The Wonder Chamber by Mary Malloy

Author:Mary Malloy
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Leapfrog Press
Published: 2013-11-11T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

With Cosimo gone, Lizzie and Carmine returned to work and moved quickly through every item on the shelves in the library. Lizzie was astonished when the clock in the room rang ten o’clock.

“I can’t believe it has gotten so late,” she said, looking at the table, which was now covered with artifacts of all sorts. “But we have gotten so much done.”

“Without another table, we can’t really pull anything more out,” Carmine said. “Dinner?”

“Isn’t it too late?”

“Not at all. We eat late around here. There is a restaurant on Via Farina that makes a very good tagliatelle Bolognese.”

Lizzie knew the signature dish of the city because Rose and Tony had each made it for her in Boston, but she hadn’t eaten it since she’d arrived and was glad to accept the offer.

Over dinner they talked about a schedule for the next two weeks. Carmine could come the next morning and they decided to walk through the ballroom and figure out how to best set it up for the work they needed to do. He had other obligations in the afternoon and for the whole of the next day, but Lizzie wanted to devote that time to going through the various collection records to see what more she could find out about individual objects. She also decided to call Pina and see if it would be possible for her to visit with Patrizio the next afternoon.

When she returned to the house she remembered the dishes she had left on the dining room table and wondered where she would wash them. There was a small bathroom off the library and she thought there might be some sort of pantry or small kitchen off the dining room. She hadn’t really gone exploring in the house before, but she was willing to now that she was alone.

When she got to the dining room the dishes and the food scraps were gone. In their place were two plain white ceramic dishes and appropriate cutlery, cups and glasses. The tableware she had taken from the sideboard had been washed and returned. It was a reminder that she was not, in fact, alone in the house; Graziella was also here.

Though it was past midnight, Lizzie wasn’t tired and she opened her computer, which was still lying on the table in the library.

“Theresa Kenney looked just like you,” Jackie wrote in an email, “in that you both share human features. She had hair in the 1939 St. Pat’s yearbook, but the picture is black and white and I can’t tell what color it is. Why do you want to know this? It’s not like there is an astonishing likeness or anything. She’s a nice-looking enough girl, but she’s also eighteen or something, so you have quite a few years on her as she looks in this picture.”

She attached a scan of the photograph and Lizzie had to admit that it wasn’t because there was some remarkable resemblance between Theresa Kenney and herself that Patrizio had mistaken her.

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