do your instincts tell you?” Maria asked.
Rita thought about that for a moment. “I don’t know,” she said honestly. “Part of me feels like whoever is doing it is doing it because he’s shy and is afraid I might rebuff him.”
“How does the other part of you feel?”
Rita met her sister’s gaze levelly now. “Like maybe he’s not shy. Like maybe he’s a—” She couldn’t even say the word aloud.
“A stalker?” Maria asked, voicing the very word Rita had hoped so much to avoid. Just like that, a cold shudder went scurrying right down her spine.
“Yeah,” she said. “Like maybe he’s…one of those.”
Maria looked doubtful. “I don’t know,” she said. “Maybe I’m being naive, but I bet you do just have some kind of secret admirer at the hospital. I mean, don’t stalkers usually strike closer to home? And don’t they inspire terror? What was the gift this time? Unless it was a decapitated pet or a dismembered Barbie doll or something, you’re probably fine.”
Rita rose from the sofa and went to retrieve the square white box from her purse, then took it to Maria and placed it in her palm.
“Too small to be a decapitated pet,” her sister quipped. “Unless you’ve been keeping goldfish you haven’t told me about. Just promise me there’s not a severed Barbie hand in there.”
“Maria,” Rita said pleadingly.
“All right, all right. Enough with the sick jokes. I was just trying to make you feel better.”
“Talk of headless animals and doll parts is not making me feel better,” Rita told her.
“I apologize. It’s late,” her sister said by way of an explanation. Then Maria opened the box and moved aside the tissue, sighing with the same sort of delight Rita had exhibited herself upon seeing what was inside.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” she said as she carefully withdrew the crystal heart from inside the box.
“Yeah, but does it refer to my job, or the guy’s feelings for me?” Rita asked.
“And it’s also Waterford,” Maria added, not answering the question, as she held the heart up to the light. “Which means, A, this guy’s got good taste, and B, this guy’s got good money.”
“How can you tell it’s Waterford?” Rita asked, moving to the sofa to sit beside her sister.
“The little seahorse etched on the side,” Maria said, pointing to the logo in question. “See?”
Rita did see the logo. What she didn’t see was why the purchaser had spent so much money this time. She’d seen the bandaged heart pin in the hospital gift shop for ten dollars, and even with her unpracticed eye, she knew the charm bracelet couldn’t have cost much more than that. This, though, was clearly a costly little trinket. Why the sudden leap in price tag?
“Okay, so the first gift came on Valentine’s Day,” Maria was saying as she admired the crystal heart, “and the second—” She gasped suddenly. “Oh, wow. I just now made the connection. Valentine’s Day. The family curse. No wonder you’re concerned.”
Rita expelled an errant breath and told herself her sister was being silly. Oh, sure, there were plenty of Barones who believed in the curse Lucia Conti had put on the family two generations ago, but Rita had never been one of them. She was too sensible to believe in curses. Well, pretty much. But she’d heard the story like everyone else in the family, and she could see why some of the Barones believed in it.
When Marco Barone, Rita’s grandfather and the founder of Baronessa Gelati, had first come to the United States from Sicily in the thirties, he worked as a waiter at Conti’s, a restaurant on Prince Street that was owned by friends of his parents, another Sicilian couple. The Contis had a daughter named Lucia, who, it was said, loved Marco very much, and it was always understood between the two families that Lucia and Marco would someday marry. But Marco met and fell in love with Angelica Salvo, who also worked at Conti’s, and they married instead. On their wedding day—Valentine’s Day—Lucia, it was also said, had put a curse on them and every future generation of Barones. “You got married on Valentine’s Day,” Lucia was reported to have said, “and may your anniversary day be cursed. A miserable Valentine’s Day to both of you, from this day forward.”
Of course, not every Valentine’s Day had resulted in misfortune for the Barones. But a number of tragedies, and a lot of things that had gone wrong for the family had happened on that date. On that first Valentine’s Day after their wedding, Angelica miscarried her and Marco’s first child. Some years later on Valentine’s Day, another child of theirs, one of a pair of twin sons, was kidnapped from the hospital nursery when he was only two days old and was never seen again.
And more recently, there had been a professional debacle this past Valentine’s Day, when Baronessa Gelati had thrown a huge gala to launch a new flavor, passionfruit. Someone had spiked the gelato prior to the event with habanero peppers, and everyone who tasted it suffered from a burning mouth. One man had even suffered from an attack of anaphylaxis, a serious allergic reaction. It had been a public-relations nightmare that not even PR whiz Gina had been able to handle. The Barones had been forced to hire an outside spin doctor to help get the company’s image back on track. They were still seeing repercussions from the incident.
Not the least of which was Gina’s marriage to said spin doctor, Flint Kingman, which, now that Rita thought about it, sort of negated the Valentine’s Day curse.
But Rita could still see why Maria might bring up the Valentine’s Day curse now, even if Rita didn’t believe in it herself.
“So the first gift came on Valentine’s Day,” Maria began again. “And the second gift came on your birthday. Both special occasions,” she noted. “But today isn’t a—”
“Today is the third anniversary of my first day working at Boston General,” Rita said morosely. “Another special occasion of sorts. Whoever’s doing this even remembers the day I started working there.”
“But that narrows it down,” Maria said triumphantly. “That means whoever’s leaving these is definitely someone you work with, and he must have been there three years ago when you started.”
Rita rolled her eyes. “Oh, fine. That narrows it down, all right. To about a couple hundred people.”
“But it must be someone you work fairly closely with,” Maria said. “It’s probably someone in CCU.”
“But I started in the E.R.,” Rita reminded her sister. “And then I worked briefly in geriatrics before I moved to CCU.”
“It still must be someone at work,” Maria said. “That’s where the gifts arrive, and with this anniversary thing, you know that must be it.”
It still didn’t help, Rita thought. There were scores of people who could be possibilities.
“I think it’s kind of sweet, really,” Maria said. “Kind of romantic.”
“Romantic?” Rita echoed, thinking that was a strange word to be uttered by a Boston University MBA who spent most of her time working. “Since when did you become such a romantic?”
Maria
