by Meg Cabot
“Here,” a masculine voice at my elbow says. “Allow me.”
It’s Cooper. He’s carrying a tray of assorted drinks in one hand. With the other, he takes my arm, helping me maneuver the tricky pathway to the firepit.
“So what’s this secret that you were talking about on the phone earlier?” he asks in a low voice. “Does it have anything to do with what you’re wearing under that dress?”
His smile is playful. Unfortunately, my secret is anything but.
“We’ll talk about it later,” I say. “At the same time we talk about where you keep your gun when it’s in the house.”
“Heather,” he begins, but I cut him off.
“Not now,” I say. “Let’s figure out who’s trying to kill Tania first. Then we can deal with our own problems.”
As I get closer to the firepit, I pick up on some of the lyrics Nicole is singing. Her voice is pleasing, with a lovely lightness to it.
Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for the words to her song.
“ ‘My blood,’ ” Nicole is singing soulfully as she gazes into the sunset, “ ‘my blood, I tasted my menstrual blood. And yes, it tasted good, just like I knew it would . . .’ ”
Jessica utters an ear-burning expletive, then says, “Mom, I swear to God if you don’t make her stop, I’ll do it. I’ll jump.”
“Welcome back to the family,” Cooper whispers and drops a quick kiss on my cheek before he drifts away to serve drinks.
Chapter 16
The Palm’s Special
Vegan Salad Made
Exclusively for Tania Trace
Serves 4
Ingredients for Tania Salad
½ pound string beans, cleaned and cut into one-inch pieces, cooked until crisp-tender, about 4 minutes
1–2 large beefsteak tomatoes, seeded and chopped into one-inch cubes
1 sweet onion, such as Vidalia, chopped into half-inch pieces
Method for Tania Salad
Pour salad dressing ingredients together in a jar and shake to combine.
Taste for seasoning.
Combine string beans, tomatoes, and onions.
Toss with dressing.
Serve on chilled salad plate.
Dinner is served outdoors on a table carved out of rock—most likely stolen from Stonehenge—under the stars, which begin to shine shortly after the sun goes down. Two waiters and a busboy from the Palm show up with an extraordinarily large number of insulated bags containing the steaks, lobsters, fries, mashed potatoes, and cheesecakes that Grant Cartwright ordered. They come out onto the deck and begin setting the table as if this is something they do every other night. For all I know, maybe they do.
For Tania there’s a special vegetarian salad that the owner named in her honor—a variation of a salad already on the menu—after Tania famously ordered it (shrimp and bacon omitted) at every Palm steakhouse in the country during her last national tour, making it one of the most popular items on the menu.
But after the waiters go to all the trouble of specially dressing and plating it, then presenting it to her with a very charming flourish, all Tania does—after thanking them sweetly—is pick at it. Even her dog, which she keeps on her lap the entire time, doesn’t appear interested in eating it. (I wouldn’t have been either, unless it still had the shrimp and bacon on it. Lucy frequently attempts to eat out of Owen’s litter box, so I’m pretty sure she’d have eaten it, even without the shrimp and bacon.)
Most of the people at the dinner table do their best to politely steer the conversation away from the horrible occurrence at my place of work. Even Grant Cartwright, the person responsible for my current state of poverty (not counting my mother and her boyfriend, Ricardo), pretends to be super-interested in where I’ve been since the last time I saw him.
“I had no idea you had such a good head for numbers, Heather,” he says. “You always struck me as more the creative type.”
“People can be both, Dad,” Nicole chimes in. “For instance, I write songs, but I’m also doing Teach for America, because I really want to give back—”
“Can someone please pass the wiiiiiine,” Jessica says loudly.
“Jessica,” her mother says, with a disapproving glance. “Don’t.”
“So you do the payroll for the whole building?” Mr. Cartwright asks me, ignoring his daughters. “And Cooper’s billing as well?”
“Not the whole building,” I say. “Just the student work-study staff. And Cooper’s bookkeeping turned out to be a breeze once I got a system in place.” I politely refrain from telling Cooper’s parents that his former system was no system. I found receipts dating from a half-decade ago tucked away in his underwear drawer. That, of course, was a recent discovery, as I have not been privy to the contents of his underwear until lately.
“She’s turned my whole business around,” Cooper says, and there’s a hint of pride in his voice.
“It helps that we found an accountant who isn’t currently incarcerated,” I say, not wanting to take all the credit.
“I owed him a favor,” Cooper explains. “You don’t have to work in an office to be a good accountant.”
“I totally agree,” I say. “And Cooper does have a very . . . diverse set of friends. But it’s easier to call an accountant who isn’t locked in a five-by-nine cell for most hours of the day.”
“Heather’s always had a good head for business,” Jordan says as he sucks on a lobster claw. “That’s why I never understood people who made dumb blonde jokes. I was like, ‘You haven’t met my girlfriend.’ ” He winces, having apparently received a kick from one of his sisters under the table. He glances nervously over at Tania. “I mean ex-girlfriend. But Tania’s real smart about that stuff too.”
Tania doesn’t seem to be paying the least bit of attention. She’s playing with her salad, separating the green beans from the tomatoes and onions, until her plate begins to resemble a small Italian flag.
“Well, I think it’s lovely Heather was able to join us tonight,” Mrs. Cartwright says. She’s on her third—or maybe fourth—glass of wine. Grant Cartwright has a full-size refrigerator in his kitchen devoted exclusively to wine and set at multiple temperatures—one compartment for the reds, the other for the whites. “If I were Heather, I’d have told this whole family to go to hell. It’s so nice when exes can remain friends, instead of being at one another’s throats.”
Tania drops her fork.
“Just leave it,” Jordan says, laying a hand across his wife’s to keep her from ducking beneath the table to retrieve the utensil, which she seems about to do. “Are you all right, hon?”
“I’m still not feeling very well.” Tania slides her hand free of his and wraps her fingers around the water bottle she’s been sucking all evening. “If it’s all right, I’m going to go inside and lie down.”
“Of course it’s all right,” Grant Cartwright says, actually appearing genuinely concerned about someone besides himself for once in his life. It’s easy to see where his sons inherited their good looks, since Grant has the same lean height, square jawline, and piercing gray-blue eyes. The only real difference is that his hair has gone completely white, and of course, I’ve yet to see real evidence of his possessing a soul, just like I sometimes suspect Jordan lacks a fully functioning brain. “Nicole, why don’t you take her to your room—”
Nicole nearly knocks over her chair in her eagerness to help.
“Of course,” she says. “Come on, Tania. I’ll play you the new song I’ve been working on. It’s called ‘My Twin, My Oppressor’—”
“Are you kidding me with this shit?” Jessica demands, slamming her wineglass down so hard I’m surprised it doesn’t shatter.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Nicole says, not sounding sorry at all. “I didn’t think you’d want me to show Tania to your room, because it reeks of cigarette smoke and that isn’t good for the unborn.”
Mrs. Cartwright, at the other end of the table, looks toward Jessica in surprise. “Yo
u’re smoking now?”
“The doctor prescribed it,” Jessica insists. “As a way to control my irritable bowel syndrome—”
“Oh right,” Nicole says, with a sarcastic laugh. “It has nothing to do with you wanting to suppress your appetite, working all day with size zero models—”
“At least I’m actually getting paid at my job,” Jessica snaps, “instead of mooching off Mom and Dad like you’ve done every summer every year since, oh, your entire life—”
Nicole narrows her eyes and sits back down, ready for battle. “Excuse me, Miss I-Work-in-an-Industry-That-Encourages-Women-to-Starve, but as soon as my Teach for America training institute is over, I’ll actually be doing something important with my life. What will you be doing? Oh, right: going to work for Daddy. I’ll be teaching children to read.”
Yowza. It’s hard to keep score, but I think I have to give the point to Nicole for this one, although in our psych class we learned that the three basic human needs are food (including water), shelter, and clothing. Reading was nowhere on the list until scientists started experimenting with monkeys, depriving them of their mothers as tiny babies and raising them in isolation cages without any contact whatsoever with other monkeys or humans, noting that the baby monkeys became completely antisocial, tried to claw the scientists’ eyes out, flung their own poo at them, then died.
Only then did the scientists decide to add love, socialization, sanitation, education, and health care to the list of basic needs, without which all creatures will eventually go mental and die (not to mention fling their own poo).
I’ve decided to stick with criminal justice as a major, as psychology seems a bit harsh.
It takes me a minute to realize that Tania is gone, having slipped away unnoticed during the girls’ argument. I only spy her as she reaches the glass doors to the penthouse and goes inside, Baby at her heels. I throw a questioning glance at Cooper, and he nods.
I wipe my mouth with my napkin and lay it beside my near-empty plate—my serving of rib eye was too large even for me to finish, and I’m a girl who appreciates a well-prepared steak. But I managed to polish off all my mashed potatoes.
“Excuse me,” I murmur and stand up, not missing the look of gratitude Cooper sends me across the table. He knows where I’m headed and is thankful. Tania needs looking after. No one else notices I’ve gotten up.
“Jess,” I hear his brother Jordan say in a sympathetic voice as I head away from the table, “I get the appetite suppressant thing, I really do. But smoking cigarettes is so bad for you. Get Dr. Shipley to write you a script for an ADD med instead. That’s what I do when I need to lose a few before an appearance. Those things work like magic. And the side benefit is that the pills really help me focus, like, on my choreography and stuff.”
“Perhaps because you actually have ADD,” Cooper suggests, but Jordan only laughs and punches him in the arm.
“In our day,” Grant Cartwright says, “they called those pills ‘speed.’ ”
“Right,” his wife agrees. “Remember that time we took all that speed, then went for the drive on Martha’s Vineyard, darling?”
“No,” Grant Cartwright says. “That was the time we had all the margaritas.”
“Oh, right,” Patricia Cartwright says. “People didn’t seem to frown on drinking and driving as much then as they do now. Although that farmer was upset about his fence.”
“You people are disgusting,” Nicole says.
Jessica seems to agree with her sister for once. “Seriously.”
Their voices fade into the background as I follow the pathway—now subtly lit by halogen bulbs hidden in plantings—into the penthouse. There’s no sign of Tania when I get inside, but I hear the sound of a television and the tinkling of a dog’s collar . . . Baby is scratching himself. I go toward it until I find myself in a media room, all dark-wood paneling and black leather couches, and spy Tania sunk into the middle of one, bathed in the light of a flat-screen TV. She has a faux-fur chinchilla throw pulled up over her bare legs to ward off the chilly air conditioning, and Baby is on her lap, energetically scratching his ears. Both of them look up at me as I appear in the doorway.
“Oh hi,” I say hesitantly. Neither dog nor mistress seems particularly glad to see me. “I was just . . .”
Trying to find the bathroom? On my way out and I took a wrong turn?
You know what? Screw that. A producer this girl has been working with daily died today, practically in my arms. I deserve some answers, and it’s time to see if she has any.
“I was wondering if I could join you,” I say and come into the room, closing the door behind me. “I can only take so much Cartwright family togetherness.” I cross the room, looping around the large glass coffee table on which rests a decorative basket of rattan balls (dear decorators of the world: what’s up with the rattan balls?), heading directly for the couch on which she’s sitting. “Scoot over.”
She remains exactly where she is, wide-eyed and confused.
“There’s lots of room over there,” she says, pointing with the remote control she’s clutching at the couch opposite hers.
“Yes,” I agree, “but you’ve got all the blankets.”
I lift the faux chinchilla and sit down beside her, careful not to touch her, slipping off my shoes—what a relief!—and tucking my legs beneath me, imitating her posture. We learned in our psych class that study after study has shown that subtly imitating another person’s body movements heightens one’s chances of a successful interpersonal involvement. Baby certainly appears to find the situation acceptable, since he quickly settles into the small faux-fur gulley that has formed between us.
“So,” I say. “The Cartwrights seem to really like you. That’s nice. They’re kind of nuts, but I think most families are. Certainly all the ones down at New York College, where I work, are. I don’t think there’s any such thing as a normal family. What does normal even mean anyway?”
Tania doesn’t reply. She keeps her gaze on the TV. She’s switching channels like no one’s business, seeming to be having trouble finding anything to watch, although the Cartwrights have satellite and Tania’s already reached the 900s. But she’s turned the sound down, which is a good sign.
“It’s nice,” I say, trying again, “that when you have your baby, she’ll have so many people to care about her, even if their sanity might be slightly questionable. I’ve heard you can restrict how many people can be in the room when you give birth, so you might want to consider that. Otherwise, I could see Nicole wanting to be there through the whole thing so she can gather material for a song about tasting the placenta—”
Tania finally cracks a smile.
“No,” she says, dragging her gaze away from the television screen. “She wouldn’t.”
“I’m serious,” I say. “She might. It’s hard to find words to rhyme with ‘placenta,’ but I bet Nicole will manage. ‘It was the color magenta. It tasted like polenta.’ ”
“Stop,” Tania says, laughing. Picking up a nearby throw pillow, she tosses it lightly at me, causing Baby to let out a tiny bark.
I pick up the pillow and pretend to conk Tania over the head with it, then say, while Tania is still laughing and Baby is running around the faux chinchilla in excited circles, “So. Do you want to tell me who hates you enough to try to poison you? Because I think you know.”
Tania’s laughter abruptly dies. She sinks back against the leather cushions and stares up at the TV screen, but it doesn’t seem to me as if she’s really seeing it.
“I don’t,” she says. She’s wearing a filmy, multicolored dress, her shoulders bare, her hair loosely curling all over. When she shakes her head, the curls tremble. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t lie to me, Tania,” I say. I’m no longer mirroring her posture, which is slumped in defeat. I’m sitting up straight. “You can lie to everybody else, but you can’t lie to me. You owe me. You actually owe me double, because Jared died in my building.” This is a slight exaggera
tion, because Jared died hours after he collapsed in front of me, in the hospital, but I’m pretty sure Tania doesn’t know this. “And if it wasn’t for you, I’d be the one married to Jordan.”
I’m piling lie on top of lie, but I tell myself it’s for the greater good, which is getting to the truth. If I hadn’t caught Tania with Jordan, he and I would have broken up anyway, because I’d have wised up on my own and realized what a terrible couple we made . . . and how much of a better fit I’d be with his older brother, Cooper, if only I could get him to glance my way. (I can’t believe it took as long as it did to get him to.)
Tania doesn’t need to know this, however.
Finally, she glances at me.
“I thought you were over Jordan,” she says, looking slightly suspicious. “I thought you were with Cooper now.”
I’m so stunned, I nearly kick Baby off the blanket and across the room, like he’s a little Chihuahua football.
“How did you know that?” I demand, my voice rising to a squeak.
“Stephanie told me,” Tania says.
Who didn’t Stephanie tell?
“Does Jordan know?” I ask. I assume not, or Jordan wouldn’t have been so chummy with Cooper at the dinner table . . . unless that was all an act to lull Cooper into a false sense of security so Jordan can push Cooper off the deck later. But I don’t think Jordan is capable of that kind of duplicity, and Cooper is armed anyway.
“No,” Tania says, shaking her head. The curls tremble. “Jordan doesn’t know. Stephanie said not to tell him. She says . . . she says you guys are getting married.”
“Well,” I say. I’m going to punch Stephanie in the face next time I see her. I don’t care that she spent the day getting her stomach pumped full of charcoal because she ate rat poison. “There’s no date set or anything, but it’s something Cooper and I have talked about. Stephanie’s right, it would be great if you wouldn’t tell Jordan yet. It’s a little . . . awkward.”
