Wedding in Great Neck (9781101607701) (15 page)

Lenore rose and surveyed the room once more. Betsy had had it redone recently, and so everything in here was new to Lenore. On the walls hung three Japanese prints in thin bamboo frames; over the dresser was a large mirror flanked by a pair of sconces with frosted glass. She looked down at the leather case, where the ring had been and now was not. Lenore picked up the charm bracelet; she remembered receiving it from her father when she was about fifteen years old. “For my
shaine maydele,
” he’d said and fastened the clasp around her slim wrist. Lenore had moved her hand this way and that, liking the tinkling sounds the charms made when she shook them. She set the bracelet back down again.

There was a pair of double doors leading onto a small balcony, and Lenore opened them to step outside. The view from here was especially nice: a glimpse of the roses, the lawn, the pool, and the tent, whose flaps and pennants waved in the breeze that must have just started up. Lenore’s eyes were quite good for a woman her age; she wore glasses to drive, read, or watch television, but otherwise she could rely on her unaided vision. So she was quick to notice a figure bent down and scrabbling furiously in the grass as if searching for something. Who was it? Lenore stepped closer to the railing to see.

Justine, that was who. Did she know that Angelica and Betsy were looking for her? And was her frantic search connected to the missing ring? Lenore stepped back. Should she alert Betsy? Angelica? But a decision was rendered unnecessary when she heard Betsy calling Justine, who jumped up from her knees and ran in the direction of the house, ignoring the path and cutting directly across the lawn. Much to Betsy’s annoyance, she was forever doing that.

Moments later they all trooped in: Betsy and the two maids—one was called Carmelita, Lenore remembered, pleased with herself—Angelica, Ohad, and Justine bringing up the rear.

“I think you all know what this is about,” Angelica began. She clasped her hands earnestly to her chest. “Today I’ve lost something that is really precious to me, and I’m hoping one of you can help me find it.” She took a deep breath. “I’ve lost my engagement ring. The beautiful,
irreplaceable
ring that Ohad gave to me.”

“That’s terrible!” Justine said. “Who would do a thing like that?”

Lenore studied the girl. Why did she sound so, well, theatrical? So insincere?

“Oh yes,” Angelica said. “And that’s why I’m hoping that one of you might know something—anything—that will help me to find it.”

“Of course we’ll help you, Angelica,” Justine said. “You know we will.” Lenore saw Betsy nodding and the two maids looking terrified, as if they expected to be handcuffed and hauled off any second. Ohad just crossed his magnificent arms over his chest and said nothing. Clearly no one else had noticed how false Justine sounded. Or, if they had, they were not mentioning it.

“Carmelita, you were in here making the bed, right?” said Betsy. But her voice was kind, not accusing.

“Si,
señora
,” Carmelita said softly. “But I no see ring. I don’t know it here. I never touch.”

“I know you don’t, Carmelita,” said Betsy. Then she turned to the other maid. “What about you, Esperanza?”

“I no in here,
señora
,” Esperanza said. “I no do this room today.”

Betsy turned to everyone else in the room. “Carmelita has been with me for years. If she wanted to, she could have helped herself to what was in my jewelry box a hundred times over. But she never has. I don’t think we can assume she has anything to do with this. The same is true for Esperanza.”

“I know that,” Angelica said impatiently. “But I just thought since Carmelita was in here, she might know
something
, might have seen
something
.”

“I sorry,” Carmelita said, raising her large brown eyes to Angelica in a supplicating look. “I wish I help.”

“You know, there’s someone else who was up here,” Justine said. Everyone turned away from Carmelita, who must surely, Lenore thought, have been grateful for the shift in focus.

“Who was that?” Betsy asked.

“Bobby,” said Justine. Suddenly an invisible but distinct change came over the assembled group.

“Bobby,” breathed Angelica.

“Who is Bobby?” Ohad asked.

“Caleb’s boyfriend. None of us had met him before,” Angelica said. “This is the first time.”

“Oh, that’s right,” Ohad said. “He got here late last night, didn’t he?”

Angelica nodded. “Well, can we bring him here? Talk to him?” she said.

“Do we really want to accuse your brother’s new boyfriend of theft?” Betsy asked.

“Mom, I do not understand why you are so timid!
Someone
had to have taken that ring—it was right there.” Angelica gestured to the dresser. “And now it’s not.”

“Let me see what I can do,” Betsy said. “But I want to be…tactful, all right?”

“I think the time for tact has passed!” Angelica said sharply. “Someone needs to talk to him. And if you won’t do it, I will.” She turned and marched out of the room. Lenore was puzzled. Something was not right here, though she could not say what it was. She did not like this Bobby person, not one bit. But somehow she had a hard time believing he had slipped into this room and stolen that ring. Call it an old woman’s intuition, but she simply did not think he was guilty. Justine, on the other hand, was hiding something. What it was Lenore did not know, but she aimed to find out. Everyone else had started filing out too.

“Justine,” she called to her great-granddaughter, but the girl had already skipped ahead of everyone else and was flitting down the stairs. She did not turn.

Lenore watched her go, yet said nothing. What she had just heard did not correlate at all with what she had seen: Justine pawing the grass, looking so frantic. Justine insinuating that Bobby could have been the culprit. Bobby, Lenore decided, did
not
take that ring. Lenore was as sure of that as she was sure that Monty had loved her or that she would continue to miss him until the day she died. So the story was clearly a
bubbemeisser
, but the question was why. Why did Justine lie? Did she take the ring? Then why would she be looking for it in the grass? If that was what she had been looking for. There was a meaning to this, an order that had yet to be revealed. And until that order had made itself clear, Lenore did not want to say anything to anyone else in the family about what she had seen.

These were the thoughts that occupied her as she walked out of Angelica’s room and down the hall to her own. Round and round they circled like a pair of puppies nipping at each other’s tails. She stopped, her attention arrested by a sound. It was a small yip. No, it was more like a whimper. Betsy’s odious little dog clamoring for attention—again. But hadn’t Lenore left it in her room with the door closed? Maybe Betsy found it and brought it back to her own room. Had she seen the stain on the rug yet? Lenore had forgotten to mention it.

The sound continued, and Lenore realized that it was not coming from the room that was Betsy and Don’s. No, it was much closer than that; it was coming from behind the door where she now stood, the door to Caleb’s room. And it was not canine but human. With a sick feeling Lenore realized she was listening to Caleb, who was crying, crying as if his tender boychick’s heart were breaking right in two.

T
he motel was every bit as grim and dispiriting as Lincoln had anticipated: the torn window shade, the lumpy mattress, the collar of rust encircling the toilet’s base, the rhythmic drip, drip, drip of the bathroom faucet were familiar and predictable, all features common to this breed of forlorn roadside establishment.

But the painkiller had blunted the throbbing, and he was grateful, even buoyant, for the reprieve. He immediately hung up the rented tux, sparing it from further travel-related indignities, and he unpacked the rest of his things, placing them neatly in the drawers, two of which were of course broken. He showered, glad he had thought to pack a pair of flip-flops; the shower floor was no doubt teeming with fungal spores and God knew what else; he didn’t want his bare skin to touch anything in this place. He shaved too and trimmed the damn hairs that poked out from both his ears and nostrils; he neatly combed what remained of the hair on his head.

Then, still wearing his flip-flops and robe, he stretched out on the unforgiving mattress for a nap. Though jittery and uncomfortable, he nonetheless fell into a deep, dreamless sleep. The sound of his phone—the opening chords of Beethoven’s Fifth—so startled him that he jumped up in the bed, knocking his head against the reading lamp that was attached to the wall above it.

“Hello?” he fairly shouted into the thing. “Hello?”

“Dad, it’s me, Caleb. You don’t have to yell—I’m not on Mars.”

“Caleb.” Just saying the name slowed and soothed the erratic pounding of his easily jolted heart. “What’s up, big guy?”
Big guy
had been his nickname for Caleb when he was a boy; considering what a pip-squeak he’d been throughout most of his childhood, it had been a running gag between them.

“Dad, can I see you?” His voice sounded clotted; had he been crying?

“Sure—your mother asked me to be at the house around five for pictures.”

“I can’t wait that long. I need to see you now.”

“Okay, okay,” Lincoln said, rubbing the sore spot on his head. Now he knew that Caleb had been crying. “But let’s not meet here,” he added, eyes roaming the room with its bald carpet, its cheap and misaligned prints of sailboats and lighthouses.

“Well, I don’t want to meet
here
,” Caleb said. “Is there somewhere else?” Lincoln had not a clue. He hadn’t been to this part of Long Island in more than a decade, and even then Great Neck was not a town he knew well. Too rich for his blood back then. And way too rich for it now.

“Tell you what,” he said. “Come pick me up here, and we’ll drive somewhere. I’ll have all my stuff ready, and after we’ve talked for a while, we can head back to your mother’s together.”

“Be there in twenty minutes,” Caleb said.

Lincoln looked forward to spending some time alone with him, the boy he loved best. Angelica had and would always come first in his heart, but then came Caleb. Gretchen and Teddy vied for third place, their respective ascendancy shifting and changing as they grew. Gretchen’s dogged and often principled gravity had been engaging when she was a child, but as an adult, it was quite frankly a drag. Whereas Teddy’s childish bellicosity had turned him into a driven, high-octane guy with his own successful Web-marketing firm; Lincoln, never more than a company drone, admired his elder son’s initiative and finely honed sense of attack. Teddy was, as his grandmother Lenore would have said, a
macher.
But Caleb—well, Caleb had a quiet, self-contained sweetness to him, a sweetness that sometimes split Lincoln’s heart but to which he was also perpetually drawn.

He got up and dressed with exceptional care. If he was going to be seeing Betsy, he wanted to look good. So he put on a fresh pair of pants and his best polo shirt—black with thin gray stripes, no guy on horseback galloping across his nipple. Then he shined his shoes with the doll-sized sponge provided by the motel, one of the few amenities he’d seen here so far. Okay, he was ready. Caleb would be here any minute. Just a last stop in the motel room’s cramped bathroom, where he lifted the seat and a moment later flushed.

The foul water in the bowl rose so quickly that Lincoln didn’t even have time to step back. Up and over the rim it rushed, splashing his pants, wetting his shoes. Damn. The water kept coming, gradually turning darker and more malodorous. He had to turn it off; wasn’t there usually a spigot on the floor behind the toilet? But he didn’t want to kneel down to locate it.

Lincoln grabbed the flimsy towel from its perch atop the tank and used it to staunch the flow. It might as well have been a tissue. As he looked wildly around for another towel, there was a knock on the door. Caleb!

“Just a minute,” Lincoln called. Spying another towel on a slightly rusted rod, he reached to pull it down. He must have yanked too hard, because the rod—cheaply made and light as a chopstick—pulled right out of the wall and fell to the floor in a grayish flurry of plaster dust. “Jesus Christ!” he said. The knocking at the door continued. Lincoln heard Caleb call, “Dad? You okay in there?”

“Coming,” said Lincoln. The water continued to pool on the bathroom floor; it had begun to saturate the room’s carpeting, rendering the ugly burnt-orange color even uglier.

“I was out there for about five minutes,” Caleb said. “Didn’t you hear me?” Before Lincoln could answer, he added, “This place really is a dive. You sure you don’t want to stay at Mom’s?” He sniffed, a critical, what’s-that-smell kind of sniff. “And it stinks too.”

“I heard you,” Lincoln answered. “But I was in the midst of a crisis. Actually I’m still in the midst of it.” He turned and looked toward the bathroom.

“Jesus, Dad, I know it’s a dump, but did you have to trash the place?”

“Trash the place!” said Lincoln. “
I
didn’t
trash
the place! But I’ve got to get all this cleaned up, or Christ only knows what they’re going to charge me for the mess.”