Occasion of Revenge (10 page)

At the exit for Route 213, Chloe awakened, her
chubby face red with the effort of producing something of significance in her diapers. A few miles later, we crossed the old-fashioned drawbridge over the Chester River into Chestertown. I consulted the map I had printed off the Internet and it was a good thing, too, because the left turn onto Queen Street came up so suddenly, we almost missed it. Paul eased the car down the street while I scanned the house numbers. “There it is!” I pointed. Paul slowed the car to a crawl. Darlene’s house stood in the middle of the first block, a two-story, double-dormered brick structure that had at one time been painted white, but the paint had softly weathered, giving the house an attractive, antiqued look.

“Well, at least it’s not a dump,” Emily commented. “I guess she spent all her ex-husbands’ money getting into this neighborhood and now she wants Gramp’s bucks to keep her in the style to which she’s become accustomed.” When I turned to scowl at Emily she raised a hand. “Joke!”

Signs along the street indicated that only residents should dare think about long-term parking there. “Where will we park?” I asked as we passed a turning for East Church Street.

“Never fear!” Squinting into the dark, Paul spun the steering wheel hard right and pulled into a driveway that led to the parking lot behind the Imperial Hotel. While we waited in the car, he gathered up our overnight cases and quickly checked us in, then we walked the block or so back to Darlene’s with Paul lugging the poinsettia.

I stepped onto the porch and mashed my finger on the bell. I heard it buzz rudely somewhere inside. The
door swung open almost immediately to a whoosh of overheated air and a blast of
Mannheim Steamroller Christmas
. Peeping around the door were the violet eyes and the beaming cherry-cheeked face of a woman I’d never seen before.

“Welcome! Come in!” I detected an accent. French, perhaps? When she threw the door wide, I got a full frontal view of a woman, nearly as tall as Paul’s six foot one, swathed in purple. A wide silver belt cinched her knit dress together at the waist and a fringed paisley scarf was tied and secured at her right shoulder by an antique silver brooch.

But it was the tiara that captured my attention, an astonishing object of intricately twisted silver wire from which crystal beads dangled and slender lavender feathers trembled in the breeze.

My husband was the first to recover his power of speech. “We’re Paul and Hannah Ives,” he stammered, extending his hand. “And this is our daughter, Emily, and her daughter, Chloe.”

“LouElla.” She leaned down to take a closer look at Chloe. “Well, hello, precious!”

I caught Paul with his mouth in mid-gape as he took in our superannuated prom queen’s too-black hair, parted cleanly in the middle and twisted into donuts at each ear, like Princess Leia in
Star Wars
.

“Where’s Darlene?” I asked, gesturing with the bag Ruth had sent.

“When last seen, in the kitchen.” LouElla indicated a square table set in the entrance hall on which gaily wrapped packages were piled like children’s blocks, by a not terribly well-coordinated child. “You can leave that there.”

There was no room on the table, so I set Ruth’s gift on the floor next to a rectangular package wrapped in silver paper and decorated with multicolored hearts. Paul placed the poinsettia carefully nearby, rotating the pot until the plant’s best face was forward.

“You can leave your coats in the upstairs bedroom, first door on the right.” LouElla clapped her hands together. “But I see you haven’t any!”

Paul chuckled. “No, it’s unseasonably warm out there.”

“But I’d love a place to change the baby.” Emily smiled at LouElla. “May I?”

“Of course, my dear,” she purred. “There’s a bedroom on the left and the bathroom’s at the end of the hall.”

LouElla’s eyes followed Emily as she mounted the stairs. “Just call if you need anything, dear!” Then she turned and glided ahead of us through the hallway and into the dining room, where a tweedy gentleman was fishing with a toothpick for a Vienna sausage floating in a reddish-brown sauce over a can of Sterno. “Dr. McWaters?”

The tweedy guy turned, eyebrows raised, the sausage now teetering precariously on the tip of his toothpick.

“Let me introduce you to the Iveses,” LouElla said. She extended her hand in his direction, palm up. “Dr. McWaters is a general practitioner,” she announced, giving equal emphasis to every syllable.

Dr. McWaters bent at the waist. “Guilty!” he said. “And it’s Patrick.”

The doorbell buzzed and LouElla twitched like a startled rabbit. “Whoops! Another customer!” She twirled
smartly on one Ferragamo toe and wheeled out of the room.

“I see you’ve met LouElla Van Schuyler,” the doctor observed.

I snagged a carrot stick. “Who is she?”

“One-woman welcome wagon.” He dropped his used toothpick into a silver bowl, one that looked vaguely familiar. I inched my way closer to it. “Drinks table is in the kitchen.” The doctor gestured to his left with a glass of white wine.

“And our hostess, too, I presume?”

He nodded.

“I’ll look forward to talking to you later, then,” I said, not wanting to appear rude.

On our way to the kitchen, Paul and I passed through a well-organized pantry with a wall of glass-fronted shelves to the right and on the left, a zinc sink which might have been used in the preparation of the extravagant flower arrangements that filled Darlene’s house. “How many silver bowls with silver dollars set into their bottoms do you know of?” I asked my husband.

“What are you talking about, Hannah?”

I grabbed his arm, stopping him in mid-stride. “Those toothpick holders look very much like Mom’s little silver dishes.”

“You mean your father’s little silver dishes.”

“Why do you have to be so logical?”

Paul shrugged. “Occupational hazard.”

The pantry opened out into a large kitchen that extended a dozen or so feet from the back of the original house, almost certainly a modern addition. In the daytime, a wall of windows offered a panoramic view, I would learn later, of Darlene’s colonial-style garden. A
handful of guests milled around a table strewn with bottles of wine, hard liquor, and an odd assortment of glasses. Olives, slices of lemon and lime, cocktail onions, and maraschino cherries were neatly arranged on clear glass saucers. Mixed nuts filled two more of my mother’s little silver dishes.

I located Daddy at once, lounging by the television, talking to a young woman dressed somberly in black with hair dyed to match. Darlene stood on his left, her back to him, engaged in an animated conversation with a twenty-ish guy dressed in blue jeans, high-top leather boots, and a short-sleeved University of Maryland T-shirt. As we entered Darlene looked up, smiled slightly, then returned to her conversation.
Well, hello to you, too
, I sneered,
and welcome to my home
. The only friendly face in the bunch belonged to a Chesapeake Bay retriever who lay comfortably on a beanbag bed, his head resting heavily on his paws as if the red bow tied around his neck had grown too heavy. The dog’s eyes were moving, following the to-ing and fro-ing of the guests like a tennis match.

I knelt in front of the dog. “Hello. You must be Speedo.” I stroked the silky blond hair between his ears. Daddy’s sob story about the harassment Darlene had been experiencing had failed to move me, but Speedo here, that was a different matter. Why would anyone want to hurt a harmless animal?

Paul found the drinks and poured us each a glass of red wine. He watched while I took a sip. “Drink up, Hannah. I have a feeling this is going to be a long evening.”

I gestured with my glass. “Do you suppose the girl in widow’s weeds and Biker Boy are Darlene’s kids?”

Paul studied the tableau, his eyes darting from one face to another as if searching for a family resemblance. “Good bet,” he said at last. “Check out the noses.”

I had been thinking the same thing. “And the chins. Well, wish me luck. Here I go!”

Paul closed his eyes. “I’m not sure I can bear to watch.”

I left Paul to carry on alone at the drinks table and swished over to confront Darlene.

“Hello, Darlene.”

“Hello, Hannah.” An introduction to her companion didn’t seem in the offing, so I extended my hand to the young man. “Hello. I’m Hannah Ives, George’s daughter. And you are …?”

“Darryl Donovan.”

“Ah,” I said. “I thought you might be.” After a prolonged silence during which I took two sips of my wine and listened to the mourning dove on Darlene’s bird clock
who-WHO-who-who-who
seven, I asked, “Tell me, Darryl. What do you do?”

He shrugged. Clearly he’d learned the niceties of social intercourse at his mother’s knee.

“Darryl manages tables at McGarvey’s,” Darlene supplied.

Darryl snorted. “What Mother means to say is that I’m a waiter.”

“Really?” Another sip of wine slid down my throat. “I must have seen you there, then.”

“I think I would have remembered.” Darryl cast a sly eye at my décolletage, which, I must admit, pleased me enormously. He was practically undressing me with his eyes. If Darryl had actually managed to charm me out of my sweater, though, he would have been in for a shock. The plastic surgeon had done a masterful job of
rebuilding my breast, but I didn’t think
Playboy
would be renewing my centerfold contract anytime soon.

Over Darryl’s shoulder I watched as Paul was waylaid on his way to join us by an attractive, silver-haired woman dressed in a red plaid suit. “Is your sister here tonight?” I inquired.

Darryl grunted. “She’s the one talking to your dad.”

“Deirdre’s working on her Ph.D. at the University of Maryland,” Darlene added. The proud mother wore a long-sleeved, scoop-neck cocktail dress in a stunning shade of turquoise with a matching pashmina artfully looped around her neck. As she reached out to touch her son’s shoulder, the pashmina shifted. What I saw nearly stopped my heart; I had to press my hand to my chest to get it going again. Knocking about in her cleavage on the end of a pure silver chain was my mother’s favorite jade-and-silver necklace. There was no mistaking it; Daddy had had it made in Japan by a jeweler working from an original design. When I could breathe again I said, “That’s a lovely necklace, Darlene.”

She reached up to caress it. “Thank you. Your father gave it to me.” She smiled, revealing even white teeth. “An early Christmas present.”

No wonder it was hard to breathe. Rage was taking up the space in my chest normally reserved for my lungs. Lucky for Daddy that all these people were around, because I felt like picking up one of Darlene’s country French kitchen chairs and clobbering him with it. “Well, I’ll let you get back to your conversation,” I seethed, then turned on a furious heel to seek out the moral support of my husband.

I found he’d migrated back to the dining room, where he was hovering over the cheese board, still
talking to the woman in the red plaid suit. Before I could tell him about the necklace he said, “Hannah, I’d like you to meet Darlene’s friend, Virginia Prentice.” He turned a dazzling smile on Virginia. “My wife is George’s daughter. The middle one.”

Virginia, who I guessed must be around seventy, grinned at me with a crimson mouth carefully outlined in a darker shade of red. “Are your sisters here, Hannah?”

“I’m afraid not. Georgina’s in Arizona with her in-laws and Ruth had to work tonight.”

Virginia shifted her drink so that she was holding her plate and her glass in the same hand. She selected a jumbo shrimp and dredged it through a puddle of cocktail sauce. “Too bad they’re missing the party!”

I speared a crab ball for myself. “Ruth sent along a bottle of schnapps, although it’ll never be noticed among all that loot. Honestly, Virginia, I’ve never seen so many hostess gifts!”

Virginia wrinkled her eyebrows. “Hostess gifts?” She brightened. “Oh, you must mean the stuff on the hall table. Those aren’t hostess gifts, my dear.”

“They aren’t?”

“You look so surprised. Surely you know!”

“Know what?”

“Those are wedding gifts.”

“Wedding?” Paul slipped a steadying arm through mine and clamped it firmly to his side.

“Your father and Darlene are getting married at the courthouse in Annapolis a week from next Friday.”

“New Year’s Eve?” I croaked.

“Oh, yes. On New Year’s Eve, just before midnight.”

Paul’s grip on my arm tightened. “Well, we knew they were thinking about it, of course, but we didn’t
realize it was so …” He paused, and I could feel him staring at the side of my face as if checking to see if it would crack and explode. “… So imminent.”

“I think it’s sweet, don’t you?” Virginia waggled her fingers in the air. “Then they’ll slip away on their honeymoon, driving into the next millennium together.”

I was sorry that I had eaten that crab ball because I was in grave danger of throwing it up all over Darlene’s clean oak floor and tasseled Oriental carpet.

“Have you met our daughter, Emily?” Paul asked.

“I may have.” She sipped her drink, something clear on the rocks with a twist of lime. “What does she look like?”

“She’s not hard to spot,” Paul offered. “Not with our granddaughter grafted to her hip.”

“My, yes! Cute little thing,” Virginia burbled. “They’re in the living room, I think, looking at the tree.”

I
certainly didn’t have an overwhelming desire to look at Darlene’s tree, but at least if I did I knew I wouldn’t see anything of my mother’s on it. As far as I knew, all the family Christmas decorations were either hanging on our tree or still packed away in boxes at my house. I decided to find Emily, if only to get out of that dining room, which was suddenly filled to overflowing with Darlene’s laughter as she swanned in on Daddy’s arm. It was either that manic cackling or me.

But Paul had other ideas. “It’s time,” he said, “to greet the happy couple.” His teeth flashed shark white in the candlelight. “Shall we?” He tipped an imaginary hat to Virginia, then dragged me across the room to a table where Daddy was fixing three cups of eggnog, one each for himself and Darlene and another for a white-haired guy on his right. The Bobbsey Twins, Darryl and Deirdre, had wandered off somewhere.