The Unraveling of Violeta Bell (7 page)

“Captain who?”

I keep forgetting how old I’m getting, that even someone in their early thirties like Eric would have no childhood memory of the avuncular Saturday morning television star pulling carrots out of his big pockets for Bunny Rabbit. “Never mind, Comic Book Boy,” I hissed. “You just go ahead and fritter your life away with that crap while I make America safe for little old ladies.”

“Sounds like a plan,” he said. He buried his nose in an X-men adventure. I started mining the website for answers.

It was hard for me to believe, but Romania had only been an independent nation since the 1860s. That’s when it pried itself loose from the old Ottoman Empire. In 1881, the Romanian parliament imported a German prince named Charles and crowned him as the nation’s first constitutional king—Carol I.

Carol I had no living heirs. So when he died in 1914, his nephew, Ferdinand, became king.

King Ferdinand died in 1927. But his son, named Carol after his great uncle, was more interested in running around Europe with his mistress than running the country. So Carol’s five-year old son, Michael, became king. That’s right, he was five. Talk about dumping more on your children than they can handle. Anyway, little Michael’s reign lasted just three years. In 1930, his playboy father had a change of heart. He booted the boy off the throne and had himself crowned Carol II.

European dictators were in vogue in those years, and so Carol II dissolved the parliament and ruled as an absolute monarch. Which was absolutely a mistake. He was forced to abdicate in 1940, and Michael, now nineteen, was put back on the throne.

Michael reigned until 1947, when the Communists forced him to abdicate. He settled down in England with his new wife, a French princess named Anne, and went to work as a commercial airline pilot.

Romania suffered under a succession of Communist rulers. The last one, Nicolae Ceausescu, was the worst of the lot. A popular uprising drove him from power in 1989. He and his equally hated wife, Elena, were arrested, tried in a makeshift courtroom, and executed just outside the door.

Today, Romania has an elected president and parliament. It also has a small gaggle of royalists who want to bring the monarchy back. They want a British-style king or queen who presumably would clank around in a turnip-shaped carriage and wave at the people. The website, however, reported that Michael I had little interest in getting his old job back.

My scroll bar had reached the bottom of the page. I slapped my computer on the side of the head. “Don’t stop there you lazy son-of-a-bee!”

My screeching brought Eric back to the real world. And he wasn’t happy about it. “What is your problem?”

“This damn website only lists one pretender,” I said. “You’d think there’d be oodles.”

“Well, Maddy, there are oodles of other websites.”

“I can’t spend all day playing with this thing, Eric. I have a cabbage waiting for me at home.”

Eric dog-eared his comic book. “See all these underlined words in blue sprinkled throughout the text? Those are called links. When you click on a link, another site with more information on the topic comes up.”

I clicked on
Michael I.
Another site appeared. “Well, look at that!”

He told me to “enjoy” and went back to his superheroes. I started scrolling and reading, and taking notes on the back of a corporate missive outlining the most recent changes in our medical coverage: Michael and his wife had four daughters. None of them were named Violeta. None of them were within twenty years of being old enough to be Violeta.

That website was a dud. But it did have a very useful link to the genealogy of the Romanian royal family. It listed every king, queen, prince, princess, count, and countess going back to the first Romanian king, Carol I. And among them was a Violeta!

My giddiness was short-lived. “Wouldn’t you know it,” I grumbled. “This Violeta was born in 1873. Which would make her fifty years too old to be our Violeta. And unless she was one of those vampires from Transylvania, much too dead to be our Violeta.”

I took notes on her nonetheless: Her full name was Violeta Dragomir. She was the daughter of a Romanian cavalry officer of low nobility, and not from the principality of Transylvania, but Moldavia. When she was seventeen, she married Prince Anthony, the twenty-one-year-old son of King Carol I. Prince Anthony died when he was twenty-three and Princess Violeta slipped into oblivion.

I asked Eric how I could find out if Violeta was a common name in Romania. He looked at me like I was a Ph.D. candidate in English who’d forgotten how to spell cat. “Duh—Google female Romanian names.”

I typed it in. Several websites agreed that Violeta was a rather common name in Romania. Next, I Googled her last name. Bell didn’t sound very Romanian to me, but you never know. Again I got several websites with long lists of Romanian surnames. Bell wasn’t on any of them. Neither was Bellescu, or Belleanu, or Bellici, or any other names that might be Americanized to Bell. “You do any of that research on Violeta yet?” I asked Eric, with a pretty good notion of what the answer would be.

“It’s only been four days, Maddy.”

“I was just wondering if she was ever married.”

“Didn’t Gabriella’s story say?”

“Violeta told her no,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. I tell people no sometimes, too.”

I went back to the Romanian genealogy website. I scrolled up and down through the dozens of royals listed, both the living and the dead, in the hope of finding something to justify the late Sunday dinner Ike was going to get.

Then there it was. A very curious adjective. In the comments next to King Carol II. You remember him, don’t you? The one who let his five-year-old son be king? So he could cavort with his mistress? Anyway, it said this: “When Carol renounced his right to be king, his recognized heir, Michael, was crowned instead.” The curious adjective, of course, was the word
recognized.
Did that mean there was an
unrecognized
heir or two?

I started clicking links like a madwoman. And I found the website of a man who claimed to be the great-grandson of King Carol I, and therefore the rightful heir to the Romanian throne. “Well, would you look at this, Mr. Chen! Pretender number two!”

Eric didn’t answer. And that’s because he was no longer sitting next to me reading comic books. I scanned the newsroom. Some time during the last half hour or so he’d wandered off to play with the boys in the sports department. They were throwing one of those stupid Nerf footballs around. But I didn’t bitch at him. A—it wouldn’t do any good. B—it appeared I’d pretty much mastered the Googling arts, anyway.

The name of this second pretender was Prince Anton Alexandur Clopotar. There was a photo of him. He had a healthy thatch of white hair. A huge white mustache. He was wearing a polka dot bowtie and a double-breasted blazer with an emblem on the pocket. He was standing in front of a huge red, yellow, and blue flag. A long, straight-stemmed pipe was clenched in his teeth. I read what he had to say about himself:

He was seventy-five. Born in Bucharest. He’d fled to Canada with his parents and older brother at the end of World War II when it looked like the Soviet occupation of Romania was going to be permanent. Unlike his rival, Michael I, who had only daughters to give his country, he had three sons and seven grandsons. Best of all, he offered direct lineage to King Carol I, while Michael was only a distant nephew.

I was confused. I checked my notes. According to what I’d read earlier, Carol I had left no living heirs. That’s why his nephew, Ferdinand, was given the throne. I read on:

Prince Anton’s father, Dumitru Clopotar, was born in 1916. His grandfather, Constantin Clopotar, born in 1891, was the son of Prince Anthony and one Violeta Dragomir.

That’s right, Princess Violeta. The cavalry officer’s daughter who married Carol I’s son. The young widow who slipped into oblivion. According to Prince Anton: “Perhaps we will never know whether my great-great-grandfather was aware that Princess Violeta was with child when he banished her. It is clear that he was distraught when his son and heir, Prince Anthony, was taken so unexpectedly. The royal biographies are not ambiguous on that point. Regrettably, there is also evidence in the king’s diaries and letters that he did not approve of his son’s betrothal to a native Moldavian of insufficient nobility.”

Prince Anton went on to explain in his stuffy way that some months after giving birth to Constantin, the destitute Princess Violeta married a commoner named Gavril Clopotar, who gave the boy his name and raised him as his own. Wrote Prince Anton: “Inasmuch as my older brother, Prince Petru, is no longer living, it is clear that I am the rightful heir to the throne, should the hereditary monarchy be reinstated by the Romanian people. Let me state further, to those who may doubt my claim, that I am prepared to assist wholeheartedly in any and all scientific inquiries deemed necessary.”

The prince also wrote glowingly about his sons and late wife, Agnes. About his satisfying career in the Canadian civil service. About his wonderful home and vegetable garden outside Kingston, Ontario. “Here on my beloved Wolfe Island I will await, with respect and patience, the judgment of my fellow Romanians.”

Good gravy! I knew Wolfe Island. It was the largest of the famous Thousand Islands. It was on the western lip of Lake Ontario. Where the waters of the Great Lakes squeeze into the St. Lawrence River for their long trek to the Atlantic Ocean. I was born very close to there, in LaFargeville, on the New York side of the river. Oh yes, I knew Wolfe Island very well.

The attic doors in my brain swung open. Memories of my years in LaFargeville sprang out like so many mice, bats, and spiders. I herded them back inside. Kicked those attic doors shut. I focused on matters at hand.

I had two living pretenders but no evidence that the late Violeta Bell of Hannawa, Ohio, was related to either of them. Or any other member of the old royal line. And what did it matter, anyway? Romania no longer had a king or queen.

I typed in
Romania, restoration of monarchy.
The good folks at Google gave me 85,000 websites to read. I scanned through the first dozen or so. There was apparently quite a debate whether the throne should be restored or not. At least quite a debate on the Internet.

I did discover that Romania had a small royalist party. Something called the Constitutional Reform and Restoration Union. It had won thirteen seats in the most recent elections for parliament. That surprising showing was credited to public disillusionment with the country’s current batch of leaders. It made me wonder how many votes Dr. Phil would get if he ran for president of the United States? Or how many Oprah would get if she ran for queen?

I clicked off my computer. I squinted at my watch. It was four o’clock. I squinted toward the sports department. Eric was gone. In metro, reporters and editors were straggling in to put out the Monday edition. I was pooped. I headed for the parking deck.

Had I found anything useful?

No, I hadn’t learned if Violeta Bell was really Romanian royalty. But I had found a pair of bona fide pretenders. And I’d learned that there was a small, but apparently growing movement to restore the monarchy. Was someone in the royal family clearing the board in case the monarchy was restored some day? Had that someone somehow seen Gabriella’s story on the Queens of Never Dull? Had Violeta Bell foolishly outed herself?

Or was Eddie French guilty as sin? Despite his aversion to guns? Or was somebody else guilty as sin? One of those other crazy old bags? Somebody else in the Carmichael House? Somebody else in Hannawa?

Or had I just wasted a beautiful day? A day I should have been at home making Ike those pigs in a blanket? “Dolly Madison Sprowls,” I growled at myself, as my Dodge Shadow puttered down the exit ramp, “you are a damn fool—more than likely.”

7

Wednesday, July 19

I spent the morning helping Margaret Newman scrounge through the morgue’s files for old heat wave stories. Hannawa was in the midst of a doozy and Margaret, our environmental writer, wanted to find out if global warming was to blame. She hadn’t written one word of her story yet, but I knew exactly what it would say. It would rehash the past. Speculate on the future. Quote a lot of experts. Come to the earth-shattering conclusion that maybe global warming was to blame, and maybe it wasn’t. More than likely there would a sidebar packed with tips for surviving the current ninety-degree temperatures. Stay inside where it’s cool. Drink plenty of water. Brilliant nonsense like that.

As soon as Margaret hustled back to her desk, I headed down Main Street to Ike’s Coffee Shop. I walked in soaked with sweat. Ike had one little fan buzzing away on the counter and another on top of the cigarette machine. I sat at my usual table by the window. Ike brought me an iced tea—my one concession to the heat—and a tuna-stuffed bagel. After the lunch rush was over he joined me. He had a pamphlet in his hand. “I hope that isn’t from your church,” I said.

“From the doctor’s office.”

“Oh?”

“It’s for you, Maddy. Not me.”

“Oh?”

“I thought it might be helpful.”

I snatched the pamphlet from him and read the fat, black type on the cover: Is Sleep Apnea Dangerous? “For Pete’s sake, Ike!”

“They’ve got a sleep test you can take.”

I came to an instant boil. “I am not taking that test! Louise Lewendowski had one and said it was just awful. They glue wires all over your head. And everywhere else. They watch you all night like a laboratory rat.”

Ike dug his fingers into the tabletop. To prevent himself from strangling me presumably. “Wouldn’t it be worth it to see how serious a problem you might have?”

“I do not have a problem.”

“Now Maddy, that snoring means you’re not breathing right. And not breathing right could lead to a heart attack or something.”

“I don’t have a heart.”

“Yes, you do. And so do I.”

The sweet old bastard had me. I stuffed the pamphlet in my purse. “I’ll read the damn thing. But I’m committing to nothing, Ike. Nothing.”