by Nancy Thayer
“Well?” Alice coaxed, her voice gentle but firm.
“This is mortifying.” Lucinda Payne’s voice was so low they could scarcely hear.
“We’re all friends here,” Shirley assured her.
Lucinda tried to look disdainful, but could not quite pull it off. “It has never been fair, you see.”
The Hot Flash Club women exchanged anticipatory glances.
“Nora has always had everything. Nora has always won. Her grandfather got Amelia. Everyone knew. Her house is larger than ours. Her father always had more money than mine. And now”—she choked as emotion swathed her words—“now her two children are alive, and my two sons are dead. I’m alone. She is not.”
Everyone sat in silence, contemplating this unexpected confession.
Shirley spoke up. “I understand, Mrs. Payne. All my friends here”—she gestured around the table—“have children. I don’t. As much as I love them, I envy them.”
“Oh, I don’t love Nora!” Lucinda snapped, pique sending color back into her cheeks. The tea was reviving her. Her posture straightened, her features tightened.
“What I want to know,” Alice said, “is how you got in here. I checked all the doors tonight before I went to bed. Do you have a key?”
“Of course not!” Lucinda shot Alice an impatient look.
But Alice had a few looks of her own to deploy. After a moment of Alice’s most ferocious glare, Lucinda admitted, “I came through the tunnel.”
48
The tunnel? What tunnel?” All five women exclaimed together.
Lucinda took another sip of tea. An element of sly pride stole over her features. Obviously she enjoyed knowing something the others didn’t.
“Nora didn’t tell us about any tunnel,” Shirley prompted.
Lucinda smiled triumphantly. “That’s because Nora doesn’t know.”
Polly clasped her hands together like a child at prayer. “Oh, show us the tunnel, please!” Her light green sleeveless cotton pajamas with the frog on the front gave her the appearance of a chubby child, and as always, her sweetness showed in her face.
“Very well.” Lucinda rose. “Follow me.”
She didn’t have to ask them twice. They nearly knocked one another over getting in line as she opened the door to the cellar.
Obviously familiar with the area, Lucinda flicked on the cellar light and began to descend the wooden steps. The other women had been in the cellar only once. They’d never had reason to go, and it was not an enticing environment. The walls were brick, dusty with age, and the floor was dirt. Naked lightbulbs hung from the wooden ceiling, the black electrical cords stapled here and there to the beams. In a corner stood the square, modern furnace and an enormous water heater. Shelves ranged along one wall, holding old canning jars with faded labels, and rusty tools, and dozens of gallon cans of Benjamin Moore paint.
As she led them through the dim, cavernous basement, Lucinda informed them, “When Ford and Pascal were boys, they dug a tunnel between the two houses. It was just the sort of nonsense they always got up to. My father told me about the tunnel when he was dying. To this day, I’ve never told anyone.” Her voice resonated with sadness. “I never had anyone to tell. My siblings are all dead, as are my sons.”
They went through an open doorway into another dirt-floored room. Lucinda pointed to a door in the wall. “That leads to the old coal bin.” Squeezing around a brick foundation for a fireplace, they arrived at a little compartment cluttered with old cardboard boxes. A low entrance, a dark upside-down U not quite five feet high, gaped in the brick wall.
“The door is here. When I leave, I simply pile these boxes up and back in. Like this.” She demonstrated. The cardboard boxes hid the opening. For a moment, Lucinda was out of sight. Then she knocked aside the empty boxes as she reappeared. “All right. Follow me. You’ll have to stoop.”
At the entrance to the tunnel, the five Hot Flash women hesitated, gripped by a natural fear of dark, low, narrow, underground places. Lucinda had flicked on the flashlight and was shuffling ahead, nearly bent double, her back almost scraping the uneven bricks of the tunnel roof. The beam of the flashlight danced eerily in front of her, making her figure seem enormous, and dark.
“I’m scared,” Shirley whispered. Somehow, she’d ended up at the front of the line.
Faye reached out and held Shirley’s hand. “I won’t let go,” she promised.
Shirley folded up and duckwalked into the tunnel. Faye came behind, one hand holding Shirley’s, the other feeling the uneven brick wall. Polly scuttled along after them, then came Alice, grumbling that she was surely going to be stuck in the tight passageway like a cork in a bottle. From behind, Marilyn assured Alice that if she got stuck, she’d push. Nervousness made Faye giggle at the thought, and soon all five women were snickering as they crept along through the dark, constricted dankness.
They popped out of the tunnel into a room floored with wood, with plastered, painted walls. Lucinda’s clean, well-lit basement gleamed like morning.
“Civilization after a few moments of Cro-Magnon life!” Marilyn sighed gratefully.
They paused to catch their breath and stretch the kinks out of their backs. Then Lucinda led them through her basement rooms, which also held cartons of miscellany. Here, each box was carefully marked and stacked at right angles, according to size. In the last room, handsome white shelves held modern discards, seemingly waiting for repair: an electric shoe buffer, a wicker picnic basket with a broken handle, a record player and a stack of old 78s. The Hot Flash five scanned the shelves for any of Nora’s items—the silver pheasant, a teacup—but saw nothing like that.
“Where’s all Nora’s stuff?” Alice demanded.
Lucinda paused, her head high, her posture rigid. “I’ll return it.”
Alice looked suspicious. “Or maybe you’ve sold it already.”
The older woman whipped around to glare at Alice. “I would never sell heirlooms!”
“So you say,” Alice countered.
Faye held her breath. She worried that Lucinda’s lucidity was balanced on a thin line between sanity and madness. The older woman was clearly under great emotional strain. And yet Faye detected a kind of bright eagerness in Lucinda’s eyes.
“Yes, yes. I’ll show you.” Lucinda headed for the stairs to the first floor.
The overhead lights, set in attractive glass fixtures, brightened their climb up the stairs and into Lucinda’s kitchen. Here it was as Polly had remembered, organized and clean to the point of sterility. Without a word, Lucinda continued to walk through the long hallway to the front of her house. The rooms off the hall were in darkness, but everyone could tell by the ambient light from the street that the furniture in the rooms was modern, spare, and elegant. The rooms were uncluttered.
“Your home is beautiful,” Faye told the older woman.
Lucinda flicked on the hall light. They were all suddenly exposed by the brightness, an odd little party in their nightgowns, pajamas, and slippers, their hair mussed, their tan lines showing beneath the thin straps of their nightgowns.
“If I show you this, it must be under the condition that you do not inform any authorities. No attorneys or police officials can be involved. I understand you’ll want to tell Nora, but no one else. Agreed?”
“Agreed.” Alice spoke for them all.
“Very well.” Lucinda started up the stairs, her satin bedroom slippers whispering against the handsome needlepoint runner.
The second floor was as shipshape as the first, dust- and clutter-free. When they passed a door opening into a small bedroom, they looked in. The room, with its narrow bed covered in a white chenille spread and its spartan bureau and side table, could have belonged to a monk. Lucinda continued walking until she reached the bedroom at the back of the house. Here she paused, and for a moment hung her head, almost as if praying for courage. Then she turned on the bedroom light and gestured to them that they were admitted.
It was a large room,
taking up the entire width of the back of the house. Windows ranged along the far wall, which, in the daytime, would display fabulous views of the harbor. Against the facing wall was a handsome four-poster double bed, the covers folded neatly back.
The rest of the room was a chaotic jumble of stuff. Two walls were lined with shelves. In front of them, tables crowded the bed. Every flat surface was crammed with items: candlesticks, vases, picture frames, clocks, figurines, paperweights, cloisonné boxes, silver salt and pepper shakers, pitchers, trivets, bowls, hatboxes, ladles, needlepoint pillows, perfume atomizers, hand-painted seashells, lightship baskets, porcelain soap dishes, papier-mâche wastepaper baskets, books, coasters, a single red shoe—it was an explosive abundance of stuff. So many tables groaned beneath the weight of so many items crowded in around the bed that there was only a narrow path to the bed.
Each of the Hot Flash women was quiet with her own thoughts, imagining Lucinda, ancient, brittle, and alone, lying like an Egyptian queen in her bed, surrounded by this profusion of possessions.
“Shades of Edgar Allan Poe,” Marilyn murmured.
Lucinda cleared her throat. “Some of this is my family’s, of course. I prefer to present a façade of simplicity to visitors to my home, and I’ve been strict in culling through all the items my family has accumulated over the years. But of course, a few things I was unable to part with. And then, a couple of years ago, I started collecting again.”
“Collecting Nora’s things,” Alice clarified.
Lucinda nodded regally. After a few moments of silence, she said defensively, “Nora has so much, after all. A house full in Nantucket, and I know she owns a house up in Boston. It was only right that I even out the inequities between us.”
Shirley widened her eyes at Polly and mouthed, “Cuckoo.”
“Well, you know we’re going to have to tell Nora about this,” Alice said briskly.
“Or maybe not,” Faye quickly intervened. “Perhaps if you agree to stop…‘collecting’…we could just forget about this.”
Lucinda passed her eyes over the motley crew gathered in her bedroom. “Five women keeping one secret?” she scoffed.
“We can at least think about it,” Faye insisted. “We don’t have to decide anything right now. It’s the middle of the night. We’re all exhausted and not thinking clearly. We’ve all had a shock to our systems. Now is not the right time to make a decision.”
As she spoke, the other four Hot Flash women got it: As Lucinda Payne stood before them, she was ashen pale, and trembling all over. Yes, they’d all had a shock, but Lucinda was older, and she was proud to the point of battiness. And she was all alone.
No one wanted Lucinda to have a heart attack tonight.
“Yes,” Polly spoke up. “I certainly can’t think straight. Let’s all go back to bed. Lucinda, perhaps you can come over to tea tomorrow to discuss this.”
Lucinda inclined her head regally.
“Good,” Faye concluded with cheerful ease, as if they’d all just run into each other at the grocery store. “We’ll just go back to bed now, and we’ll see you tomorrow, Lucinda.”
“Can you find your own way out?” Lucinda asked, as she allowed herself to rest one hand on a bedpost for support.
“Can we borrow your flashlight?” Alice inquired.
“Very well.” Lucinda sounded as if she were making an enormous concession.
“Then we’re good to go,” Alice told her.
“Then turn out the lights and shut the doors behind you,” Lucinda ordered.
“We will,” Faye said. “Good night.”
They each said good night, then filed out into the hall and down the stairs.
“Stephen King!” Shirley whispered.
But Faye shook her head and put a warning finger to her lips, shushing her. The five moved along in silence down the stairs, through the hall, into the kitchen, and down the stairs to the cellar.
When they reached the entrance to the tunnel, Shirley said, “Now may I please say this is all so creepy I want to barf?”
Polly whispered, “Actually, Lucinda reminds me a lot of my mother-in-law.”
“That’s right,” Faye recalled. “Claudia was a domineering, brittle old bat.”
“Let’s never get that way,” Shirley pleaded. “Let’s never put possessions before people.”
“Let’s not worry about ever,” Alice said practically. “Let’s stop stalling and get through this horrible little tunnel and back to bed!”
“Agreed.” Faye, who this time was first in line, doubled over and began to creep forward.
Next came Polly, then Alice, then Marilyn. Shirley was last. She held her lavender froufrou negligee between both hands to keep the hem free of dust, but as she crept along, the lace frill of her ruffled cap sleeve caught on the rough edge of loose brick angling slightly out of the wall.
“Wait!” she cried. “I’m caught!”
“Hurry up,” Alice said. “I’m bent over like a croquet wicket.”
Shirley reached up to ease the lace from the brick. Instead, with a scraping sound and a puff of dust, the brick came loose, falling to the floor, taking a section of Shirley’s gown with it. “Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Shirley said. She picked up the brick and tried to wedge it back into the tunnel wall. “Hey!” she cried. “Faye, shine the flashlight over here.”
Faye aimed the light at the space where the brick was.
“There’s something in here,” Shirley said. She forgot the hem of her negligee and the lace of her sleeve. She forgot she was cramped inside a narrow passageway. She gripped another brick and pulled. With a rasping noise, almost like a cough, the brick dislodged, exposing a small square chamber, and inside the chamber, a rusty metal box.
49
What’s in it?” Polly asked breathlessly.
“I don’t know.” Shirley ran her fingers around the edges.
“It’s not locked, but it’s been forced shut…”
“Bring it with you,” Alice ordered. “I’m getting claustrophobic.” She gave Faye a little poke.
Faye obligingly crept forward, the other four women following. When she reached Nora’s basement, she said, “Now, let’s see!”
But the hidden cubicle was so crammed with cardboard boxes there wasn’t room for all five women to stand comfortably.
“Could we please go upstairs?” Polly begged. “This basement is so gloomy.”
“Right.” Faye hurried through the dank, shadowy rooms and up the stairs.
Nora’s kitchen glowed, familiar and cozy. The table, set with all the accoutrements of tea, rose like an island of civility in a dusty world. Shirley put the metal box on the table. Alice slammed the cellar door shut, muttering that she wished it had a lock. The others gathered around the table. Faye sipped her tea to see if it had grown cold—it had. Polly nibbled on a ginger snap for sustenance. They all kept their eyes fastened on the metal box, as if expecting it to attempt escape. It was only about three inches deep, eight inches long, and eight inches wide. It was made from brass, which had darkened with age.
“Okay,” Alice directed. “Now open it, Shirley.”
“Drumroll, please,” Shirley joked. She reached out, then hesitated. “Shouldn’t we do this with Lucinda present?”
Polly groaned.
Marilyn said, “Shirley, Lucinda looked worn out. It wouldn’t be a kindness to her to get her out of bed again…”
“And I won’t be a kindness to you if you don’t open it now,” Alice growled impatiently.
“We’ll tell Lucinda about it first thing in the morning,” Faye said.
So Shirley lifted the small brass latch, which was not fastened by a lock. She pulled the lid up and back. It creaked on its rusty hinges.
Inside was a small, dark glass vial and a small bundle of letters tied with a ribbon.
Faye lifted the vial out and turned it in her hands. “Laudanum,” she said. “I’ll bet anything.”
“What’s laudanum?” Polly as
ked.
“It’s a derivative of opium,” Shirley told her. “It was used in childbirth, to ease pain.”
“And it was used by the wives of sea captains to ease their boredom,” Faye added.
“And the letters?” Alice prompted.
Shirley lifted the bundle out, untied the ribbon, which fell away in a stiff curl of red silk. She scanned the first page. “Oh, my.” She breathed.
“What!” Alice growled.
Shirley handed the missive to Alice. She flipped through the rest, then said, “They’re letters between Amelia, Nora’s mother, and Ford, Lucinda’s father. Just after their affair.”
She picked up the second letter and read it. “Amelia’s telling Ford that she’s pregnant. She’s sure it’s Ford’s child.”
She handed the page to Alice, who handed the first letter to Polly. In this way, all seven letters were read and passed around the table.
“They agree to remain with their spouses, to protect their children. Amelia’s had carnal relations with Pascal so he’ll believe this child is his. Amelia is hiding these letters in the tunnel until the day when the feud between the two families is mended.”
When they had all read the final letter, Shirley said, with wide eyes, “Do you know what this means?”
Faye nodded. “It means that Ford Payne was the father of Nora Pettigrew.”
“Oh, my gosh.” Polly clasped her hands to her face. “Isn’t this amazing! That means Nora and Lucinda are half-sisters!”
“Good grief, Gertrude,” Alice mumbled.
“How wonderful!” Shirley’s eyes were shining. “This means Lucinda isn’t really alone in the world.”
“Get a grip,” Alice told Shirley. “Lucinda and Nora hate one another. I don’t think they’ll run into one another’s arms with cries of delight when we tell them.”
“If we tell them,” Faye amended.
“Right,” Marilyn agreed. “We stumbled across this cache by accident. We could put it back in its hiding place and never say another word about it.”
