La Bete Noire

“…and then, in front of everyone, she opened the barrel. Do you know what she found inside?”

We all gasped, holding our glasses of Cabernet a bit closer to our chests. For the past half hour, Nirali had every last one of us enraptured with the grisly details of our town's most infamous cold case. Of all the friends I made since I moved to Palmetto Town, none could hold a candle to her when it came to storytelling.

Back in her heyday, Nirali was a flight attendant for a major airline and her cottage is decorated with photographs and trinkets from her many adventures. I’ve seen pictures of her and her husband Vijay running down the streets of Pamplona for the annual Running of the Bulls; walking atop Siberia’s ethereal frozen Lake Baikal; holding hands beneath the vibrant green northern lights in Reykjavik; and smiling happily as they purchased marigolds in the Jaipur flower market.

There’s never a dull moment within the Shah home and their “3C” parties (Chocolate, Crime, and Cabernet) are one of the highlights of my month. The same can also be said for my husband Rodrigo (who insists on bringing a bucket of pears from our farm each time we show up, namely because the damn trees makes more fruit than the two of us can eat) and some of the other retirees in our neighborhood.

“Why don’t you finish the story, dear?” Nirali asked her husband as she left her chair and headed to the kitchen. “I need to check on the cake and make sure it’s cooled down enough to serve.”

Vijay Shah used to be a detective—not a homicide one, but he tried to get transferred to that division multiple times. It’s a shame he never got that job, because the man’s quite passionate about the field. While Nirali’s into true crime for the story and motives, Vijay tends to focus more on the forensic aspects. He’s also quite terse, and that ended up being true for the Hicks case as well.

“Whiskey,” he murmured as he sipped his wine. “It was just whiskey. To this day, Mr. Hicks’s body has yet to be found.”

“Well, damn,” my husband grumbled and stuffed another pear slice into his mouth. “Sounds like the whole town was obsessed with that case.”

“Oh, they were,” Vijay confirmed nonchalantly, “but I can assure you that the case my wife wants to talk about next is so bizarre that I had to look it up online just to make sure she wasn’t making things up again. You know how Nirali likes to pull one over on us sometimes, just to see if she can.”

Indeed. The last time we came here, Nirali told us the sordid tales of:

• An Australian woman who butchered her husband and tried to serve him to his children
• An American lady who murdered her lover’s Malaysian wife because she was convinced they were both reincarnated alien queens from rival planets

Some things truly do sound too strange to be real, yet end up being all the more gruesome because they are.

When Nirali returned with the biggest, richest, and darkest chocolate cake I’d seen in years—as well as a huge grin on her face—I couldn’t help but wonder if the cake itself had something to do with this next case.

“You and Rodrigo had your honeymoon in Italy, didn’t you?” she asked as she placed the cake in the center of the table. “Where specifically did you go?”

“Naples,” I told her. “I’m assuming that this next case is Italian?”

There it was again: that excited smile. “Have you ever heard of the Soap-Maker of Correggio? If not, then by all means help yourself to another glass of wine. I think you’re going to need it.”

I did as Nirali suggested, namely because I knew her well enough to know that she only dragged out the suspense for the nastiest of cases. When she found an especially grisly one, her eyes glimmered in the same way our son’s eyes used to glimmer when we bought him the number one item on his Christmas list.

“Come on, Nirali,” I goaded her as I took my first bite of the cake. It was rich and creamy, almost to the point of reminding me of a firm cheesecake, but had the added decadent bitterness that only the darkest of chocolates could provide. “Don’t keep us waiting. Tell us about the case!”

So she did, with gusto.

“It all began in 1917, when a young lady in Avellino married a man her mother disapproved of. The mother then cursed the couple and misfortune followed them everywhere they went.

“For starters, the young woman was arrested on fraud charges. A few years after that, the couple ended up losing their house in an earthquake. Additionally, the couple lost three children in the womb and another ten in their early years. Of the fourteen live births Ms. Cianciulli had, only four survived.

“Romani fortune tellers confirmed that she was indeed cursed. In one hand, they saw prison in her future. In the other, they saw a criminal asylum. They also predicted that every last one of her children would die young and when her eldest enlisted to fight in World War II, she freaked out. She feared losing her darling Giuseppe so badly that she decided to sacrifice the lives of others to protect him from the curse.

“Her victims, all single women who lived nearby and believed Ms. Cianciulli could predict the future, all met a similar fate. Each one was told that a wonderful opportunity awaited them in another town. They were all instructed to pack their things, write postcards in advance, and tell no one of their trip. Then Ms. Cianciulli killed them with an axe and dissolved their bodies with caustic soda. As for the blood…”

With this, Nirali’s eyes turned toward the cake in the center of the table and a low, ominous chuckle rattled in her throat. “It’s amazing what chocolate can hide.”