To the Manor Dead (6 page)

I walked into the
store to find Josie vacuuming. I looked around—mirrors sparkled, wood shone, tchotchkes had been dusted.

“This place looks great,” I said.

Josie turned off the vacuum and gave me a proud smile. “I sold something.”

“No kidding? What was it?”

“A poster, it said Keith Haring on the bottom.”

“Did they ask for a discount?”

“Yes, but I told them no, that he was a great artist and it was valuable.”

“Good work.”

“Who’s Keith Haring?”

I gave Josie a quick tutorial on Haring. Then I called Claire Livingston’s cell phone.

“Hi, Claire, it’s Janet Petrocelli.”

“Hi.” Her tone wasn’t exactly warm.

“How are you?”

“Holding up.”

I waited for her to volunteer some more information. Nope. She didn’t.

“I was wondering if there was going to be a funeral?”

“No. But some of Aunt Daphne’s old friends, from the local families, are having a small memorial. It’s at Franny Van Kirk’s chapel Friday at ten in the morning.”

“Did you make any decisions about looking for another place to live?”

“Listen, I have to run.”

What was that about? She was probably embarrassed that she had opened up to me. I’d seen that happen. People would come in for their first session, or just for an interview as a potential client, and they’d pour their hearts out, reveal their deepest secrets and shame. And then I’d never see them again. Of course, Claire’s chilly tone could also be something else—like a message to mind my own business.

But who was Franny Van Kirk? And why did she have a chapel? And most important, why was I letting myself get pulled into this mess? I wanted to study Chinese history, learn to kayak, cook Italian, read
Madame Bovary
. Not get sucked into something that had nothing to do with me.

I looked over to where Daphne had sat that morning, remembered her wistful reminiscences, how fragile and frightened she had been. I didn’t have the energy to minister to the living anymore, but I could at least try and find justice for the dead.

The phone rang.

“Hey, babe, want to come out for dinner tonight?” Zack asked. “I’ve got some good stuff in the garden, I’ll make pasta primavera and a gorgeous salad.”

I was ambivalent about my relationship with Zack, but then again I was ambivalent about
all
relationships. With good reason. Both my parents had been hippies—they met, naked and body-painted, at a Be-In in Tompkins Square Park. My father was a tin-pot genius, a self-proclaimed East Village
artiste
who was too busy drinking, drugging, declaiming, and screwing to ever start—much less finish—that great novel, painting, play. He acted in incomprehensible off-off-Broadway shows and drove a cab three nights a week to pay his share of the rent on whatever tenement he was currently crashing in. He died when I was ten, when he drove his cab into the East River at three a.m.—his blood toxicology report ran to three pages. I didn’t find out for a month.

My mom was about as maternal as a pet rock—she took off to India when I was six and as far as I knew was still a nomad—and I spent most of my childhood farmed out to more conventional aunts and uncles on Long Island, who fought, drank, and hauled their tired asses to jobs they hated. It all left me with a pretty warped view of marriage and family. My first husband was nice, safe, sober, reliable, and had his own star on the Boring Humans Walk of Fame. He was a classic over-correction after a chaotic childhood. When that sad union died a slow death, I fell hard for the Asshole. He was charming, smart, sexy, funny, narcissistic, arrogant, intolerant, promiscuous, and basically viewed marriage (and the wife that inconveniently came with it) as one more step on his march to the Holy Grail of “personal fulfillment.”

The truth is I suck at relationships, which is not an easy thing for a therapist to admit. Fortunately I was able to see in my clients what I couldn’t always see in myself: the difference between a healthy give and take between two compatible people, and a desperate need to assuage loneliness and be validated in the eyes of family and society. With Zack, my expectations were realistic and my boundaries clear. I was getting my bearings in my new upstate life, and my second wind to carry me through middle age. I didn’t want a be-all-and-end-all relationship. Zack was a nice, randy guy—and that was enough for now.

“Pasta primavera sounds great.”

“We can have each other for dessert.”

Just as I hung up a man walked into the store—around forty, strong but going to seed, the florid face of a boozer, a paunch, thinning blondish hair, wearing jeans, work boots, a sweatshirt.

Josie stiffened and shrank.

“Hi, sweetheart,” he said to her. Then he turned to me. “Hey there, Phil Nealy, Josie’s stepdad.” He attempted a smile, but it came out all oily.

I stood up. “Janet Petrocelli.”

He nodded toward Josie. “How’s she doing?”

“She’s doing great, she’s smart and hardworking.”

“She is, huh?”

“And attractive.”

“If you like gimps.”

“Can I help you with something?”

“Nah, I’m not interested in junk.”

“Well, feel free to leave then,” I said, coming around the desk and approaching him.

“I just came in to see where Josie was working.”

“Well, now you’ve seen it.” I went to the door and opened it.

“Are you kicking me out?”

“Draw your own conclusions.”

Just then two women, obviously a couple, walked past me into the store. As they began to look around, Phil Nealy and I exchanged glares. Josie was immobile. I put a hand on Nealy’s elbow, applied pressure, and led him out to the sidewalk. Booze wafted off him like vapors.

“Listen, do me a favor—don’t come around here anymore,” I said.

“It’s a free country and I’m her stepfather.”

“Your freedom ends at my doorstep.”

“Is that so?”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know who the fuck you think you are, but you’re messing with the wrong guy.”

“Right back at ya.”

I looked him dead in the eye. He glared at me before puffing out his chest, spitting on the sidewalk, and walking away.

I went back inside. The two women seemed seriously interested in a set of Russell Wright china, but there was no sign of Josie.

“I’ll be right with you,” I said.

I went into the back. Josie was sitting in a straight-back chair, gulping air.

“Hey there,” I said, putting a hand on her shoulder.

“I’m sorry that I made you hire me.”

“You didn’t make me do anything.”

“You’re a nice person and you felt sorry for me.”

“Bullshit. I hired you because I need help around here and you seem like you have a lot of potential.”

She looked up at me with flashing eyes, “Oh, go fuck yourself.”

I suddenly had a massive déjà vu—on all the deeply wounded people I’d taken on, people who needed their psyches rebuilt from the ground up, who had to somehow make peace with horrific childhoods and circumstances, on all the times I’d sworn to myself that I wouldn’t get involved again, that I would protect myself.

I just couldn’t handle it anymore.

“I’m sorry, but I don’t think this is going to work out,” I said.

Josie’s body heaved, she opened her mouth and a thin stream of vomit poured out.

“Oh, poor baby,” I said, reaching for a stack of paper towels.

Before I had time to wipe her off, she jumped out of the chair and ran out of the store. I took a couple of deep breaths and walked out front. The two women gave me a concerned look, but thankfully minded their own business.

“We’ll take the Russell Wright,” the taller one said.

“It’s cool stuff, isn’t it?” I said, grateful to have this simple transaction to ground me.

“It is cool, and the price is fair,” she said.

“We just bought a little weekend place up in Palenville,” her partner said.

“We just love it up here.”

“It’s magic.”

Yeah—black magic maybe.

Zack lived in West
Sawyerville, right under the eastern flank of the Catskills, in a little cabin next to a stream on a dead-end road. When I first met him I figured that any guy who would buy the place had to have some soul. I arrived to find him strolling around his vegetable garden shirtless, with a drink in his hand, picking the lettuce for dinner.

“Hey, little darlin’,” he called. Zack was from Levittown and like a lot of guys who grew up in cities and suburbs but settled in the country, he loved to use twangy slangy language.

He handed me his drink. I took a sip. It was one of his Zackwackers—basically whatever fresh fruit he had laying around, blendered-up with enough tequila to grow hair on a billiard ball. It was Zack’s drink of choice after “a hard day in the fields” (a.k.a. watering rich second-homers’ perennial beds), especially during “the high summer months” (which started in the middle of March). For years Zack had worked for a large landscape company, planting trees and building stone walls. Then two years ago he’d decided it was time to “be my own man, be
Zack.
” He’d taken a six-week course in landscape design at Ulster Community College and reinvented himself by printing up business cards reading “Zack Goldman, Earth Art.” Well, it worked. He had more clients than he could handle, usually eco-earnest types from the city who bought second homes and dreamed of ponds, sweeps of grasses, masses of rare flowers—but who, after hearing the price tag, invariably settled for a couple of perennial beds and a dwarf evergreen or two, all of it tarted up come spring with impatiens, petunias, and geraniums.

The drink went down easy—I needed it. “That’s potent stuff.”

“I’m a man with potent appetites. And you’re one hell of a woman.” He leaned over and kissed me. Zack was pretty adorable when he was on his first drink—it was the second and third that were the problems, as he went from endearing to annoying to incoherent to comatose. At least he never got mean.

“How was your day?” I asked, sitting on a stone bench. His property was small, but it was ringed with stone walls and filled with benches, paths, and nooks that Zack had built.

“Darlin’, my day was … spectacular. The earth and I worked together to create beauty. It was hard work, earth work, muscles and sweat.” He looked up at the mountain, his eyes filled with tenderness and tequila. “It was spiritual work, a work of wonder.” I guess he caught my eye-roll because he said, “Janet, sometimes I think you don’t take me seriously.”

“You don’t make it easy.”

Zack was a hunk, no doubt—almost six feet of solid beefy muscle, thinning reddish hair, an open face covered with freckles, green eyes nestled in crow’s-feet. The package was a big part of the attraction for me. That and the fact that the Asshole had been a self-important, condescending pseudo-intellectual who turned every discussion into a game of one-upmanship. So much of what we do in life is a reaction to our previous mistakes—but Zack didn’t feel like an overcorrection. At least not yet.

“My day was good. How was your day?”

I told him about the town meeting, and my suspicion that maybe Vince Hammer was somehow connected to Daphne’s death.

“My old company takes care of Hammer’s place. It’s outside Woodstock, up on Ohayo Mountain. Amazing place, views almost all the way down to the city, they say he spent like ten million building it.”

Suddenly a battered red pickup plastered with bumper sticks—“Pray for Whirled Peas,” “Honk if You Love Silence,” “I’d Rather be Fartin’”—came to a roaring stop in Zack’s drive. I steeled myself as the driver’s door flew open and a giant burst out.

“The Moooose is looooose!” he bellowed, before galumphing across the lawn and chest-butting with Zack.

“Dude!”

“Fucker!”

“Freak!”

“Loser!”

Male bonding is so erudite.

The giant turned to me. “And there’s the Janster! How’s it goin’, hip sister?”

Moose LaRue was Zack’s best friend—a rowdy, six-foot-six fellow landscaper who could “lift a tree ball with a single arm.”

“I’m okay, how are you, Moose?”

“The Moose be groovin’! Hey listen—cool news! I bought a boat!”

“No shit,” Zack said.

“Yeah, so we can go out drinkin’—I mean fishin’—on the river.”

The two of them roared some more.

“Hey listen, Moose, Zack was telling me you take care of Vince Hammer’s place,” I said.

“Yeah. The man is a solid-gold superfreak.”

“You’ve met him?”

“Hell, yeah. He’s one of these rich assholes who has to prove how down-home he is by making nice with his slaves. He’s a total dick. Speaking of dick, he can’t keep it in his pants. It used to be like the Playboy mansion around there.”

“Say more.”

“There was a different babe on his arm every time I saw him. Sometimes one on each arm. Cat liked to party. One day I was there doing cleanup and this chick comes out of the house starkers—the bod, Zack man, the bod. She says she wants to take a swim, then she asks me my name. When I tell her, she says ‘is it true what they say about moose?’ Pretty soon we’re in the pool together and she’s practicing her underwater humming skills.” The boys roared yet again. “Hey, is that a Zackwacker?”

Zack handed him the drink and he downed it in one long swallow.

“But lately there’s been just one lady there. Marcella Sedgwick. She is
fierce.
Fuckin’ knockout. High-class bitch won’t give me the time of day. She’s cleaned the place up, a lot less partying. I think they’re getting serious. So, amigo, want to go out on the river this weekend?”

“Hell, yes.”

“Moose, if River Landing gets built, is your company going to do the landscaping?” I asked.

“We’ll do the real work, Hammer hired some fancy-ass Italian company to design the ’scape. He walked my boss and a couple of us grunts around the place, wants it to be a ‘work of art’. Give me a fucking break—take away a few bells and whistles and you’ve got another cheesy townhouse development. I’ll tell you another thing—the man is fucking obsessed with that property across the river.”

“Westward Farm?”

“Bingo. He kept pointing it out, was practically salivating, called it ‘the crown jewel of the Hudson’.”

“You want to stay for dinner, Moose?” Zack asked, pulling up a head of red lettuce.

“Not if you’re serving rabbit food. Naw, I gotta split. See you Saturday.”

He galumphed back to his truck and roared away.

“I hope you’re hungry,” Zack said as we headed into the cabin.

“Starving.”

He slipped in a Phish CD, put a pot of water on the stove, and started to chop vegetables.

“Speaking of obsession,” I said, “I’m getting obsessed with Daphne’s death.”

“Do you really want to get involved?”

“I think I already am.”

“I thought your big thing up here was keeping out of other people’s business.”

“I can’t just walk away.”

Sitting there watching Zack cook, listening to the mellow music on a soft evening in the shadow of the mountain, I should have been relaxed—after all, this was just the kind of life I’d moved upstate for. Instead I felt it rising through my chest, up my spine—that seductive mix of adrenaline, apprehension, anticipation.

“Turn off that water,” I said to Zack.

He looked at me, perplexed.

“Just turn it off.”

He did. I got up, took his hand, and hauled him to the bedroom.