Claire and Present Danger (12 page)

“I did not make up the specifics of the menu,” she said. “The woman who did looks like she has a metabolic problem, and kept saying that everybody had paid so much for this dinner, she wanted it to be special. So live it up—tomorrow, we diet.”

Given all the food that was going to be returned to the kitchen, I was relieved that we weren’t raising funds for the homeless or the starving. I turned back toward Vicky. She was a disciplined woman, and her dinner was largely untouched, but she wasn’t a subtle woman. She showed her displeasure and abstinence from fattening food and, possibly, from further conversation, by folding her hands in her lap.

I couldn’t let my font of information dry up this way. I turned to Beth and whispered. “Ask me something—anything—about the newcomer I met. Or newcomers, or—”

“Why?” she whispered back.

I shook my head. “Just ask—I’ll explain some other time.”

“But I . . .” And then she got it—or thought she had, and unfortunately, it was the same thing in the end. “Ooooh,” she said.

“You’re—” her eyes darted toward Vicky “—but you can’t—her?—I can’t believe she—”

“Not her. No. But—ask, okay?”

She nodded, and I turned back to Vicky Baer, who looked abstracted until she noticed I was angled toward her and became alert again. “Sorry—I was lost in thought,” she said. “And it wasn’t worth a penny, so don’t try to bribe me.”

“I never would.”

“Amanda,” my sister began.

“That woman, Emmie,” Vicky said at the same time. “Why would she tell you she was—”

“—is there a Center City version of a Newcomers Club?” Beth continued. “Do you think—”

I put my hand on Beth’s knee and squeezed.

“But you—”

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I pressed her knee again. She winced. But she also stopped talking.

“—lonely, or having problems?” Vicky finished her question.

“She’s engaged. Leo knows lots of people.”

“You know what,” I said. “She hasn’t been here long, and she’s engaged, so she probably knew her fiancé before she moved here.

I’ll bet he’s the one person she knew and that’s what she meant.”

Vicky shook her head. “She was married, you know. Widowed not that long ago, in California, right before she moved here.” She laughed, though it wasn’t a particularly happy sound. “Besides, I introduced her to Leo. At a party at my house, so I fear, by default, I must be the person she meant. And you’re right. It’s been a whirlwind affair, but you know, when a man’s ready, he’s ready.

And it was certainly high time for Leo. It’s nonetheless amazing that Emmie Cade so quickly got herself through the poisoned brambles.”

“Meaning?”

She looked at me as if deciding what to say, how honest to be.

“His mother,” she said. “I hope I’m not out of line—you said you met Emmie at Mrs. Fairchild’s, and I don’t mean to say anything against the woman, but . . .” She shook her head and grew quiet, poking her fork into the puff-pastry crust around the chicken.

“I don’t really know her,” I said, stepping carefully, hoping an explanation for how I do and don’t know Mrs. Fairchild would form as I spoke. “We . . . the school is having a ‘good-neighbor’

campaign. You know, heading off at the pass the kind of complaints you get from people who live nearby, so . . .” I let it go at that, and hoped Vicky Baer’s need to express her opinion was stronger than my ability to come up with a reason I needed to hear it.

She raised an eyebrow, and put down her fork. “Claire Fairchild is nice enough—unless she thinks you want a piece of what is hers. That applies to her possessions, which includes her things, of course, her money, and most of all, her son. She’s destroyed 88

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every relationship Leo ever had, and I know this from personal experience.”

“You and Leo?”

She made a mock pout. “Let’s just say she wasn’t exactly a help.

My point is, there’s no reason to think the old lady won’t destroy this one, too. Poor Emmie. You’d think it was time for her luck to change.”

“She’s had a bad mother-in-law before?”

“Just a virulent variety of bad luck. Her last husband drowned.

That was horrible. And I understand that her first husband was a general rotter. Of course, Emmie was pretty wild herself. Ran off during her freshman year with a guy . . .” She seemed a little lost, remembering.

“Her first husband?”

She shook her head. “Just a passing fancy. Then I lost touch. The rest I only learned later on, when I bumped into her out west.”

Two marriages behind her, then, not one. And a third waiting in the wings, and she was younger than I was. A prodigy.

Vicky gave in to hunger and pulled apart a dinner roll, slowly eating a segment of it.

“Bad luck indeed,” I murmured, noticing that somehow, my chicken en croute was nearly gone. “She’s awfully young to be marrying for the third time.”

“There was a near fourth,” Vicky said. “An engagement. But he died in a motorcycle accident two weeks before they were supposed to be married.”

Two husbands, a third pending, two violent accidental deaths, one by motorcycle, one by drowning. I couldn’t help but remember that red paper with AND THERE’S MORE DEAD!!! on it.

“The fates seem lined up against poor Emmie,” she said. “She’s a bad luck girl. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

We both sat in silence, Vicky chewing her single bite of dinner roll, when we heard a tinkly version of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth.

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“My phone,” she said. “Sorry. I forgot to shut it off. I’ll take it outside.” She checked her watch. “Be back in ten minutes,” she said. “Might as well go water, walk, and medicate Bruno.”

I sat there thinking about what she’d said. I agreed there was bad luck aplenty in the story I’d heard, but I wasn’t sure whether it was aimed at Emmie Cade or whether she held the franchise for bad luck, and she was the one doling it out to the hapless men who crossed her path.

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Eight

“GOODwork,” Mackenzie said when I told him all I’d found out within a few hours of meeting Mrs.

Fairchild. “Especially with next to nothing to go on. But don’t count on coincidence striking twice. Or ever again in this lifetime.”

I knew that, but I tried explaining why the evening’s find had been lucky, but not exceptionally coincidental. It had been more like finding a bird in its expected roosting spot. “As soon as I saw her photograph, I was going to get Beth’s Main Line tom-toms in action. The surprise was that it went from thought to actuality without any action in between. A miracle.”

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His nod of acknowledgment slid toward nodding off, his head lowering toward his open text for Quantitative Methods in Sociology, his hand still holding his pen, resting on his notebook. I had glanced at the book and found it largely unintelligible, and all through our mutual descriptions of our varied days—his classes and his work with Ozzie, my classes and ditto—he’d rubbed his eyes, stifled yawns, and insisted he wasn’t tired. Now he snapped back up, cleared his throat, and said, “What’s next?”

“Check with Shipley and find out Vicky’s Ohio school, call there, see when Emmie—who I think was Betsey then, but I’ll check—attended, her address, parents’ names, if she transferred in or out, then from and to where—whatever else I can find out. Forwarding address, I suppose. Maybe something will lead to the first husband—the rotter. Or the fiancé who was killed. Can I say I’m considering hiring her and doing due diligence on her résumé?”

He shrugged. “Most people don’t check back to high school.”

“They might, since she didn’t finish college. I don’t want grades or anything personal, just her stats. Would Cornell have records of however long she was there?”

He nodded again, though he was so tired, that was a dangerous bit of body language, too tempting on the downward motion.

“Don’ forget the San Francisco stuff.”

Embarrassing not to have already mentioned it. It was so obvious as, possibly, the real smear on what’s-her-name’s record. I appreciated the gentle, nonsuperior way he’d mentioned it, as if anybody would have needed prodding about it.

“—the marriage records,” he was saying. “Maybe mention of how that first marriage ended. An’ the transcripts of the inquest.

I’ll start that in the mornin’, before class.” He leaned back and stretched his arms. “I am beat,” he said, standing up. “So—what’s your take on Ms. Cade?”

“In person? Absolutely charming. It’s only all this . . . confusion surrounding her.”

“Con men—and women—have to be charmin’. It’s part of their basic equipment kit.”

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I nodded acknowledgment. “Creepy, too. First of all, she said Victoria Baer was her great good friend, or that’s the impression I got from Claire Fairchild. But that seems a gross exaggeration.

Makes me wonder how stable Emmie Cade is, how tight her grip on reality is. She said she moved here because of Vicky, but Vicky acts appalled by the idea that she had anything to do with it. At best, she acts as if they are casual acquaintances from way back—a year of high school, a year of college, a surprise encounter in San Francisco, and no more than that.”

He yawned and opened his eyes close to bug-eyed wide, trying to appear alert.

I pretended his ruse had fooled me, so I could justify continuing. “Mostly, I don’t get it about the name changes, not to mention two dead guys. She’s been awfully busy on the romantic and death front for one young woman.”

“Or she’s a total flake with amazingly bad luck,” Mackenzie said.

“I don’t much believe in luck. Except when it seats me next to the person I’m looking for.”

THE NEXT MORNING, before I was fully dressed, let alone en route to school, the phone rang.

“Has to be your mother,” Mackenzie said from across the room.

He’d been up for at least an hour and was already studying. What a good student he was. Wish I had him in my class.

“That didn’t take deductive powers,” I answered.

“Maybe they’re calling off school because of the rain,” he said amiably. Above us, the skylight drummed with water and had been since a massive electrical storm around midnight.

“Maybe they’ve changed their minds and aren’t coming,” I said.

“Let us hope.”

I took a deep breath and lifted the receiver. “You said you’d explain,” the voice said by way of greeting.

“Beth?” She really was mutating into our mother at an ever-accelerating speed.

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Mackenzie returned to his coffee and studies.

“Explain what? When did I say . . .” I could only find one of my favorite black shoes, and I looked at Macavity suspiciously, though he was far too indolent to drag a shoe under the bed. I held the phone between my shoulder and cheek and got onto the floor to search. The cat stood next to me, peering in the same direction. I wondered what he thought he was looking for. It’s pathetic and loveable when cats pretend to know what’s going on. Then he gave up, lay down on his back, figuring that since I was in the neighborhood, maybe it was for a belly rub.

“Don’t act naïve,” Beth said. “I’m your sister—not a spy—and you know what I’m talking about: Vicky Baer. You asked me to keep her talking last night about newcomers, or that newcomer.

You said you’d explain. Were you or weren’t you investigating her?”

“I told you I wasn’t.” I’d spotted the shoe in the absolute mid-point under the bed. The impossible-to-reach point. I stood up and went in search of a broom with which to snag it. “Am not.”

“Then why did you ask me to ask about that newcomer when we’d finished talking about newcomers?”

I kept quiet because the only honest answer was that I’d asked because I was an inept idiot, who behaved as if Beth had no brain or sense of curiosity.

“You owe it to me.” This wasn’t a familiar Beth. Perhaps this hard-edged tone was part of Business Beth’s new wardrobe. “I’m hoping to do business with her, so if there’s some dark secret I should know about, then . . . then—I should know about it!”

Macavity saw the broom and took off for the other side of the loft. I got back down and poked at the shoe with the handle until it was out the other side, and said only, “There’s no secret—

network her like crazy. You’re safe.”

Beth was silent for a moment, digesting this and not giving up.

“Then it has to be because she knew that newcomer you met,” she said. “That Emmie Cade.”

“Apparently.” I’d forgotten that Beth had written down the 94

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name. And then I heard what I’d dreaded—that nearly silent oh!

where Beth figured something out, most likely that I hadn’t met any newcomer who babbled about her life to me. I was about to say something to hold her off at the pass—as soon as I thought of what it was, when she dropped the entire matter. Maybe I’d been wrong about her powers of intuition.

“You don’t have to tell me a single thing more—I understand.

But don’t act like your job’s so unglamorous, like you’re a clerk and nothing more,” she said, making me wonder what she thought she understood. “And, since I have you on the phone, what do you think of the Emory mansion?”

“Excuse me? I’ve never heard of them, let alone visited their home.”

“The family died out years ago, and their house is used for events. It’s beyond gorgeous, and it’d be perfect. I’m going out there this morning, to check it out for a corporate party. Anyway, it’s about thirty minutes outside—”

“Nice, Beth, but I have to get to work. Good luck with the Averys.”

“Emorys! Aren’t you even interested?”

“Of course I am. I love hearing how you put things together, but right now, I haven’t even had coffee and—”

“I mean for you! For your wedding.”

“What wedding?”

“Aren’t you ever going to set a date? What’s wrong with you?

And then you’re going to let me help you with it, aren’t you? It’s what I do, and you have to think ahead, way ahead. This place gets booked—”

This was way too weird for a dark, rainy morning, but since she was already scratchy about Victoria Baer, I had to tiptoe around this. It took another solid five minutes to extricate myself from the conversation and to extract a promise that she’d say nothing further about this mansion or my wedding date until so requested.