Iced Under

by Barbara Ross

  “You know about this?” I was incredulous.

  She sat down on the high hospital bed, swinging her legs and peering at me with her raccoon eyes. She wore a sleeveless yellow sundress, a stark contrast to the weather outside. I studied her tattoo. The flowering branches of a tree, a cherry I thought, ran from her back, over her left shoulder down to the top of her breast. Below her clavicle, a small bird perched, dull and gray, in contrast to the blossoms around it. I wondered about her psyche. What caused her to make this songbird, obviously a representation of herself, so plain in contrast to its opulent surroundings?

  “I looked at Hugh’s scrapbook all the time when I was little,” she said. If she’d noticed me staring at the tattoo, she didn’t acknowledge it. She must be used to people looking. “You and your sister were like girls in a fairy tale to me,” she continued, “living on an island with a mansion and a playhouse, a beach and a magical woods.”

  “Hugh told you about us?” I was surprised. The scrapbook read like a secret obsession.

  “I begged him for stories about you. He made them up. You and your sister went on so many adventures. I longed for a sister to have adventures with.”

  There was a concept; you living your life with no idea you were a character in someone else’s fairy tales. “Why didn’t any of you contact us? We’re real people.”

  “Hugh forbid it. He said it had to do with keeping the secret of who he really was, but as I got older, I thought he was embarrassed about deceiving your mom.”

  “Was everybody in on this?” I was incredulous.

  “I always knew about you. I can’t remember a time of not knowing. Mummy and Granny knew, of course, and Rose. We all looked at the scrapbook. Hugh never tried to hide it. In fact, the opposite. He’d look through it with us. But no one else knew. I was told never to say anything outside the house.”

  “Does Clive know about us?”

  She shrugged. “Probably. Mummy will have told him. Or maybe even Hugh said something when Clive was in here reading to him. Hugh talked a lot about your mother at the end.”

  Paolo had said that too. Hugh had talked about Mom, but he hadn’t called her. “Tallulah, did Hugh ask you to send a package to my mother?”

  She didn’t hesitate. “No. He never did.” She stood and walked toward the door. “I’ll leave you to go through his things.”

  I looked down again at the scrapbook, still open to the last page, the photo of the ruined mansion. The note with the Black Widow had said, “For Windsholme.” It was clearer than ever Hugh meant us to use the necklace to restore the house. But why didn’t he say so? And why the anonymous mailing if he meant my mother to have it? I felt sure the necklace would turn up in the inventory of “personal items” he’d left her, but who else in the house knew that?

  Chapter 19

  I stood up, stomping a foot that had fallen asleep. I was at a bit of a loss. I’d learned so much and advanced so little. Paolo had said everything of value was in the bureau. I limped over to take a look.

  The oak bureau was a simple one, with two small drawers on top and larger ones below. I pulled out the top drawer on the left and found socks, neatly paired. The other top drawer held flotsam and jetsam, a jumble of crumpled receipts, cheap pens, pennies, and stamps. I riffled through the paper, hoping there was a note for my mother. If I couldn’t bring her Hugh, maybe I could bring her his thoughts, his apologies for what he had done. But nothing like that appeared.

  I found a leather case, about the size of a paperback book, in the back of the drawer. When I finally got the case to open, its lid snapped up with such force I jumped. The contents were unremarkable. A broken men’s watch, some tie tacks. There was a pair of gold cuff links engraved with the initials AWM. I supposed they had been Arthur’s. Maybe Rose had given them to Hugh when he cleaned out her grandparents’ house. She said he’d taken nothing, but that didn’t mean he hadn’t accepted some tokens. I wondered if she would want the cuff links back. I had no doubt Mom would offer them to her. There was also a man’s signet ring, not something I could picture anyone I knew wearing.

  “What are you doing? Get out of there!”

  I hadn’t noticed the door open an inch or so. Vivian Morales Whatever-Whatever-Whatever pushed it farther and angled herself into the room. “You have no right to be in here. No right at all.”

  I looked around the spare room. If you removed the evidence of illness, it was the modest room of a modest man. Did she think there was something valuable here, a necklace, perhaps? “I’m sorry,” I said. “Marguerite said I should look around in here at the—”

  “The what? The treasures your ill-deserving mother stands to inherit? Did she look after Hugh all his life? Did she take him in when he was alone in the world with no identity, no place to live, and no way to make a living? No, she did not. My mother did all of that. She deserves his things. I can’t think what was in his head when he left his personal property to your mother. And, as for what my mother may or may not have said you could do, she is old. Ancient, in fact, and easily influenced and confused. You should be ashamed for taking advantage of her.”

  To me, Marguerite seemed to be the opposite of easily influenced or confused. And as for my mother, she would have loved to have done any of those things for Hugh, but he never gave her the opportunity. I looked around the room. I wasn’t sure Mom would want any of Hugh’s old junk after what he’d done to her. But that still left the problem of the necklace.

  I snapped the lid of the leather case shut and put it back in the drawer. I didn’t bother asking if she’d mailed a package for Hugh. I had no doubt that if the Black Widow had ever passed through Vivian’s hands, it never would have arrived in Busman’s Harbor. “Excuse me.” I walked past Vivian into the hallway.

  “I never.” She stalked to the door at the opposite end of the hall from her mother’s room, opened it without knocking, and slammed it behind her.

  * * *

  I had left the room as Vivian had ordered. A part of me wanted to linger, simply because she’d ordered me to go, but there wasn’t much left to see. The door on the opposite side of the long hallway was open. I peeked in. It was a bathroom, the only one on the floor from the look of things. The old tub had been replaced with a walk-in shower, probably to accommodate Marguerite or Hugh’s physical condition, but other than that, nothing had been updated in ages. Tiny black and white tiles covered the floor, and the pedestal sink was crowded with toothbrushes and toothpaste tubes along with a razor and shaving cream. It looked more like a bathroom college students shared than one for grown people. The mirrored door of the medicine chest hung open over the sink, a jumble of makeup and prescription medications inside.

  I backed out of the room and nearly into Clive. “Excuse me. I’m sorry.”

  “No worries.” We did a little dance in the tight hallway where he moved to his left and I moved to my right and then we did the opposite.

  “I understand you’re raising money for a technology company,” I said. Rose had warned me to avoid the subject, but I couldn’t resist. “What does your product do?” I was curious to see what kind of an entrepreneur he was. If he was a marketing person, he would offer to show me his “deck,” the PowerPoint slides that contained his investor presentation. If he was a technology person, he’d want to show me a demo of the product.

  “You wouldn’t understand.” Clive attempted to push past me.

  That annoyed me, so I stood in his way. “Try me.” Rose knew I’d worked in venture capital in Manhattan, but it seemed possible the others in the house knew me only through Hugh’s scrapbook. My life after college was a blank for them.

  He glanced around the confined space. “This is neither the time nor the place, but if you must know, my company’s product, the GimmeThat! App is a point of purchase credit system. It’s an Uber for Bitcoin for Millennials.”

  What a mouthful.

  Clive relaxed into his pitch. “Say you’re walking past a shoe store, and you se
e a pair of Jimmy Choos you really like. You scan the bar-code with a little device attached to the phone, and bing, bang, boom, the GimmeThat! App purchases the shoes and has them sent to your house.”

  “So your invention is the app and the bar-code scanner?”

  “Much more than that. GimmeThat! is the entire ecosystem in which the product is purchased. We’re revolutionizing retail, baby!” In his enthusiasm, he’d forgotten his objections to telling me.

  “So you’re partnering with the credit card companies?”

  “No, we’re competing with credit cards. Five years from now, there’ll be no such thing. No need to partner or share the wealth with anyone.”

  I was confused. “But where does your company get the money to buy the shoes? Do your customers preload the card with money, like a phone card?” It would be a lucrative business model, but I couldn’t see many users giving GimmeThat! their money to hold for the next impulse purchase.

  “That’s the beauty of it. The retailer is so grateful for the business he gives us a percentage.”

  “But if he only gives you a percentage, how do you cover the full price of the shoes?” I tried to keep my voice light and curious, not challenging.

  “With the percentage, as I explained. So many people will buy so much stuff, the money will roll in. That’s what we’ll use to pay off the retailers.” He gave me a self-satisfied smile.

  An Uber for Bitcoins for Millennials? More like a Pitch for a Ponzi Scheme for Patsies. There was no way anyone was falling for this. Clive was an idiot.

  “I said you wouldn’t get it.” He must have sensed my skepticism, despite my best efforts. “Not much call for this sort of thing up in the great north woods where you live, but here in the city, believe me, millennials will eat up the GimmeThat! App.”

  I was sure they would, since as far as I could tell, they wouldn’t be paying for those shoes. It wasn’t that Clive didn’t understand marketing or technology. The problem was more fundamental. He didn’t understand basic concepts like money and math.

  I had to get out of this. “Thanks for telling me about your idea.”

  “Not idea. GimmeThat! is a product and a company. Don’t tell anyone else. I should have had you sign a confidentiality agreement.”

  I practically burst out laughing. “No worries. I won’t tell a soul.” I left him, feeling much better. I hadn’t heard anything as funny as the GimmeThat! App pitch in days.

  My phone vibrated in the pocket of my skirt. I pulled it out and glanced at the screen. Chris.

  Chapter 20

  I clambered down the stairs, stopped in the front hall to step into my boots and shrug on my coat, and went outside. I didn’t want anyone to hear my conversation. The phone stopped vibrating. Chris had hung up.

  He picked up on the first ring. “Hi, stranger. What you been up to?”

  “How much time do you have?” I answered.

  “That good, huh?”

  “It’s complicated. You?”

  “It’s not complicated at all. I’m standing in my bare feet on the deck of a gorgeous sailboat that’s spit-shined within an inch of its life. It’s eighty degrees out. How complicated can life be?”

  I’d walked around the corner, my boots crunching with every step on a combination of melting ice and sidewalk sand. I laughed. “You’re loving it.”

  “I am,” he agreed. “This trip has really made me think.”

  “Think what?”

  “Think, why am I spending my winters in frozen Maine?”

  My stomach flipped. I sputtered into the phone. Why was he spending . . . Because we ran a restaurant together, and practically lived together, that’s why. He was the reason I had given up my job, my apartment, and my life in New York to stay in Busman’s Harbor, Maine. He had told me in no uncertain terms that he was dug in deep and wasn’t moving.

  Chris continued along, oblivious. “This is a good gig Joe has here. Maybe I’ll bring the Dark Lady down next year.” The Dark Lady was Chris’s most prized possession, a wooden sailboat inherited from his uncle. Chris worked most of the year to support it, renting out his cabin in the summer season so he could live aboard her.

  “The Dark Lady isn’t big enough to take groups out for snorkeling or sunset cruises.” My lack of enthusiasm was obvious in my voice, but Chris didn’t pick up on it.

  “Maybe private captaining, taking a couple or two out overnight or longer. Cuba’s ninety miles from here. Pretty soon we’ll be able to take people over for a night of music and dancing and bring them back the next day.” Finally, he slowed down. “I’m fantasizing. This place will do that to you. But it’s not like there’s anything keeping me in Maine in the off season.”

  At last, he heard himself. There followed a rapid series of exhalations. “I mean, I mean . . .” But the damage was done. Weren’t we building a business together in the off-season? And if that wasn’t important, shouldn’t it have been, “It’s not like there’s anything keeping us in Maine.”

  My phone buzzed again. A second call. Mom. It wasn’t the time or place for this discussion anyway. “Chris, I have to take another call.”

  “Cool.” He sounded like a prisoner given a reprieve by the executioner. “We’re off to lunch. I was checking in to see how you were doing.”

  Better before this call.

  I pressed the screen to end Chris’s call and picked up Mom’s. “Julia?”

  “Hi, Mom. Why are you calling from work?” Mom had limited breaks during her shifts at Linens and Pantries and she didn’t use them for social calls.

  “I’m not at work. I’m at the hospital with Livvie.”

  “Is this it?” What would it mean if I left this whole mess in Boston and went home?

  “Another false alarm from the look of things. Sonny took his dad to a lobstermen’s meeting in Augusta. He wouldn’t have gone except he knew I’d look after Livvie and Page. He’ll be back before dinner. They’re doing some tests on Livvie, a sonogram, and monitoring the baby’s heart rate, but we’ll probably go home.”

  “You sound worried.”

  “Livvie’s exhausted. She’s so big she can’t sleep. I don’t want her going into real labor already worn out. I’m sure it will be fine.” My mother was the queen of the stiff upper lip.

  “Do you want me to come home?”

  “There’s no need. Come home when you’re done with the business there.”

  “I’ll call later from the hotel and fill you in.”

  “Thanks.”

  It was only after we’d hung up that I realized my mother had no real reason to call me. She was worried, reaching out for a comforting voice.

  I’d walked all the way around the block. As I approached Marguerite’s house, Rose appeared from the other direction, carrying two cloth shopping bags packed to their tops. I hurried to her. “Let me take one of those.”

  She handed me a bag and we moved toward the house. “What are you doing out here—running away? I know it’s been a lot,” she said.

  “I stepped out to take a phone call from my mom. My sister’s very pregnant. Mom’s worried.”

  Rose stopped on the sidewalk. “Olivia is having another child? That’s wonderful.”

  “We call her Livvie. She’s having a lot of false labor.”

  Rose nodded. “It’s called prelabor now. It’s not that it isn’t doing anything, but it’s not going to get a baby out.”

  We were at the town house’s front walk. “This way.” Rose led me under the stairs to a door. She turned a key in the lock and we were in the basement kitchen. From upstairs, I could hear someone, presumably Jake, playing a jazz riff on the grand piano.

  Rose set me to work, putting sandwich halves on platters—rich, delicious looking and smelling deli sandwiches—and spooning salads into bowls. She emptied the contents of the second shopping bag—packages of wide, flat noodles, cans of tomato, cartons of creamy ricotta, and balls of mozzarella. “I’m making lasagna for dinner,” she said. “Works for a
crowd.”

  “You’re like Cinderella, feeding the family, cleaning up.”

  “Hugh was the domestic one. He and Marguerite ran the house. After he got sick, and with Marguerite getting older, I’m not sure anyone has stepped up.”

  “They can’t have been starving before you got here.”

  “There are a lot of take-out cartons in the recycle bin. Though that would be expected with a family member dying.” She turned away, busying herself assembling the sauce for the lasagna.

  At last, we carried it all up to the dining room and put the food on the long table. Rose went to the front hall and called, “Lunch is here!”

  Jake was the first to arrive, looking eager and hungry. He took a plate and loaded it up. Tallulah followed close behind. Paolo came in, took a sandwich, and sat at the table. I don’t know why that surprised me. Probably because it was the first time I’d seen him seated when he was in the company of the family. Marguerite glided down the stairway on her moving chair, like Glinda the Good descending.

  I hung back. I assumed everyone had a “regular” chair, and I didn’t want to put anybody out. When they all began to eat and it was clear Vivian and Clive weren’t coming, I served myself and sat next to Rose.

  The room was silent as people munched sandwiches, staring into their plates. I suspected Marguerite was usually a more gracious hostess, but she nibbled at her salad, looking exhausted. They’d all been through a lot, first Hugh’s death, and now a question of murder.

  “Where are Vivian and Clive?” I asked.

  Tallulah answered. “I dunno. Do you, Granny?”

  “I do not.” Marguerite didn’t sound all that interested in finding out, either.

  “How is your search for a new position progressing?” Marguerite asked Paolo.

  “Nothing yet.”

  “Don’t worry. Something will turn up soon, I’m sure.”

  “How did you and Paolo find each other?” Rose asked. “It turned out to be such a good thing for Hugh.”

  “For all of us,” Marguerite responded. “Paolo worked for a friend of mine. Several friends, in fact. He came highly recommended.”