Under the Skin

by Vicki Lane

  “Ben’s dad’s still around, isn’t he?” Phillip’s hands were beginning to stray as so often happened and I swung my feet up on the sofa and stretched out with my head in his lap.

  “Oh, he’s around, but Ben doesn’t see much of him. Benjamin Barton Hamilton the Third—and that’s how the dad introduces himself, just to give you some idea of how stuffed his shirt is—anyway, he’s a partner at some big important firm in DC. I think he was kind of disappointed in Ben’s career path—he’d hoped his son would carry on the family tradition of lawyering. But BBH the Third’s remarried now to a woman not a lot older than Ben. They have three young children and he’s just not a big part of Ben’s life anymore.”

  “Is he the guy your sister’s money comes from? Ben mentioned something once about his mother being so rich that she was out of touch with the way real people live.”

  “No, the big money came from Harold. Harold Holst came after BBH the Third.”

  And was, very probably, the real reason Gloria left him. When she met Harold in connection with some charity do she was organizing and found out that not only was he recently widowed, but he had more money than God on a good day, that pretty well did it for old boring Benjamin the Third. Gloria and Holst were married before the ink was dry on her divorce papers.

  Oh, mee-yow, Elizabeth! What a catty bitch you are, to be sure!

  I closed my eyes, remembering the handsome white-haired man and his magical effect on Glory. During the ten years they had together, before Harold died so suddenly, my sister had been a different woman—softer, gentler—and happier than I’d ever known her.

  Amazing what a having few million dollars for mad money can do.

  Evidently that brat of an inner child was still whining and kicking. I bit my lip, then went on.

  “Harold was a really nice guy. And he and Gloria truly adored each other.”

  Phillip’s roaming hands fell still and I was amused to note that the cop was winning out over the lover. “So, if we count the annulment, this is her fourth husband that she’s running away from … What’s he like?”

  “I’ve never met Jerry—two of Glory’s weddings were enough for me.”

  That sounded pretty cold, I thought. It seemed hard to admit how little I knew of my sister’s life; I fumbled around for what scraps I could offer.

  “Ben told me he was surprised by Jerry because he didn’t seem like Gloria’s usual kind of guy. I got the impression he’s maybe a little … uncouth. From some other things Ben said when he came back from spending a little time down there, evidently the relationship was pretty intense—either Jerry and Gloria were yelling and throwing things at each other or they were carrying on like hormone-crazed teenagers. No middle ground.”

  Sitting up, I swung around to face Phillip.

  “Oh, here’s one interesting thing—Ben kind of wondered if maybe Jerry was … you know … connected. Ben said there were these shady types who would drop by the house and Jerry would take them outside to talk business. Ben seemed to think”—and now I’m the one sounding like a soap opera—“that maybe Jerry was part of the Mafia or whatever they call it these days.”

  Phillip raised an eyebrow. “Really? That could be interesting. Ben’s not the kind of kid to make up stuff like that. What did you say Jerry’s last name is?”

  I spelled it out and he wrote it on the inside cover of the paperback. The schoolhouse clock in the den struck the hour and Phillip gave a Pavlovian yawn and then another. Glancing at his watch, he frowned and shut the book.

  “Hate to do it but I better turn in—early meeting tomorrow.

  But after that, I’ll make a few inquiries—see what I can find out about this Jerry Lombardo.”

  Phillip was already in bed and I was making my last prowl through the house—turning off lights, putting dogs out for one last pee, and picking up odds and ends. I was moving the stack of Phillip’s paperwork—tedious cop stuff, he calls it—off the cedar chest when I noticed the corner of an airmail envelope sticking out from under one of the files. The spidery handwriting of the return address was familiar.

  Sure enough, it was a letter from Aunt Dodie that must have gotten mixed in with his things when he picked up the mail—a part of Phillip’s routine when he comes home, saving me the half-mile trip to the mailbox for what’s usually nothing but bills.

  But why airmail? I turned the light by the love seat back on and sat down to see what my honorary aunt had to say. I had my finger under the flap when it hit me—the stamp was wrong.

  The return address was Aunt Dodie’s own—in New Bern—but the postmark was from the UK—Chipping … and something smudged. What in the world? I wondered, ripping open the flimsy envelope.

  Her spidery handwriting was clear—unlike her thought processes. But as long as I’d known her—which was roughly forever as she’d been my mother’s best friend—Aunt Dodie had been a fluttery, scatterbrained little woman. And her infrequent letters were always marvels of exclamation points and underlining, dizzying changes of subjects and frequent long-winded asides. This one was no exception.

  Elizabeth, dear,

  Believe it or not, here I am in England!!! As I told you when I left that message on New Year’s Eve, there I was thinking about the Inevitable and starting to put my house in death order (!!!) when the next day—New Year’s Day—I had a call from my granddaughter Meredith!!! (Sarabeth’s oldest, you know.) Well, Meredith married a charming young Englishman a few years ago (so handsome, just like Leslie Howard, you remember, the one who was Ashley Wilkes in “Gone With the Wind” but not nearly as good-looking as that devil Rhett Butler) and the dear child arranged for me to fly over with her mother and father and make a nice long visit and that’s exactly what I have done!!!

  I can hardly believe that I’ve been here four months and am only now getting around to writing you but the children have kept me on the run! They’ve taken me to see so many things!—the Crown Jewels in the Tower (a little gaudy for my taste, and I expect the dear Queen feels the same) and to Stratford-on-Avon (Anne Hathaway’s cottage is charming though, I fear, damp) and to a cricket game where I rather embarrassingly dozed off!

  The letter rambled and nattered on for two more violet-scented pages of cream teas, Liberty fabrics, biscuits not really biscuits at all but cookies—“very nice cookies too, though why called digestive, I couldn’t say.”

  My eyelids were getting heavy and I was just skimming the waves of words when the last paragraph stopped me.

  My neighbor forwarded your sweet letter with all your news—it makes me so happy to hear that everything’s all right with you and your beautiful Full Circle Farm and that you are still planning to marry your Mr. Hawkins. I’m just a silly old woman at times—I should have known there couldn’t be any connection between your nice police detective and the mysterious Hawk poor Sam was so worried about!! I don’t know what got into me. But when I found that puzzling letter of Sam’s in the Old Gentleman’s desk—well, I suppose I just wanted to get it off my mind which is why I called.

  Of course I recognized Sam’s hand at once—that beautiful clear printing like architects do and I thought I’d see if there was anything in the letter that you or your girls might be interested in. Sam and the Old Gentleman struck up such a friendship when you two visited—talking Navy talk nineteen to the dozen or is it twenty? But evidently they continued to correspond for in this letter Sam mentions having written before—though I haven’t found any other letters.

  The peculiar thing is that Sam spends most of this letter telling the OG about some strange “detached duty” he and this other man had been sent on. He asks the OG if he has obtained any information on “the matter I mentioned in my last letter” and then goes on to say that he’s not sure if he can TRUST the other man whom he calls the Hawk! Really, too mysterious!”

  So that was why I called. And then when the trip to England sprang up and I hadn’t heard back from you, I just popped the whole thing, along with a few pictu
res of boats and things that were with it, into a mailer I had—bright red, I remember because Sarabeth had sent me some lovely family photos in it—to get it in the mail to you before going to England. I knew you’d want to make sure … but we won’t talk about that now! All’s well that ends well, as the Bard says!!!

  By now you’ve read it for yourself and are probably shaking your head at your foolish old Aunt Dodie! I’m sure there was a perfectly logical explanation and that your Phillip has helped to clear it up. It was just that the names were so similar.

  In the stillness of late night, the ticking of the schoolhouse clock in the next room was the only sound I could hear. I sat up straight and read through the letter again.

  It was like coming into a theater at the midpoint of a movie. What letter of Sam’s was Aunt Dodie talking about? Yes, Aunt Dodie’s late husband, aka the Old Gentleman, and Sam had become unlikely friends and correspondents. The Old Gentleman, a retired admiral, had seemed to enjoy hearing about the Navy from Sam’s considerably more lowly point of view. So it wasn’t impossible that there might have been some letters left in the Old Gentleman’s desk and Dodie had thought … what exactly had Dodie thought? The mysterious Hawk …

  And for that matter, as I reread the letter a third time, what phone message at New Year’s? Surely the last time I’d talked to Aunt Dodie had been in December when I called her a few days before Christmas …

  I thought back to New Year’s Eve: Phillip and I had been here alone all evening. We had watched distant fireworks from the front porch at midnight, I had told him I wanted to marry him—had accepted the proposal he’d made long before. We had drunk champagne and gone to bed. If there’d been a phone call …

  Was it the first of the year when the answering machine went out? I don’t understand how these things work—I just remember at some point months ago, it didn’t—work, that is—and eventually I switched to voice mail.

  And why didn’t I ever get this mysterious letter in the bright red mailer? Where had that gone—down the same rabbit hole as the New Year’s Eve message?

  Yawning and shaking my head, I folded the flimsy sheets back into the envelope and tucked it under the calendar on my desk. Dodie is battier than usual, I’m afraid. I’ll see if it makes any more sense in the morning.

  Chapter 2

  You Can Always Hope …

  Friday, May 11

  Good morning, Lizzy! Don’t you just love this dewy early morning time? The sky at sunrise, the blaze of color …”

  I watched as Gloria paused in the kitchen doorway and waved a vague hand at the window—the south-facing window. Yawning luxuriously she headed for the coffeemaker, baby-blue silk mules clicking on the wooden floor. Like our mother before her, my sister has never been one to leap out of bed and dress for the day—she prefers to spend the morning lounging about in some charming negligee before dressing to go out to lunch. Just now she had on a knee-length robe covered with clouds of embroidered pastel hydrangeas, each small petal tinged with delectable melting shades of palest greens and pinks, faintest blues and lavenders. It was heart-breakingly beautiful and set off her fair skin and blond hair to perfection.

  A picture of the shabby terry-cloth bathrobe hanging on my closet door popped into my head and I gave the lump of dough I was kneading a final savage thump before I scooped it from the countertop and plopped it into the greased bowl awaiting it.

  I glanced at the clock. “It’s 10:53, Gloria. The sun came up about five hours ago—in the east, as it usually does around here. And don’t call me Lizzy.”

  My sister had been at the farm for less than twenty-four hours and already she was getting on my one last nerve.

  On Wednesday morning, there had been a second frantic call from Gloria: this time to say that Jerry had just left the house and a friend was coming to take her to the airport.

  “I hate leaving my Beemer but it would be too easy for Jerry to trace me—he has contacts everywhere. I’m literally throwing a few things in a bag and walking out … No, I don’t have a ticket yet. I’ll get one at the airport and I’ll call you when I know what time I get in.”

  This, of course, had resulted in a day of frantic housecleaning and reorganization—the guest room having become the repository for Phillip’s belongings. Now that he worked full-time for Marshall County’s High Sheriff Mackenzie Blaine, Phillip had finally given up his rented house in Weaverville and moved in with me—and though he had very few possessions, there were some that we hadn’t yet found the right place for and these were, of course, piled on the guest room bed. Actually, we’d been talking about turning this quiet room at the back of the house into a study for him—but now that would have to wait.

  So I had spent the day chasing cobwebs, airing pillows, moving the boxes of Phillip’s belongings to the basement, scouring the bathroom—all with an ear out for the phone call that would tell me when I would have to make the hour-plus drive to the airport and pick up Gloria.

  A phone call which, I might add, didn’t come till late that night. Gloria was in Atlanta, having decided to do a little shopping before continuing her trip.

  “And the good news is you won’t have to meet me after all! I was in the taxi heading for the hotel and I suddenly had a brilliant idea. I just had the driver take me right to the BMW dealership and I got myself the perfect little car for the mountains! I know you’re going to love it, Lizzy.”

  “Oh yuck, this coffee’s cold—I’ll just make a fresh pot.”

  Before I could stop her, Gloria was pouring the coffee down the drain—coffee that normally I’d have drunk iced at lunchtime—and the grinder was chewing up a fresh batch of beans.

  “Where’s that good-looking cop of yours?” she asked, leaving the coffeemaker to fold herself into an elegant leggy pose on the cushioned bench at the end of the kitchen. “I was hoping to talk to him about my situation. We hardly said more than hello last night before he disappeared off to bed.”

  I wiped off the countertop and hung the dish towel on the rack. “Phillip had to be at work early this morning. Besides, I expect he thought you and I had some catching up to do and he’d just be in the way of our girlish confidences. Look—do you want some breakfast? There’s eggs, bread for toast, juice, yogurt …”

  “Is it Greek yogurt? That’s really the only kind worth eating. I usually have it with fresh figs and—”

  “It’s probably made by Greeks in New Jersey,” I said through gritted teeth, as I opened the refrigerator door. “And the fruit of the day is dried cranberries.”

  Her nose wrinkled in disgust. “Do you know how much sugar dried cranberries have? Never mind, then; I’ll just have coffee. Is there some skim milk?”

  I put the yogurt back, noting that it was, in fact, appellation New Hampshire—though still not Greek—and reached for the milk.

  “That’s two percent milk!” Gloria waved away the carton in something very close to horror. “Don’t you have skim?”

  I felt my teeth beginning to grind again. “No, and in my opinion, putting skim milk in coffee is about like adding dishwater. This is what I’ve got … or some dishwater.”

  “Oh, but I always add a splash of half-and-half with the skim milk—never mind, Lizzy, black will be fine—I don’t want to be any trouble. If you’ll drive me down to my car later, I’ll run out to the grocery and do a little shopping. You know if you’d just have a little work done on that road, I could get my car all the way up here. Then I wouldn’t have to bother you.”

  “For someone who’s supposed to be hiding out, my mother isn’t exactly low profile, is she? Are you going to have to ferry her up and down the hill every time she takes a notion to go somewhere?”

  Ben and I were watching as Gloria’s bright yellow Mini Cooper maneuvered around a water break and continued down the road with a cheery toot-toot of its horn.

  “You know, I think that all of this area seems so like the back of beyond to your mom that she can’t imagine that she could run into anyo
ne who knows her. And she’s probably right. Besides, she’s just going up to the grocery on the bypass to get a few things. I’ve got plenty to do in the workshop that will keep me busy till she gets back—it shouldn’t take her much over an hour.”

  Ben hefted the flat of lavender starts into the bed of the utility vehicle and I followed him over to the cold frame to get the rest. Out in the bottom Julio and Homero were preparing the new lavender bed, raking it smooth and tossing out the inevitable rocks that had surfaced in the wake of the tractor. Thank god for these guys, I thought. With any luck, Full Circle Farm will perk along, providing fresh arugula, tarragon, nasturtium petals, and all those other delicacies to Asheville’s ladies who lunch, while I deal with Gloria.

  In the beginning, it had been just Sam and me—with a little haphazard help from my girls. After Sam’s death, things were pretty difficult—the girls were in college and I had been almost at the point of admitting that perhaps I couldn’t manage alone. So when Ben showed up, wanting to learn the business, I’d welcomed him as something between a miracle and a knight in shining armor. With Ben’s help and with the growing number of restaurants in Asheville, the business had doubled and then some. So now we had Julio and Homero—Mexican workers who shared the rental house just above our main growing field.

  As so often happened, Ben seemed to be attuned to my thinking. “Listen, Aunt E,” he said, taking the last flat of fragrant little gray-green plants from me. “You really don’t need to worry. The guys and I can handle the work. And Amanda’s willing to help too. You have plenty to do getting ready for the wedding and babysitting Mom.”

  “I don’t know,” I said, pinching off a single lavender leaf. I crushed it with my fingers and brought it up to my nose. The pungent smell filled my nostrils—calming and strengthening at once. “Since she’s got a car, I have a feeling she’ll find plenty to do that doesn’t involve me.”

  “She’ll find plenty to do, that’s for sure.” Ben laughed and climbed into the driver’s seat of the little vehicle. Over the noisy clatter of the engine, I could just make out the words, “You can always hope it won’t involve you …”