The Hot Flash Club Chills Out (30 page)

47

T
uesday evening, in the privacy of her small bedroom on Orange Street, Alice pressed her son’s number on her cell phone.

She’d been away from Alan, Jennifer, and baby Aly for four entire days now. Saturday she’d spent packing and organizing her house for a week’s absence, and Saturday evening she’d spent with Gideon. She’d almost forgotten how much she enjoyed just hanging out with the sweet man. Sunday she’d traveled to the island with the other Hot Flash femmes, Monday they’d all gone to the beach, and today, thank heavens, it had rained, so they’d gone their separate ways. Tonight Faye and Polly were in the kitchen, preparing a Nantucket dinner for them all. Shirley was still not home from wherever it was she biked off to—no doubt a rendezvous with that dubious character, Harry. And Marilyn was soaking in the tub.

So it was a good time to call her son and his family. For this event, Alice had allowed herself, since it was after five o’clock, a nice tall gin and tonic. She hoped the alcohol would help slow her racing heart. She really did not want to have another heart attack. But no matter how many deep breaths she took, her concern about her son and his family set her heart galloping every time.

“Hello?” A strange voice answered.

“Oh.” Alice was puzzled. “I must have the wrong number. I’m looking for Alan Murray.”

“He’s here. Hang on, I’ll get him.”

When her son’s familiar voice came on the line, Alice asked, “Who was that?”

“That’s Greg, Mom.” Alan’s voice was more buoyant than she’d heard it for months. “Jennifer’s cousin, remember?”

“Um…” She closed her eyes, trying to conjure up an image. Vaguely, the acne-spotted face of a hulking kid in a striped rugby shirt swam across her vision.

“
You
know,” Alan was saying. “Greg graduated from high school this May, and he didn’t want to start college yet, so he’s at loose ends. We asked him to come help us this week, and wow, is he a dynamite worker! I think he’s got Jennifer’s baking genes.”

“Oh,” Alice said again, faintly. “So he’s helping?”

“Helping! I don’t know how we managed without him. He’s so strong, he’s got so much energy, he can do twice as much as Jennifer, and he’s a quick learner, so basically he’s helping me in the bakery and Jennifer’s having a chance to spend time with Aly and just be a mom. Greg is…”

Alice took a hearty swallow of gin and tonic as she listened to Alan enumerate Greg’s endless talents and strengths. Not only was the young man physically powerful and mentally adept, he was fascinated by the baking business, and already they were thinking about arranging for him to work full-time.

“This is wonderful news,” Alice said, when her son finally finished praising Greg.

“I know it is, and for you, too,” Alan told her. “We know we’ve overworked you, Mom. We’ve worried a lot about your heart. This way we won’t need you to babysit so much, and you can really enjoy Aly. How’s your vacation, by the way?”

Alice had to work hard to summon up convincing enthusiasm. “It’s swell. We spent all day yesterday at the beach and today I just sort of loafed around.”

“That’s exactly what you should be doing, Mom!” Alan sounded like he was praising a five-year-old. “I’m so glad you’re taking care of yourself.”

“Thanks,” Alice said weakly. “But if you need me, I can be there in only a few hours…”

“Don’t even think about that!” Alan laughed. “We’ve got it all under control. You just enjoy yourself.”

When Alice hung up the phone, she felt like an hourglass whose middle had expanded—a painfully appropriate metaphor. All the sand wasn’t
trickling,
it was
gushing
to the bottom. She was glad her son was working things out. She was glad he’d found the solution to their various problems. She was really, truly, glad that finally she was free from that exhausting drive out to The Haven.

But she hated this feeling of being dispensable. Unnecessary. Put out to pasture.
Old.

In the middle of the night, Marilyn lay on her enormous queen-size bed, tossing and turning and feeling terribly alone. She missed Ian’s presence in the bed with her. She missed the slightly operatic crescendo of his snores and the way he reached out for her at odd times in the long night, to clutch her shoulder or arm, as if even in his deepest sleep he needed to know she was there. She missed his warmth. Even though it was a hot August night, she missed his particular warmth.

She’d spoken with him by phone earlier this evening. Their conversation had been pleasant, but brief, and for Marilyn, unsatisfactory. She was glad to know that Ruth was well and happy and she
should
be glad to know that Fiona had broken out of her paralysis long enough to prepare dinner for Angus, Ruth, Ian, and herself, but it hadn’t been a real source of pleasure to hear how delicious Fiona’s lamb casserole was, how rich, juicy, just like
home.
Marilyn had never been a gourmet cook. Now she felt inferior and slightly alarmed. What if the way to a man’s heart really was through his stomach?

This was nonsense. She couldn’t sleep, she shouldn’t just lie here wallowing in her misery. She would creep downstairs, fix herself a mug of warm milk, find a novel, and read in the living room. After all, she was on vacation. She could read all night and sleep all day if she wanted to.

Her choice of night wear was simply an extra-large T-shirt that hung almost to her knees. She felt around on her bedside table for her reading glasses, stuck them on top of her head, and padded barefoot out of her room. Quietly, so she wouldn’t wake the others, she sneaked down the stairs, tiptoed down the long hall into the kitchen, turned on the light—

And screamed.

“AAAHHH!” Marilyn stumbled backward, clutching at her throat, into which her heart had leaped like a mouse for a hole.

“AAAHHH!” screamed the intruder, so stunned by Marilyn’s sudden appearance that she dropped the flashlight and the silver pitcher she was holding. They banged on the floor, rolled against the stove, and clanged.

“Oh, my God!” Marilyn cried. “
You’re
the thief!”

“Nonsense,” scoffed Lucinda Payne. She was very regal as she stood there in her ancient taupe crepe de chine negligee. Every white hair was in place.

“But you
have
to be the thief,” Marilyn pointed out sensibly, as her heart slowly descended back down into her chest. “I mean, it’s three in the morning, and you’re in our kitchen.”

“What’s going on?”

Alice stormed into the room, waving an umbrella she’d grabbed from the stand in the front hall. Faye, Shirley, and Polly followed, and they all crammed into the kitchen behind Marilyn to stare at Lucinda Payne. The kitchen windows, blacked by night, reflected their images back to them: wide-eyed, their hair shooting out in all directions, as disheveled and disoriented as a pack of lunatics who’d just broken out of the asylum and then forgotten what they were doing.

“Oh, my God!” Faye exclaimed. “You’re the thief!”

“I am not.” Lucinda was indignant. “I was only returning this silver ice bucket I borrowed a while ago.” She glanced down at the container, glittering forlorn next to the stove.

Alice put her hands on her hips. “You can’t be
returning
that. We used it last night!”

“This is wonderful!” Shirley cried. “We found out who the thief is! I can’t wait to call Nora and tell her!”

“No! You
mustn’t
!” Lucinda Payne’s aristocratic, arrogant face suddenly cracked before their eyes into a starburst of lines and fissures, and with a rusty creak, like a faucet being turned after years of neglect, she burst into tears.

For a moment the five Hot Flash Club friends stood frozen with shock.

Then Faye gently suggested, “I think we should all sit down.”

“I’ll make tea,” Polly added softly. She approached the stove slowly, as if afraid to startle the white-haired woman standing next to it. With careful moves, she bent, picked up the ice bucket and flashlight, and set them gently on the counter.

Shirley, who now felt hideously guilty for driving the older woman into what looked like the first crying jag of her entire life, crossed the kitchen floor and pulled a chair out from the table for her. She wasn’t brave enough to touch the haughty older woman, even if Lucinda was in tears.

Lucinda sank into the chair. She covered her face with her hands, then pulled her hands away, looking mystified at the wetness on her fingertips.

Marilyn rushed to pull some tissues from the dispenser. She handed them to Lucinda.

Polly bustled around, setting the tea kettle on the burner and filling the Limoges teapot with hot water to warm the pot, the way she knew Lucinda would want it to be done. Alice opened the cookie jar and assembled an assortment of ginger snaps, almond macaroons, and lemon bars on a delicate, painted porcelain plate. She set the plate on the table, near Lucinda. Marilyn poured cream into the antique Limoges cream pitcher. Faye zipped into the dining room to fetch silver teaspoons and heavy cloth napkins which she brought back and placed around.

When Lucinda lifted her face from her soggy tissues, she looked even older than she had before. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her nose bright magenta, her wrinkled skin deathly pale. She looked haggard. She looked exhausted. She looked crushed.

“Here you are.” Marilyn placed a thin china teacup on its matching saucer in front of Lucinda.

Polly poured tea into the pot. “Sugar? Cream?”

Lucinda shook her head abruptly. Then she sighed, an enormous, surrendering sigh, picked up the cup, and sipped her tea.

The five other women settled in their chairs and for a few moments devoted themselves to preparing their own tea.

“Well?” Alice coaxed, her voice gentle but firm.

“This is mortifying.” Lucinda Payne’s voice was so low they could scarcely hear.

“We’re all friends here,” Shirley assured her.

Lucinda tried to look disdainful, but could not quite pull it off. “It has never been fair, you see.”

The Hot Flash Club women exchanged anticipatory glances.

“Nora has always had everything. Nora has always
won. Her
grandfather got Amelia. Everyone
knew. Her
house is larger than ours.
Her
father always had more money than mine. And now”—she choked as emotion swathed her words—“now
her
two children are alive, and my two sons are dead. I’m alone. She is not.”

Everyone sat in silence, contemplating this unexpected confession.

Shirley spoke up. “I understand, Mrs. Payne. All my friends here”—she gestured around the table—“have children. I don’t. As much as I love them, I envy them.”

“Oh, I don’t
love
Nora!” Lucinda snapped, pique sending color back into her cheeks. The tea was reviving her. Her posture straightened, her features tightened.

“What I want to know,” Alice said, “is how you got in here. I checked all the doors tonight before I went to bed. Do you have a key?”

“Of course not!” Lucinda shot Alice an impatient look.

But Alice had a few looks of her own to deploy. After a moment of Alice’s most ferocious glare, Lucinda admitted, “I came through the tunnel.”

48

T
he tunnel? What tunnel?” All five women exclaimed together.

Lucinda took another sip of tea. An element of sly pride stole over her features. Obviously she enjoyed knowing something the others didn’t.

“Nora didn’t tell us about any tunnel,” Shirley prompted.

Lucinda smiled triumphantly. “That’s because Nora doesn’t know.”

Polly clasped her hands together like a child at prayer. “Oh, show us the tunnel, please!” Her light green sleeveless cotton pajamas with the frog on the front gave her the appearance of a chubby child, and as always, her sweetness showed in her face.

“Very well.” Lucinda rose. “Follow me.”

She didn’t have to ask them twice. They nearly knocked one another over getting in line as she opened the door to the cellar.

Obviously familiar with the area, Lucinda flicked on the cellar light and began to descend the wooden steps. The other women had been in the cellar only once. They’d never had reason to go, and it was not an enticing environment. The walls were brick, dusty with age, and the floor was dirt. Naked lightbulbs hung from the wooden ceiling, the black electrical cords stapled here and there to the beams. In a corner stood the square, modern furnace and an enormous water heater. Shelves ranged along one wall, holding old canning jars with faded labels, and rusty tools, and dozens of gallon cans of Benjamin Moore paint.

As she led them through the dim, cavernous basement, Lucinda informed them, “When Ford and Pascal were boys, they dug a tunnel between the two houses. It was just the sort of nonsense they always got up to. My father told me about the tunnel when he was dying. To this day, I’ve never told anyone.” Her voice resonated with sadness. “I never had anyone to tell. My siblings are all dead, as are my sons.”

They went through an open doorway into another dirt-floored room. Lucinda pointed to a door in the wall. “That leads to the old coal bin.” Squeezing around a brick foundation for a fireplace, they arrived at a little compartment cluttered with old cardboard boxes. A low entrance, a dark upside-down U not quite five feet high, gaped in the brick wall.

“The door is here. When I leave, I simply pile these boxes up and back in. Like this.” She demonstrated. The cardboard boxes hid the opening. For a moment, Lucinda was out of sight. Then she knocked aside the empty boxes as she reappeared. “All right. Follow me. You’ll have to stoop.”

At the entrance to the tunnel, the five Hot Flash women hesitated, gripped by a natural fear of dark, low, narrow, underground places. Lucinda had flicked on the flashlight and was shuffling ahead, nearly bent double, her back almost scraping the uneven bricks of the tunnel roof. The beam of the flashlight danced eerily in front of her, making her figure seem enormous, and dark.

“I’m scared,” Shirley whispered. Somehow, she’d ended up at the front of the line.

Faye reached out and held Shirley’s hand. “I won’t let go,” she promised.

Shirley folded up and duckwalked into the tunnel. Faye came behind, one hand holding Shirley’s, the other feeling the uneven brick wall. Polly scuttled along after them, then came Alice, grumbling that she was surely going to be stuck in the tight passageway like a cork in a bottle. From behind, Marilyn assured Alice that if she got stuck, she’d push. Nervousness made Faye giggle at the thought, and soon all five women were snickering as they crept along through the dark, constricted dankness.

They popped out of the tunnel into a room floored with wood, with plastered, painted walls. Lucinda’s clean, well-lit basement gleamed like morning.

“Civilization after a few moments of Cro-Magnon life!” Marilyn sighed gratefully.

They paused to catch their breath and stretch the kinks out of their backs. Then Lucinda led them through her basement rooms, which also held cartons of miscellany. Here, each box was carefully marked and stacked at right angles, according to size. In the last room, handsome white shelves held modern discards, seemingly waiting for repair: an electric shoe buffer, a wicker picnic basket with a broken handle, a record player and a stack of old 78s. The Hot Flash five scanned the shelves for any of Nora’s items—the silver pheasant, a teacup—but saw nothing like that.

“Where’s all Nora’s stuff?” Alice demanded.

Lucinda paused, her head high, her posture rigid. “I’ll return it.”

Alice looked suspicious. “Or maybe you’ve sold it already.”

The older woman whipped around to glare at Alice. “I would never sell heirlooms!”

“So you say,” Alice countered.

Faye held her breath. She worried that Lucinda’s lucidity was balanced on a thin line between sanity and madness. The older woman was clearly under great emotional strain. And yet Faye detected a kind of bright eagerness in Lucinda’s eyes.

“Yes, yes. I’ll show you.” Lucinda headed for the stairs to the first floor.

The overhead lights, set in attractive glass fixtures, brightened their climb up the stairs and into Lucinda’s kitchen. Here it was as Polly had remembered, organized and clean to the point of sterility. Without a word, Lucinda continued to walk through the long hallway to the front of her house. The rooms off the hall were in darkness, but everyone could tell by the ambient light from the street that the furniture in the rooms was modern, spare, and elegant. The rooms were uncluttered.

“Your home is beautiful,” Faye told the older woman.

Lucinda flicked on the hall light. They were all suddenly exposed by the brightness, an odd little party in their nightgowns, pajamas, and slippers, their hair mussed, their tan lines showing beneath the thin straps of their nightgowns.

“If I show you this, it must be under the condition that you do not inform any authorities. No attorneys or police officials can be involved. I understand you’ll want to tell Nora, but no one else. Agreed?”

“Agreed.” Alice spoke for them all.

“Very well.” Lucinda started up the stairs, her satin bedroom slippers whispering against the handsome needlepoint runner.

The second floor was as shipshape as the first, dust- and clutter-free. When they passed a door opening into a small bedroom, they looked in. The room, with its narrow bed covered in a white chenille spread and its spartan bureau and side table, could have belonged to a monk. Lucinda continued walking until she reached the bedroom at the back of the house. Here she paused, and for a moment hung her head, almost as if praying for courage. Then she turned on the bedroom light and gestured to them that they were admitted.

It was a large room, taking up the entire width of the back of the house. Windows ranged along the far wall, which, in the daytime, would display fabulous views of the harbor. Against the facing wall was a handsome four-poster double bed, the covers folded neatly back.

The rest of the room was a chaotic jumble of stuff. Two walls were lined with shelves. In front of them, tables crowded the bed. Every flat surface was crammed with items: candlesticks, vases, picture frames, clocks, figurines, paperweights, cloisonné boxes, silver salt and pepper shakers, pitchers, trivets, bowls, hatboxes, ladles, needlepoint pillows, perfume atomizers, hand-painted seashells, lightship baskets, porcelain soap dishes, papier-mâche wastepaper baskets, books, coasters, a single red shoe—it was an explosive abundance of
stuff.
So many tables groaned beneath the weight of so many items crowded in around the bed that there was only a narrow path to the bed.

Each of the Hot Flash women was quiet with her own thoughts, imagining Lucinda, ancient, brittle, and alone, lying like an Egyptian queen in her bed, surrounded by this profusion of possessions.

“Shades of Edgar Allan Poe,” Marilyn murmured.

Lucinda cleared her throat. “
Some
of this is my family’s, of course. I prefer to present a façade of simplicity to visitors to my home, and I’ve been strict in culling through all the items my family has accumulated over the years. But of course, a few things I was unable to part with. And then, a couple of years ago, I started collecting again.”

“Collecting Nora’s things,” Alice clarified.

Lucinda nodded regally. After a few moments of silence, she said defensively, “Nora has so much, after all. A house full in Nantucket, and I know she owns a house up in Boston. It was only right that I even out the inequities between us.”

Shirley widened her eyes at Polly and mouthed, “Cuckoo.”

“Well, you know we’re going to have to tell Nora about this,” Alice said briskly.

“Or maybe not,” Faye quickly intervened. “Perhaps if you agree to stop…‘collecting’…we could just forget about this.”

Lucinda passed her eyes over the motley crew gathered in her bedroom. “Five women keeping one secret?” she scoffed.

“We can at least
think
about it,” Faye insisted. “We don’t have to decide anything right now. It’s the middle of the night. We’re all exhausted and not thinking clearly. We’ve all had a shock to our systems. Now is not the right time to make a decision.”

As she spoke, the other four Hot Flash women
got
it: As Lucinda Payne stood before them, she was ashen pale, and trembling all over. Yes, they’d
all
had a shock, but Lucinda was older, and she was proud to the point of battiness. And she was all alone.

No one wanted Lucinda to have a heart attack tonight.

“Yes,” Polly spoke up. “I certainly can’t think straight. Let’s all go back to bed. Lucinda, perhaps you can come over to tea tomorrow to discuss this.”

Lucinda inclined her head regally.

“Good,” Faye concluded with cheerful ease, as if they’d all just run into each other at the grocery store. “We’ll just go back to bed now, and we’ll see you tomorrow, Lucinda.”

“Can you find your own way out?” Lucinda asked, as she allowed herself to rest one hand on a bedpost for support.

“Can we borrow your flashlight?” Alice inquired.

“Very well.” Lucinda sounded as if she were making an enormous concession.

“Then we’re good to go,” Alice told her.

“Then turn out the lights and shut the doors behind you,” Lucinda ordered.

“We will,” Faye said. “Good night.”

They each said good night, then filed out into the hall and down the stairs.

“Stephen King!” Shirley whispered.

But Faye shook her head and put a warning finger to her lips, shushing her. The five moved along in silence down the stairs, through the hall, into the kitchen, and down the stairs to the cellar.

When they reached the entrance to the tunnel, Shirley said, “Now may I please say this is all so creepy I want to barf?”

Polly whispered, “Actually, Lucinda reminds me a lot of my mother-in-law.”

“That’s right,” Faye recalled. “Claudia
was
a domineering, brittle old bat.”

“Let’s never get that way,” Shirley pleaded. “Let’s never put possessions before people.”

“Let’s not worry about
ever,
” Alice said practically. “Let’s stop stalling and get through this horrible little tunnel and back to bed!”

“Agreed.” Faye, who this time was first in line, doubled over and began to creep forward.

Next came Polly, then Alice, then Marilyn. Shirley was last. She held her lavender froufrou negligee between both hands to keep the hem free of dust, but as she crept along, the lace frill of her ruffled cap sleeve caught on the rough edge of loose brick angling slightly out of the wall.

“Wait!” she cried. “I’m caught!”

“Hurry up,” Alice said. “I’m bent over like a croquet wicket.”

Shirley reached up to ease the lace from the brick. Instead, with a scraping sound and a puff of dust, the brick came loose, falling to the floor, taking a section of Shirley’s gown with it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Shirley said. She picked up the brick and tried to wedge it back into the tunnel wall. “Hey!” she cried. “Faye, shine the flashlight over here.”

Faye aimed the light at the space where the brick was.

“There’s something in here,” Shirley said. She forgot the hem of her negligee and the lace of her sleeve. She forgot she was cramped inside a narrow passageway. She gripped another brick and pulled. With a rasping noise, almost like a cough, the brick dislodged, exposing a small square chamber, and inside the chamber, a rusty metal box.