by Susan Conant
I smiled. “I’m sure you are.”
“Could I ask you to hand me that picture?” Enid pointed to the photo of Frankie and Gil.
I complied.
“My brother, God rest his soul, made me promise to look after them. Their mother died when they were practically babies. My sister didn’t ask me to make any promises about their cousin, that Cathy, not that I’d’ve said yes even with my sister on her deathbed, God rest her soul. That Cathy was a bad girl. Pretty and spoiled. So pretty! But a bad girl and a bad influence on my boys. I won’t have her in my house.”
Having been strangled to death by her cousin Gil, Cathy wasn’t going to turn up at Enid’s door, but I chickened out of breaking the news.
“But my boys! My Frankie, so sweet, and Gil, not handsome like Frankie, but so generous, even when he couldn’t afford it, not that he ever admitted it. Take that little Scottie dog. Gil told me a friend of his didn’t want that dog anymore, but I knew that Gil found that little dog and decided to give him to me because he knew I missed my own baby Edgar Pooh. Gil didn’t mean to do wrong. He just wanted a present for his auntie. But I didn’t feel right about it. Gil hadn’t even taken the tags off the Scottie’s collar, so I knew the little one was somebody’s pet. So I called.”
“Thank you. It’s good that you did.” I pondered the gruesome question of whether Gil had presented his auntie with her gift before or after he’d dumped his brother’s body in the river.
“I told you a fib,” Enid confessed, “but I didn’t want Gil getting in trouble. And I told him that the little Scottie ran away.”
“Actually,” I said, “as it turns out, the Scottie, Willie, does belong to someone who knew Gil. My friend Rita.”
Enid beamed. “She sent me such a lovely basket of cookies.”
Reluctant though I was to take advantage of Enid’s mind-boggling gullibility, I pulled out my phone and showed her some pictures of Rita and Quinn with Willie. “Gil was taking care of some things that belong to Rita and her husband,” I said. “Gil was doing them a favor.”
Enid said, “That’s just what he told me, but he didn’t say who they were. He just said that his friends were moving.”
“They’re all settled in their new house now. I don’t want to trouble you today, but whenever it’s convenient, Rita would—”
“She’ll want her very own things around her, just like I do.” Enid swept her hand through the air, and her gaze landed on her china shepherdesses, tawdry tchotchkes, and garish bric-a-brac, all of which Rita would have consigned to the trash.
At Enid’s insistence, I followed her outdoors and waited as she unlocked and opened a side door to the small garage. Entering, she flipped on bright overhead fluorescent lights that revealed a power mower, a small wheelbarrow, rakes, snow shovels, a circular saw, and, across the back wall, a long workbench with tools hung neatly above it on pegboards. Resting on the workbench were two ordinary brown paper grocery bags that proved to contain Rita and Quinn’s sterling flatware and serving pieces.
Removing a sterling dinner fork and examining it closely, Enid confided, “I have to tell you that these are not of the very best quality. I saw the same pattern in Walmart in Framingham the last time my poor Gil drove me out there. But we do love what’s our very own, don’t we? It’s just human nature.”
I thought of her attachment to Frankie and Gil. “Yes,” I agreed. “It is.”
chapter thirty-nine
When I arrived at Rita’s to find her in the back yard with Willie, Zara, and a healthy-looking Izzy, my first thought was that Quinn had moved out and taken his parents with him. As of the previous evening, the wedding had been on. In the unromantic setting of the ER, Quinn had dropped to his knees, declared his undying love for Rita, and pleaded with her to forgive him for being an idiot—his words—and to do him the honor of becoming his wife.
The curtain around Rita’s bed had offered privacy from prying eyes, but not from my shamelessly eavesdropping ears. I knew that Quinn had fallen to his knees because I’d heard Rita tell him to get off them. The scene reminded me so much of the ghastly Mr. Collins’s proposal to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice that I foresaw the same happy outcome: rejection. Or maybe my wish for that outcome made me imagine that the scenes resembled each other more than they did. Quinn’s proposal hadn’t been penned by Jane Austen, and neither had Rita’s response.
In non-Janeist fashion, Rita began by admitting that she’d deliberately quit using birth control. Quinn was flattered. Rita went on to say that she’d done a lot of thinking about love, mortality, and the fragility of life and that she didn’t want to squander the chance for happiness because of petty irritations about trivia. She loved Quinn, knew what a wonderful father he’d be, and wanted to marry him. Then the two of them got unbearably sappy, and I quit listening.
As I discovered when I presented Rita with her stolen silver and started to explain how I’d recovered it, the wedding was still on.
“Sit down,” Rita said. “We need to talk.”
Only then did I notice that both Rita and Zara looked peculiarly wide-eyed and stunned, as if they’d just stepped off a violent carnival ride that had spun them upside down, shaken their brains, and jolted their bodies into flaccid insensibility.
“What’s happened?” I asked. “Izzy is okay, isn’t she?” Izzy was sitting calmly at Zara’s left side. Her posture was alert but relaxed. Her eyes were clear and bright. “She looks fine, but both of you look—”
“—gobsmacked,” Zara finished. “Thunderstruck. Bowled over. Thrown for a loop.”
“Zara,” said Rita, “this is no time for word games.”
“What’s going on?” I asked.
Therapists can never just blurt things out. After supplying me with coffee and making me endure seemingly endless psychotherapeutic preliminaries about the ubiquity of family pathology, Rita finally revealed that her parents and Zara’s were switching partners.
My response was inevitable: “What?!”
“Vicky and Al and Erica and Dave,” Rita said. “Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice. Zara, it’s an old movie.”
Zara nodded. To me, she said, “I’ve suspected for a while.”
“Not me,” Rita said.
“They intended to make an announcement tomorrow at the reception,” Zara said. “Rita and Quinn’s reception!”
“You’re joking,” I said.
Zara and Rita spoke in unison: “We’re not.”
“Quinn and I thought about postponing the wedding,” Rita said, “but we didn’t want to. And we thought about going to city hall with you and Steve and Zara and Uncle Oscar and Quinn’s parents, but it would feel like scurrying off. Besides, we want a celebration.”
“You should disinvite them,” Zara said. “The way you did John.”
“John?” I asked.
“The skunk,” Rita said. “The liar. Do you know that he and Cathy were never divorced? So he’s the surviving spouse, and he can hardly wait to get his hands on whatever she owned. He’s been in touch with her all along.”
“I’m shocked,” I said. “Shocked.”
“He knew she wanted Izzy,” said Zara, “and he never said a word to me.”
“He was still in love with her,” Rita said.
“And desperate for money,” Zara added. “He got fired a month ago. I had to drag that out of him. I think it’s true, but with John, you can never tell for sure.”
“It all blew up when Quinn caught John trying to borrow money from Uncle Oscar,” Rita said. “From Uncle Oscar! I was just furious. When we confronted John, he denied it. I never want to see him again.”
“So what’s the latest on your parents and the wedding?” I asked. “What have you decided?”
Zara answered for Rita. “The four of them are allowed at the wedding but not the reception. If they turn up at all, they’re supposed to say that they have planes to catch.”
“Where are they now?”
“Gone,” Rita said. �
�At hotels. I don’t know, and I don’t care. Those people tried to hijack our wedding! They will not be at tonight’s rehearsal and dinner, and they may or may not show up at the service tomorrow, and if they do, they’ll leave right after it, and good riddance to them.”
“And Monty and MaryJo?”
“We’re not telling them,” Zara said. “They know there’s been a falling-out. That’s all. And Uncle Oscar says he already knew. Or guessed.”
“Where is everyone?”
“Steve’s taken them all to play golf. Quinn, his parents, Uncle Oscar.”
“Steve doesn’t play golf,” I said. “Miniature golf?”
“No,” Rita said. “They’re at some golf course in Newton. It was Uncle Oscar’s idea.”
Zara said, “He brought his clubs with him. It’s a good thing I have a big car.”
Rita said, “Uncle Oscar was quite the athlete in his day. He’s had to give up tennis, but he still plays bocce with some other old Italian men.”
“He uses the weight room at his retirement place,” Zara said.
Rita stood up. “Speaking of Uncle Oscar, the cleaners were here again this morning.”
Zara laughed.
Rita made a quick trip to the kitchen. Returning, she handed Zara a fancy-looking camera. “Yours, I think.”
“Mine,” Zara confirmed. “Thank you.”
“Holly, I think this must be yours.” She handed me the outdoor sensor for our weather station.
“Steve and I looked everywhere for this.”
“Not quite everywhere.” Rita laughed.
“Under the bed is his favorite spot,” Zara said affectionately. “Sometimes, under the mattress.”
With warmth and pride, Rita said, “As you already know, Holly, Uncle Oscar is our family packrat.” She sounded as if she expected me to congratulate her on her family’s good fortune in possessing someone to fill that role.
I said, “Does Uncle Oscar ever return the things he, uh, borrows?”
Zara was quick to correct me. “He doesn’t borrow them. He takes them.”
Rita answered my question. “Of course not. If he returned them, he’d have to say that he’d taken them, wouldn’t he?”
“He could say that he’d found them,” I suggested.
Zara was defensive. “He’d never do that.”
Rita nodded in agreement. “Uncle Oscar wouldn’t lie. It’s John who’s the family liar. Uncle Oscar is perfectly truthful.”
“Perfectly honest,” Zara said.
“And no one ever confronts him.” Although I knew that no one did, I still couldn’t quite believe it.
“We wouldn’t want to embarrass him,” Rita said. “Besides, there’s nothing to confront him about, really. It’s just his little foible.”
“Exactly,” Zara said. “It’s just his little foible.”
chapter forty
That afternoon was so hectic that I had no time to think through what I’d learned. The second I got home, my cousin Leah arrived with Kimi, who caroled a woo-woo-woo greeting to me and flung herself at my feet. My response to our reunion was more restrained than Kimi’s, but I was as happy to see her as she was to see me. Before I had a chance to fill Leah in on everything, Steve got home, and then Buck, Gabrielle, and their dogs arrived from Maine with live lobsters and clams.
My father, as usual, turned my kitchen into booming chaos by bellowing like a moose while steaming enough seafood to feed thirty people, all the while insisting that lobster rolls wouldn’t have been the sensible choice and that he’d clean the kitchen after lunch the way he always did. Always, as in almost never.
Seconds after I’d managed to break the news about Vicky and Al and Erica and Dave, our guests arrived for our lobster feast: Zara, Izzy, Rita, Quinn, Monty, MaryJo, and Uncle Oscar. Our next-door neighbor Kevin Dennehy and his obnoxious girlfriend got home from vacation in time to join us.
John Wilson wasn’t there, of course. He’d vacated his room without bothering to strip the bed or to leave us so much as a hastily scrawled thank-you note. I didn’t care. I’d never liked him and hoped never to see him again. So far, I haven’t.
Everyone was so busy talking to everyone else that no one, I think, noticed my preoccupation with my own thoughts and my effort to identify a confidant with whom to share them. Steve? Rita? Zara? Leah? Gabrielle? Kevin Dennehy would have been the obvious choice. As a law-enforcement professional, Kevin would understand my logic and my suspicions, but if my suspicions were confirmed, I wouldn’t necessarily want to have the law enforced; and if I told Steve, he’d insist on telling Kevin, so Steve was out, too. It would be cruel and selfish to inflict my conclusions on Rita or Zara. Leah, Gabrielle, or the two together would listen to me, but I trusted neither to keep my confidences. Leah had an alarming habit of blurting things out; and it was easy to imagine Gabrielle swearing Buck to secrecy only to have him publicize the private in his moose-like bellow. Who was left?
Having resolved to confide in my dogs, I found it impossible to be alone with them. After lunch, our guests pitched in to tidy the yard and clean the kitchen, and before we’d even finished, it was time to leave. Rita had canceled her plan for our spa visit, but Rita, Zara, MaryJo, Leah, Gabrielle, and I were going to a fancy salon in the Square to get our hair and nails done. I’d initially resisted, but Rita had pointed out that a person who has spent as much time as I have doing the hair and nails of show dogs should be willing to receive the same treatment herself.
Although Izzy seemed fine, my father, who was crazy about Izzy, insisted that the outing would be stressful and that she had to stay with him. Zara indulged him. Buck is not sane on the subject of dogs. I felt a surge of love for him.
The trip to the human groomer surprised me: I had fun. In that public place, we had to avoid painful topics, and after the horrible events of the previous day, I enjoyed the escape into pampered frivolity. Gabrielle and Zara talked me into adding a few blonde streaks to my hair, and although I’d intended to insist on clear nail polish, I ended up with pink and liked it. My cousin Leah’s red-gold curls drew oohs and aahs from the stylists and the colorists. MaryJo confessed herself to be nervous about the prospect of having a man do her hair, but she liked the smooth blunt-cut result and twittered, “Oh, I feel so sophisticated!” Rita and Zara entered the salon with perfect hair and left looking as sleek as ever. Gabrielle went an extra shade of blonde and made friends with the stylist, the colorist, and the manicurist, all of whom said to me, “Isn’t your stepmother wonderful! You are so lucky!” I am, too.
When we got home, Buck and Steve had already fed and exercised the dogs. Because I had to get dressed for the rehearsal and the dinner, I had no time to consult with my malamutes before we left. Although Monty, MaryJo, Buck, and Gabrielle weren’t members of the wedding, they tagged along for the rehearsal at Appleton Chapel, a sort of annex to Harvard’s Memorial Church. The exterior was nothing special, but the interior had lacy-looking white wood on the upper half and lovely dark wood below; the small sanctuary took the form of an elegant woman dressed in a white silk tunic above a floor-length mahogany velvet skirt.
The service was so simple that there was little to rehearse: we learned who went down the aisle when and who stood where. Uncle Oscar walked Rita down the aisle. His morning on the golf course had been a bit too much for him, I thought. He was shaky and, beneath his sunburn, oddly pale; he begged off going to dinner, and my father drove him home.
In the absence of Rita’s and Zara’s parents and Uncle Oscar, there were only nine of us at the rehearsal dinner at Rialto, which is Steve’s and my favorite Cambridge restaurant. Although Rialto is in the fancy-schmancy Charles Hotel and is always winning well-deserved awards for its fabulous food, it’s unpretentious. Still, the menu is sophisticated, as proved to be ideal since translations and explanations of sformato, salumi, gremolata, and straciatella filled what might otherwise have been the empty conversational space. My father arrived in time to inform Monty and MaryJo tha
t andouille meant a garlic hot dog. As Buck had intended, Quinn cringed.
Gabrielle rescued the dinner by expressing such genuine interest in the honeymoon that she had Rita and Quinn talking about the three days they’d spend in London before going to Southampton to board the cruise ship that would take them to the fjords of Norway. Buck encouraged Monty and MaryJo to talk about the route they’d take on their drive back to Montana and nobly refrained from putting forth his usual argument that the gigantic heads of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt represented sculptural pollution and that Mount Rushmore should be cleansed of its three-dimensional graffiti and returned to its natural state.
The food was distractingly wonderful. Rita, Gabrielle, Zara, and I had butter-poached lobster—yes, lobster twice in one day. That’s celebration. Steve and my father had venison. I forget what others had, but in spite of our lobster-feast lunch, everyone ate well.
Because we were concerned about Uncle Oscar, we almost hurried through dessert. Back at Rita and Quinn’s, we gathered on the patio for coffee. Quinn served brandy and liqueurs. When Uncle Oscar joined us, he drank grappa, and we persuaded him to lead us in singing. My father, as he is wont to do, took possession of the dogs, in this case, Willie and Izzy, and sang along with “On Top of Old Smoky,” the Scottie on his left, the Lab on his right.
Rita tapped my arm and whispered, “Let’s not let Uncle Oscar overdo it. I don’t like the way he looks, and his voice is a little weak.”
“He’s having fun,” I said. “He enjoys being a star.”
“He does, doesn’t he. That’s his role in the family, really. Uncle Oscar is the center of the family. He’s our family star.”
