Claire and Present Danger (18 page)

He moved the small silver vase from between us and leaned forward, smiling. “Interesting way of looking at it. Ozzie would have a good laugh at that interpretation of our roles. But tell me: Why are you so sure she was killed?”

“Because I came to see her, and Leo got suspicious, and somebody’s secret was going to be exposed.”

“Ah,” he said softly, leaning back in his chair. “You’ve managed to feel personally responsible. Consider this: If you believe you triggered events, how did that happen?”

“The way I said.”

He shook his head. “Too vague. What I’m askin’ is, who knew we were hired, aside from Mrs. Fairchild and the two of us?”

Even before he’d finished that sentence I realized where he was headed, and I wasn’t willing to travel that road with him. It’d only make me feel worse. “You can’t think Beth . . .”

“I have to think Beth, because who else is there? If she didn’t tell Vicky Baer, for whatever reason, then how did the information make its transit around?”

“It didn’t necessarily start with Vicky Baer. She came to talk about giving a shower for Emmie. Obviously, Emmie herself told her that she was getting married in two weeks.” The awful thing was, I could envision Beth telling Vicky Baer because she thought what I did was “cute” and might make her own subtle sales pitch that much more engaging. I can arrange everything, she’d be saying in essence—even a sister who’s sleuthing around the Main Line. She would never do anything that she perceived as potentially harmful, but why would bragging about your sister’s job be a bad thing? She’d undoubtedly said something, and Ms. Baer thought back to all my remarks about her old friend, and put two and two together. Those excellent schools she’d attended insisted you knew that much math.

And then, likely as not, indignant on her friend’s behalf, she told her, and Emmie told Leo.

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I must have looked still more depressed, because Mackenzie changed tracks and tried to make me feel better. “The most logical explanation is that Claire Fairchild told Leo when he confronted her about—”

“Me,” I said. “My fault. I should have had a better cover story, but I didn’t know I’d need a story, and of course, I had no way of knowing the woman didn’t read.”

“Doesn’t matter now. So maybe she told him, he told Emmie, and she did or didn’t tell her old friend. Or it started the other way.”

“But if Leo was the one who found out, in that fight with his mother, he probably wouldn’t be stupid enough to tell his fiancée.

I mean, I assume he didn’t want the two women in a permanent state of war.”

“Unless his mother told him about what happened in San Francisco and he got scared, too. Wanted her to know he was on to her.”

That produced an olive-eating silence until finally, only a small container of pits remained. The feta and bread had long since disappeared. I couldn’t think of any logical response, and all I wanted to say, again and again, was: It wasn’t right.

“Here it is and it’s beautiful, is it not? My two best, best dishes!

Enjoy!” The owner chuckled as he presented us with enormous platters. The aroma of nutmeg drifted up from mine, and Mackenzie smiled and inhaled deeply over his garlicky entrée.

“There’s Batya, too,” I said. “She overheard everything.”

“But she wasn’t being investigated, so your theory—”

“Maybe her motives had nothing to do with me.”

“Gets you off the guilt-hook, then, right?”

“Well . . . I’m bothered about who called the paramedics, aren’t you? She’s the only possibility.”

“Why would she lie and say she didn’t, then?”

“So she could lie and say she didn’t know Claire Fairchild was dying.”

The chef-owner hovered nearby, waiting.

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We complimented him on the aroma, then tasted, and recomplimented as he continued to stand there. He poured more wine into my already-full glass, convinced Mackenzie—not a difficult job—

that one glass of wine wouldn’t prevent studying later on, and again awaited a verdict, which was again positive.

The food was delicious, but if he insisted on being an active part of every dining experience, I could understand why the place wasn’t thriving.

Finally, he left us alone.

“Something rotten happened there,” I said. “You know how to find things out. You were a homicide cop all those years.”

“I’m not one now. I have no legal—”

“You’re clever.”

“You have an idea, don’t you?”

“More a gut feeling somebody did that woman in.”

He stopped, a fork filled with flaky white fish doused with the stinking rose—I could smell the garlic from across the table—midway to his mouth. “How?” he asked quietly. “She was alive after everybody left. So how?”

“I don’t know. Something slow. A poison?”

“There are symptoms with poisons. Symptoms not meant for the dinner table.”

“Something biological warfarish. Something the government’s afraid terrorists will use.”

“Like what?” He didn’t even look up from his food when he asked that. He didn’t care.

“There must be those things—look at the anthrax deaths—or what are we all worried about protecting ourselves against? Claire Fairchild went from relative health to zap, dead—”

He sighed. He over-sighed, so that if there were a far balcony, the theatergoers would know he was tired, possibly peeved, and definitely not interested. “Forgive me,” he said. “I love you dearly, and among the things I love about you is your mind, which comes up with surprise after surprise, as now. But for the rest of dinner, could we shelve this and talk about reality?”

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“As if—”

“Reword that. Let’s talk about urgent matters.”

“Those matters are two days away,” I said. “Claire Fairchild is dead now.” It was much easier thinking about a dead near-stranger than contemplating the visitors ahead.

Ever since they’d announced their “All-U.S.A.-Scattered-Offspring Visitation, I’d felt like one of those metal hunters at the shore, poking in the sand and sifting out the worthless from the treasures. Not only did every remark about past affairs of the heart resurface, but so did odd bits and pieces, descriptions and explana-tions of his family from which I built an image of parents who seemed an acquired taste, like cigars or octopus sushi. Mackenzie called them eccentric and colorful, but anyone who’s read books by Southern authors knows to duck when those adjectives are in the vicinity. Eccentricity mutates into lunacy when it crosses the Mason-Dixon, and colorful families are genetically suspect and dourly dys-functional in Yankee-land. We grow eccentrics in this climate, too, but then we lock them up.

For starters, C. K.’s parents, who hadn’t even given him a first name, were themselves named Boy and Gabby. More properly, Boyd and Gabrielle, but nobody called them that. I frankly cannot imagine a grown man in Philadelphia being called—allowing people to call him—Boy.

Perpetual Boy or not, Mackenzie Père sounded less dotty than Gabby, and their couplehood was always described in the most glowing of terms. C. K. forever referred to his happily mismatched parents when I’d get nervous about our differences. To him, they were the gold standard of how opposites can attract and keep on attracting.

Boy was described as an outdoorsy sort of man, fond of hunting and fishing, bad jokes, and lamentably conservative politics that Gabby in no way shared.

I wasn’t apprehensive about their eccentricities on my own behalf. It was how those interesting deviations from the norm were going to mesh with my parents’ familiar yet strange ways. My fa-140

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ther was shy, taciturn, an observer, a city boy who considered stamp collecting a sport. He’d never hunted and never wanted to.

His politics were liberal, thoughtful, and soft-spoken. He loved his family passionately, but was not a demonstrative man.

My mother was listed as an Independent, and her political philosophy mutated according to whatever annoyed her at any given moment. She wasn’t shy about sharing her views—or changing them fifteen minutes later. She was also an inveterate toucher and hugger, and even normal Northerners had been known to step back and be astounded by one of her unprovoked hugs.

My mother was coming north to crack the whip and get us in line—and that meant the line down the aisle. None of this shilly-shallying and delaying. Bea Pepper was on her way.

My father was coming north because my mother was, and when the word wedding floated through the ether, what he thought about—but was too polite and quiet to say—was the enormous Mackenzie clan and what it would cost to manage such a guest list.

He was not a wealthy man and he was all for taking things as slowly as possible.

Mackenzie’s mother had never even hinted that she’d like things to move more swiftly—at least not with me—and who knew what Boy Mackenzie wanted, aside from a shotgun and a fishing rod?

The fathers didn’t seem likely to get along, and the mothers seemed even less so. But their arrivals were forty-eight hours away.

Somehow, it would all work out. That had become my new mantra, but at the moment, my mantra’s batteries had run out.

“You look so worried,” Mackenzie said. “Shouldn’t be. They’ll love you to death. They’re all for having fun and celebrating whatever’s around to celebrate. That’s undoubtedly how they wound up with eight children.” He reached over and put one of his hands atop mine, the one that had his grandmother’s ring on it.

“No reason to be concerned,” he said softly. “Everything’s going to be fine.”

But his words were southerning up, which is to say, mushing down, spun and liquified in the blender of his own apprehensions.

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And why shouldn’t he be nervous? Why shouldn’t we both be?

Why on earth were we supposed to believe that stupid mantra—It Will All Work Out—when nothing whatsoever had, so far?

Mackenzie was wrong. Dead wrong. It was easier and more productive to think about Claire Fairchild. There was nothing I could do about the Parents’ Visits. That would be its own disaster, or it would not.

But Claire Fairchild had suffered the ultimate disaster, and I could do something about that.

I smiled at my fiancé, my love, my partner. I smiled and realized how easily looks—including mine—could deceive. Because I wasn’t going to let go of whatever Claire Fairchild’s death might mean, or my part in causing it, no matter what Mackenzie thought.

Yes, I was his partner, in life and in work, but neither relationship meant I was supposed to be indistinguishable from him. I was myself, and I’d do whatever I thought was right.

He smiled back, his face full of love and trust.

I wasn’t sure I liked me at the moment.

142

Twelve

ONEof the often-overlooked good things about teaching is that it’s very Zen, an ongoing lesson in living in the minute. To do even a mediocre job, and to avoid all hell breaking out, a teacher has to be present in mind as well as body.

That sounds easy, but if taken seriously, it’s anything but. Being on, being alert, being aware of what’s happening in twenty to thirty separate bodies and minds makes for an incredibly difficult job even without the mandate of wedging culturally important information between the audience’s ears. Imagine what pay and benefits Actors Equity would demand if their member performers had 143

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to hold the stage, being alert and on for five to six hours per performance. Hamlet each and every school day.

But the good side of this is that it means the teacher’s mind can’t wander and obsess, even if really important nonclassroom matters loom, like planning how to prepare for meeting the senior Mackenzies. Making A Good Impression. This translates into the mundane quandary of what to wear. Certainly not the otherwise perfect white silk blouse the teacher currently has on, not tomorrow and not perhaps ever again, because ten minutes earlier, her pen leaked navy blue ballpoint gorp, a splat the size of a cat’s head over its right sleeve.

And this particular teacher could not, at the moment, think of a single other item in her wardrobe.

She might have thought about how messy the loft was and how much scrubbing and tidying she’d have to do tonight, and she knew her mother certainly wished she would. But luckily, there was no opportunity to think about such concerns. She had to Be Here Now And Always.

I was also too busy paying attention to the classroom to ponder the meaning of the note in my mailbox this morning, complete with smiley-face, of course. Dr. H., it said. Sunshine had reverted to plain English for The Supreme Boss of Us. That Dr. part was an ongoing mystery. Nobody knew in what field that doctorate had been pursued, or what offshore diploma mill had produced it, because he showed no special learning—not even basic smarts—in any area yet plumbed. But no surprise, Sunshine believed in it and accorded it the full dignity of a normal abbreviation. After that, the note degenerated into pure Sunshinelish. 1ts 2CU—f2f b43@ bk. OK?

Sunshine’s notes forced me to sound them out the way a kindergartener might. “Onets—wants—two—to—Oh, C.U. To see you.

Face-to-face be . . . no. Before three, about book.” The effort exhausted me and only the OK? didn’t require effort. Hers was the longest, least efficient, shorthand I’d ever seen.

It had to be about Sonia Lawrence’s difficulties with Lord of the Flies. If I needed further proof of Havermeyer’s lack of a brain, and 144

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I did not, here it was. Any half-wit could have told her that even if we were at war with evil, understanding the enemy, recognizing the impulse toward it would be a good thing, the equivalent of arming our side.

Couldn’t he have simply said thinking was a good thing? On second thought, how could Havermeyer, who’d never dared to entertain an original thought, say that? I’d have to do battle, sense-lessly. I’d win. Havermeyer was wary of me, ever since I’d caught him playing doctor instead of behaving like the one he claimed to be. But the idea of having to waste breath and energy on something this stupid exhausted me in advance.