The Late Contessa by Dorothy Fletcher

Author:Dorothy Fletcher [Fletcher, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-4405-7199-2
Publisher: Prestige Books Inc.
Published: 1971-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter Eight

When we got back, Lucrezia was just leaving. She told me that Elizabeth and I had been invited next door for dinner. She gave Gianni and me a sly look and, behind his back, even winked at me. I winked back, not to be outdone. She climbed onto her Vespa and, before starting the motor, called to me, “Signorina, the evening is quite cool. Perhaps you had better take a shawl for the signora. In the top drawer of her dresser.”

“All right,” I called back, and told Gianni to go on ahead. “You won’t take all night?” he demanded, a hand on my arm.

“No, I won’t take all night. I just want to wash my hands and get Elizabeth’s shawl. Tell your family five or ten minutes, I’ll hurry.”

I went into the house, lit a few lamps for cheer, ran my hands under the water and didn’t bother to do anything else. There was this to say for a sunburn: makeup wasn’t required. I regarded my bronzed face in the mirror and told myself I was quite a dish. Then I snapped out the light over the washbasin, made my way to Elizabeth’s room, found a shawl and was about to step into the garden when something caught my eye.

I don’t know why, but I noticed.

Of course Lucrezia had much work to do in this large villa, even our half of it, and I had observed that surfaces were not entirely free of dust. It didn’t matter. The only thing I was ever fearful of, in my Manhattan apartment, was roaches. I had been lucky in that regard, but part of it was due to eternal vigilance. A little dust didn’t break my heart so long as vermin were not present.

It wasn’t the dust that bothered me. It was the fingerprints in the dust. Oh, not well-defined prints … simply the marks of hands in several places. Marks that left little, clean trails. It gave me a kind of electric feeling, those little trails. It signalled something to me.

I looked about and saw the streaks everywhere. On a desk, a lowboy, a bedside table. My bachelor apartment had been broken into once, and it was just small signs that had stayed in my mind. Little nothings … but amounting to so much in the final analysis.

Abruptly, I left Elizabeth’s room and went back to my own. And yes, they were there too, those ghostly fingerprints, etched, eerily, on the top of my vanity, my writing table and my bureau. And then, alerted, an uncomfortable pounding in my chest, I checked my armoire.

It was closed, as usual, but was not closed correctly. That is to say, the left hand door had a catch at the top which, unless one slid it up, left the door a tiny bit ajar. It was ajar now, although that very morning I had secured it firmly. I was not the most compulsive person in the world, but living alone in a rather small flat I had learned the value of good housekeeping.

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