She meant it. At that moment.
“When you changed the seating cards, who had my seat?”
“Detective Jones asked me that.”
“What did you tell him?”
“I don’t know.”
I stared at her, a forkful of eggs suspended halfway to my mouth. “You don’t know?”
“Originally, I moved myself to table sixty-two and I moved the cards around. When I realized there would be six women and four men, I put myself back at our table and moved you and Hunter.”
“Why move in the first place?”
“You were so angry at me…”
She had that right.
“And I knew you had every right to be.” She scratched her shoulder. “It made me itchy.
“You have absolutely no idea who was supposed to be seated next to Hammie?” I confirmed.
“None.”
I ate in silence.
Marjorie sipped her coffee.
“Do you still want me to move out? I can. I hear the new hotel on the Plaza is quite fabulous.”
After the apology and the banana bread there was no way I could kick her out. “Stay.”
Marjorie’s eyes looked misty—or maybe it was a trick of the light.
“What happened to us?” she asked. “We used to be such good friends.”
Maybe the mist was real.
Maybe time’s passage had added a golden hue to her memories or maybe all that mist in her eyes had blinded her to our actual pasts. I remembered constant arguments over everything from socks to boys.
She looked at me as if she expected an answer.
Um…We’d just mended our fences. Why was she bringing up the past?
“Something smells amazing.” Grace bounded into the kitchen and saved me from answering.
“Do you want some banana bread?” asked Marjorie.
“You cook?” Grace sounded surprised enough to be insulting. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t cook at all. Hand me a box of Bisquick and I could make a mean pancake.
“I do.”
“Mom can’t.” See if I made her any more pancakes.
“I can’t paint.” Marjorie handed Grace a plate with fresh-sliced bread on it. “I don’t have an artistic bone in my body.”
Grace bit into Marjorie’s bread, closed her eyes and groaned.
Perhaps I should have learned to mix batter instead of paints.
“Did Mom tell you? She has a new dealer in New York. We’re going up for a show in November.” The pride in Grace’s voice made me glad I couldn’t make a muffin.
“She didn’t tell me. Congratulations, Ellison.”
Grace grinned. Marjorie smiled. My own lips curled.
The phone rang.
“I’ll get it.” Grace somehow teleported herself from the far side of the island to the kitchen phone in the time it took me to blink. She snatched up the receiver. “Russell residence.”
She listened for a moment then said, “She’s right here. I’ll put her on.” Then she held out the phone to Marjorie.
My sister wiped her hands on a tea towel.
“It’s Uncle Greg.”
Marjorie’s face paled and she backed away from the phone. “I’m not here.”
She obviously was. What’s more, Grace had said as much.
Right there. That was why I couldn’t get past the years and scars that stretched behind Marjorie and me. She’d just asked my teenager to lie.
I took the phone from Grace’s hand.
“Greg, it’s Ellison.” I regarded Marjorie with disgust. “How are you?”
“Fine.” Greg didn’t sound fine. He sounded dead tired. “May I talk to Marjorie? Please?”
Truthfulness or family loyalty? What was more important? “She took Max for a walk. May I have her call you?”
Greg’s laugh was as bitter as yesterday’s coffee. “That’s the best you’ve got? You’re a terrible liar, Ellison.”
How is one supposed to respond to a comment like that?
“Tell her my plane just landed. I’ll be at your house within the hour.”
“I’ll tell her.” Just what we needed. More drama.
I dropped the receiver back on the cradle and regarded my sister. “Greg’s flight just landed. He’s on his way here.”
Marjorie wiped her hands again, patted her hair, and swallowed audibly. “I guess I should go clean up.” She glanced at the pans on the stove. “Do you mind?”
Her wanting to primp for her husband was a positive sign. Maybe their marriage wasn’t irreparably broken. “Go.” I shooed her toward the back stairs. “I’ll clean this up.” It wasn’t the first time Marjorie had left me with a mess.
“Thank you.”
She ran up the stairs.
I washed dishes.
Grace dried. “So I heard last night was eventful.” My daughter is a master of understatement.
“Your grandmother may never recover.”
“Poor Mrs. Walsh.”
Hammie Walsh definitely wouldn’t recover.
“Who told you?”
“Aunt Sis. She also told me that Anarchy thinks you were the intended target.”
“Did she?” Aunt Sis wouldn’t tell me who she’d met in my backyard but had no trouble spilling the beans about me to Grace? And since when did Grace call Anarchy by his first name? “Detective Jones is mistaken. Who would want to kill me?”
Grace looked at me with serious eyes. “Just be careful. Promise?”
I tossed the sponge into the sink and pulled her into my arms. “Promise.”
My daughter’s scent is a mix of girl and woman, Love’s Baby Soft and Tame Créme Rinse. I breathed her in. She let me hold her for almost thirty seconds. She might have tolerated my hug longer but the doorbell rang.
She pulled free of my arms and hurried toward the front door. I followed more slowly.
“Hi, Uncle Greg.” Her voice was bright and confident. So why did unease rumble through my stomach.
I stepped into the foyer. “Greg, how lovely to see you.”
My brother-in-law looked like hell. His skin held a grayish cast, someone had left suitcases under his eyes—large suitcases, and, like Anarchy, stubble colored his jaw. Unlike Anarchy, the stubble did not add to Greg’s sex appeal. Instead, the whiskers on his cheeks made him look like a tired old man.
“Grace,” I said. “Go tell your aunt that Uncle Greg is here.”
She took the stairs two at a time.
Greg and I stared at each other, neither sure what to say. “May I get you a cup of coffee?”
He nodded.
“Mooooom.” Grace’s voice carried down the stairs.
“There’s fresh coffee in the kitchen,” I said to Greg. “Help yourself. I’ll be right in.” I climbed the front steps.
Grace met me at the top. “She’s gone!”
“Who is gone?” She wouldn’t.
“Aunt Marjorie. She’s not in her room. Her purse is gone.”
I went to the nearest window and looked out onto the drive where my car should have been parked. It wasn’t. Marjorie was gone and she’d left me with another mess.
Ten
Twenty years ago, when Marjorie and Greg were married, he possessed a sort of devil-may-care charm, a grin that said no one who made condoms for a living could take life too seriously, and a youthful vigor that suggested he was his own best customer.
Twenty years had cost him dearly. The charm, the grin, the vigor—all gone. Instead, a middle-aged man with a slight paunch and sad eyes sat slumped at my kitchen counter. “She left.”
It wasn’t a question, but I nodded anyway.
He rubbed his stubbled jaw. Had he not had time to shave before boarding the plane? And, I blinked, was that—just visible through h
is open collar—a gold chain nestled in his chest hairs?
A watch. A wedding ring. Maybe a signet ring. That was the sum total for acceptable jewelry on a man.
Greg’s hands moved from his jaw to his cheeks, pushing loose skin until his eyes were lost in the creases. “Damn.”
“What happened?” How had the couple who’d once seemed so happy come to this?
He dropped his hands to his lap and his gaze followed them. “It’s all my fault.”
I doubted that. Seriously. The proper implosion of a marriage takes both a husband and a wife. “Do you want to talk about it?” I crossed my fingers that he didn’t.
He shifted his gaze to the depths of his near empty coffee cup.
“More coffee?” My voice sounded new penny bright—far too cheerful to address a man whose wife had just snuck out of the house rather than talk to him.
He nudged his mug my direction.
I refilled it. “Cream?”
“Please.”
Could I be in the clear? No embarrassing revelations. No sordid secrets. Cream bloomed like algae in his cup. “Tell me when to stop.”
“Stop.” He reclaimed his cup. Took a sip. Swallowed. “I asked for an open marriage.”
Oh. Dear. Lord. I returned Mr. Coffee’s pot to its warmer. Jamming my fingers in my ears and singing, “La-la, la-la, la,” never seemed so attractive. Somehow I refrained. “Oh.”
He lowered his head, ran his fingers through his thinning hair, then looked up at me. “Can every woman in your family do that?”
“Do what?”
“Fill one word with so much disapproval that disdain sloshes over the rim and runs down the sides.”
Oh. That. Yes. Mother’s first lesson.
He ground the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Don’t look at me like that, Ellison. I’m not a monster.”
Did I dare say “Oh” again?
“Marjorie and I got married when we were twenty-two. I thought experimenting with other people might bring us closer together.”
Oh.
“She wasn’t excited about the idea at first, but I convinced her.”
That must have been some conversation. “Something went wrong?” Imagine that. My idiot brother-in-law, who was apparently in the midst of an epic mid-life crisis, probably thought he’d be able to sleep around, not feel guilty, then come home to a wife who kissed him at the door before putting dinner on the table.
“We weren’t prepared for the emotions.” He wasn’t prepared for the emotions.
“Oh?”
I swear, I couldn’t help but say it.
His lips thinned but, unfortunately, he kept talking, his voice somehow sharper. “We went to one of those parties…”
Henry took me to one of those parties. A glass fishbowl filled with car keys. People drinking too much to get over their inhibitions. Women with numb expressions in their eyes because they’d taken too much valium just to get through the night. I left in a cab.
Apparently Marjorie had not.
If the sour look on Greg’s face was any indication, Marjorie hadn’t endured, she’d enjoyed.
“I think this is a conversation you need to have with your wife.” Not me. I’d heard more than enough.
“You have to help me win her back.”
Oh?
“I need her. The kids need her.”
He’d opened Pandora’s box and now he wanted me to stuff everything back inside?
“Greg, you two need counseling. You don’t need me meddling in your affairs.”
“She won’t talk to me.” A tear gathered on his lower eyelid then rolled unchecked down his cheek. “Will you at least get her to talk to me?” More tears joined the first.
A grown man crying in my kitchen? The second one this year. Was there something about me that invited men to reveal their feelings? If so, I needed to figure out what it was and change it.
All things being equal, I’d rather triple bogey an easy par with Prudence Davies watching than endure the raw emotion emanating from Greg. Sadly, no one offered me a choice.
“Greg—”
“Please, Ellison. I need your help.”
I handed him a tissue.
He wiped his eyes and sniffled as if he was four instead of forty. “Please?”
How could I say no? “I’ll talk to her.”
“Thank you.”
He stood, towering above me, reached out a hand as if to pat me on the shoulder and—
“Freeze.” Anarchy pointed a gun at Greg.
Revealing more intelligence than he’d shown since he walked through my door, Greg froze.
“Anarchy,” I said. “Please meet my brother-in-law, Greg Blake. Greg, this is Detective Jones.”
The two men stared at each other. By the slight curls of their lips, I surmised that neither was particularly impressed. At least Anarchy lowered his gun.
“Do you often have policemen with guns in your kitchen?” There was the Greg I knew. Slightly starchy. Slightly snobbish. He’d even squared his shoulders.
“More often than you’d expect,” I replied.
Anarchy holstered his gun.
“He just wanders in whenever he feels like it?”
Talking about a man with a gun as if he wasn’t there probably wasn’t the smartest move, but at least Greg sounded like Greg.
The skin around Anarchy’s eyes tightened so much he looked a bit like Dirty Harry. Greg might not sound like Greg for long.
“Anarchy is staying here.”
“Oh?” Turns out Greg can pour a lot of disapproval into one word as well.
“Someone might be trying to kill me.”
“What did you do?” My brother-in-law sucked in his paunch, puffed up his chest and looked as if he was ready to take charge—of the situation, of my kitchen, of my life.
“Nothing,” I snapped. What is it about men that makes them think women are just sitting around with tragic, helpless looks on their faces waiting to be saved?
My would-be hero drew his brows together. “I should probably stay here.”
All four bedrooms and the carriage house were occupied. Either Grace gave up her room and slept with me—a solution that was less than optimal for both of us—or I put him in with Marjorie. That gave me pause. My sister wouldn’t appreciate my moving her estranged husband into her room and after the way she’d behaved…“You can’t.”
“Oh? You have four bedrooms.” Greg counted on his fingers. “You, Grace and Marjorie. I’ll stay in the fourth.”
“Aunt Sis is in the fourth. The house is full. There’s a new hotel on the Plaza. We’ll get you a room there.”
“Where is he staying?” Greg jerked his head toward Anarchy who leaned against the counter and watched us with an amused expression on his lean face.
“The carriage house.”
Greg jerked his chin toward Anarchy. “He can move out.”
Anarchy roused himself to speak. “No. I can’t.”
“Blood is thicker than water, Ellison. I’m family.”
“Which is why I know you’ll understand when I tell you, you can’t stay here.”
The silence that followed was as itchy and uncomfortable as a Shetland sweater against bare skin.
Anarchy lounged.
Greg glared.
I silently cursed my sister.
“Fine,” Greg huffed. “Can you put yourself out enough to give me a ride to the hotel?”
“She’ll call you a cab.” If anyone, anywhere, had a desire to split strands of hair against something razor sharp, Anarchy’s voice was their answer.
Twenty endless minutes later, Greg was gone.
I closed the door on my brother-in-law and Anarchy said, “We need to talk.”
Indeed, we did. “You cann
ot keep barging into my kitchen acting as if you’re ready to shoot someone.”
“I am ready to shoot someone.”
“Not in my kitchen!”
He bit his lip as if suppressing a laugh. “Is it the barging, the potential shooting, or the blood on the floor that bothers you?”
“All of them.”
“Let me understand.” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You’re upset I want to protect you?”
Not exactly. I was upset because he thought I needed it. In my own kitchen. Power matters. And in Anarchy’s scenario, the rescuing hero had all the power; the damsel in distress had none. A big, strong man who wanted nothing more than to protect me sounded good in principle. But the reality—my reality—was that to move forward with my life or be any kind of role model for my daughter, I couldn’t play the damsel. Try explaining that to a man who reaches for his gun first and asks questions later. “Just drop it. What did you want to talk about?”
“The Medical Examiner thinks Hammie was poisoned with Cantharidin.”
“With what?”
“Cantharidin.” He spoke slowly, enunciating each syllable.
“I understand what you said. I just don’t know what it is.”
“Spanish fly.”
His explanation wasn’t helping. “What?”
“You’ve never heard of Spanish Fly?” He covered his mouth with his hand as if hiding a smile. “Some people think it’s an aphrodisiac.”
“Oh?”
“They’re wrong. It’s a poison. Mrs. Walsh’s throat was so blistered she couldn’t breathe.”
I sat on the stairs. “How awful.”
“Probably better than what would have happened once the poison hit her internal organs.”
I pondered that for a moment then shuddered. “Where does one get Spanish Fly?”
“It’s derived from a Spanish Fly.”
“So Spain?”
“Yes. But it’s available anywhere. Some people take it for…In small doses it…” His cheeks darkened. Whatever Spanish Fly did, Anarchy was embarrassed to tell me.
I sank my elbows onto the stair above me, leaned back, and waited.
He mumbled something.
CLOUDS IN MY COFFEE Page 10
