The Last Will of Moira Leahy (19 page)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

IL SOTTO ABBASSO

S
omething about Rome stimulated contact and intimacy; maybe—the fountain water everyone sipped was laced with pheromones. People held hands, embraced, kissed. Even the statues twined around one another. So it was easy to blame the great city’s power of suggestion for my ogling Noel, which began the moment I appeared back in his room.
Perfectly tailored pants the color of rich espresso. Midnight blue silk shirt fitted like a skin, open at the neck
. My eyes roamed him as he chatted with Giovanni.
Abdomen, shoulders, thighs, mouth
.

I thought Noel caught me once or twice, but I always looked away, then.

“You will change, yes?” Giovanni asked me at one point. I still wore the outfit I’d had on that day.

“I thought maybe this would—”

He tsk-tsked. “No,” he said. He looked sinful himself in black pants and a leopard-print shirt with an overlay of bold orange stripes. “Where is your flow-in-the-dark?”

I glanced at Noel, who raised a brow.

“I … I don’t—”

“Mariella said you have a new and beautiful thing. You go. Go now and change.”

Before I could respond, Giovanni began a twisty little dance. “Sunday night and I ain got no body! I got some money ’cause I just got paid! Mama let me have someone to talk to, and there will be jazz tonight.” He continued to sing and dance while my thoughts snagged on just one word.

“Jazz?”

“Music,” Noel said. “It’s a jazz club.”

Ah, hell. Jazz almost always meant the sax. Though I hadn’t managed to evade all sax music over the last decade, I’d done my best. I imagined it was like seeing an old lover, happy without you; hearing the live sound of a reed’s voice made me ache. It had ever since my instrument drowned in the Penobscot, met up somewhere on the sea’s rock-and-silt floor with my family’s old
keris
. Time to pull out my Chinese Brother skills and take a long drag of air; I wouldn’t let Noel down again.

Back in my room, I closeted up with my new clothes, my old concerns, and finally my resolutions. And when I finished with my transformation, I stared at the woman in the glass. Her wisp-of-smoke skirt showed the curve of slender hips. Her sheer black top revealed a dimple belly button, and its elaborate silver threading concealed only the most intimate parts of her breasts. There was something medieval about her sleeves—the way they hugged tight to her forearms and flared at her wrists. Her cheeks and lips looked ruby-kissed, her eyes dramatic, and her hair held a flock of butterfly clips. A pair of red heels made miraculous work of her calves.

“Who are you?” I asked the mirror.

You are Alvilda. You are Maeve. You fear nothing
.

Right, then. I would go. I would face Noel as I faced the glass. And I would face the music.

I REPLACED THE
keris
in my safe before I left. “Stay,” I told it. I knew I was stalling.

I donned a silver wrap, then took a deep breath and opened the door. Noel and Giovanni looked staggered, and I had to admit to a thrill of feminine power.

“My girlfriend will kill me for saying so”—when the words came, Giovanni Benedetto Chioli sounded as American as Billy Crystal—“but you look marvelous!”

“That’s the magnum opus of understatement,” Noel said.

I smiled and wondered if I might glow in the dark after all.

NOEL SETTLED HIS
jacket over my shoulders as we walked a short but chilly distance to the outskirts of Trastevere. When Giovanni announced that we’d reached our destination, I thought he’d lost his mind; we stood before what looked like a long shed. He opened a door marked with nothing but a thin growth of moss, and in we stepped. We traveled a dim hall, then a long flight of stairs, before passing through another door and down more steps.

I hadn’t known places like Il Sotto Abbasso existed—a club beneath modern-day Rome, where a buried city sprawled in mute glory. Shops and homes, streets and aqueducts—there were many such places, even under people’s houses, Giovanni said, and owners hid them away to maintain their peace. It fascinated me, the idea of a secret world beneath the surface.

Before the final door was even opened, I heard the din of holler-talk along with strains of Louis Armstrong’s “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.” Relief. Recorded trumpeting I could handle.

Giovanni left us to visit with friends while we took in the room. Tall tables dotted the floor, amid a throng of swaying bodies. I turned to Noel, ready to let loose a comment about the likelihood of me going out to dance, but he stopped me.

“You look delicious,” he said.

I shook my head.
Delicious
wasn’t a label I could own.

“You make it hard sometimes, Maeve Leahy, to be a gentleman.”

“But you are one.”

“An effing inconvenient reputation,” he said with a grimace. “But I know the rules. I’ll be good.”

I realized then, in that under-down place, why I’d kept Noel in my life when I’d shunned others. Because he was, at heart, an old-world chap like his grandfather. A man who might’ve stepped from the pages of
Jane Eyre
. Safe. And maybe I’d wanted him close because I knew he genuinely cared for and admired me as a woman, and I craved that rush, even if I took nothing else. Not kisses or sweet words. Not a body to hold at night. Noel Ryan was my not-mate mate. My not-lover love. My gentleman who didn’t always want to be a gentleman.

What a selfish bitch I’d been. To both of us.

I let my wrap slide down to the crook of my arms and held out my hand. “Let’s dance.”

He regarded me with hooded eyes, then joined his palm with mine. Not at all awkward, just …
just
.

I pressed my face against his chest as we melded in to become two more people on the dance floor. “You know something? I missed your smell.”

He laughed. “My smell? God, do I smell?”

His scent was rich with complex notes—like air, earth, water, and fire, distilled and woven into his DNA. Like a seasoned shore, maybe, one that had endured some bad times and survived. “You smell good.”

The song changed, became “Dream a Little Dream of Me.” I spoke in time with the tune, mimicked Louis’ words: “Say nighty-night and kiss me. Just hold me tight and tell me you’ll miss me …”

He stilled, swayed again.

When the next verse began, with talk of craving kisses and lingering till dawn, I switched to Italian.
“S’affievoliscono le stelle, ma io, tesoro, indugio con l’anelito tenace, bramante per il tuo bacio. Con l’ardore languisco … E già è l’alba! Tesoro, che posso dirti?”

He sang the next words in my ear. I don’t think I’d ever heard him sing before, but his voice was a rich, clear tenor. “Sweet dreams till sunbeams find you. Sweet dreams that leave all worries behind you. But in your dreams whatever they be, dream a little dream of me.”

His fingers splayed over my bare back, and I leaned into him, held tight. Here we were again, like the night I’d had too much to drink and called him a ninny. Like then, but different.

“God, Maeve, it’s worse and worse,” he said in a soft-serious mutter. “You have no idea.”

“Yes, I do.” My hand dipped to his hip, flexed there.

He pulled back, and the expression on his face—like I was it for him, the only woman in the room—filled me with rapture. I realized in that honey-covered moment, as he tucked a finger under my chin, that I’d kissed Noel a thousand times in my dreams. But this was no dream. His lips were warm and gentle. They didn’t ask much, just to be still with mine. Not nearly enough for my resurrected yearnings. Just as I’d begun to brush my mouth over his, though, Louis’ song stopped abruptly—

—and was replaced by the squeal of a microphone. I jerked my head back as a stew of live sounds thickened the room. The pluck of a bass, the steady tap-tap of the cymbals, a beat on drums, and an ivory-key melody.
Oh, Moira
. And there, not quite on key, the sax.

MY JOY SOURED
as the player sustained his bad start. Strident notes sounded out with a hiss—the clear protest of a harassed instrument. I put my hands to my lips, my ears, set them down again.

A black curtain lifted in a dark corner, revealing a stage and a group of musicians. A woman with black hair and red lips at the piano. A thin man plucking a bass. A bald drummer who married stick to metal with his eyes closed. And a guy with hair whiter than mine who completed a flat run on an airy nonnote, his fingers wrapped around a sax.

“Are you all right?” The man I’d just kissed looked at me with a reasonable question in his eyes, as my eyes stung.

“Sorry. I’m just …”

Noel shook his head in question, and I shook mine back in response. The tale of my music, of my sax, was one of a long-lost love. Intimate. Over.

Cymbals crashed. I turned to see metal disks fluttering on their stands as the sax player righted himself, squealed out another note. He had to be drunk or high. Plenty of people laughed. My fingers itched to steal his instrument.

Remember the taste of reeds?

My tongue watered and curled. I had to get out of there.

I opened my mouth to offer an excuse. Headache. Fatigue. The urge to kill. That’s when I noticed a high shelf loaded with skulls just beyond Noel, a Jolly Roger pinned to the wall. The sight of those disembodied heads took my anxiety up a significant notch. I would gladly have sunk into the floor to escape, but deep in Il Sotto Abbasso, there was nowhere to go but up.

I pushed my way through the crowd and to the exit, and had run halfway up the first set of stairs when Noel called. I waited as he followed me up, reached the step just below mine. We stood almost nose to nose.

“Was it that bad?” Pride and hurt warred in his eyes.

Comprehension dawned. “It’s not about the kiss. It’s personal.”

“How much more personal—”

“Later, all right?” I took a step backward, upward. I still heard the lush’s massacre too well.

“What about now? Now sounds pretty damned good to me.” Frustration threaded through his voice. It rushed through me, too—like water in my lungs, through the heart of my sax—as more laughter rose from below. “Why can’t you open a little, Maeve? Say what’s in your head. Trust me.”

“Like you trust me?”

“What do mean by—”

“Just what I said—you don’t trust me.” I clung to this line, desperate, and pursued it, let anger fill me up as I took another step back. “You don’t contact me for months, you say nothing! Why don’t you send those letters to the investigator? Why won’t you read them? Why don’t you want to find your mother?”

“What has this got to do with that?”

“You’re avoiding talking about it or taking any action.”

“I’m
avoiding?”

“You still hate her,” I said, four steps away now. “Maybe you don’t want to hear what she has to say, but you might be able to fix things! Don’t be a coward!”

His chin jerked as if struck, but it was too late now to call the words back. “Tell me you’ve never run from anything, Maeve. Christ, you’re running now, look at you go!”

“Maybe I am. But you … you don’t even know what you’re running from. You don’t know what your mother ran from.”

“She ran from me.”

“And now you’re running from her!”

“No, I’m running from you!”

My foot froze midair. From me? The possibility exploded in me, fused together incongruent bits and settled them into sense: Noel’s lack of contact over so many months, his distant behavior since my arrival in Rome, the sense that I’d hampered him with my
keris
business. He didn’t want me here. He didn’t want me because—

“You didn’t leave Betheny to find your mother at all.” My voice was a rasp. “You left to get away from me.”

His jaw worked.

“Tell me. Tell me the truth!”

“Fine, the truth! I needed solid ground, and you’re anything but that. What would you have me believe? The look in your eyes when you think I’m not paying attention or your body language when you know I am?” He laughed without humor. “I wanted an affair with a beautiful woman to get you out of my blood, but I couldn’t even do that. And then you came here, across an ocean, like a ghost on the trail of her favorite tormentee!”

His expression grew cracked and raw. And then he took the steps, two at a time, near me, past me. I ran after him, tangled my fingers in his shirt until he stopped. He emanated heat.

“Let go, Maeve,” he said, quiet now. “You’re just another woman who doesn’t give a damn.”

“That’s not true.”

He turned, looming over me. “It bloody well is true. I want you exorcised.” Long dark strands stuck out between his fingers as he snatched at his hair, and I thought of the skeletons near the ceiling, thought of them falling on my head. “I want to be free of this. And I don’t want to love you anymore, Maeve Leahy,” he said, quiet and solemn like a prayer.

Love me? I couldn’t quite wrap my brain around it. Love me? My fingers loosened. I tried to make words and couldn’t.

Stop. Stop him
.

Noel had pulled away and disappeared up the stairs, while below sounds of torture seemed to grow louder by the second. I put my hands over my ears and still the noise thrummed in my veins and kicked my heart offbeat.