The Seventh Sinner - Elizabeth Peters [73]
“He is right,” Ted said. “I was in the stacks at noon, and saw him in his office. For several hours thereafter I sat in the reading room. I would have seen him if he had left.”
“I saw him too,” Jean said.
“All right,” Jacqueline said. “To the last painful word, is that it? Ann.”
Ann had been sitting with her grotesquely painted face hidden in her hands. She looked up. Tears had streaked the makeup, but her face did not look at all comic.
“One or the other of you is going to be accused of murder,” Jacqueline said. “The logic can’t be faulted. The motive can be applied to either; your devotion to your brother is well known, you might steal for him. You would probably prefer suffering yourself to seeing him suffer. You’ve done it all your life. But can you let him go free, knowing him for what he is? He’s sick; he may not be incurable. Whether he is or not, whether or not you are ready to sacrifice yourself for him, you have no moral right to sacrifice his potential victims. This will happen again.”
For a long moment the whole room waited, without breathing. Then Ann’s head drooped.
“It was me,” she said, so softly they had to strain to hear. “In the library that day. You said—how easy it is for us to look like each other…. He said it was part of a practical joke. Then, after Albert died…Nobody ever asked! And I didn’t want to believe…”
Di Cavallo had been poised and ready, but Andy’s supple quickness caught him off guard. It was Michael who pulled the clawed fingers from Ann’s throat, and it took both of them to hold him until he finally collapsed into a sobbing heap. But bad as it was, Jean knew this was not the sight that would haunt her. It was Scoville’s face, as he cursed his daughter for betraying his son.
10
TOWARD MORNING A THUNDERSTORM MOVED IN over the city, in a spectacular display of Jovian thunder and lightning. Next day the air over Rome was sparklingly clear. The mighty dome of Michelangelo floated on a sea of green branches. The suburban streets looked as if they had been newly painted in the warm earth colors Jean would always remember when she thought of Rome—umber and orange, gold and brick-red. The sky had the heavenly blue shade Fra Angelico used in the cloaks of his Madonnas, and wild poppies glowed like rubies in an empty lot beside the café.
Jean was the only customer at Gino’s. She had left the apartment early that morning, before Jacqueline awoke, and she didn’t expect any of the others to join her in their old haunt. The Seven Sinners would never meet again; and the commonplace neighborhood café held memories she would not be able to face comfortably for a time.
Yet when she recognized the two figures coming up the hill she was, somehow, not surprised. At the sight of them something shifted and fell back into focus. The past could not be obliterated; it had to be endured. And among its memories were some that were too good to be discarded.
José was back in his customary suits of solemn black, but the ghost of Montezuma still haunted his aquiline face. Ted looked the same, outwardly, but there was something different about his expression, and a new swing to his step. They greeted her rather diffidently.
“We hoped you would come,” Ted said. “But we wondered—”
“About many things,” José interrupted. “We could hardly linger, last night, to ask questions.”
“Don’t expect any answers from me,” Jean said. “I’m just as baffled as you are. The whole thing—”
Her voice broke. José said calmly,
“Was unendurable. That is why we must ask the questions, talk like little gossips. It is the only way—to extract the commonplace and the rational from disaster. It could have been worse.” Meeting Jean’s eyes, he added, “You might have loved him. That would have been worse.”
“I did love him. The same way I love all