’s mother, Caterina, who had died. My room pleased her so much that I heard her humming. In the bathroom, I opened the medicine cabinet and handed Glynis a new freebie toothbrush I had brought with me from home. Leaning over the sink, wearing Sofia’s clothes, she brushed her teeth as though it was an unfamiliar task, and I felt terrible for her.
I brought in a small plastic case with an assortment of hair clips, bobby pins, and scrunchies. “When you’re ready,” I told her. “I found these in a drawer. More stuff from Pete’s mom.”
She lifted her head and eyed me, then herself, in the mirror. “The toilette of the dead.”
I leaned against the doorframe. I was itching to ask her about Bob’s mysterious spreadsheet, but I could tell it was too soon. “Glynis,” I told her, “everything at the villa is such a jumble”—I watched her widen her eyes and shake her head, left to her own thoughts—“I’ll be out of my room all day. Would you like to hang out in here? I can get Rosa to bring you your meals, and—” I stopped because I didn’t know what more to add.
“Kind of you, Nell, I’m sure,” she said with strength, pulling herself up straight and wiping her lips with the hand towel I held out, “but I’ve got plans.” Hire a lawyer, file a whopping lawsuit against the Villa Orlandini Cooking School, pack for home? I held my breath as she spoke through the slicking of a cherry red lipstick I passed to her.
“Plans?” was all I could get out.
“I’ve got cooking classes.”
My grilling by Detective Joe Batta was so bland it made me nervous. I thought the guy must be hatching something, stringing me along until he could pounce. He seemed pleased when I turned over my office to the carabinieri. I could tell it felt like more familiar surroundings to this candy-sucking Italian cop, more accustomed to a desk, a couple of chairs, a file cabinet, and—maybe—even a tampon lamp than what he encountered in the villa common room, what with all its Orlandini branding flung about. It felt downright peculiar for me to be sitting on the non-Nell side of the fancy desk from Cassina’s, which Nina stroked appreciatively, but I sucked it all up and answered his questions.
Resting his chin stubble on his hands, he asked for my account of the day of the murder. In Italian, he leered something, looking like the Cheshire cat preparing to disgorge a hairball, which Nina translated as “You were so very helpful just three weeks ago.” I decided to overlook his suggestion that I was running a show that somehow whisked up homicide on a regular basis. So I described the mushroom-picking trip to the woods, and pretty much stated that to the best of my recollection, nobody dallied to collect a fine specimen of a death cap. With Annamaria at the head of the group and me at the rear, any of the five would have had to pull some pretty fancy footwork to harvest the poison.
Then I did my best to get the idea across about the kitchen chaos later in the day.
“Chi era presente?” Who was there, asked Joe Batta in a mundane voice. Even though the voice memo on his phone was recording us, he watched his pen with some manufactured interest as he listed the names, sliding the paper to the side to check it against another list. I felt lulled, I have to admit. It was odd trying to describe chaos in an office atmosphere of supreme humdrum.
I cast my mind back. “Oh, Chef, Annamaria, Rosa, Oswaldo, Theresa, Glynis—” I named whoever crossed my mind, but I felt disorganized, and then I pulled up short. “People,” I explained, wincing, “were in and out.” His head whipped around to Nina inquisitively. “Dentro e fuori,” she told him, thumbing through some tweets on her phone. “Ah!” he exclaimed, suddenly clear about something, chopping his hands to the left of him, “Dentro e fuori,” and then to the right of him, “presente tutto il tempo.” He raised his sparse eyebrows to regard me. “Capisce?”
At that moment, Nina let out a squeal and held up her phone to show me the video of the meerkat in math class.
I asked him, “You want me to separate who was in and out and who was there the whole time?” Nina didn’t help, but he seemed to understand.
“Il meglio che puoi,” rumbled the detective, acting as casual as he could stand.
The best I could do. I heaved a sigh. At the end of my recital, the only ones I had put in the kitchen the whole time were Annamaria, Chef, Rosa, and Zoe. But I couldn’t say whether it implicated them more or less in the eyes of Joe Batta. On the in-and-out side of the ledger: George, Pete, Bob, Glynis, Sofia, Pete, and me.
“Oswaldo Orlandini?” He rippled an accusatory eyebrow at me.
So that’s what the cops had in mind? Oswaldo of all people? I doubted he could farm, let alone plot a murder. I had forgotten our new produce purveyor was on the premises the day Bob Gramm “took ill.” I decided to keep it simple. “Dentro e fuori.” I shrugged. “He brought vegetables.”
Nina translated.
“E”—he consulted another list—“Theresa Franchi?”
Theresa? Another flitter I had forgotten in the high-spirited chaos of the late afternoon in the kitchen. “Dentro e fuori,” I said dismissively, adding a “fft.” Another shrug. “She brought wine.”
Nina translated.
From another stack of papers, Joe Batta drew out a hand-drawn diagram and passed it over to me. Someone had sketched the villa kitchen with just enough detail to show all the cabinets, major appliances, windows, doors, workspaces—and their proximity to each other. No lighting fixtures, no dimensions, no stools. It was a good job. Setting his fingertips on the diagram, Joe Batta said something in Italian and then clasped his hands. Nina explained he wanted me to indicate where exactly the gluten-free plate was. It was an interesting question, and I wondered how many versions he’d gotten in the way of answers.
While I considered, he moved his fingers across separate areas of the paper, with every stop, looking at me inquiringly. Back here next to the stove? Here on the worktable? On the counter by the door? “Dove?” He added to the question, and Nina translated his need to understand whether Bob Gramm’s plate was standing alone, or side by side with all the others, requiring an expert to tell them apart.
Could, in other words, someone have made a mistake?
I felt a sudden chill.
He didn’t come right out and ask it, but there it was. Was the intended victim someone else? Not—I thought as I saw the kitchen clearly and pointed to the diagram—when someone as hateful as Bob Gramm was around. “Separato,” I told him, adding: “Qui.” Here. On the counter by the door. While he digested that, I saw the implications. The poisoner didn’t have to be someone present in the kitchen the entire time—although it gave him or her more opportunities to sprinkle death cap, which might blend in with the freshly grated Parmesan.
I shuddered. If the plate was set out separate from the others, just to keep the gluten-free fare apart, no mistaking one for the other, even someone dentro e fuori—in and out—could have managed, with enough nerve and coolheadedness. Not to mention a pretty sure knowledge by sight of what gluten-free pasta looks like, cooked. Could I myself tell the difference? Not sure.
We took a break without stretching any legs while Nina checked her watch and then plunked a few big gumdrops in her boss’s hand. He sat back in my chair, chewing, and Nina adjusted her blouse, her skirt, and her attitude. Scowling at her phone, she muttered, “Un troll terribile,” and clucked her tongue. All I could do was wait. At last, Joe Batta inquired about Bob and Glynis Gramm’s relationship. Any, oh, and then he shadowboxed to Nina’s delight.
So he already knew about the argument, either from Rosa or Glynis herself. I gave him the bare bones, a bracelet bought for another woman by a man with an apparent history of womanizing. Then came the final question: “Raccontami”—he leaned back in my chair as though he was going to impound it as evidence and make off with it, chuckling—“il coltello, per favore.”
Tell me about the knife.
For that, I didn’t even need Nina.
Ah, Jenna, Jenna. The knife returns to slash you in the keister.
And I had hoped that my simply returning it surreptitiously to the knife block—no harm, no foul—would end the matter. She had stolen a knife the day of the mushroom identification field trip. Later, Bob Gramm got sick and died horribly. But not from stab wounds. In a way, as I watched the famous police detective press all the flavored sugar from his mouthful of gumdrops, the more interesting question was . . . how had Joe Batta gotten to me? One of the Bari sisters had to have noted the return of the stolen knife. That stood to reason. But how had I been brought into the picture?
When I eyed Joe Batta, what I saw was humor. Lucky guess, was what his look was telling me. And a little of You Americani are outfoxed by high-level police work. Annoyed, I gave him the slimmed-down truth. Worried about the missing Jenna, I had looked in her room for some clue as to where she might be, and I discovered the knife Annamaria had reported stolen. It was my situation to handle (although even as I said it I found myself wondering why), and—I smiled sweetly at Joe and Nina—since I believed we had nothing to fear from Jenna Bond, I thanked my stars for letting me come across the knife, which I cleaned, returned to the block, and moved on.
What about you? I felt like asking, but didn’t.
Instead, standing up with as much poise as I could muster, I tugged at my sleeves and addressed them. “If we’re done here, Signor Investigatore, I have work to do.”
Joe Batta purred something complacent in Italian, and Nina gave him a wooden look. Turning to me, she said, “Go right ahead. We all have work to do. And we will be making an arrest soon.”
The walk to my office door had never seemed so long.