Perfect Little Ladies

It was a colorful note, comprised of red and black and yellow and blue letters in different type sizes and styles, each letter, each word, pasted onto a single sheet of paper the old-fashioned way, not printed from a computer with thoughtless emotion.

It was a colorful note, a clever invitation perhaps, a ribald request for her presence at a ladies’ luncheon, a charity auction, or maybe high tea. One or two of her friends, after all, were known to have slightly twisted senses of humor.

It was a colorful note, but…

After a moment, after a breath, she let her gaze travel the page.

Found: One pair Lavender Lace Panties!

Where: Dumpster, New York Lord Winslow Hotel!

Cost: $500,000 for their return!

Instructions to follow. Stay there and wait for my call.

Elinor supposed she’d had a worse day in her life, but right now she didn’t know when.

One

Alice and Poppy were drying their nails in
the late August sun. They were poised on chaise lounges that were perched on the terrace of Elinor’s country house north of Manhattan, far from the frenzy of Washington, D.C. The house had been a gift from Elinor’s husband, Malcolm, right after the weight-loss drug Ranilin had won FDA approval and he’d received a sizable bonus for his efforts. Finally Elinor had been able to return home on weekends and be with her oldest and dearest friends, Alice and Poppy, whom she counted on for everything, including their opinions of the acrylics they were now testing for Elinor to wear to Jonas’s engagement party, which was only a week away.

She did not count on advice from her sister, CJ, unless the
situation was dire. It did not matter that they were identical twins.

CJ (Catherine Janelle, named after their mother’s mother) sat on the top step of the wide marble stairs that led from the terrace to the topiary garden and wondered why she’d been summoned along with the oldest and dearest. So far, they’d been there an hour; since then, Yolanda had been gluing and shaping while Elinor had been flitting, which Elinor didn’t do well. Poppy was more the flitting type, but they were all nearing fifty, too old for that sort of thing.

“Seltzer?” Elinor (who’d been named for their father’s mother, who’d only had one name because “one was sufficient”) asked for the ninth or tenth time.

The o & d shook their heads. At their age, sipping meant peeing, which was not easy when one’s nails were tacky.

“Elinor,” Alice, the plucky one plucked, “will you please sit down? You’re driving me mad with your wandering.”

“Ditto,” added Poppy, whose nickname had been coined from the color of her flame-red hair so long ago that CJ had forgotten what her name really was. Veronica. Victoria. Something like that.

Elinor sat but said nothing.

CJ sighed. She rose from the stairs and strolled toward her sister. “What’s going on, E? You’re nervous about something, but I doubt it’s the party. You have far too much experience as hostess-with-the-most-est to be suffering simple frayed nerves.”

Alice looked at Poppy, rolled her eyes, and wiggled her fingers. Poppy giggled and waggled her toes. Like Elinor, they’d been pampered girls who’d become pampered wives, so CJ forgave them their trespasses.

Elinor set the pitcher on the Italian flagstone and stared at the lime slices that dipped and bobbed as if they, too, were at sea.

“Well,” she said. “Well.”

Yolanda approached, shaking another bottle of enamel, that one creamy peach. Whichever shade was selected must blend with Elinor’s mango Versace gown that said “Washington wife” with its straight, elegant lines, yet “playful” with its vivid tone. Elinor would look regal. She always did.

CJ would wear less obvious gray silk that she’d hand-painted with violet fringed tulips, like the ones Jonas had helped “Auntie CJ” plant at the cottage when he’d been a boy. The flowers were his favorites, he said every year, so it seemed only fitting. It would be their little secret, in a bittersweet way.

“Well, what?” Alice barked, because she could be as snappy as the old librarian who’d worked at McCready School for Girls when Elinor and CJ’s father, Franklin Harding, had been headmaster, autocrat, person-in-charge.

“Well, give her a minute to think,” Poppy excused, because she was as good at excusing as Elinor was at looking regal.

“Hold out your hand,” Yolanda, the nail tech, demanded. “I don’t have all day.” She had, after all, a business to run, the top-notch hair and nails salon in New Falls, the next town over. Yolanda made house calls on special occasions.

Elinor shook her head. “Not now,” she said soberly. “I’m being blackmailed.”

Well, that made no sense, even to CJ, who was used to her twin sister’s frequent cryptic-speak.

“E?” CJ asked. “What did you say?”

Alice and Poppy stopped wiggling and waggling. Yolanda screwed on the top and set down the bottle.

“I’m being blackmailed,” Elinor repeated. “And I desperately need your help.”

The Harding sisters were identical twins whose hair was what told them apart: Elinor’s, always in a neat, ponytail-place, CJ’s, short but askew, in need of combing. When they were kids they’d been cute, two little clones, too adorable for words. As adults, however, their identical-ness disturbed them both; neither wanted to be mistaken for the other, because it had taken them too long to just be themselves.

Still, a few years ago, when their ebony locks had started sparkling with silver, Elinor was appalled that CJ wanted to dye them. Washington, after all, wasn’t New York, where only money mattered, or L.A., where looks were what reigned. In Washington, success was all about power and wisdom, and silver hair was oddly connected to that.

Or so Elinor said, anyway.

It hadn’t mattered that CJ did not live in Washington but in the old family lakeside cottage in Mount Kasteel, named by Dutch settlers for the castle on the south side of town that overlooked the lake, the Hudson River, and part of Manhattan on a clear day.

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