“Something,” Peach’s eyelids fluttered, and her voice dropped an octave, “something involving the cottage?” She reached a hand toward Leigh and dropped it on the table. “You’ve changed your mind?”
“Don’t get too excited,” Marti said. “You’re not getting back in there.”
Ellen set down her knitting and started typing on her computer.
Peach looked from Marti to Leigh, then she turned to Ellen and snapped, “We haven’t formally convened the meeting.”
“Just noting who’s here,” Ellen said cheerfully.
Peach called the meeting to order and started working through the agenda. One by one the women reported on their assignments for the upcoming convention. Decorations, registration, bus tours of the surrounding area, the parade permit, late housing requests, and more. Peach’s voice droned. “I don’t understand all these special diets. Do people really need…”
Leigh’s thoughts drifted. The kitchen was blessedly free of mannequins or any attempt to recreate the books’ purported magic, and it seemed to be used mostly for storage. Boxes were piled on the floor and on the counters. She shifted in the folding chair and tried to look alert. It was too damn bad these kitchen cupboards didn’t hide a bottle of Glenlivet.
Peach rapped her pencil. “Now some good news! But I must ask everyone here to keep it a secret. Donnie and I have made a special donation. We’ve commissioned a statue. It’s ready to be shipped to Pepin and it will be unveiled at the convention. You may have noticed the slab out front. That’s for the sculpture, which recreates the moment when the girls spot the eagle.”
Leigh smiled as the others murmured, “Big World.” Was there any reference from the books they couldn’t identify and cite?
Ellen, Jane, and Holly clapped, and Peach beamed. Marti said, “Seville or the poster version? Two girls or three?”
Peach examined the eraser on her pencil.
“Oh, crap,” Marti said. “The artist is copying the TV poster version, not the original Seville drawing. You’re going with the television version of the story.”
“Does it matter?” asked Leigh. “Are they that different?”
Ellen whistled softly. “Don’t go there, honey.”
Peach said, “We’ve been through this a million times, Marti. Our fans expect certain things. If they’re primarily familiar with Pepin and Maud because of the television show, we should honor that. After all, the fans pay dues, they make the donations that enable us to care for this house, and they buy the books. It’s up to us to keep those fans happy.”
Marti said, “I have a surprise of my own.”
Peach straightened the papers in front of her. “You’ll have time later. We need to discuss a few other things first. Holly, did you—”
“Roberta Garibaldi has agreed to come and speak at the convention,” Marti said. “I realize I should have consulted with you first, but the opportunity presented itself and I had to move quickly.”
Opportunity for blackmail, Leigh thought as she took a third Snickerdoodle.
While Ellen, Jane, and Holly fussed happily over the announcement, Peach and Marti engaged in a stare-down.
I will not take sides, Leigh thought. Or was it too late? Had she already been conscripted, tossed into the fray of an apparently fierce and very personal battle?
“I’ll be picking her up at the airport on the fifteenth,” Marti said. “She’ll be here the final three days. She has generously waived her standard speaking fee because of her affection for the books. The Ida May Turnbull Society will be covering her travel expenses.”
Ellen said, “She’s my favorite living author!”
“Her first novel was wonderful,” Holly said, “but I thought Sunset America was terrible. Anti-Christian, if you ask me. All that crude language and then those scenes between the two men…horrid.”
“I love her books!” said Ellen.
“Will she be staying with you, Marti?” Peach asked. “There’s not an open motel room for thirty miles.”
“No. She’ll be staying in the cottage. Leigh has been gracious enough to welcome her.”
Leigh said, “I’m delighted, of course.” She turned to Peach. “I’m sorry I couldn’t say anything the other morning.”
Peach’s eyes narrowed as her chin lowered in folds on her neck.
“Don’t you think,” Marti said, “given Roberta’s fame and popularity, that it might be a good idea to open her talk to the public and have it in the high school auditorium? Perhaps it should be part of one of the evening programs. And Jane, since you’re in charge of the convention shop you’d better have plenty of her books on hand to sell. She’s agreed to a signing session each day she’s here.”
“I’m rather surprised she’s interested in being part of a Little Girl event,” Peach said. She folded her agenda in half, then half again, each time pressing the tip of a pale lilac fingernail along the crease. “We sent her a newsletter for a few years, but then she moved and never gave us a forwarding address. I assumed she had lost interest.”
“Not at all,” Marti said. “She was delighted to be asked. I’ve talked with her several times. She’s especially thrilled about staying in the cottage. The real cottage.”
“An exciting development,” Peach said, “though perhaps next time, Marti, you needn’t be so independent in your initiative. And Leigh, we thank you for your part. Now we need to move on to the fashion show.”
“You don’t need me for this,” Leigh said, rising. “Your convention sounds like a wonderful event. I wish you all the best with it.” She smiled at everyone, took another cookie, and then faced Peach Wickham. The woman had flushed, a furious pink that spread from her cheeks to the plush freckled bosom framed in lilac.
Oh lord, Leigh thought. She did not want this woman for an enemy. Marti’s blackmail would pale against any threat Peach contrived. “Those photos you took,” she said slowly.
“What about them?” Peach snapped.
“They couldn’t have been all that good. Would you like to get back in and take some more? Perhaps you could make a commemorative album to sell at the convention.”
Peach gripped the edge of the table. Leigh glanced at Marti, who was nodding as she slowly and softly clapped her hands.
“It will have to be soon,” Peach said. “Tomorrow at one?”
Leigh nodded. “See you then.” She took two steps, then turned back. “I don’t want your visit tomorrow to turn into a public event.”
“Surely you don’t mind if I hire a professional photographer? The album is a brilliant idea, but the photos must be good ones.”
What had she started, and what would Terry say? “I’ll need that waiver you mentioned.”
“Of course.”
“The photographer’s fine, but no entourage of assistants. No special lighting or props. And no rearranging, Peach, absolutely no redecorating. You can shoot the cottage, but everything’s as is.” She paused, then added, “I’ll make my bed.”
“Next item!” Peach barked as Leigh left the kitchen. “The fashion show. We have twenty-seven models…”
The woman had missed her true calling, Leigh decided as she closed the museum door and lifted her face to the still-warm sun. Peach Wickham would have made a fine wartime general.
5.
Was Ida May Turnbull a writer or a sorceress?
Leigh moved about the cottage, touching the relics that had so moved both Marti and Peach and which, no doubt, would fetch a nice price on eBay. Why were some of them even still in the cottage? The blue vase, the spoon rest, the painting—each was important enough to be mentioned in the woman’s books, so why hadn’t she taken them with her when she left Pepin?
She sat in the big brown chair and studied the Red Lady. Marti was right: the nipples were astounding. “I’ve always loved Matisse,” she said into a mug of tea she’d brewed as soon as she’d returned from the meeting.
What was the committee planning now? Three hundred women were soon arr
iving in town to celebrate a long-dead writer, and she was living in the bull’s eye of their obsession. Perhaps she shouldn’t have left the meeting so abruptly. Perhaps she should have read through the agenda she’d left on the table. Had one of the items been “Group assault on the cottage”?
Three hundred and one. Three hundred Little Girls and Roberta Garibaldi. It had been, what? Ten, twelve years?
“Call me Robbie!” the woman had said the moment they’d met. Of course, they’d both been naked in a hot tub at a plush resort in West Virginia, crossing paths one night as guest speakers at a symposium on Women and the News. Why not be friendly?
Twelve years, that was it. Just before Roberta—Robbie!—had retired from the Courant and started writing fiction. Just before Leigh had fudged her first detail in a story.
Leigh had never read one of Roberta Garibaldi’s books. By the time the first one came out, she’d been banished from newspaper work and had no particular desire to read the highly praised novel another ex-journalist had written.
Her temple throbbed and she pressed the warm tea mug against it. What had she gotten into with this photo shoot the next day? Would Peach really keep her promise and make it a low-key event? She snorted. Fat chance. She’d bet her meager monthly income that nothing that woman ever did was low key, certainly not if it concerned this convention.
The goddam convention. Maybe she could just disappear. Find an excuse to go home and let Marti stay with Roberta. Terry would wonder why she took off, but it wouldn’t take much of a story to appease him. Geneva might wonder, though. She’d have to know there were guests in the house and she might wonder about that and why Leigh was leaving them alone. If she told her…
“Oh, hell,” she sighed. “I’m so tired of hiding behind stories.”
The Red Lady’s eyes seemed to flicker.
Had this chair really belonged to the little Ida May? Had she truly sat here and thought up her stories? Sat here, staring at the painting as she imagined other lives and adventures?
The Red Lady’s frown seemed to deepen.
Leigh stroked the arm of the big brown chair. No. This belonged to the mother. She was the one who sat in the chair, perhaps nursing a glass of wine late at night after her daughter was in bed. Night after night, keeping company with the Red Lady as she waited for her lover.
6.
“I have a confession,” Leigh said as soon as she took her seat in Terry’s study.
He waved papers. “I know all about it. Peach was here not long after daybreak. Brought a waiver and a photo release for me to sign.”
“A photo release? Oh god, I didn’t even think about that. I’m sorry, Terry, I just.…”
“Just what? Just wanted to spend more time with the donkey ass daughter of the donkey ass father?”
“I just didn’t want to get on her bad side. It seemed like a reasonable compromise to keep her from pestering me. She might have some work for me down the road.”
“Fair enough. I hear they’re doing a photo album. She said it was your idea.”
“It just blurted out of me.”
“Let’s hope some more brilliant ideas blurt out for my book. When Peach told me about it, I could practically hear her counting up the gold. Ka-ching!”
“The photo session’s early this afternoon. Why don’t you come over and watch with me? Have you even seen the cottage since it’s been re-opened?”
He gazed out the window and began tracing the lines of the oak with his hand. “Twice. Once when Geneva got started on it and wanted to show me how many things were wrong with the place, and then again when we hung the copy of the painting. I’ve always loved that painting. I had it in this house for a while, but my older daughter insisted that security here wasn’t good enough. She took it to New York.”
“Did you know the author referred to it as ‘The Red Lady’ in her books?”
He frowned as he thought, then laughed as the explanation dawned. “Granddad would have loved that.”
“Maybe he knew. Do you suppose he ever read her books?”
Terry shrugged. He signed the two papers quickly and handed them to Leigh.
“Thank you. I’m sorry for the inconvenience.”
“There’s none, unless it keeps you from working on my book for too long. What have you got for me today?” She handed him a sheaf from her back pack and he settled into his chair. After three pages he looked up and smiled. After he turned over the fourth his eyelids drooped. Soon he was dozing.
She wrote for an hour and then went to the kitchen for fresh coffee. When she returned to the study with a full carafe he stirred awake. As she settled into her usual chair opposite his, he feigned being alert and tapped the pages on his lap. “This just gets better and better. I wish I’d had your help on the first volume. Are you enjoying this project?”
She picked up his cup and refilled it. “It’s the most interesting writing I’ve done in years.”
He took the cup from her, kicked off his loafers and rested his feet on a footstool. “Enjoying Pepin?”
She looked out the window. More and more, he was dipping in and out of time, forgetting where he was and where he’d been, at least if it was within the recent past. Clearly he’d forgotten their earlier conversation. Would she have to explain once more that she was letting people into the cottage today?
A single red wing blackbird groomed itself on a branch of the oak tree. “I am enjoying Pepin. It’s a beautiful town. I’ve been getting out some. Meeting a few people.”
“Charlie Ewald’s daughter. Lord, he was a donkey ass. How’s the car?”
“Not quite done. They’re a little slow down there.”
“Use mine.”
Charlie Ewald. The accident. The slow pace of the repair work and his insistence she use his car. Every day, the same conversation. Did he really not remember that they went through the routine each time they talked?
If her own parents were still living would she be having this sort of repetitious conversation with them? Would she be this patient? Her father had died when she was ten in a typical Wisconsin death—car crash involving a deer. But her mother had died more recently. Leigh hadn’t been patient during that ordeal two years before, not when her mother—dying from lung cancer—continued to light up as she continued to lash out at Leigh. One last battle, one last round of protests about her daughter’s life. “A long chain of mistakes,” Marge Lee had shouted over the phone. Their final conversation. A mother’s benediction.
“Sonny will do a good job on your car,” Terry said. “His people have worked on all of ours. His great-grandfather was my grandmother’s driver.”
“Families stay put in this town.”
“Not me; I went to Washington and India. Now I want to see what you’ve written about that.” He held out a hand and wiggled his fingers. “Let me see the new work.”
“I gave it to you, Terry,” she said softly. “It’s in your lap.”
He stared at the papers. Then he whispered, “Peach pie.” Their eyes met.
She said, “As I told you, your life is the most interesting story I’ve written in a long time. I’m so grateful you hired me for this job.”
He rested a brown-spotted hand on the papers. “You’ll get it done, Leigh? Promise me that?”
“I’m trying my best, Terry. It’s a big story.”
He nodded as he gazed out the window.
“I know it doesn’t seem related, but as I said, it’s a big story. I have some questions about your grandfather.”
He stiffened.
“Why are so many of the original furnishings still in the cottage? I’d have thought the girl would have taken more of them.”
Tall tales and venom, she thought as Terry continued to stare out the window. That’s how Peach had described the Bancroft version of Ida May’s life. Would she hear some of that now?
“My grandmother…” his words faded into a deep sigh. “Granddad told me once that he was out of town on business when
the doctor died. He wasn’t notified right away. By the time he’d returned, the daughter had come and gone.”
“Taking nothing?”
He faced her. “Apparently my grandmother behaved badly. She claimed the cottage and furnishings were Bancroft property, and the girl wasn’t allowed to take anything but clothing and a few books she could prove were her own.”
“Did your grandfather ever talk about the doctor’s death or about the daughter? He lived long enough to be aware of her writing success. Do you know if they kept in touch? He must have known Ida May fairly well. I imagine they might have had some affection for each other.”
Terry made a scoffing noise. “Girl’s mother kills herself, don’t you think the girl put at least some of the blame on him?”
“Did he blame himself? Is that part of the reason why he chose to live in the cottage? How did he explain that to the family?”
He again looked out the window. “Can’t really help you with any of those questions, Leigh. He never said much. And certainly no one else did. Even after she was famous Ida May Turnbull and her mother were not discussed in the family.”
“Which is why you said nothing about them in your first book. You talked about your grandparents, but said nothing about their separation or his mistress or her famous daughter.”
“Good god, why would I? Haven’t you ever kept something out of a story because you decided it was irrelevant? You can’t tell me you haven’t played around with the truth in your writing. Hah—you should see your face. Guilty as charged!” He pointed to the bookcase. “I’ve read the books you wrote for my friends.”
Leigh rubbed her left thumb against her right wrist. “Those books were vanity projects written for private audiences. They made no public claim of truth.”
“Even if they had—does truth require full disclosure?”
“Maybe not, Terry,” she said softly.
“I’m not paying you to get caught up with those women,” he said. “You’re letting Peach in to take pictures and that’s bad enough. I suppose it’s my own fault, of course, because I put you in the cottage. But goddam it, Leigh, that doesn’t mean you have to spend night and day thinking about that writer and her mother and my grandfather. We have work to do.”
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