An Apartment in Venice by Marlene Hill Page B

laughed. “Thanks, but I am old enough, believe me.”
    “How old are you, if you don’t mind me asking?”
    “Not at all. I’m forty-three. Marc’s thirty-nine and teases that he’s always been attracted to older women. How about you?”
    “I’m thirty-two.”
    “And you look about twenty-two, so here we are older women masquerading in Venice.”
    “That fits, doesn’t it?” Giulia said. “Sometimes this whole city feels like continual Carnivale.”
    “Ready to go? Marlowe asked. “We can catch a vaporetto to Murano at Fondamenta Nuova.”
    “I’m ready. Thanks for getting me inside this little gem. It’s been on my list for ages. And Marlowe, thanks for opening up to me.”
    “Thank you , for listening without judgment.”

CHAPTER SIX
    On the way to the vaporetto stop, Marlowe said, “Where’d your feet take you first today?”
    “Pretty much straight to Didovich’s pastry shop.”
    “My favorite, too.”
    “Since you’re a maven on Venetian trivia, maybe you know what happened to Santa Marina’s missing church.”
    “As a matter of fact, I do. In fifth-century Lebanon, she was called Marina the Monk because she entered a monastery disguised as a boy. Until the monks prepared her body for burial, they hadn’t known they’d been living beside a woman. Can you imagine the shock to those sequestered old monks!”
    They whooped with laughter. As each woman offered a different image of the improbable situation, they kept erupting into more laughter until they were staggering down a narrow calle. Giulia guessed they were both releasing tension of one sort or another. When she caught her breath, she said, “I assume poor old Marina’s bones were brought to Venice in the usual way—by theft. But why was her church destroyed?”
    “Napoleon, no doubt. It was probably one of those that he suppressed when he swept through demanding huge changes. Maybe the same time he ordered all bodies in Venetian cemeteries dug up and placed on the cemetery island.”
    “You could write a book for the tourists on Venetian trivia.”
    “Sometimes I drive Marc crazy with it. Let’s turn left here onto Calle del Fumo. It’s a nice, straight shot to Fondamenta Nuova. A relief from the twisty turns everywhere else in this city.”
    “I can’t believe I’ve been in Italy for more than a month already,” Giulia mused aloud.
    “Me too. It’s almost April,” Marlowe said. “When classes began March fourth, I couldn’t believe I had a job to support myself in Italy.”
    “But you were married before coming to work, weren’t you?”
    “Barely—we married in February. But what’s that got to do with work? Are you implying that once I married, I’d drop everything and sit back to stitch Home-Sweet-Home samplers?”
    “No,” Giulia sputtered. “That was a knee-jerk reaction coming straight from my mom’s knee through my mouth.”
    “I know about that. If Mom had known what I was studying, she would have done her best to discourage me from the Law.”
    “Why?”
    Marlowe shrugged. “Because she feared I’d fail maybe? Or… jealousy? Thank God Marc came up with the idea of me teaching law at the base. I’ve never practiced, but in trying to make it understandable to others, I’m learning more than the students. Marc was intent on keeping me here, not that I minded. He called a good friend, Chuck Novak, about the possibility. Chuck arranged an interview for me. Do you know him?”
    “Met him recently on the post.” Giulia told Marlowe how they’d met outside Oliver Ogle’s office. One part of her wanted to know more about the tall, dark, sexy man. Another part wanted to veer far away.
    That problem was temporarily solved when they arrived at a row of pontiles —floating landing stages—lined up along the broad quay. Usually, one pontile was enough, but here, many water-bus lines left for all parts of the lagoon. Il Cimiterio, the cemetery island, seemed to float just across the way, and several