The Widows' Gallery Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Praise for Marilyn Baron

  The Widows’ Gallery

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Epilogue

  A word about the author...

  Thank you for purchasing this publication of The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  Abigail Adams Longley looked around at the three women flanking her in Hall 10/14 of the Uffizi Gallery. They were all staring at The Birth of Venus like wide-eyed art students. Admittedly, the painting was as compelling as when the Medici family originally commissioned the tempera on canvas in the fifteenth century. But for Abigail, seeing the painting again wasn’t cathartic. It was beautiful, but that wasn’t the feeling she was going for. Peace. Why couldn’t she get some goddamned peace in this life?

  Abigail glanced at the square-cut, four-carat diamond on her finger, gazed at the sparkle of the ring she hadn’t removed since the day Louis had proposed. And now, a whole year after his death, she still hadn’t taken it off. Conventional wisdom dictated that you weren’t supposed to make any major life decisions until a year after a spouse’s death. Well, it had been a year already, and she hadn’t wanted to make even one decision—major or minor—about where to live, where to go, or what to do. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness had devised another dead-on axiom. She had all the money in the world—in fact Louis had left her a big chunk of the globe. He’d left her set for life, monetarily. But she would have traded every cent for the chance to be with him again. Louis was gone, and the sooner she faced the fact that she was alone on this planet, the better off she’d be.

  Praise for Marilyn Baron

  “Baron offers a bit of everything…humor, infidelity, murder, mayhem, and a neatly drawn conclusion.”

  ~RT Book Reviews (4.5 Stars)

  “I just finished reading UNDER THE MOON GATE and really enjoyed it. I was fascinated by the intertwining of the characters in the stories from the 1700s to present day and I especially enjoyed the segment that took place during WWII. Great writing. Marilyn did a great job of bringing Bermuda during the WWII era to life in this book.”

  ~PJ Ausdenmore, The Romance Dish

  “[UNDER THE MOON GATE] is a surefire blockbuster…a treasure trove of mystery and intrigue. It sparkles with romance… I couldn’t recommend it more.”

  ~Andrew Kirby

  “An enjoyable read from start to finish...family, friends, enemies, intrigue and suspense...sadness, laughter, romance and ultimately love.”

  ~Romance Junkies (4 Blue Ribbons)

  “SIXTH SENSE has a great mix of romance, spine-tingling suspense, and real hope for two jaded individuals for a happily-ever-after ending.”

  ~Tami Brothers

  “An intriguing, albeit reluctant, psychic detective in this paranormal romantic suspense story…a strong and captivating heroine.”

  ~Pauline Michael, Night Owl Romance (3 Stars)

  The

  Widows’ Gallery

  by

  Marilyn Baron

  The Lobster Cove Series

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales, is entirely coincidental.

  The Widows’ Gallery

  COPYRIGHT © 2015 by Marilyn Baron

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission of the author or The Wild Rose Press, Inc. except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.

  Contact Information: [email protected]

  Cover Art by Debbie Taylor

  The Wild Rose Press, Inc.

  PO Box 708

  Adams Basin, NY 14410-0708

  Visit us at www.thewildrosepress.com

  Publishing History

  First Last Rose of Summer Edition, 2015

  Print ISBN 978-1-62830-760-3

  Digital ISBN 978-1-62830-761-0

  The Lobster Cove Series

  Published in the United States of America

  Dedication

  To Sandro Botticelli,

  wherever you are in the universe,

  thank you for painting The Birth of Venus,

  my favorite work of art—

  the masterpiece that inspired this story.

  ~*~

  To my beautiful daughters Marissa and Amanda

  (Venus has nothing on them),

  my favorite living works of art.

  ~*~

  To my husband, Steve,

  who took me on a fortieth anniversary Mediterranean cruise that started it all,

  and to my dear friend and first reader,

  Rae Stein, and her husband Barry,

  who signed us up for the “free” cruise in Las Vegas

  and who took the cruise with us.

  ~*~

  And to my friend, Catherine Goetzke,

  the best next door neighbor ever and book club buddy,

  a voracious reader and an eternal inspiration.

  Acknowledgments

  To Abigail Adams Reynolds,

  whose name I appropriated for my heroine, Abby.

  She really was a descendant of John Adams,

  the second President of the United States,

  and was named after his wife, Abigail.

  And for my good friend and neighbor,

  Margee Kane,

  for letting me do it.

  Chapter One

  Somewhere in the Mediterranean,

  off the coast of Italy

  There is a popular but anonymous Italian saying coined in the late 1700s, “See Naples and die!” Well, the cruise ship had just pulled away from Naples Harbor, and Victoria Dare was about to make that phrase a reality.

  Victoria stared into the watery wake of the massive floating hotel. The superliner sliced through the water like a sharp knife through a hot buttered blueberry muffin. Weird she should think of food at a time like this. But she was going to miss blueberry muffins. And crispy bacon. And pancakes. And steaming hot chocolate, for that matter. Maybe it wasn’t too late to change her mind and go to the dining room for one final breakfast—a Last Supper, of sorts.

  And she would miss this fabulous view—so beautiful it was almost painful. The first rays of a rising sun warmed her face and caused her to squint. The surface of the water was smooth as glass, and it mirrored a calm she hadn’t felt in a long time, as if there weren’t a few thousand feet between the Lido deck and the ocean bottom. A place she was going to end up—she glanced at her watch—in five more minutes. Would her body sink to the depths of the ocean floor? Wash up on some picturesque Italian shore, her tender skin ripped to shreds by propeller blades? Or would she become shark bait?

  She’d picked this secluded spot on the cruise ship for a reason. And this time—dawn—before the ship came to life. Victoria was nothing if not a planner. She’d planned her life down to the second, and now she was planning her own death in as structured a fashion. This was only a dry run. Victoria snorted. A dry run. She wouldn’t be so dry when she finally took
the plunge. Practice makes perfect. The motto reminded her of the marketing themes she created for her clients back in Atlanta.

  But she’d recently resigned all her corporate marketing clients. The social media queen had become antisocial since her husband Zach’s untimely death. Although when was death ever timely? She’d purchased a cemetery plot next to Zach’s and had even written her own eulogy. She’d studied her death file in the stateroom before she emerged on deck, to see if she’d forgotten any last-minute details. Ever efficient, it seemed she’d taken care of everything. She’d traced her finger along the map outlining the ship’s route and the stops along the way—Barcelona, Naples, Rome, Florence, Marseille, Palma de Majorca, and back to Barcelona. Well…she wouldn’t be going back to Barcelona with the rest of the passengers.

  Who would miss her if she disappeared into the watery void?

  Her daughter, Emma, for one. And she was going to miss Emma terribly. They’d just spent some quality mother-daughter time in New York City, seeing the latest Broadway musicals, dining at their favorite Italian restaurants, wandering through museums. She’d even slipped in a final visit to the Fragonard Room at the Frick.

  She’d miss hearing all about Emma’s escapades with the online dating service—what Victoria now realized were her daughter’s unsuccessful attempts to find her father, find a man who would take care of her, now that Zach was gone. She recalled their recent conversation over dinner when they’d discussed the fact that Emma was dating three men named Neil at the same time, after a disastrous breakup with a guy named Giuseppe.

  “Isn’t that Pinocchio’s father?” Victoria had asked her daughter.

  “Mom, that’s Geppetto.”

  “Oh.” Victoria had become quiet. She no longer believed in fairy tales.

  Emma told her how she and Giuseppe had met. Giuseppe had texted her, “You’re hot. Let’s get together.” Victoria couldn’t believe her daughter wanted to meet a guy with such a cheesy pickup line. But since her father’s death, Emma had been floundering and making bad decisions about men. The wrong kind of men. If she was trying to find The One, she was going about it the wrong way. It was obvious to Victoria what was happening, but she couldn’t bring herself to verbalize it. She was in no position to criticize or counsel her daughter about happy endings or even provide comfort, when she was struggling to cope with her own loss.

  Emma had agreed to meet Giuseppe, and it turned out he was hot, all right. In fact, he was steaming mad when, after several dates, he asked Emma back to his apartment and she said no.

  “Do you remember what you wrote on your profile page?” he accused.

  “I said a lot of things,” Emma had replied.

  “Under the number of dates it would take before you’d have sex, you said three to five,” he reminded her. “This is our fifth date.”

  “It was just an estimate, not a guarantee,” Emma had countered, adding, “Remind me to change that in my profile.”

  But Emma certainly wasn’t going to miss her mother’s annoying obsession with her love life or lack of one. It seemed doubtful Victoria was ever going to become a grandmother anytime soon, so, really, even at forty-something, this was the perfect time to go, before she became hopelessly attached to a precious new baby. Emma had a close circle of friends and a satisfying job in New York, so she’d be okay.

  Victoria had purchased a beautiful green Italian inlaid burl-wood jewelry music box in Sorrento that played “Ritorno a Sorrento” when you lifted the lid. She’d placed her wedding ring in the box, had the store wrap it, and left a long letter on the package in her stateroom explaining her actions to her daughter. Though Victoria was pretty sure committing suicide was unexplainable.

  Why was she doing it? Why snuff out her life? Because it was scary out there. And now she was single again. In the same boat as Emma. Well, not in a boat, exactly. On a humongous ship in the middle of the Mediterranean. Thousands of miles away from Emma. She was dying to call her daughter and listen to her sweet voice one last time, but she knew if she did she would lose her resolve.

  And, if she jumped now, she’d miss seeing The Birth of Venus at the Uffizi Gallery on the excursion to Florence, the only item left on her bucket list. A chance to experience Sandro Botticelli’s masterpiece once more in her lifetime. Returning to the gallery with Zach had been a dream of hers. But Zach was gone, and she didn’t want to go on without him. Seeing the painting would bring back too many memories. A framed reproduction print of the painting hung over their bed. She had also chosen the classic scene as her desktop wallpaper and set it as her homepage. But she wanted to see the original again before she left this world. She reached for the picture of Zach she had just placed, carefully wrapped and protected, waterproofed, in the deep pocket of her jeans, and kissed it for the very last time. If there was an afterlife, and she believed it with all her heart, then, suicide aside, she would be seeing Zach again soon.

  Victoria tensed in contemplation. What if they couldn’t find each other in the hereafter? What if the fact that she had taken matters into her own hands, so to speak, prevented her from reaching Zach on the other side?

  The last time she’d laid eyes on Botticelli’s masterpiece was on her honeymoon. That first night in Florence, after visiting the Uffizi, a naked, engorged Zach, flexing his rippling muscles to tempt her in his imitation of David, was anxious to get down to business. He joked that the artist painted The Birth of Venus during his pagan phase. Victoria had been captivated by the peaceful sea-green colors, the golden tresses of the goddess, her ethereal beauty, and her modest yet sensual pose.

  From the moment they’d first made love in the hotel room, Zach had called her his goddess of love. That painting represented the birth of their love. Seeing her favorite painting without Zach would be incomprehensible. But maybe she should delay her demise just a few more days. Then she could experience Rome again, and Palma de Majorca, a place she’d never visited.

  “Vickie, you’re nothing but a gutless coward. Just do it.”

  Victoria glanced around.

  No one was out on deck yet. No sunbathers stirred. No walkers exercised, no joggers ran. Not a sign of the crew anywhere. She dragged over a chair and stood on it, teetering slightly as her hands clutched the ship’s railing to steady herself.

  Gingerly, she started to hoist herself up onto the railing—and ventured a look down. The distance to the water was farther than she’d thought. And she had calculated every aspect of her demise so carefully.

  As she made her move, her body was jerked backwards, the chair tumbled, and she landed with a thud on the wooden deck.

  “For God’s sake! What are you doing? Are you trying to kill yourself?”

  Victoria looked up at a statuesque woman, an angel in the mist. An angel with long, strawberry-blonde tresses that blew about her lovely porcelain face in the breeze.

  It was Botticelli’s Venus come to life. Only this Venus wasn’t nude. She was dressed in a purple jogging suit.

  Registering embarrassment, Victoria struggled to her feet, turned, and ran in the opposite direction.

  “I was just practicing,” she yelled over her shoulder.

  Chapter Two

  Florence, Italy

  Abigail Adams Longley looked around at the three women flanking her in Hall 10/14 of the Uffizi Gallery. They were all staring at The Birth of Venus like wide-eyed art students. Admittedly, the painting was as compelling as when the Medici family originally commissioned the tempera on canvas in the fifteenth century. But for Abigail, seeing the painting again wasn’t cathartic. It was beautiful, but that wasn’t the feeling she was going for. Peace. Why couldn’t she get some goddamned peace in this life?

  Abigail glanced at the square-cut, four-carat diamond on her finger, gazed at the sparkle of the ring she hadn’t removed since the day Louis had proposed. And now, a whole year after his death, she still hadn’t taken it off. Conventional wisdom dictated that you weren’t supposed to make any major life decisions u
ntil a year after a spouse’s death. Well, it had been a year already, and she hadn’t wanted to make even one decision—major or minor—about where to live, where to go, or what to do. Whoever said money can’t buy happiness had devised another dead-on axiom. She had all the money in the world—in fact Louis had left her a big chunk of the globe. He’d left her set for life, monetarily. But she would have traded every cent for the chance to be with him again. Louis was gone, and the sooner she faced the fact that she was alone on this planet, the better off she’d be.

  Abigail was named after the second First Lady of the United States, the wife of a distant relative, but what had she accomplished in her own lifetime? The name was a lot to live up to. And what had she contributed to the world? She burst into tears, and water poured like it was flowing from the Fountain of Neptune outside on the piazza. Shit. Shit. Shit.

  A pretty woman next to her reached into her Furla bag. The same woman she’d pulled back from the brink of death on the Lido deck the other morning. She’d run away so fast Abigail hadn’t had time to question her. She’d debated about reporting the incident to the captain, but then the woman had been in such a fragile state Abigail was afraid to tilt the balance, and apparently the woman had changed her mind, so who was she to interfere? Stiffening, the jumper implored Abigail with her eyes, pleading that she not mention what had happened, or had almost happened, that fateful morning.

  “Here, take this,” the woman said, extending a clean handkerchief she had pulled from her handbag. This Jennifer Aniston lookalike had purchased her new bag at the bottom of the Spanish Steps in Rome. These women were either stalking her or they had the same taste in leather goods, cruise excursions, and, apparently, in artwork. They had been on every excursion with her. First the city highlights tour in Barcelona, then to the farmhouse in Sorrento, next viewing Rome and the Vatican—an eternally arduous tour in the Eternal City. They didn’t appear to know each other. Were they single, too? There was never any evidence of a man. Maybe their husbands were back on the ship, gambling.