The Summer We Read Gatsby (11 page)

“Social magicians,” Peck called Bethany and her husband. It was the sort of term she’d claim to have coined. This was one I’d never heard before, so perhaps Peck did come up with it on her own. “They show up places, mostly at the parties where you have to buy a ticket. Then they can say, I was at so-and-so’s house or I had dinner with so-and-so. And they create the illusion that they’re social. But that’s all it is, an illusion.”

“If we go over there,” I said, “we have to take Hamilton. When she handed me the invitation he told me to let him know if we decided to go. Said he wanted the opportunity to sneer at it from the inside.”

“He’s so
naughty
,” Peck said, grinning and handing me the phone. “Tell him to get his white English ass over here and let’s go.”

The house that the Samuelses owned had replaced whatever small house had been there before it, and was too large for its lot and soulless. It was the kind of house that had been thrown up quickly and greedily, by a builder looking to cash in with no specific buyer in mind other than one with money to burn. It came with all the bells and whistles, a media room, a wine cellar, a gym, and plenty of steam showers, flat-panel televisions, and Viking appliances, but not an ounce of charm.

I’d hardly had time to hang up the phone and slip on my shoes before Hamilton was in our driveway, waving his fan at us, a pink sweater tied jauntily around his neck. “Are we really going to pay a call on our neighbors?” he called out. “I feel deliciously
sneaky
.”

“Come up and try my lemonade,” Peck instructed him, and then added in her usual slightly irritable tone, “It’s delicious. But of course, my
sister
could never say so. God forbid she should pay me a compliment.”

“I drank three glasses of the stuff,” I reminded her. “I oohed and aahed over everything.”

“You didn’t say anything specifically about the lemonade,” she quibbled. “It’s disheartening, to work that hard on something and then have you gulp down three glasses and not even mention it.” She sighed. “And then when you do say anything, it’s just dripping in sarcasm, as if it’s supposed to be funny. I’m telling you, I’m at my wit’s end with you.”

“Now, girls,” Hamilton said, once he’d accepted a chilled glass of lemonade with ice from Peck and quickly declared it “marvelous.” He gestured with his fan in the direction of our neighbors’ house. “What exactly is the reason for our visit to the unsightly mass of cedar shingles on the other side of you?”

Peck quickly explained about the missing painting and Hamilton took his glass of lemonade into the house as we followed him. There we gazed up at the forlorn hook that was all that was left in the empty spot above the mantel.

“When the
Mona Lisa
was stolen from the Louvre,” Hamilton said, “more people came to see the empty spot where she’d hung than had ever come to see the painting.”

“This was hardly the
Mona Lisa
.” Peck gestured toward the hook. “Do you know who painted it?”

Hamilton rubbed his chin. “I always wondered. She was somewhat coy about this one. One got the sense it was more
important
than any of the others. But she never said who the artist was. I’m not sure I ever asked.”

I told him about the words on the back of the frame.: FOR L.M. FROM J.P. Peck shared her theory that Miles Noble had figured out what it was and taken it.

“I wish we could just ask the old girl,” he said, somewhat deflated. An air of sadness seemed to have come over him suddenly. “I just don’t know.”

“Could this be the thing of utmost value she was talking about?” I asked him.

He shrugged. “I haven’t the foggiest. We never talked about dying. I didn’t know
what
was in her will. I didn’t even know she had one.”

“Well, there’s a reason someone took this painting,” Peck proclaimed with authority. “Now let’s go see if we can get anything out of that nosy pipsqueak next door.”

As we headed off together down our driveway on foot, Hamilton threw one arm around each of us. “I’m having a party on Tuesday. I want you both to promise to be there. I’m simply adoring having the two of you here.”

“See, Stella,” Peck said, peering around his girth at me. “Hamilton thinks we should stay at Fool’s House.”

“That’s not exactly what I said and you know it,” he corrected her. “If I had the money I’d buy the place and let you enjoy it. I wish I could do that. But the real estate market out here has gotten so crazy, even Lydia was thinking of selling.”

We both stopped walking, shocked at what he just said. Peck looked over at me. “That’s impossible.”

Now it was Hamilton’s turn to look surprised. “What? Of course not. We both were talking about selling. The real estate market out here has gone wild. Houses that only a few years ago were five hundred thousand are now five million. We were going to sell these two places—we thought we might get more if we sold them together, you see. And then we planned to move to Greece. Or some days it was Morocco. Then for a while we thought of Fiji, but neither of us had been there. We called it cashing in our 401(k)s.”

Peck shook her head, refusing to believe him. “Lydia would never have cashed in on Fool’s House. She loved this place.”

“We may not have actually done it,” Hamilton said as we started to walk again. “But it was highly amusing to talk about it. Now I don’t know. Greece and Morocco don’t sound as much fun without her.” He paused for a moment, and then continued. “I’ll probably just stay and complain bitterly while some young couple tears Fool’s House down and puts up another of these monstrosities too big for its lot.” He shuddered dramatically as we turned into our neighbors’ driveway and their house came into view. “How could anyone build such an ugly thing?” he asked gleefully.

“My sister said the same thing about
Miles Noble’s
house,” Peck reported in the manner of a journalist who can’t believe there are actually people in the world who can’t see clearly, that is, the way she does. “But his is
huge
.”

He tilted his head toward me conspiratorially. “More to go wrong, then.”

The front door to the Samuelses’ house was propped open and we followed two women in beach cover-ups through it. “Oh, it’s worse than I imagined,” Hamilton whispered happily as we stepped into the living room, where a riot of mismatched blue-and-white patterns caused him to recoil slightly. “Look at the toile!”

Peck admonished him with a grin. “You’re so bitchy.”

“I wouldn’t be,” he protested, “if I didn’t know they spent a bloody fortune doing this up with that leech Emmet Leary. I think he picked these fabrics with his eyes closed and then laughed his little self all the way to the bank.”

There were several rows of sandals and flip-flops lined up near the front door, next to a basket of patterned Chinese slippers in assorted sizes. A hand-lettered sign indicated that we were to take off our shoes and don a pair of the slippers before entering.

“Is the woman mad?” Hamilton looked to me. “I’m absolutely not taking off my shoes. What a repulsive thought.”

“Me neither,” Peck crowed, lifting her heel to show off a dainty sandal. “This is disgusting.”

I hesitated, then slipped off my sandals.

“My sister is so
obedient
,” Peck pointed out. “She can’t help herself. She’s like a schoolgirl, isn’t she? Afraid Headmistress is going to come looking for her.”

There must have been fifteen women in Bethany Samuels’s coral dining room—“More toile!” Hamilton exclaimed—where ropes of diamonds and pavé bracelets and huge cocktail rings were laid out on velvet trays. The chatter was loud and excited as the women fluttered around the table, draping themselves in expensive baubles and admiring their reflections in conveniently placed hand mirrors. There was something frenetic about the way they picked at the shiny pieces before them, like birds nervously preparing their nests.

“Witness the wives,” Peck intoned under her breath, in the voice of a
National Geographic
commentator. “My friend Lucinda became one of these, a ‘wife of.’ I watched her transformation.”

There were two untouched platters of tea sandwiches on a sideboard, along with bottles of Voss water. But all the focus in the room was on the jewelry displayed on the polished dining table. There was so much of it, and the women approached the task of sorting through it with a frantic seriousness, their necks straining slightly with the effort.

Bethany, a petite blonde with flat hair that hung stiffly to her mid-back, gave us a wave as we came through the door, but she didn’t interrupt what she was doing, coercing a bug-eyed customer in a beach cover-up that was too tight across the hips into dropping what sounded like sixteen thousand dollars on a pair of earrings. According to Bethany, the earrings were a “wardrobe must-have” that could be worn “for day or evening.”

“You’d think they were giving the stuff away,” Peck whispered to me as we stood to one side, watching the women shop. “They won’t even call their husbands. They don’t make this money themselves. I mean, some of them might. But not the ones I know, the ones Lucinda hangs out with. They’ll drop twenty grand on stuff they don’t need or even really want.”

By the following summer Bethany Samuels’s husband would lose his job and they’d have put that house on the market. The women she knew would no longer feel comfortable shopping in such conspicuous fashion even if they were able to. But for now, they were intent on the business at hand.

“What do you think?” the woman in the orange tunic called out to Peck, extending an arm with three bracelets on it. “Which one do you like best? Or should I get all three? They look nice together.”

“All of them, definitely,” Peck said, reaching into the tray of bracelets and pulling three of them onto her own arm. She held it up, admiring the way they looked on her, like she could, if she wanted, drop a few grand on some bracelets to go with what she called her “patio look,” green pedal-pusher pants and a patterned halter top that vaguely resembled a tablecloth. Peck waved the arm with the bracelets on them at me. “You know, this is all discounted. And she said she would even give us a neighborhood price. Another ten percent less.”

Hamilton gave her a mock-stern look. “Pecksland Moriarty.” And then he leaned over to whisper, “We’re not here to shop.”

She shrugged and slid the bracelets off her wrist. “I’m insanely jealous right now.” Slowly, she placed each one carefully back on the velvet tray as though reluctant to part with them. “Although you couldn’t pay me to sleep with one of those fat losers just for the shopping privileges.”

I pulled her by the arm to get her out of there before she whipped out the credit card she’d tucked into her bra, just in case, and we made our way over to Bethany. Hamilton introduced himself and explained that he was also a neighbor. “I’m an interior designer. I’d love to see what you’ve done with the place.”

Bethany was more than happy to give him a tour. “Shop, ladies,” she told us, waving in the direction of the jewelry. “I’ll be right back.”

“Actually,” Peck said as we followed them out of the dining room, “we wanted to ask if you noticed anything unusual at our party last night.”

Hamilton gazed around in comic distaste as we moved into what was presumably a family room, decorated in primary colors that made the room look like a nursery school classroom.

“Unusual?” Bethany repeated sharply. “What do you mean?”

“Something strange happened in our house,” Peck explained, deliberately sounding mysterious. “And we thought you might have seen something that would help us figure it out.”

Bethany gave her a look. “Well,
what
was it?”

“Something was
stolen
,” Peck intoned, cheerfully playing a role she’d seen on television. Bethany shook her head, the sheaves of hair hardly moving. She seemed unable to decide whether she wanted to be Peck’s best friend or run in the other direction. Insecure people often had this reaction to my sister. “I went home early, remember?”

Peck, of course, wouldn’t have willfully remembered anything about Bethany Samuels, but she nodded as though she had. “Maybe you saw something once you got
home
? Through the window?” Bethany Samuels was hardly the type of woman she would aspire to befriend, and it was becoming clear that Bethany was starting to think the same of her.

“We
don’t
. Look. Out. The window.” Bethany seemed to resent the implication in Peck’s words, but she sounded guilty. Peck was probably right about her spying down on us from the third floor.

We’d moved on to the kitchen, where the walls and backsplash were covered in patterned tile of yellow and blue and green. “Emmet has outdone himself,” Hamilton said to Bethany.

“Oh, do you
know
him?” she crowed, happy to ignore Peck, who was sounding more and more like an interrogator. “Isn’t he genius?”

Hamilton was nodding, wearing a baffled look. “He’s genius, all right.”

“What was stolen?” Bethany asked me. She’d clearly decided I was the good cop to Peck’s bad.

“A painting,” I explained. “About two by three feet, easy enough to slip under an arm.”

“It was an abstract,” Peck chimed in, as though she were in the habit of talking about art. “Modern.”

Bethany Samuels made a face. “I know nothing about modern art,” she stated with pride, as though she’d made a decision just then and there about Peck. Peck was what she might call “out there” or “artsy,” as in “not the kind of person who could help me get into a country club.”

“It was the one that was hanging above the mantel,” I said. “In the living room.”

“I’ve never
gone
into the living room,” she said, in pointed fashion. “I’ve never even been inside the house.” It was hard to tell if she was offended or hurt not to have received a more intimate invitation from either Lydia or us.

When we finished up the tour Bethany tried to interest us in some “cheap and cheerful” cocktail rings before we said our good-byes and she moved on to a much more likely customer, a very tall, very pretty woman—“Now that’s a trophy wife,” Peck whispered to me—in white jeans, gazing adoringly at herself in the mirror as she assessed what looked like chandeliers hanging from her ears. According to Bethany, these too were “must-haves.”