“Strip search?” Lettie slapped a cold, quivering hand on my arm. “Please, Dotsy, talk to them. This can’t be happening!”

“I can’t believe you had a gun in your carry-on, Lettie. Have you lost your mind?” Here we were in Milan, Italy. A whole new world. Same old Lettie.

“I was just following your suggestion, and it isn’t a gun. It’s a water pistol.”

I threw a maternal arm around Lettie’s trembling shoulders. At home, Lettie and I live two hundred miles apart, and we normally get together maybe once or twice a year. It amazes me that she manages to stay alive and out of jail without my constant intervention.

“I told you to bring a water pistol to Italy? Maybe you misunderstood me. I may have said to bring a water bottle.”

“No, and don’t treat me like a kid. I’m fifty-umm years old.” Lettie shuffled at a snail’s pace toward the door the uniformed security man had indicated. He scrutinized her from his position behind a checkpoint table. Lettie eyed him as if she might try to make a break for the concourse and hide out in the duty-free shop.

Dragging her suitcase behind her like an albatross dead three days, she trudged through the doorway and disappeared behind a humorless-looking woman who shut the door with an ominous click. Welcome to Italy.

I wasn’t about to let this ruin my day, let alone my trip. I could already see myself laughing about it at Christmas parties next winter. I slipped out my passport and ran my finger lovingly over the brand new stamp. My first passport stamp. My first passport.

“Dorothy Lamb?” I jumped at the sound of my legal name and located the source, a pretty young woman with tousled auburn hair shoved back with a pair of large sunglasses. “I’m Tessa D’Angelo, your tour guide. Welcome to Milano.”

“Please call me Dotsy.”

“And this is Amy Bauer,” Tessa said, turning to her companion.

Just behind Tessa, a tall woman who could easily have been a model—she was gorgeous—stepped forward and extended her hand toward me. The extending of the hand, I think, caused her purse to slip off her shoulder and bounce into the crook of her arm. A slip of paper popped out of the purse and drifted, perhaps caught by a tiny air current, toward me. As it landed near my left foot, I bent over to pick it up for her.

Amy Bauer lunged forward so fast and so awkwardly—it would be no exaggeration to say she pounced on it—that she fell, head first, onto the top of my lowered head. The inside of my eyes were immediately treated to a psychedelic light show. I heard a crack which could have been either Amy’s barrette or my own skull, and my sinus cavities imploded, as if I had just dived off the high board and hit the water, chin first. I grasped the paper, but Amy snatched it away before I could even yell, “Owww!”

She apologized profusely, and I, in an attempt to get this relationship off on a smoother footing, changed the subject. “You must be Beth Bauer’s sister. Lettie is dying to meet you. She says the last time she saw you, you were about six.”

“If she says so, I’ll take her word for it. Beth has told me so much about her old friend—oh, I didn’t mean . . .”

“That’s okay. I know you meant old in the good sense of the word,” I said. What the hell is the good sense of the word “old”? I wondered. If Lettie was old to Amy, what must I seem like to her? I’m five years older than Lettie.

“Is that Letitia Osgood you’re talking about? Where is she?” Tessa scanned the printed list she held clamped to a clipboard.

“Well, at the moment, she’s being strip-searched. She ran into a spot of trouble at the immigration gate.” I explained the whole thing while Amy’s and Tessa’s mouths dropped closer and closer to their collarbones.

“Why didn’t she get caught in Washington?” Tessa asked. “Security should have caught that before she got on the plane.”

I shrugged as the door swung open and Lettie, now pushing her luggage ahead of her, sort of oozed out with her head down, as if she thought everyone in the airport had just seen her naked.

“I hate Italy. I want to go home.” Lettie’s chin tightened up in that way it always did when she felt vulnerable.

Tessa whisked us out of the airport so quickly, Lettie had no further chance to dwell on her recent unpleasantness. A blast of heat hit us as we dashed out and through a parking area to the six-passenger SUV Tessa had borrowed from her tour company. She heaved our luggage into the back. “We have to pop over to Linate Airport on the way out of town. There’s a couple coming in on a ten o’clock from England to join us, and that, I believe, will be everybody. The others are already at the hotel in Venice.”

Lettie and I hopped in behind Tessa and Amy. “I’m at a total loss to think what I said that made you bring that water pistol, Lettie,” I said.

“You said, ‘it’s fun to meet children when you travel, and one way is to have a toy to show or give them.’”

“I meant something like a balloon or a finger puppet.”

We stopped in Verona for lunch. Now this was Italy; or my image of Italy. Milan had struck me as being no different from any city anywhere. It could have been Cleveland, for heaven’s sake, except the signs were in Italian. Milan seemed to have more than its fair share of furniture stores and factories. Where were all those exclusive boutiques I’d heard about?

Verona, by contrast, sang with color and whimsy. Frescoed walls, crumbling corners, Roman ruins. Flowers cascaded from every window. The windows served as box seats from which small, frizzled women watched the pageant of street life below.

We ate at a sidewalk café on the Piazza Brà, overlooking the Arena. The Arena di Verona looks, for all the world, like the Coliseum in Rome, but in much better shape. Several huge sphinxes and lotus-shaped columns littered the eastern side of the piazza, testaments to the Arena’s modern use as an opera house. They were apparently doing Aïda. In spite of my jet lag and the headache left over from my collision with Amy, I began to get that giddy feeling that comes over me when I plunge into totally foreign territory—like when I water-skied for the first time and the night I bought moonshine from a bootlegger.

“Juliet’s house is just a few blocks from here.” Tessa signaled the waiter for menus.

“Juliet? But she wasn’t a real person.” I laughed. “How could she have a house?”

“You’re not supposed to think like that. You’re supposed to be a tourist.”

The Reese-Burtons, the couple we had picked up at the Linate Airport, seemed like a jovial enough pair, but the problem was, I couldn’t understand a word the husband, Geoffrey Reese-Burton, said. He looked like the prototype of the English colonel, retired from Her Majesty’s service in India. He blustered out sentences in a sort of guttural word purée. He plopped his well-padded bottom beside Tessa and said something like, “Yawf tendop heh?”

“Pardon?” Tessa asked.

“Don’t worry if you don’t understand a word Geoffrey says,” Victoria Reese-Burton offered, glancing around at all of us. “I can’t understand him myself, half the time. But what he said just then was, ‘Have you ever attended an opera here?’”

Amy glanced toward me and grinned. Tessa said, “Oh, sure. I’ve been to performances over there. It’s marvelous. The acoustics are . . .” She kissed her fingertips in a typically Italian gesture.

Tessa, Amy, and I had kept up a light-hearted chatter in the car, between Milan and Verona, and slowly Lettie had climbed out of her blue funk and joined us. As she studied the menu, she nudged Tessa. “You’ll have to help me with this menu. I need to get something easy to chew.” Lettie put the back of her hand up to the side of her mouth in a sort of stage-type aside.

It was such a uniquely Lettie-quirk, that I could have spotted her in a jam-packed stadium if she only did that little thing with her hand. It was as if she was telling a secret, but she always did it while talking in a normal voice.

“You see,” she said, “I’ve been having some dental work done, and temporarily, I have to wear this partial plate which I cannot get used to. So what would you suggest?”

Tessa suggested the eggplant Parmigiano, and the rest of us shared two pizzas. I said, “You haven’t even a trace of an Italian accent, Tessa. What’s your first language, English or Italian?”

“Both, actually. I grew up in Pennsylvania, but my mother immigrated to the U.S. after she and Dad got married.”

Amy butted in. “She and I were buddies in college.”

“Anyway, I grew up speaking English everywhere but home. At first, my mom tried to learn English, but then she . . . well, I have a younger brother who is mentally challenged . . . my mother would never let anyone care for him but herself, and he had to be watched all the time. So, after he was born, she hardly ever went out, and therefore, hardly ever practiced her English. I grew up speaking Italian with her and English with everybody else.”

“And after you moved here?” I tried to imagine the loneliness of the poor woman, housebound, in a foreign land. “Has she been here to visit?”

“No. Mama died a few years ago. Then my brother had to be put in a nursing facility, anyway, in spite of how hard Mama had worked to avoid that very thing.” As if to turn the conversation in a happier direction, she touched Amy’s hand lightly and said, “But my ol’ buddy, Amy Perez . . . whoops, Bauer, I mean, has finally come to visit. Amy and I hadn’t seen each other since we were in college and then we bumped into each other at a travel convention this spring. I talked her into this trip, and then she recruited her sisters to join us.”

Beth and Meg, as I well knew, were Amy’s sisters. Like everyone else in the world, I had already asked Lettie if they had another sister named Jo, and Lettie had informed me that, of course, they didn’t. They had a brother named Joe.

“And then Beth talked me into coming,” Lettie said. Lettie and Beth were sorority sisters.

“And then Lettie talked me into coming,” I said.

“And Meg has also talked a few acquaintances into coming,” Amy added.

“Just like old home week!”

“Oh, dear. Geoffrey and I are like interlopers.” Victoria peered over her sunglasses with questioning eyes.

“Not at all. When we get to the hotel, you’ll find we have people from all over.” Tessa signaled for the check. “Speaking of that, I’ve run off copies about the folks in our group for each of you. Remind me when we get back to the car.”

As we headed for Venice, Tessa drove, and the rest of us studied our copies of the list she had given us. It was arranged, she said, with roommates listed together. I read mine, mentally matching up spouses, siblings, friends, and parents with children as well as I could:

Amy Bauer—Philadelphia, PA

Margaret Bauer—Baltimore, MD

Elizabeth Bauer Hines—Baltimore, MD

Richard Kramer—Silver Spring, MD

Michael Melon—Washington, DC

Letitia Osgood—Fredericksburg, VA

Dorothy Lamb—Staunton, VA

Shirley Hostetter—Philadelphia, PA

Crystal Hostetter—Philadelphia, PA

James Kelly—Newbury, Ontario

Wilma Kelly—Newbury, Ontario

Walter Everard—Washington, DC

Elaine King—Washington, DC

Geoffrey Reese-Burton—Woodstock, England, UK

Victoria Reese-Burton—Woodstock, England, UK

Paul Vogel—Arlington, VA

Lucille Vogel—Arlington, VA

I decided that Shirley and Crystal Hostetter were mother and daughter, rather than sisters, based purely on their first names. I knew a lot of Shirleys my own age, but hardly anyone over twenty-five named Crystal. I knew that the first three, the Bauer sisters, wanted to share a triple room so that meant that the next two, Richard Kramer and Michael Melon, were roommates. Friends? Gay? Don’t know each other, but got put together because they were both single men? Singles who wanted to have their own rooms had to pay a single supplement. And what about Walter Everard and Elaine King? I asked Tessa about them.

“They’re a couple. I suppose she just still uses her maiden name.”

“That’s done a lot these days,” Lettie said.

“Not by me, I was glad to get rid of my maiden name,” Victoria said.

“Why? What was it?”

“Crapper.”

“I see what you mean.”

I folded the list and tucked it in my purse, then scratched around for a bottle of aspirin for my stubborn headache. I guess it was the combination of thinking about my head and, at the same moment, seeing Amy slip her list into her own bag that made me remember the four words I had read on that little piece of paper before she snatched it away. It said “. . . crushed the baby’s skull.”