Pushing Up Daisies

CHAPTER 49

“Just hold off on the sledgehammer until we shoot video,” Lucy said, thinking ahead.

“I’m not razing it. Besides, I’ve got over a hundred stills.”

“This isn’t public television-I need video. I can’t just zoom in and zoom out on the same damn pictures for twenty- seven minutes.”

Characteristically, Lucy had become obsessed with the Yoly project and had all but moved in with me. In no time she’d written a script, shot a ton of additional footage, and interviewed everyone remotely connected to Yoly, including, with Felix acting as translator, Celinda Rivera, who was still in the United States, visiting cousins in New York.

Jon Chappell’s help was invaluable. Lucy had dangled a coexecutive producer credit as the carrot to keep him engaged, but he needed little incentive-being in the same room with Lucy seemed to be payment enough for him.

“If there were Kennedys involved, even distant ones, I could be looking at a Peabody Award,” she’d said early on.

“Well, don’t start writing your speech now,” I’d said. “Not only aren’t there Kennedys, we may not even have a Fifield.” I replayed my visit with Dina.

“Something going on in Washington?” Lucy said. “In the summer… in the early seventies? She ever hear of Watergate? It must be dark, living your whole life with your head up your butt.”

Evidently, the summer Yoly disappeared, both Mr. Fifields were out of state, otherwise engaged, and could prove it. Which left the amazingly well- preserved- some would say pickled-Mrs. Fifield with only her lusty Mediterranean gardener for company. She made do.

“That rascal,” Lucy said. “I guess even a broken clock is right twice a day. But if Guido Chiaramonte was boffing the very rich, very worldly Dina Fifield, would he waste his time with poor, simple Yoly Rivera?”

“In a heartbeat,” I said. “Dina might have made him feel like a Roman god in the sack, but once they were vertical she probably fell right back into character and reminded him that she was slumming with him. With Yoly, he’d be the worldly, upper- class partner.”

By the time I had a realistic estimate and a signed contract with Dina, Felix and Hugo had assembled a workforce and we were ready to start as soon as the ink was dry. Not surprisingly, our first task was dismantling the fountain.

The marble pool and some of the statues would remain intact. The trumpeting angels would lead Dina to her gazebo; the cherubs would frolic in her serenity garden; the massive Roman god would preside over her waterfront pavilion. The rest I’d figure out along the way.

The smaller statues weighed close to three hundred pounds each and required three men to lift them off the brass rods anchoring them to the fountain’s base. We hired a piano mover to raise Neptune and deposit him on his new perch facing the water on a quickly built platform of gravel and Pennsylvania bluestone. That alone took half a day, and anyone watching might well have wondered why I was more interested in a hole in the ground than a thousand- pound marble statue hanging precariously by a cable. Once Neptune was enthroned, I sent the men home.

Lucy was there to record the event, if, in fact, there was one; and Felix and the newly sprung Hugo provided the muscle.

In the center of the now empty marble pool was a concrete ring housing the fountain’s pump and tubing. Four cinder blocks surrounded the pump.

We moved the cinder blocks and external pump. Underneath the pump was a thick square of black slate. It took Felix and Hugo and two heavy crowbars to flip over the slate. Black landscape fabric was wrapped around a lumpy, unidentifiable object, but poking through the weed mat was something that looked eerily familiar. A bone. A bone I was convinced belonged to Yoly Rivera.