I looked at Maestro Lippi. “The book you had, which talked about Juliet’s Eyes and the grave… are you sure it didn’t say anything about where it is? When we talked about it, you just told me to go ask Romeo.”
“And did you?”
“No! Of course not!” I felt a surge of irritation, but knew that I could not reasonably blame the painter for my own blindness. “I didn’t even know he was Romeo until this afternoon.”
“Then why,” said Maestro Lippi, as if nothing could be more straightforward, “do you not ask him next time you see him?”
IT WAS MIDNIGHT BY the time Janice and I returned to Hotel Chiusarelli. As soon as we entered the lobby, Direttor Rossini rose behind the reception counter and handed me a stack of folded-up notes. “Captain Santini called at five o’clock this afternoon,” he informed me, clearly blaming me for not being in my room, on tiptoes to take the call. “And many times since. Last time he called was”-he leaned forward to check the clock on the wall-“seventeen minutes ago.”
Walking up the stairs in silence, I saw Janice glaring at my handful of messages from Alessandro-evidence of his keen interest in my whereabouts. I began bracing myself for the inevitable next chapter in our ongoing discussion of his character and motives, but as soon as we entered the room we were met by an unexpected breeze from the balcony door, which had sprung open by itself with no immediate signs of a break-in. Instantly apprehensive, however, I quickly checked that no papers were missing from Mom’s box; we had left it right there, sitting on the desk, since we were now convinced that it contained nothing like a treasure map.
“Please call me back-” sang Janice, leafing through Alessandro’s messages one by one. “Please call me back-Are you free for dinner?-Are you okay?-I’m sorry-Please call-By the way, I’m a cross-dresser-”
I scratched my head. “Did we not lock that balcony door before we left? I specifically remember locking it.”
“Is anything missing?” Janice tossed Alessandro’s messages on the bed in a way that had them scatter in all directions.
“No,” I said, “all the papers are there.”
“Plus,” she observed, wiggling out of her top in front of the window, “half the law enforcement in Siena is keeping an eye on your room.”
“Would you get away from there!” I cried, pulling her away.
Janice laughed delightedly. “Why? At least they’ll know it’s not a man you’re sleeping with!”
Just then, the phone rang.
“That guy,” sighed Janice, shaking her head, “is a nutcase. Mark my words.”
“Why?” I shot back, making a dash for the receiver. “Because he happens to like me?”
“Like you?” Janice had clearly never heard anything so naïve in her entire life, and she embarked upon a long-drawn, snorting laugh, which only stopped when I threw a bed pillow at her.
“Hello?” I picked up the phone and carefully shielded the receiver from the noise of my sister stomping defiantly about the room, humming the sinister theme from a horror film.
It was Alessandro all right, concerned that something had happened to me, since I had not returned his calls. Now, of course, he acknowledged, it was too late to think about dinner, but could I at least tell him whether I was, in fact, planning to attend Eva Maria’s party tomorrow?
“Yes, Godmother…” mimicked Janice in the background, “whatever you say, Godmother-”
“I hadn’t actually-” I began, trying to remember all my excellent reasons for saying no to the invitation. But somehow they all seemed utterly groundless now that I knew he was Romeo. He and I were, after all, on the same team. Weren’t we? Maestro Ambrogio and Maestro Lippi would have agreed, and so would Shakespeare. Furthermore, I had never been completely convinced that it was really Alessandro who had broken into my hotel room. It certainly would not be the first time my sister had made a mistake. Or told me a lie.
“Come on,” he urged, in a voice that could talk a woman into anything, and probably had, many times, “it would mean a lot to her.”
Meanwhile, in the bathroom, Janice was wrestling loudly with the shower curtain, pretending-by the sound of it-to be stabbed to death.
“I don’t know,” I replied, trying to block out her shrieks, “everything is so… insane right now.”
“Maybe you need a weekend off?” Alessandro pointed out. “Eva Maria is counting on you. She has invited a lot of people. People who knew your parents.”
“Really?” I could feel curiosity tearing at my feeble resolve.
“I’ll pick you up at one o’clock, okay?” he said, choosing to interpret my hesitation as a yes. “And I promise, I’ll answer all your questions on the way.”
When Janice came back into the room, I was expecting a scene, but it never came.
“Do as you wish,” she merely said, shrugging as if she couldn’t care less, “but don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
“It’s so easy for you, isn’t it?” I sat down on the edge of the bed, suddenly exhausted. “You’re not Juliet.”
“And you’re not either,” said Janice, sitting down next to me. “You’re just a girl who had a weird mom. Like me. Look”-she put an arm around me-“I know you want to go to this party. So, go. I just wish-I hope you don’t take it too literally. The whole Romeo-and-Juliet thing. Shakespeare didn’t create you, and he doesn’t own you. You do.”
Later, we lay in bed together and looked through Mom’s notebook one more time. Now that we knew the story behind the statue, her drawings of a man holding a woman in his arms made perfect sense. But there was still nothing in the book that indicated the actual location of the grave. Most of the pages were crisscrossed with sketches and doodles; only one page was unique in that it had a border of five-petal roses all around, and a very elegantly written quotation from Romeo and Juliet:
And what obscur’d in your fair volume lies,
Find written in the margent of my eyes.
As it turned out, it was the only explicit Shakespeare quotation in the entire notebook, and it made us both pause.
“That,” I said, “is Juliet’s mother talking about Paris. But it’s wrong. It’s not your fair volume or my eyes, it’s this fair volume and his eyes.”
“Maybe she got it wrong?” proposed Janice.
I glared at her. “Mom get Shakespeare wrong? I don’t think so. I think she did this on purpose. To send someone a message.”
Janice sat up. She had always loved riddles and secrets, and for the first time since Alessandro’s phone call she looked genuinely excited. “So, what’s the message? Someone is obviously obscured. But we can find him. Right?”
“She talks about a volume,” I said, “and a margent, which means margin. That sounds like a book to me.”
“Not just one book,” Janice pointed out, “but two books: our book, and her book. She calls her own book her eyes, which sounds to me a lot like a sketchbook”-she knocked on the page of the notebook-“as in this book. Wouldn’t you agree?”
“But there’s nothing written in the margin-” I started flipping through the notebook, and now, for the first time, we both noticed all the numbers that were jotted down-seemingly randomly-on the edges of the pages. “Oh my-you’re right! Why didn’t we see this before?”
“’Cause we weren’t looking,” said Janice, taking the book from me. “If these numbers do not refer to pages and lines, you can call me Ishmael.”
“But the pages and lines of what?” I asked.
The truth hit us both at the same time. If the notebook was her volume, then the paperback edition of Romeo and Juliet-the only other book in the box-would have to be our volume. And the page and line numbers would have to refer to select passages in Shakespeare’s play. How very appropriate.