Death's Savage Passion (23 page)

Adrienne wore black wool from Lord & Taylor—$230 for a dress she would wear only once and would grow out of in a year. Phoebe had elected herself Arbiter of What Is Necessary for Children. I wanted to tell her I doubted if a shoemaker’s daughter from Union City, New Jersey, spent her childhood in Lord & Taylor black, but I didn’t. Her orientation made a peculiar kind of sense. Sarah had worked to make a certain kind of life for herself and Adrienne. Phoebe just wanted to make the dream come true.

Nick divorced himself from the funeral arrangements and went to work on Sarah’s money. There was going to be a lot more of it than we thought at first.
Shadows in the Light
was not her only romantic suspense novel. There were six more. Like a lot of unpublished writers, Sarah had (sensibly) kept them in the mail. They started to drift back after stories about her appeared in the newspapers. They came with notes attached, “under the circumstances” notes. “Under the circumstances” in this case meant that everyone wanted to publish them, but they were Nice People and knew AST should have first crack. I found an agent happy to set up a bidding war, and Nick kept watch with a calculator.

The last I heard of Dana, she was accusing me of the murder of Verna Train. Dana had been getting fairly crazy since her arrest, and I had a feeling she was going to get crazier still. You cannot claim Extreme Emotional Disturbance unless you show signs of being Extremely Emotionally Disturbed.

“It was a mistake,” I told Phoebe, on a late Monday afternoon about a week after the funeral. We were sitting at my kitchen table, waiting for Adrienne to come home from her first day at Brearley. Phoebe had a new set of romantic suspense posters (girls in off-the-shoulder peasant blouses hanging from cliffs, tied up in caves, disappearing down Alpine crevasses, getting swamped by tidal waves) and four different colors of AWR letterhead. Nick had the Personal Response Form for the Department of Social Services. I had given him a dollar and hired him as my lawyer.

“The key to it,” I said, “was that she didn’t know she’d sold the manuscript twice. She had it retyped and left the original on the receptionist’s desk to be returned. But Jane Herman came along and thought she saw it in the In box, and had nothing to do for the weekend, and the next thing you know, Dana had sold it to Gallard Rowson as a Verna Train novel, and Jane had sold it to AST as a Sarah English novel. If Sarah hadn’t come to New York, or hadn’t had dinner with all of us, no one would have known until the books were published.”

“Do you have any skin irregularities?” Nick asked.

“What?”

“Social services.” He waved the forms in my face. “If you want to go through with this adoption, you’ve got to fill out two sets of forms. New York and Connecticut. Skin irregularities,” he said again.

“No,” I said. “She was completely out of control by the end, you know. Once the secret started getting out, it was
out.
She got Radd Stassen by doctoring his coffee when he came to tell her he’d found out about Max’s ghosting, but she couldn’t have stopped with him. She’d have had to waste half the business before she was safe. Maybe they will get her off on Extreme Emotional Disturbance. God only knows she had to be crazy to think she could pull it off.”

“You have to. be crazy to think you can pull this off,” Nick said. “Listen to this. Religious involvement. What in the name of God do they want? Piety on a scale of one to ten? Contacts with Krishna groups? Membership in—”

“Protestant Episcopal,” I said. “I think we’re high church.”

“You think?”

“I prefer high church,” I said. “It’s prettier.”

“You’re a Congregationalist,” Phoebe said patiently. “It’s your Aunt Eugenie who’s Protestant Episcopal.”

Nick glared at us.

Out in the hall, the apartment door opened and closed. The hall closet opened and closed. Adrienne appeared in the kitchen, prim and neat in Brearley’s maroon and navy uniform. She put her books on the table and took a chair. We stared at her.

“Well,” I said, “how was it?”

“I’ll get you something to eat,” Phoebe said. “I made cookies.”

“Could I have some milk, please?” Adrienne said.

“Of course, milk,” Phoebe said.

Adrienne turned to me. “You can wear any socks and shoes you want,” she said. “Most of them have Adidases and funny knee socks. Courtney has reindeer knee socks.”

“Who’s Courtney?”

“Courtney Feinberg. She sits next to me.”

“You like her?”

“A lot. She’s very smart.”

“Where does she get her knee socks?”

“Putumayo.”

I winced. I couldn’t tell Adrienne she couldn’t go to Putumayo, since I go there myself. On the other hand, the prices...

Adrienne took three large cookies and bit one over her napkin. “Are we going to get married to Nick?” she said.

Nick looked at her, nodded, and stuck a thumb in the air. “You don’t have to do that for free,” he told her. “I’ll pay you to talk her into it.”

Adrienne ignored him. “If we’re going to get married to Nick,” she said, “we ought to do it right away. Before court.” Court was what Adrienne called the adoption. She’d been all in favor of adoption since she’d found out she didn’t have to change her name to do it. Staying Adrienne English was one of the things she was doing for her mother.

“I talked to Courtney, and she said with adoptions they like the adopting person to be married,” she said. “So I think we should cover our—”

I gave her a look. She coughed. “You know what I mean,” she said.

“That I do,” I said.

“I think you’re going to have to do this,” Nick said gleefully. “I think she’s going to back you into a corner.”

“Nobody backs me into a corner,” I said.

“Everybody backs you into corners,” Nick said. “You spend your life getting backed into corners.”

“Courtney says it’s very important,” Adrienne insisted.

“It would help,” Nick pointed out.

“It would be good for you,” Phoebe said.

“The next thing you’re going to want is a move to the suburbs,” I said.

Adrienne looked horrified. “Oh no,” she said. “You never give up a good apartment in
Manhattan.”

I was beginning to have second thoughts about Brearley. It was reputed to be the best girls’ school in Manhattan, but I was beginning to think there was such a thing as being too bright. And too hip. If there was something like that, Adrienne was going to have it down in less than a week.

I grabbed a cookie and got out of my chair. Putumayo, for God’s sake. Reindeer knee socks. Courtney Feinberg.

“Don’t tell me,” I said. “You want to be a flower girl.”

“I’m too old to be a flower girl,” Adrienne said. “But if that’s what it takes to get you to do it, I’ll do it.”

Nick was grinning like a homicidal maniac. “Score,” he said.

“Caterers,” Phoebe said. “And not just the caterers. Invitations. I’ll have to call Tiffany’s. And the flowers, this time of year—”

After all that, buying a kid eighty-dollar sneakers actually seemed sane.

Turn the page to continue reading from the Patience McKenna Mysteries

Great virtue consists of a strictness in small things.

—Louisa Haldoran Campbell McKenna

If my mother ran the universe, Theodore Roosevelt would have been immortal, and he’d still be President.

—Patience Campbell McKenna

T
HERE IS NO TRAIN STATION
in Waverly, Connecticut. There may have been once—there’s a small section of town called Waverly Depot—but for as long as I have known the place, it has been deliberately isolated from all modern forms of transportation. Even the roads are a joke. 202, 45, 109: square white markers with those numbers on them appear at irregular intervals along the two-lane blacktops that twist and dip and rise and plummet through the hilly landscape, remnants of a time when the mere presence of asphalt spelled “progress.” When the snows come, the town is cut off, not only from the towns around it, but from the access roads that lead to the interstates that lead to the stores that make living in the country possible. Waverly has no supermarkets, no groceries, no convenience stores, no malls. Shopping for food means a forty-five-minute trek to Waterbury. Shopping for clothing means a longer trip—to West Hartford, where the West Farms Mall has branches of Lord & Taylor and Laura Ashley and Ralph Lauren Polo, or into Manhattan. Waverly does have a hardware store, and a few gas stations, and the best bookstore in the state of Connecticut. It also has a great many very old houses. Some of these houses are very large and very expensive: reconstructed New England antique. Others are very small and not expensive at all. The people who live in those will sell you cordwood in the winter and shovel snow off your gravel drive at twenty dollars an hour. At least, they will do these things if they can get out of their own driveways and down the road to yours—which they can’t, most days. The snows always come, and with them some of the nastiest patch ice in the known universe.

There was a lot of patch ice that first day of February, stuck in the hollows at the bottoms of the hills, glowing black and wicked at the worst spots in the curves—but, believe it or not, it wasn’t what I was worried about. For one thing, it had been long enough since the last heavy fall—nearly two weeks—so there wasn’t a lot of snow clogging the road. For another, I’d had the sense, back in New York, to rent not a car but a Jeep Wagoneer. Four-wheel drive, oversized snow treads, and a brand new set of chains conspired to make me feel secure, except when I did something stupid and nearly flipped us over. The Wagoneer is not a vehicle that tends to flip over, but the people who designed it hadn’t taken into consideration either Litchfield County or me. Litchfield County is bad enough. I am a disaster. One of the reasons I moved to Manhattan in the first place was that it was possible to live there without ever having to drive myself anywhere.

Actually, the reason I moved to Manhattan was that I didn’t want to spend my life in Waverly, Connecticut. Like millions of other young women in millions of other small towns, I had my eye on the exciting, the adventurous, the cosmopolitan—the not-home. That I grew up rich instead of poor, and went away to boarding school instead of being imprisoned in the local high, mattered not at all. Boredom is in the eye of the beholder. I was as agonizingly stupefied by tennis parties and high tea as my best friend Phoebe was by sock hops and the Dave Clark Five in Union City, New Jersey.

Of course, Phoebe could go home to Union City and know not only that she had changed, but that the city had changed right along with her. Waverly never changes. I was bombing along on 109, through a landscape that looked exactly the way it had when I was eight years old. The same houses were in the same places. The same side roads wound out of sight into the same hills. The longer I drove through it, the worse I felt. It was as if my life for the past ten years—or maybe the past twenty—had been an illusion. I hadn’t really lived any of it at all. Now I was waking up, and as soon as I shook the sleep out of my eyes I’d find I’d turned into the person my mother always wanted me to be: married to a nice stupid man from a good New England family, traveling to Fairfield twice a week for the meetings of my charity boards, obsessional about gardening.

I brushed hair out of my face and reminded myself I was none of that. I did live in Manhattan, and the man I was marrying was from anything but “a good New England family.” He had grown up poor, and Greek, three blocks from Phoebe’s mother’s kitchen. Stuffed in the back of the Jeep, I had the paraphernalia of my authentic existence: copies of all three of my published true-crime books and the working notes for my fourth; a copy of the new maintenance agreement for my apartment on Central Park West; my adopted daughter’s first shot at a “real” short story. I even had a few clippings from the
New York Post
—
LOVE GIRL DETECTIVE SCORES AGAIN
—as if, all else failing, I could prove who and what I was by the blithering absurdities of Rupert Murdoch’s successors.

I caught the glint of ice just as I was making the turn off 202 onto 109, tried to downshift, and realized I’d been traveling in first gear since Watertown. The wheels spun. The Jeep shuddered and rocked. My stomach disintegrated. Then the miracle occurred for the fiftieth time, and we were on the road and traveling serenely forward once again.

I looked across at the passenger seat and saw that Phoebe had gnawed a hole in the cover of a paperback novel called
Rage for Passion, Cry for Love
. Phoebe was what I was worried about. I was worried about her physical condition, because she was seven months pregnant. I was worried about her mental condition, because she was in the most irrational mood I’d ever seen anyone in, anywhere. Most of all, I was worried about her emotional condition. I have known Phoebe (Weiss) Damereaux for twenty years, ever since we were both freshmen at Greyson College for Women. I have known her poor: living in a three-room railroad flat on the Lower East Side, with a bathtub in the kitchen and the electricity off for lack of payment. I have known her rich: royally ensconced in a ten-room apartment ten blocks north of my own, surrounded by velvet furniture and two-thousand-year-old Chinese snuff bottles. I have even known her triumphant: according to
Publishers Weekly
, she’s “The Most Important Writer of Historical Romance Since the Death of Georgette Heyer.” This was the first time I had ever known her
insecure
.