by Jane Haddam
Phoebe had gone inside by the time I reached the doors. I went in after her, wiping my boots first on the mat on the sidewalk and again on the mat in the vestibule. Then I went into the store proper.
I found Phoebe standing to one side of the doors, looking at the double bookcase that rested against the desk and that was the first thing customers saw when they came in. The case held only hardcover books, only new releases, and only what the store considered especially commercial or especially recommendable. It was February, so recommendable was winning out over commercial. Phoebe’s latest was there, among the books on the left side, but everything else in the case was “intellectual” to a fault. There was the new Anne Tyler. There was a novel by Gore Vidal. There were slim volumes by Bobbie Ann Mason, Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver and Alice Hoffman. I winced.
Phoebe folded her arms across her chest. “Well?”
“It’s February, Phoebe. You’re the only commercial writer I know who comes out with books in February.”
“You’re doing it,” Phoebe said. “You just called me a commercial writer.”
“Watch out for the cat,” I said. “She’s climbing your coat.”
The cat was, indeed, climbing Phoebe’s coat. I’d never been so glad to see anything—animal, vegetable, or mineral—in my life. Phoebe has a near mania for cats. She picked this one up, stroked its long, soft, light-gray fur, and began whispering nonsense in its ear.
I began to look frantically around for a salesperson, any salesperson, even one I didn’t know. The Chestnut Tree is a large place, actually a series of rooms, and crowded with sturdy wooden bookcases and broad flat tables. The center room has current hardcovers and current paperbacks and a large paperback classics section that takes up the wall space around the windows that look out on the parking lot. The room to the left has a fireplace and wing chairs and used books in hardcover. The room to the right has children’s books and gifts. There are so many nooks and crannies, so many private places, there could have been a hundred people in the store without our seeing even one of them.
I craned my neck for a look at the back passage to the office and was rewarded. Advancing into the store with a pile of books in her arms was Susanna Mars. She was dressed in head-to-toe Laura Ashley. Her fine light hair was pinned to the top of her head in a haphazard way that practically screamed “Bennington College.” The books she was carrying were translations from the French. None of that mattered. I had known Susanna since I was six. I trusted her.
One of the books slipped. Susanna caught it with her chin, edged it back onto the pile, and looked around distractedly. She registered Phoebe’s existence, and also the fact that Phoebe didn’t need any help at the moment. Then she turned to me.
It took a moment, but it finally sank in. “McKenna! Hi! Elizabeth said you were coming home!” She rushed to the front desk and dumped the stack of books on the counter. “Lord, those were heavy. I think they’re weighting covers with lead. Anyway, I’m glad to see you. I kept some things aside thinking you’d be in, but Elizabeth didn’t really say—”
“What is all this about Elizabeth?”
Susanna wrinkled her nose. “You know Elizabeth. She was in about an hour ago. She gave me a lecture about how the tone of this place is sadly deteriorating.”
“Then she gave you a lecture about your clothes and offered to recommend a personal nutritionist.”
“Naturally.”
I turned to Phoebe, still occupied with the cat. “This is a friend of mine from New York. Phoebe Weiss. She writes as Phoebe Damereaux.”
Susanna’s eyebrows climbed. “Really? That Phoebe Damereaux?” She tapped the bookcase just above Phoebe’s novel.
Phoebe blushed. “That Phoebe Damereaux,” she said.
“This is Susanna Mars,” I said. “We went to grammar school together.”
“We went to boarding school together for about a week,” Susanna said. “I got kicked out. Do you mind signing books?”
The question was directed at Phoebe, not at me, so I hung back. This was not the reception she had expected, or wanted to expect, at the Chestnut Tree. She didn’t know what to do with it. Normally, Phoebe will sign books anywhere, anytime, for anybody. It’s all part of being a best-selling popular novelist, and if Phoebe knows anything, she knows how to be that.
She struggled with Dignity, and Graciousness, and Playing Hard To Get—all of which she can do fine when faced with a man, but can’t do at all when faced with a bookseller. She gave in.
“I’d be happy to sign books,” she said. “It’s very gratifying to see Timeless Love right out front like this.”
“Oh, we always put your books right out front. You’re one of the few really popular writers who understand English.” Susanna grabbed a pen and thrust it into Phoebe’s hand. “Start on the ones in the case,” she said. “I’ve got about forty more in the back.”
She whirled around and hurried to the rear, a slight young woman with no gray hair and a face full of freckles at the age of thirty-eight.
I waited until she was safely out of earshot and then said, “Well?”
Phoebe grabbed a copy of Timeless Love from the case. “Don’t lecture me, Patience. The last thing I need right now is a lecture from you.”
Susanna really did have forty copies in the back. She put them out on the counter, found Phoebe a chair, and then—because the store was empty and she was in no hurry to start putting out the French novels—pulled up another chair for herself.
“You should have been in earlier,” she said. “It’s been a McKenna family reunion here all day. Elizabeth. Your mother. George with his little girl. She’s very pretty, George’s little girl.”
“Her name’s Andrea,” I said. “I have an adopted daughter named Adrienne. It causes a little confusion.”
“I didn’t know you’d adopted a daughter. You should be more careful about sending your questionnaire in to the newsletter.”
“Right,” I said.
Susanna laughed. “I know. I never send the thing in either. I don’t even read the newsletter if I can help it. It makes me feel like a complete dork.”
“Me too,” I said. “Sometimes I think everybody but me is either winning the Nobel Prize or having a hundred babies.”
“It’s more babies than Nobel Prizes these days,” Susanna said. “Either that, or something positively weird. Did you know Delia got married?”
“Delia Grantham? You mean Delia’s still running the newsletter?”
“Well, it was her idea, wasn’t it? I mean, none of the rest of us wanted anything to do with the thing.” Susanna plucked at her hairpins, making them looser. “Anyway, Delia got married. Last year. And you’d never guess who to.”
“The local brain surgeon,” I said. “Or the local motorcycle gang leader.”
“We don’t have motorcycle gangs in Waverly,” Susanna said. “She got married to Damon Rask.”
“Damon Rask,” I repeated. I’d been thumbing through a book on foreign policy, one of those great doorstop volumes that always seem to have black covers with gold lettering on them. I put it back in its place in the case. “How the hell did Delia Grantham meet Damon Rask?”
“He bought some land up here about two years ago,” Susanna said. “A great big stretch of it up in the hills behind your brother George’s place. And then he got very interested in local government.”
“Trying to get a zoning variance?”
“Trying to get a dozen,” Susanna said. “And then when Will Marsh was killed—”
“Our Will Marsh?”
“No, no. His father.” Susanna brushed at her hair again. “Doesn’t your mother ever tell you anything?” she said. “I mean, it was a very big deal out here when it happened. In 1988. I know it was a long time ago—”
“My parents were in France most of 1988,” I said.
“Well, George should have told you, then. Anyway, Old Will either fell or was pushed down the dry well out on the Deverton place—you know,
the one that’s been in litigation forever, and nobody knows who owns it. And the state police came in and said it was an accident, and it probably was, but Will was the only holdout on the zoning board and two weeks after he was dead Damon Rask got everything he wanted, so our Will is convinced—and after all, Damon Rask is Damon Rask, you’ve got to admit there’s something funny right there, and—”
“Excuse me,” Phoebe said. “Who’s Damon Rask?”
Susanna and I both turned to her. For the first time today, she looked normal: a little confused, but definitely interested. That was one of the things I’d always liked about Phoebe. She could get definitely interested in anything.
“Damon Rask,” I told her, “is a very famous trance channeler.”
“A what?”
“A trance channeler,” I said. “You know, one of those people who goes into a trance and then some dead person starts talking through him. I think Damon Rask’s control is an ancient Egyptian pharaoh.”
“You’re making this up,” Phoebe said.
“She’s definitely not making it up,” Susanna said. “We’ve got all his books here. He’s written about twelve. And they sell like crazy. And he gives seminars—”
“Seminars?” Phoebe said. “On what?”
“On the great words of wisdom handed to him by Amenhotep the Ninety-second,” I said. “How am I supposed to know on what?”
“But who’d go to something like that?” Phoebe said.
“About a thousand people a seminar at three hundred dollars a head,” Susanna said. “And no, we’re not making that up, either. The man’s worth a mint and a half. You should see that place he built out in the woods. Seven million square feet and paid for in cash.”
“We got invited to his last book party,” I said. “Austin, Stoddard and Trapp held it at Telemetron. We didn’t go.”
“Good for us,” Phoebe said.
“If I’d known Delia was going to be there, I would have gone,” I said. “Out of curiosity if nothing else.”
“Delia probably wouldn’t have been there,” Susanna said. “She almost never goes into the city anymore. In fact, she almost never leaves her house. I think she’s got agoraphobia or something.”
“Do you think Damon Rask killed Old Will Marsh?” I asked.
“Nah,” Susanna said. “Old Will was kind of a crank, you know that. He’d been on some kick about the Deverton place for years—”
“I remember that, vaguely,” I said.
“Everybody remembers it, vaguely. I don’t know if anybody ever knew what it was about. Anyway, he was always going out there, poking into things, and this time he poked his head down the well and fell in. Our Will found him about two days later. He knew his father well enough to go out there to look.”
“I guess,” I said.
“Don’t guess,” Susanna said. “It’s depressing just thinking about Old Will, and our Will is crazy, so there’s that. Speaking of crazy, your Aunt Cordelia was in today, too. And your uncle, the one with the spats and the tank.”
“Robert,” I said.
“Robert. Anyway, they were all here. They were all buying books, too, which surprised me a little. I didn’t think Elizabeth could read.”
“Great-Aunt Felicia reads,” I said, “and Elizabeth takes care of Great-Aunt Felicia.”
“Your Great-Aunt Felicia usually comes in for herself, which she didn’t this morning. Thank God for that.”
“Mmm,” I said.
“Gold Coast relatives,” Susanna said. “I have a pack of them myself. You’d think if they hated this place so much, they’d just stay home.”
She slid off her chair and picked up the books Phoebe had put to one side, already signed. She looked tired. Her skin was pale. Her freckles seemed faded. She wedged the books under one arm and smiled, setting off a sunburst of tiny lines at the corners of her eyes.
“You know,” she said, “there’s a house for sale, on 49, right up at the top of the hill. The one with the big white pillars.”
“The one with the greenhouse?” I said.
Susanna nodded. “It doesn’t have a lot of land, of course, but there it is. And it’s going relatively cheap for Waverly. And it’s in walking distance of this place.”
“Sounds perfect,” I said. “I take it you’re trying to buy it.”
She had her face turned away from me, her eyes fixed on the yellow legal pad the Chestnut Tree used to record the titles of books sold during the day. She reached out and straightened it against the base of the cash register.
“I was thinking you might want to buy it,” she said. “I know you live in New York, and you’ve probably got your daughter in school there, but lots of people have houses in the country. And you always did like that one.”
“That’s true,” I said. “I liked it even when we were children.”
“Finished,” Phoebe said.
Susanna turned around and gave Phoebe a great big smile. “Wonderful,” she said. “Just let me put these in the back again, and then I can help you two buy some books. Which is probably what you came in here for.”
“Damn straight,” I said.
“I’ve got a dozen things under the counter for you,” Susanna said. “It’s Miss Damereaux I’m worried about.” She got another stack of books wedged under the other arm, treated us both to another freckle-faced grin, and went trotting off again.
Phoebe watched her go as if she were a rare species of bird, or maybe a toy soldier come to life. “Don’t you just hate it when you say the wrong thing and don’t even know why it’s the wrong thing?”
I was thinking about something else—my Gold Coast relatives, maybe, parked in my mother’s house and waiting to move in for the kill. I had no idea what Phoebe was talking about.
“You didn’t say the wrong thing,” I said. “You didn’t say much of anything.”
Phoebe snorted. “I wasn’t talking about me, Patience. I was talking about you. All that business about did she want to buy that house. It was the wrong thing.”
“Your imagination has been on stimulus overload all morning.”
“No it hasn’t, Patience. When you said that about her buying the house, she blushed. Bright red. You were looking at the back of her head, but I was looking at her face. Trust me.”
“After the way you’ve been behaving today?”
“She’s coming back, Patience.”
She was indeed coming back, bouncing between the bookcases like a bright yellow bird. She did look tired, but she didn’t look much of anything else, and I had every reason to suspect that Phoebe was hallucinating. After all, Phoebe had been hallucinating since we left the city.
Susanna scurried behind the desk, reached under the counter, and came up with a stack of mysteries. “Here,” she said. “Julie Smith, Linda Barnes, Joan Hess, Lia Matera, Nancy Pickard, Magdalen Nabb, and a new one you haven’t heard of yet. Mickey Friedman.”
“You have the Grafton?” I asked.
“F Is for Fugitive. Right over here.”
“Maybe I’ll write a mystery myself,” I said. “Will Marsh will kill Damon Rask and take his place, and nobody will ever know the difference.”
Susanna giggled. “Then Delia will kill Will, and it’ll turn out she’s the rightful owner of the Deverton place, and—”
“Oh for heaven’s sake,” Phoebe said. “Here we go again.”
She gave us both her most imperious Queen-of-the-romance-writers look, and marched off in search of a novel without a death in it.
THREE
ON ANY OTHER DAY of my life, I would have spent whatever time I had alone with Phoebe going over and over the story of the death of Old Will Marsh. It was just the kind of thing I liked, in life and in books. It even had a tinge of the bizarre to it, like a story by John Dickson Carr. On this day, I had my mother on my mind—and when I have my mother on my mind, I can never think of anything else. I had forgotten all about Old Will and the Deverton place, and even about Damon Rask, by the time we we
re out of the Chestnut Tree’s parking lot and on the road again. By the time we got to the Old Canfield Road, I was positively morose. I am always morose when I think about my mother. She makes me feel like a wimp.
To do Phoebe credit, she hadn’t gotten so strange she’d forgotten about me. She had started making clucking noises while we were still on 42. Then we got to the turnoff, and the landscape changed, and she got wound up tight. So did I. Back in the 1700s—when the McKennas were farmers, and the house they lived in was a four-room shack with barn attached—the Old Canfield Road was our driveway. Now it only looks like our driveway. It seems to run through our gate, except that our gate is always locked. That’s the price of no longer living in a four-room shack. Over the decades, and the centuries, bits and pieces had been added to the original house. What we have now is thirty-two rooms, twenty-four thousand square feet, and a floor plan that looks as if it had been drawn by a schizophrenic on angel dust.
Of course, everybody else on the Old Canfield Road has a very large house, too. This is the part of Waverly where Really Old Families live, rich or not. Restlessness and eccentricity had touched every one of them. In the days before historical preservation societies, what you did with your own house was your own business. The families on the Old Canfield Road had done a lot with theirs. Additions had been tacked to the backs and sides of graceful Federals. Porches had been wrapped around the corners of saltboxes. Third and sometimes fourth floors had been added piecemeal. Nobody could complain that the houses all looked alike—except that they did. In a strange and not quite definable way.
If Phoebe’s concerns about money and class had been rational, this was the part of town that would have bothered her most. Instead, it was the part that bothered her least. She recognized it. Since it’s the only route to my parents’ place, my mother drove her through it at least once a month.
She leaned forward, squinted out the windshield, and pretended to be looking at something. She was really just trying to calm me down—but that was such a normal thing for Phoebe to do, I didn’t want to stop her.
