Occasion of Revenge (11 page)

Paul came straight to the point. “I understand congratulations are in order, Captain.”

Daddy refused to look at me directly and the lobes of his ears changed from pink to red, almost as red as the white-headed guy’s sweater. The left side of his mouth turned up in a crooked grin. “Yes.” His arm snaked around Darlene’s shoulders. “We both realized rather suddenly that we weren’t getting any younger, and with the millennium almost upon us, we thought it might be fun to start out the new century together.”

Perma-grin firmly in place, like Br’er Rabbit, I lay low.

Daddy shifted his weight from one foot to another and said, “Have you met Darlene’s neighbor, Marty O’Malley?”

Mr. O’Malley raised a hand. “No relation.”

My laugh was forced, but I welcomed the change of topic. “You must get that all the time!”

Although they were approximately the same height, the man whose hand I was shaking bore absolutely no resemblance to Baltimore’s newly elected mayor, Martin O’Malley. Marty O’Malley the mayor was broad-shouldered, muscular, and dark-haired, while Marty O’Malley the neighbor was slim, solid, and straight as a tree, with a generous head of pure white hair and an infectious grin. I’d doubt we’d catch Baltimore’s new mayor wearing red-and-green striped suspenders, either.

“Oh, I do, I do,” Marty said. “All the time. And when I show up at restaurants, I get all kinds of grief, as if I’d gotten my reservations under false pretenses!” He waved a Heineken at me. “I can’t help what my parents named me. Besides”—he leaned closer, until his mouth was almost touching my ear—“the mayor’s thirty years my junior, so it’s
he
who should be apologizing to
me
for the inconvenience!”

“What do you do, Mr. O’Malley?”

“Nothing, my dear. Absolutely nothing.” He cackled. “I’m retired.”

Virginia Prentice, accompanied by a youngish woman in a silver, bead-encrusted sheath, joined the growing knot of people clustered in front of the drinks table. “Nonsense! You’re the busiest person I know, Marty.”

Marty ran his thumbs up and down the inside of his suspenders. “Not during the winter, I’m not. Been reading a lot, though, Virginia.”

“Have you read
The Perfect Storm
?” Virginia wanted to know.

The young woman, who was introduced as Eileen, shivered inside her silver sheath. “No, and I don’t intend to. I might never go sailing again! No, I’m reading that new book by Phyllis Talmadge,
Flex Your Psychic Muscles.
”

Marty puffed air noisily out through his lips. “Who believes in all that crap? Might as well waste your money on the psychic hot line.”

Eileen bristled. “
I
believe in it.”

“I looked for that Talmadge book in the Compleat Bookseller the other day, but they were all sold out,” Darlene complained.

“I bought my copy from Amazon dot com,” Eileen said.

“No, thank you!” Marty’s eyes narrowed. “I prefer to support the independents.”

“But the Internet is so convenient,” Eileen insisted. “In a couple of days—bingo! It appears in your mailbox.”

“I get my contact lenses by mail,” Darlene said.

“That’s different,” said Marty. “That’s medical. I’m retired and I get my vitamins, blood pressure medicine, you name it, by mail.”

Virginia waved an opal ring in front of Marty’s face. “I got this ring yesterday. Only sixty-nine ninety-nine.”

Marty caught her flailing hand and squinted at the ring. “You should own stock in the Home Shopping Network, Virginia. Didn’t you just buy a necklace and some fancy no-fat cooking grill?”

Virginia reclaimed her hand and turned it back and forth so that the stone caught the light.

“Weren’t you afraid someone would steal it out of your mailbox?” Daddy inquired, eyeing the ring.

Virginia shook her head. “Pshaw! Not in Chestertown!”

“Pshaw? Pshaw? You sound just like my great-aunt Matilda,” said Marty.

Virginia blushed to her silver roots.

I decided to stick in my oar. “I try to buy everything locally. By the time you pay for shipping and handling on that mail-order stuff, you eat up all the money you might have saved.”

It wasn’t until she spoke that I realized that LouElla had been standing just behind me, listening to the conversation. “The CIA was always rifling through my mail. That’s why I had to get a post office box.”

“LouElla!”

“Well, it’s true.”

Darlene ladled herself another eggnog. “I don’t know about the CIA, LouElla, but my mailbox was so stuffed with junk mail that I had to get a bigger one.”

Marty seemed to be the expert in these matters. “I
told
you not to order all that stuff from mail-order catalogs. All it takes is one order and—
ka-ching
!—you’re on every mailing list from here to the planet Pluto.”

Daddy had been staring, apparently bored, at a spot just over my left shoulder, but he suddenly joined the
conversation. “I heard that the DMV even sells their mailing list.”

“There oughta be a law,” said Eileen.

While Darlene argued cheerfully with LouElla over the United States government’s peculiar interest in the contents of her, LouElla’s, mailbox, I took the opportunity to drift away. I cornered Deirdre next to the fruit punch and introduced myself. “I guess we’ll be seeing more of each other now.”

She topped off her cup with bourbon poured from a silver pitcher. “I guess.”

“We don’t know very much about each other, do we?”

“No.”

So much for breaking the ice. Deirdre seemed as cold and inflexible as the molded ice ring bobbing about in the punch bowl. I didn’t have time to wait for the bourbon to loosen her tongue, so I tried again. “Frankly … Deirdre, is it?”

She nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Deirdre. I’m glad Daddy’s found someone to share his life. He’s been so lonely since our mother died.”

Deirdre stared at me over the rim of her cup. Her lower lip seemed stuck to it.

“Has your mother told you much about us?”

Deirdre swallowed. Holding her cup in both hands she said, “Not much. We’ve never been very close.”

“Maybe now that you’re living nearby?”

“I doubt it. Frankly, Hannah, I’m only here because I’m curious. About your father. About the lot of you.” She set her empty cup down on the table. “But I’m disappointed that your sisters weren’t able to attend.”

“We didn’t have much notice.”

Deirdre squinted at me in puzzlement. I explained
about Ruth and Georgina. “But surely you’ve met my daughter, Emily?”

“Oh, yes. She was talking to my brother in the living room.” One corner of her mouth turned up in what I took to be a smile. “He was putting the moves on her. Chip off the old block.”

“Your father was a womanizer?”

She hooted. “Hardly! I meant Mother!” She leaned toward me. “You realize, don’t you, that if your father marries my mother he’ll be number four.”

“Daddy doesn’t seem to mind.” I shrugged.

“Mother doesn’t have much luck with husbands.”

“What happened to your father, Deirdre?”

“He died of a heart attack when I was eleven.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“It was a long time ago.”

“How soon before she remarried?”

“Not long. Mother disappears into her relationships, like she’s standing in front of some flowered wallpaper wearing a flowered dress. She can’t seem to define herself in terms other than wife. Widow is a role she doesn’t like to play.” Deirdre’s eyes darted to the left. “Is it, Mother?”

Darlene’s voice screeched like a clarinet tuning up in my ear. “What on earth are you going on about, Deirdre?”

Deirdre’s eyes sparkled in the candlelight. “Nothing much, Mother.”

“Impossible girl!” Darlene tugged on my arm, drawing me toward the food table, effectively dismissing her daughter. “Your father wanted me to ask you something, Hannah.”

“Yes?”

“We wanted to borrow the silverware for the party,
but when we went to look for it, it wasn’t in the drawer.”

I nearly choked on my chocolate-covered strawberry. “There were lots of things they hadn’t had time to unpack before Mom got sick,” I said, which was true as far as it went. Mom and Dad had lived in the house less than three months when she died. The basement was still full of boxes.

Darlene stared. “He can’t find the crystal, either.”

“As I said, Darlene, tell Daddy to check the boxes in the basement.” I swallowed my revulsion at seeing Mother’s necklace bobbling on Darlene’s incomparable chest as she breathed. Did she know the necklace had belonged to my mother? Did she care?

Heat from the nearby radiator swept over me in waves—the scent of the candles, the ripe aroma of the gorgonzola, Darlene’s heavy perfume. A pounding began in my ears. Any second I would pass out. “Excuse me,” I mumbled. I waved my glass vaguely, then scuttled into the living room where I leaned against a bookcase, breathing deeply, and watched Emily work her magic on Darryl. I thanked my lucky stars that Dante wasn’t there to observe what was going on, although I rather suspected that the jealousy gene was completely missing from Dante’s particular strand of DNA.

Freshly diapered, Chloe lay asleep on a flowered chintz sofa, her little body tucked in by a needlepoint pillow. The music ended; when nobody seemed to care, I moved to change it. I was pawing through a pile of CD’s Darlene had stacked on a nearby end table—many of which I recognized—and was just tipping Mozart’s Greatest Arias into the carrier drawer of the CD player when LouElla materialized at my elbow.
From over my shoulder, she studied the plastic jewel case I was holding. “He is alive, isn’t he?”

“Who?”

“That chap.” She pointed with a purple fingernail to a picture of the conductor, resplendent in his tails.

“I should think so,” I said.

“Good.” She pushed a button and we both watched while the CD was sucked inside. “Because I don’t like listening to dead people.”

This place was getting seriously weird. “Excuse me,” I said, desperate to escape. But LouElla followed me into the dining room. While I gulped down some punch, she positioned a shrimp on her plate next to a precarious tower of carrot and celery sticks cross-stacked over a glob of sour cream onion dip like a well-laid camp-fire. “Your father is a handsome man, Hannah. Darlene is a lucky woman.”

“Are you married, LouElla?”

“I was, many, many years ago.” She slid a mushroom cap into her mouth and chewed thoughtfully while staring into the corner of the dining room where my father and Darlene were still pinned by Virginia and Dr. McWaters. “Look at him! Except for the bandage, you’d never know he’d been in an accident, would you?” LouElla laid three well-manicured fingertips on my arm. “Poor man. First your mother, then the accident …”

Bearing up pretty well
, I thought, watching Daddy practically slobber all over Darlene. Aloud I said, “He totaled his car.”

“What’s he driving, then?”

“A rental. A dark blue Taurus. He’s ordered a Chrysler PT but it won’t be delivered for another three months.”

I found myself wishing the good doctor were giving Daddy advice on the dangers of immoderate drinking, but I suspected that both men were enabling each other well into their fourth or fifth cocktail. LouElla nattered on about a conspiracy between the oil producers and the auto industry to put the nation’s railroads out of business and I nodded appreciatively, but my attention wandered. Suddenly, reflected in the window behind LouElla, Darryl passed behind me and into the kitchen and I saw my chance to escape. “I’ve got to go check on the baby,” I said. I gestured toward my father. “Keep an eye on him while I’m gone, will you?”

LouElla nodded, the crystal globule in her tiara glittering in the candlelight. “Don’t you worry, my dear.”

Eager to hear what Emily had to say about Darryl, I retreated to the living room, but Emily was nowhere in sight. I flopped down on the sofa next to Chloe, who was still sleeping like … well, like a baby. I touched her face gently. If I could just close my eyes for a minute maybe all this would go away. Maybe when I opened them again it would be just me, Chloe, Emily, and Paul, and my father would walk through the door, smiling, holding my mother’s hand.

I felt the cushion next to me shift, and I opened a damp eye to find Emily facing me, her legs tucked under her and her arm stretched along the back of the sofa. “What’s wrong, Mom?”

I had a hard time focusing on her face through a sheen of tears. “It’s just too hard! Our first Christmas without your grandmother is bad enough, but this?”

Emily handed me a paper napkin with holly berries on it. “I know. Daddy told me about the wedding.”

I handed the napkin back. “I’m not going to cry! I refuse to let that woman get to me!”

Emily tucked the napkin into her sleeve as if not really believing she wouldn’t just have to hand it back to me shortly. Next to me, Chloe stirred, her little mouth working as if tasting something sweet. I laid a hand on her chubby leg. “I’m very glad your father made arrangements for us to stay in Chestertown tonight, Emily. I wouldn’t relish the drive home.”

“Sure you want Chloe and me, too? I mean, we wouldn’t want to cramp your style.”

Her face wore such a serious look that I had to laugh. “Don’t be silly. This is supposed to be a
family
weekend.”

I downed what was left of my punch in three short gulps. I found myself looking forward to the cool night air, the short walk back to the Imperial Hotel, a hot bath, snuggling down into the scrumptious antique bed in room 309 with Paul.

My head went all balloony. “Let’s find your father and blow this joint,” I said. A few minutes later I liberated my husband from the animated attentions of a stubby matron wearing a top that glittered like Times Square. “Let’s get out of here,” I whispered.

“Don’t you want to bid a fond good night to the happy couple?”

“Not particularly.”

“Hannah!”

I bounced my forehead three times against his chest. “Oh, all right, but my heart’s not in it. I suppose we should remind Daddy that he’s agreed to join us for lunch at the hotel tomorrow.”

“Isn’t Darlene coming, too?”