Rita had, as she always did in the afternoons following her shift, walked home tonight, unconcerned about her safety because the streets of Boston’s North End were always well populated on a Friday night, even in a light drizzle, as there was tonight. Now she shrugged off her raincoat and ran her fingers through her damp, dark bangs, then forsook the elevator to make her way up the stairs to her third-floor apartment. Once inside, she hung her coat on the rack by the door and went straight to her kitchen to brew herself a cup of chamomile tea. She wasn’t normally a night owl, but she was still too wound up from her shift to go to bed just yet. So, dipping her teabag in and out of her mug, she moved to the bathroom for a long, hot soak in a tub full of lavender-scented water.
It was going on one-thirty, and she was about to turn off her bedside lamp, when she heard Maria coming in downstairs. Pushing back the covers, Rita climbed out of bed and padded barefoot to her front door, waiting until she knew for sure that her sister was alone before opening it. It wasn’t so much that she didn’t want to interrupt anything Maria might be doing with the potential someone special in her life that she didn’t seem to want to tell anyone about, but Rita didn’t want anyone else to catch her in her neon-pink pajamas decorated with ice-cream desserts, which she’d fallen in love with at the store and thought appropriate for a Barone. But she detected no footsteps other than Maria’s on the stairs, so she stepped out of her apartment, peeked over the stair rail and called down to her sister.
“Hey, you,” she said. “Where have you been?”
At the summons, Maria looked up over the stair rail two floors below and smiled. Her dark hair fell just below her shoulders, and her dark eyes twinkled merrily, even in the scant stairwell light. “Hi,” she called softly out of habit, even though there was no one else in the building to disturb anymore. But instead of answering Rita’s question, she asked one of her own. “What are you doing up so late?”
Rita hesitated a moment before telling her sister, “I got another anonymous gift at work tonight.”
Immediately Maria’s smile fell. “That’s what? Three now?”
Rita nodded.
“And you still have no idea who’s leaving them?”
Now Rita shook her head. “And no idea why.”
“Let me drop my purse and shoes in my apartment,” Maria said, “and I’ll be right up.”
Rita murmured her thanks and returned to her own apartment, leaving her door open so that her sister could come inside. A few moments later Maria arrived, still dressed in her Friday-night outfit of black capri pants and sapphire-blue silk shirt. The combination was striking with her dark good looks, and Rita, who was hopelessly fashion-challenged, made a mental note to copy a similar outfit the next time she went out. Then she wondered why she was bothering to make such a mental note, seeing as she never went out anyway.
She sighed fitfully as Maria took her seat on the overstuffed chintz sofa opposite the overstuffed chintz chair Rita occupied herself. Her decorating sense was no better than her fashion sense, so she’d copied the room down to every detail from a photograph in a magazine. Between the chintz furniture and the lace curtains, and the hooked floral rugs on the hardwood floor, she’d managed to capture an English-country-cottage look fairly well, right down to the dried flower wreaths and watercolor landscapes on the cream-colored walls. Usually, this room soothed Rita. Tonight, though, she just felt edgy.
“You didn’t see who left it?” Maria asked without preamble.
Again Rita shook her head. “And it’s really starting to creep me out, Maria. I mean, why would he leave gifts without letting me know who he is?”
“What 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