The Mephisto Club

move.
    “If you ever need help, you can call me.” He pulled a business card from his shirt pocket and handed it to her. “The number for my mobile.”
    “I’ll give you a call sometime,” she said, dropping the card inside her backpack. Let him hang on to his fantasy. He’d give her less trouble when she left.
    At Rome’s Stazione Termine, she climbed out of the truck and gave him a good-bye wave. She could feel his gaze as she crossed the street toward the train station. She didn’t glance back, but walked straight into the building. There, behind windows, she turned to watch his truck. Saw it just sitting there, waiting.
Go on,
she thought.
Get the hell away from me.
    Behind the truck, a taxicab blared its horn; only then did the truck move on.
    She emerged from the station and wandered into Piazza della Repubblica where she paused, dazed by the crowds, by the heat and noise and gas fumes. Just before leaving Florence, she had chanced a stop at an ATM and withdrawn three hundred Euros, so she was feeling flush now. If she was careful, she could make the cash last for two weeks. Live on bread and cheese and coffee, check into rock-bottom tourist hotels. This was the neighborhood to find cheap accommodations. And with the swarms of foreign tourists moving in and out of the train station, she would easily blend in.
    But she had to be cautious.
    Pausing outside a sundries store, she considered how she could most easily alter her appearance. A dye job? No. In the land of dark-haired beauties, it was best to stay a brunette. A change of clothes, perhaps. Stop looking so American. Ditch the jeans for a cheap dress. She wandered into a dusty shop and emerged a half hour later wearing a blue cotton frock.
    In a fit of extravagance, she next treated herself to a heaping plate of spaghetti Bolognese, her first hot meal in two days. It was a mediocre sauce, and the noodles were soggy and overcooked, but she devoured it all, sopping up every particle of meat with the stale bread. Then, her belly full, the heat weighing down on her shoulders, she trudged sleepily in search of a hotel. She found one on a dirty side street. Dogs had left their stinking souvenirs near the front entrance. Laundry flapped from windows, and a trash can, buzzing with flies, overflowed with garbage and broken glass.
    Perfect.
    The room she checked into looked over a shadowy interior courtyard. As she unbuttoned her dress, she stood gazing down at a scrawny cat pouncing on something too small for Lily to make out. A piece of string? A doomed mouse?
    Stripped down to her underwear, she collapsed onto the lumpy bed and listened to the rattle of window air conditioners in the courtyard, to the honking horns and roaring buses of the Eternal City. A city of four million is a good place to hide for a while, she thought. No one will easily find me here.
    Not even the Devil.

FIFTEEN
    Edwina Felway’s house was in the suburb of Newton. It sat at the edge of the snow-covered Braeburn Country Club, overlooking the east branch of Cheesecake Brook, which was now a gleaming ribbon of ice. Although it was certainly not the largest house on this road of grand residences, its charming eccentricities distinguished it from its more stately neighbors. Thick vines of wisteria had clambered up its stone walls and clung there like arthritic fingers, waiting for spring to warm their knobby joints and coax forth blooms. Framed by one of the gables, a large ocular of stained glass peered like a multicolored eye. Beneath the peaked slate roof, icicles sparkled like jagged teeth. In the front yard, sculptures reared ice-encrusted heads, as though emerging from snowbound hibernation: A winged fairy, still flash-frozen in mid-flight. A dragon, its fiery breath temporarily extinguished. A willowy maiden, the flower wreath on her head transformed by winter to a crown of snowdrops.
    “What do you think?” asked Jane as she stared out the car window at the house. “Two million? Two and a half?”
    “This neighborhood, right on the golf course? I’m guessing more like four,” said Barry Frost.
    “For that weird old house?”
    “I don’t think it’s all that old.”
    “Well, someone went to a lot of trouble to make it look old.”
    “Atmospheric. That’s what I’d call it.”
    “Right. Home of the Seven Dwarfs.” Jane turned the car into the driveway and parked beside a van. As they stepped out, onto well-sanded cobblestones, Jane noticed the handicapped placard