Fed Up (18 page)

I handed Ade the gift from Owen’s mother. Unwrapped, the package turned out to contain a voluminous white cotton nightgown with a high ruffled neck. Staring at this chaste garment, I realized that it should have had a prominent monogram that read Not Adrianna. Ade shot me a look out of the corner of her eye, and I refrained from laughing out loud.

“This is lovely, Eileen. Thank you.” Ade spoke politely.

“Isn’t it?” Eileen said cooly. “You can think of me every time you wear it.”

“Yeah, every time I return to the convent,” Ade muttered in my ear as she noisily scrunched up the wrapping paper.

Adrianna had seen what I’d missed: the nightgown was suitable for a nun and must have been chosen to keep Owen as far away from Adrianna as possible. Dream on, Eileen! Adrianna could wear a chicken costume, and Owen would still find her the sexiest woman in the world.

“I’m sure it will be beautiful on you when you lose all the weight you’ve put on, dear,” added Kitty, passive-aggressive as ever.

I hurriedly put Kitty’s gift in front of Adrianna. “Now, your mother’s present.”

When Adrianna had removed the wrapping paper, I could hardly believe my eyes. Or maybe I just didn’t want to believe what I was seeing. To Adrianna, to her own daughter at this wedding and baby shower, Kitty had presented a cheap-looking basket that held a small assortment of cheese balls and dried sausages. Bad? Bad enough if the basket had been new, but the terrible gift had already been opened: one of the sausages was obviously missing.

“Thank you, Mom,” Ade croaked.

My heart broke for her. Of all the stupid, meaningless, idiotic gifts to give to a daughter on any occasion! But now? Oh, I was furious. Goddamn it. Kitty soared to the top of my official shit list. So what if Adrianna was pregnant before her wedding? Couldn’t her own mother have the decency to fake understanding? Kindness, generosity . . . and even love? Evidently not!

Robin reached out to push Nelson’s camera down. Amazingly, for all the cameraman’s greed for his notion of reality, he actually looked sympathetic.

Adrianna’s eyes were glistening. Before she had time to shed tears, I put the presents from my mother in front of her. One was in a big box on the coffee table, the other in a long, wide package too bulky to lift off the floor. I knew what Mom was giving Ade and saw the lavish gifts not just as expressions of celebration but as tokens of the maternal devotion that Ade’s own mother withheld. Adrianna opened the Cuisinart food processor and then a fancy high chair with an adjustable seat, a dishwasher-safe tray, and all sorts of decorative doodads, baubles, and bells.

Kitty leaned over for a better view of my mother’s gifts. “My, how extravagant.”

Adrianna pulled herself up from the chair and gave my mother an enormous hug. Ade was not one to get sappy or weepy, but I saw her wipe her eyes.

Naomi’s voice rang through the room as she happily leaped off her seat. “Hasn’t this just been a touching display of female bonding? Really, the power of a group of women coming together to celebrate the impending arrival of another life!” She placed her hands on her chest. “My heart is overwhelmed with the love in this room.”

I smiled at Naomi, who was totally oblivious to the family drama that had just transpired. Although this couldn’t be the first baby or wedding shower that my supervisor had ever attended, I suspected that it was rare for her to find herself in a gathering of women not associated with some sort of political movement.

Nelson was standing five or six yards from Naomi with his camera fixed on her. He briefly peered around the camera to gaze at her with such clear interest that I spotted an opportunity, pounced on it, and pushed him in her direction. As far as I knew, Naomi was still involved with her boyfriend, Eliot, who owned a gallery on Newbury Street right near Simmer. Still, it wouldn’t hurt to have Naomi see that other men noticed her.

“Why don’t you go interview Naomi?” I suggested to Nelson. “I’ll bet she’d give you some really good material to include in the video.”

Nelson responded immediately. He practically skipped across the room to position himself smack next to a surprised Naomi.

I cleaned up wrapping paper, moved gifts into one area of the living room, and then helped my mother to replenish the supply of coffee and pastries. When I returned to the living room and took a seat, Nana Sally was narrating a tale about Owen’s brothers, Evan and Willie. From the look on Cousin Phoebe’s face, I gathered that this sort of recitation was a family ritual.

“Hee hee!” Nana Sally shrieked. “And remember when those two set up that skateboard ramp for Owen?” She had a fit of laughter. “Owen was fifteen, but he still could barely stand on the skateboard without falling off. Love him! But athletic he is not. Well, Evan and Willie built a ramp and told him it would be easy as pie for him. They got poor Owen standing on the skateboard at the top of a hill, and then the pair of them sent him flying down onto this ramp contraption that they’d thrown together out of old plywood. I don’t know how Owen managed to get all the way to the ramp without falling off, but he did. As soon as he hit the top of the ramp, he fell crashing down!” Nana Sally again squealed with laughter. Covering her eyes with a napkin, she finished the story by saying, “Those damn kids had rigged the ramp to crumble when Owen hit it!”

Eileen crossed her arms and frowned. “It wasn’t funny, Nana. Owen still has a scar on his forehead from that incident. Four stitches, he needed!”

Ade perked up her head. “Owen told me he got that scar from a fistfight he had in ninth grade.”

Phoebe took a turn at storytelling. “Then there was the time those two rascals balanced a bucket on top of the door so it would fall on their dad’s head,” she said. “Remember that?”

I chimed in. “That doesn’t sound so bad. It’s an old trick. Did they fill the bucket with water or something?”

“No!” Nana giggled. “Rocks!” She exploded into uproarious laughter.

Rocks? The prank didn’t strike me as the least bit funny. In fact, both of the supposedly hilarious practical jokes sounded cruel and dangerous. Nana Sally’s and Phoebe’s stories, far from convincing me that Willie and Evan were harmless pranksters, fueled my theory that Owen’s brothers could have perpetrated a horrible joke that had turned deadly last Monday. I hated to have Adrianna’s shower end on such an ugly note.

By the time Owen arrived to pick up Adrianna and Kitty, Ade looked exhausted. Owen loaded the gifts into the car and did his best to be polite to Kitty, who issued nonstop criticism disguised as advice.

“Owen, I don’t understand why you’re putting the bags in the car first,” she said. “You ought to start with that overpriced high chair.” Kitty shook her head as she spoke. It seemed to me that she might as well have come right out and voiced the opinion that her daughter had chosen to procreate with an idiot.

“Thank you for that very sage advice, Kitty. I’ll reload the car in the proper manner.” Owen winked at me and picked up the last of the gifts.

“I can’t thank you enough for all for all of this, Chloe.” Adrianna engulfed me in a hug. I rubbed her back with my hands as I squeezed her.

“I’m so sorry about your mom, Ade,” I whispered. “I don’t know what in the world is going on with her.”

“What’s going on with her is that she is a bitch.” She pulled back from me. “It’s just the way it is. She’s done nothing but complain since she got here. The hotel is crappy, she hated the restaurant we went to last night, and she is one hundred percent put out that she has to stay in town for the week until the wedding. Believe me, I’m put out by it, too. And the kicker? My due date is a major pain in her ass. She has herself in knots because the birth might interfere with a work conference she has in Chicago. I informed her that no one invited her to the delivery room anyhow, and after that, we had a particularly obnoxious exchange. What are you going to do, right?” Adrianna waved her hand in the air. “I’m going to go home and inhale some of those aromatherapy oils Naomi gave me. Maybe they’ll actually work.”

Before the tipsy Nana Sally was helped to the car by Phoebe, she slipped me an envelope for Adrianna and Owen. “Give this to the proud couple at the rehearsal, okay? I don’t want Kitty and Eileen to know about it.” Nana Sally kissed me sloppily on the cheek. “You’re a good friend, Chloe.”

When everyone had left, my mother started on the dishes while I cleaned up the living room. Under a napkin on an end table I came across the distinctive cell phone that Robin had used at Alloy, the metallic hot pink phone that was as loud and obtrusive as her phone conversations had been. I tucked it in my pocket to take home.

“Well, that went pretty well, don’t you think?” My mom threw a dish towel over her shoulder and somehow managed to get it caught on her Maypole hair wreath. “Oops, there we go.” She untangled the towel and surveyed the room. “Looks like we’re all set in here.”

“Aside from Kitty, it was perfect.” I couldn’t bring myself to mention Nana Sally and Phoebe, who’d done their share, too. “Adrianna looked really happy. You and Dad have been amazing to her, and I know how much she appreciates you guys.”

“Our pleasure, Chloe. With a mother like that, Adrianna needs all the support she can get. Oh, before you leave, I have a bag of clothes to donate to that women’s shelter you volunteered at.”

“Haven’t you done enough good in the world today?” I teased. “Now you’re just showing off!”

WHEN I got home, I hauled the bag of clothes up to my apartment and put it in the living room, where it served as a reminder of what a lovely person my mother was: kind and generous to her family, her friends, her daughters’ friends, and even to the strangers at the women’s shelter; considerate to everyone; respectful of privacy; and, in short, the kind of fine human being who would return someone’s forgotten cell phone without so much as thinking of turning it on and exploring its contents. Bad luck for Robin that it hadn’t been my mother who’d found her phone. I should’ve been calling the shelter to arrange to drop off the clothes, but first things first: I turned on Robin’s cell, plopped down on the couch, and started scrolling through her list of contacts. Inga settled in next to me and began purring melodiously. I stroked her with one hand as I tapped through names on the phone.

One stood out: Leo.

Unless Robin knew Leonardo DiCaprio, I had a strong suspicion that this Leo was Francie’s husband and not a famous movie star. Because Leo’s number was still stored on my own caller ID, it took me all of thirty seconds to confirm that Robin’s Leo was, in fact, Leo the widower. When had Robin added Leo to her list of contacts? On the day of the filming? In other words, on the day of his wife’s murder? Or could Robin have known Leo before the show?

Leo. Hmm. As I knew from carefully studying thousands of TV shows, murderers were often spouses or lovers, so unless Francie had had a lover, Leo should have been the prime suspect from the beginning. Did the police agree? Did they watch as much TV as I did? And what about motives? What about love and money? Maybe Leo had wanted to get rid of Francie because he had a lover or because he stood to inherit oodles of cash when Francie died. As to access to digitalis, for all I knew, he had foxglove growing right in his weed-choked garden. Under other circumstances, I could have gained access to his yard by trying to sell him a rain barrel, but as it was, I couldn’t very well call him up and say, “So sorry your wife died a grisly death, but would you like to conserve water by recycling rain?”

Still, I could follow him to see whether he did anything suspicious. Such as? I didn’t know exactly. But there was nothing wrong with my keeping an open mind. And how hard could it be to tail someone? I was too wiped out from Adrianna’s shower to set out on a spying expedition today, but I resolved to pursue the investigation the next morning.

I checked my messages. There was a brief one from Josh to ask how the shower had gone. He said that tonight he was again working late and working an early shift on Sunday, but could he come by in the late afternoon? I returned his call and left him a voice mail saying that unless he showed up tomorrow, I was going to kidnap him from Simmer and, like some sex-starved cave woman, drag him back here. I was on my way out, I said, to buy a loincloth, a club, and a bone for my hair, so he’d better watch out.

Early on Sunday morning, I drove to the warehouse in Waltham where my parents stored equipment and supplies. They did most of the landscape design and planning work from home, but the rest of the company ran out of the second location, which was only a twenty-minute drive from my place. The deep red building gave the impression that a tornado had dropped a barn in the middle of Waltham, and the stacks of hay and the smell of garden manure only fueled that fantasy. I can’t say that I was a fan of the manure aroma, but I did love the smell of hay and soil and the sawdust aroma from Emilio’s lumber. I parked my Saturn in the small parking lot, let myself into the building through a large red door, and got the keys to the oldest of the five vehicles used for deliveries, a beat-up gray Chevy van with seats in the front and all sorts of shovels, rakes, and hoes in racks on the walls of the rear. The other two vans were new, as were the two pickup trucks. As I drove toward Leo’s house, the stick shift gave me a hard time, and I regretted my choice of the beat-up gray van, which I’d picked because it was the smallest of the vehicles and would presumably be the easiest for me to maneuver. As it was, although I’d driven the gray van a few times before, everything about it felt unfamiliar, and I hated having to rely on the side-view mirrors. Whoever had driven it last had left half-empty coffee cups in the holders. With each passing mile, the trip seemed more and more like the stupidest idea ever. I was hardly Veronica Mars. But by the time I’d decided that the whole undertaking was a mistake, I’d passed the Natural High market and was almost at my destination.