Magnificence (15 page)

“I’m sorry?” said Jim.

“It’s one of those days,” said Vera, rolling her eyes.

Her English had improved, thought Susan, since she first started with Angela.

“Yes, my son is a criminal,” said Angela, with a measure of pride. “A criminal mastermind. Would you like white? Or red?”

“Oh, whatever you’re having,” said Susan quickly, and stole a sidelong glance at Jim. He was gazing at Angela and grinning faintly.

“Look,” said Angela, smiling delightedly, and lifted one of the bottles by the neck. “A Zinfandel. A Zinfandel is cheap and stinks like shit.”

“Oh!” said Susan. “Yes?”

“I never heard that said,” said Jim.

A look of sadness crossed Angela’s face and she shrugged regretfully. “I love it very much,” she said.

She turned her back, wine in hand. They followed her into the kitchen, where Vera handed them a tray with olives and pickles on it. Jim took a pickle.

“Often they blame it on the parents,” went on Angela, as she rummaged in a drawer. They stood back, spearing olives and biding their time. “The worst criminals are often caused by neglect. There was a television show . . .”

“Oh, but not in T.’s case,” said Susan.

“I’m sure, not with him,” agreed Jim.

“Really?” asked Angela. “But you’re a criminal too, aren’t you?”

“Some would say,” agreed Jim gravely, and inclined his head.

“I’ve heard of those,” mused Angela. “A criminal lawyer.”

They stood beside each other and watched as she struggled to open the bottle—“May I?” asked Jim—but Vera was already taking over.

“You would know better than I would,” said Angela, and turned from Vera to take a dish towel out of a drawer. It was cheerfully patterned with strawberries; she swabbed it up and down her arms as though cleaning or drying them. “So you tell me. Did they neglect you too? Was that why you did it?”

“I wouldn’t say they did,” said Jim. “No, I really can’t complain. My parents were pretty nice to me.”

“The Zinfandel,” said Angela, and proffered two glasses.

They sipped expectantly, waiting for the next remark. But instead she ceased to perform, and for the next half hour was gracious and comprehensible. She made tactful and sympathetic remarks about Hal’s death; she knew what T. was working on, discussed the mission statement for his new foundation; she understood that Jim was a lawyer for nonprofits and remembered that he had met T. at an alumni party for their college fraternity.

Frat boys, both of them, realized Susan with vague astonishment. In her youth she would never have gone near one.

They walked away slowly, afterward, in a mild daze.

“I like her,” said Jim.

•

The architect came to the house a week later, a tall, thin man with glasses and a prominent nose—more or less an architect cliché, as far as Susan could tell. Together they toured the grounds. He studied the building from various angles and then accepted a cup of coffee and went inside with her to examine the interior features. He said he was hopeful the house would be granted state historic status and she felt a surge of confidence: now, even if Steven and Tommy somehow won their suit, she had an ace in the hole. Not that she had the money to pay them off without selling the house anyway, in the event that the decision went against her, but she would cross that bridge . . . she would rather lose all the money she had than sacrifice the house.

When she walked him out to his car he popped the trunk and brought out a long yellowing roll. “The 1924 drawings,” he said. “You can keep them. We’ve made a copy to put back in the archives. Technically we don’t need to keep even the copies this long, but since the file’s been reactivated . . .”

“Thank you,” she said, rolling the thin rubber bands up and down on the tube.

He got in his car, and she stepped back as he started it up. Then he put it into reverse and rolled the window down. “Hey, if I come out again you’ll have to show me the basement,” he said. “On the plan it has a surprisingly large footprint.”

“What basement?” she asked, but he had already backed up out of earshot with a light wave.

At the kitchen table, beneath a blackbelly rosefish, she spread out the drawings. There were several pages and she wasn’t good at correlating the lines on them to the real house, but soon she had glasses weighting the corners and could study the one marked
BASEMENT & SUBCELLAR
. She wondered if it had been filled in since—was that even possible? She’d never noticed a door to the basement, yet there it was on the plans. As far as she could tell it had been as large as the ground floor, had extended over the same area—maybe nine thousand square feet. The subcellar was smaller and seemed to have been designed for wine storage: there were built-in racks on the plan, if she was reading it right.

She called the architect, who had a phone in his car.

“Could it have been, I don’t know, filled in or something? I’ve never seen a basement here. I mean, I’ve lived in the house since December.”

“Tell you what,” he said. “My lunch meeting just canceled. Let’s look for it.”

He was back in half an hour.

“So you’ve never seen a door?” he said.

“Never,” she said firmly, and shook her head. “They’re not where the plan says they should be. See? Here?”

“The plans indicate there—there—two doors, two staircases,” and he tapped the flattened paper. “Let’s go look.”

He lifted the glasses off the drawings and took the plans with him. She followed him out of the kitchen, along the main hall to the raptor room with the sunken floor.

He looked around for a second and then consulted the drawing.

“Huh,” he said, and turned around a few times.

“What?”

“I don’t think this room was ever built as the plan stipulated. Either that, or it was gutted and rebuilt from the ground up. See? This should be a supporting wall. Nothing. Instead the support’s over there,” and he pointed.

“So what does that mean?”

“First we check where the other staircase was supposed to be,” he said, shaking his head, and this time she followed him to the music room.

“No,” he said, and shook his head again. “Hmm. Surprising.”

“Will it affect the application?” she asked abruptly, quickly worried that her curiosity had jeopardized the house’s future.

“Oh no. Shouldn’t be relevant,” he said vaguely, looking around and then back at the drawing.

“Oh good. Good.”

“OK. We’ll have to walk it. We can start from the east end,” he said finally.

“Wait. Are you hungry? I know you’re missing your lunch hour right now. Would you like me to make us some sandwiches first?”

“Thanks. Appreciate it.”

In a few minutes they were standing with their sandwiches in the parlor off the cavernous front hall—the drawing room, full of raccoons and ringtails and coati, weasels and otters and minks. “Procyonids and mustelids,” she told the architect, as he nodded and masticated his ham and cheese, casting his eyes to the molding and ceiling beams.

She liked knowing the nomenclature, even took pride in it. They were beautiful words, the terms from Greek and Latin: careful words to be kept and valued, along with the collection.

“All this furniture has been here? Since you took possession?”

“This room is unchanged, pretty much, except for the taxidermy. That’s all been moved around. But I don’t think it blocks anything.”

He walked along the one interior wall, rapping with one hand, sandwich in the other.

“Moving along,” he said, when the last bite of sandwich was gone.

He checked the hallway next, the wall behind the grand staircase; he went back and forth between rooms, measuring closet spaces and the depths of walls with his eyes. She was impressed by this, how he could know measurements without using a measuring tape. He knew the volume of hidden spaces without seeing both sides of them at the same time. But in room after room he shook his head, and finally—by this time she was impatient and the balls of her feet were hot and sore from standing—they had made it to the west end of the house without new information.

There had been some shelves and cabinets and wardrobes they’d need to get out of the way, he said, if she wanted him to be sure—some walls he couldn’t get to without the furniture being moved, pieces that were too heavy for just the two of them to shift. He wrote down the list of rooms and the walls he needed to check if she wanted a definitive answer.

“I can send over a couple of burly guys who work for one of our contractors, if you don’t mind paying his fees,” he offered at the front door, consulting a sleek wristwatch. “Some cement guys or roofers or something.”

“Yes, please send them,” she said. “Or give me the number. Whatever’s quick.”

“The secretary will call it in to you.”

It hadn’t occurred to her to sleep with him, she thought, despite his competence and a passing attraction. She wondered at this, and when he was gone she put her feet up on the couch in the library and gazed into the face of a black bear.

“V
era’s gone,” said Angela.

Susan had picked up the phone at two in the morning, with Jim asleep beside her.

“What?”

“She’s gone. She had to go away.”

She sat up, discomfort growing.

“You mean—she’s coming right back, though?”

“She had to go because someone was sick. But now I’m all alone.”

She could hear thinness in the voice, a lost quality.

“She—Vera left in the middle of the night?”

“She left in the afternoon.”

“And she didn’t call for a substitute?”

“No substitute has come.”

“No one’s with you? No one?”

“I’m all alone.”

“I’m in Pasadena, you know. There’s really no one there with you?”

Silence.

“Angela. Why don’t you give me the agency’s number and go back to bed, and then I’ll call them for you first thing in the morning?”

“. . . I’m all alone,” said Angela again.

Susan sighed, sat for a minute in inertia and resentment, and then got out of bed.

“What?” asked Jim, as she flicked on the closet light and stood blinking at the clothes hanging.

“I have to go make sure she’s OK,” she said.

“She? Who? Casey?”

“Angela. Her attendant apparently left her. Unless she’s making it up, for some reason.”

“You’re kidding.”

“Have to drive over there,” she said.

“There? Where?”

“Santa Monica.”

“It’s the middle of the night. Why you?”

“There’s no one else.”

“But why . . .”

“There’s no one else,” she repeated, and reached into the hanging clothes to grasp the folds of anything.

•

The drive was faster than usual since the freeways were empty, but it still took almost forty minutes. When she got to the townhouse the lights were all out. After several minutes of her knocking and waiting, increasingly impatient, Angela appeared at the door in a lacy dressing gown and old-school hair curlers.

“Did you go back to
sleep
?” asked Susan. “After you called me?”

Angela shook her head firmly. But there was a waffle pattern printed on the side of her face.

Irritated that she’d driven across the whole city for what seemed to be nothing, Susan slipped past her and flicked on the overhead. Apparently Angela was fine with shuffling around in pitch black.

“OK, listen,” she said. “I told your son I would check in on you while he and Casey were gone. So I’ll sleep here tonight, until I can call Vera’s agency in the morning. I’ll just sleep on the couch, right here. And you need to go back to sleep too.”

“I’m sorry. T. will be back soon,” said Angela, lucid for a moment.

“Well, good,” said Susan. “I’m glad. And I have to say, I’m surprised at Vera. Even if she had to leave on an emergency, she still should have made sure you had someone.”

She plumped a pillow on the edge of the couch and slipped off her shoes.

“Back from the honeymoon,” said Angela, and nodded.

Susan stared at her.

“Pardon me?”

“Back from the honeymoon.”

“Vera went away on her
honeymoon
?” asked Susan, and studied Angela’s face, her pale blue eyes and carefully plucked brows. Maybe Vera did the plucking for her. Personally she wouldn’t trust Angela with a sharp pair of tweezers in the eyeball vicinity.

“Not Vera, T.,” said Angela.

Not lucid anymore.

She had to be inventing it—very likely she was. Still, Susan remembered what Angela had said about T., when he was missing in the jungle and she herself was convinced he was dead. Possibly the woman had some kind of savant deal going on.

“Let’s get you back to bed,” said Susan gently, and took her arm. “Here. I’ll walk with you to the room. Were you going around in the dark before I got here?”

After she’d left Angela in her room she tossed on the couch for a while beset by images of Casey with vanilla cake smeared around her mouth, Susan not there at all, Susan all alone and separate and completely forgotten. Casey in the middle of sunlight, sunlight and other people who knew her—flowers and dresses, pomp and circumstance, ceremony and dancing, white frills and hideous ruffles.