The House On Willow Street

by Cathy Kelly

  “No.” Eric’s mellow voice interrupted her fantasy. “It’s a Redmond Suarez book.”

  Suki nearly dropped the phone but she managed to steady herself. Suarez was the sort of unofficial biographer to make a subject’s blood run cold. His work was always unauthorized—nobody would authorize the things he wrote. He invariably managed to dig out everything, every little secret a person had hoped would remain hidden. If he was trawling through the Richardson family, then they would all be shaking in their shoes. And so was she.

  “Oh God,” she said.

  “Oy vey,” agreed Eric. “Not good news for anyone involved, I take it.”

  “Well, you know . . .” she said helplessly.

  “Yeah, I know. He says he’s researching now and will be writing next year with a view to publication in the fall.”

  “Nearly a year of research,” breathed Suki.

  Imagine what he could find out in a year! Suki hated research. That was one of the obstacles getting in the way of the new book. That and the fact that everything was riding on it.

  “I’ll get my assistant to scan the letter and e-mail it to you,” Eric said. “I won’t be cooperating, but you can bet your bottom dollar that other people will, Suki.”

  “I’m sure,” she said dully. “Thanks for the call. How is . . . ?” Too late, she realized she’d forgotten the name of his wife.

  “Keren,” he said drily. “She’s great. Ciao.”

  Suki winced as she placed the receiver on the cradle. Eric was one of those she’d burned during the Jethro years. It had all seemed so much fun at the time: living the high life on the touring scene, never returning phone calls, being too stoned to care about old friends. In turn, the old friends had moved on with their lives.

  It was only after Suki had hung up that she realized he hadn’t asked her how she was or if she was happy. At least she’d made the effort, even if she couldn’t remember his damned wife’s name.

  Her sister, Tess could stay friends forever. Tess had maintained contact with her old classmates from school, she’d go to dinner with them and have civilized conversations about life. Suki wouldn’t recognize any of her old classmates in a police lineup. It was crash and burn with old acquaintances where she was concerned. Always had been.

  Suddenly, she became aware of the sound of clapping. Her introduction was over. It was time to stand up and do her thing, become the Suki who fought the feminist fight, not the Suki who was scared to the pit of her stomach.

  Suki opted out of dinner with the faculty when someone suggested a vegan restaurant in town that served organic, low-alcohol wine. Give her strength! Screw vegans and all who sailed in them. She wanted pasta with a cream sauce or steak Diane, thank you very much.

  Plus, she’d bet her fee that they’d order one glass of crappy organic wine each. Nobody drank anymore. Two drinks and they were offering rehab advice, and she’d had enough of that to last her a lifetime.

  Back in the horrible little hotel room the faculty had booked for her, she took off her ballbusting purple trouser suit with satin lapels and hung it in the wardrobe. Her speech outfit scared the hell out of men; maybe because purple was such a sexual color.

  “I hate that goddamn purple pantsuit,” Mick had said as she was leaving the house earlier that day to catch the train to Kirkenfeld.

  He was leaning against the doorjamb of their bedroom, still in the T-shirt he’d worn in bed. He’d done what he did most days and just pulled his jeans and boots on. Even so shabbily dressed, he was incredibly attractive: part Irish, part Italian, part something else, with intense blue eyes and jet-black hair. His band hadn’t landed a gig in over a month, so he spent a lot of time sitting on the porch, smoking weed and messing around on her laptop.

  “New song ideas, honey,” he said when she tried to ask what he was doing.

  She didn’t believe him.

  They were so broke, yet she couldn’t ask him to get a regular job. It wouldn’t be fair. He wasn’t that sort of person.

  “Music is a calling, babe,” he’d say. “I don’t turn up at nine like regular guys. I need the muse.”

  No, it was no good depending on Mick, Suki thought as she changed into her brown sweatpants. She was going to have to sort out their lack of money by herself.

  First, however, she needed a drink. She closed the wardrobe and went to check out the minibar. It was entirely empty.

  Please phone if you’d like the minibar filled, said a plaintive little note on the top shelf. Damn straight she wanted it filled up. A stiff drink might help her unwind.

  She ordered a double vodka tonic from room service. She’d have dinner downstairs with wine, and then, hopefully, she’d sleep. Provided she could get that damned Suarez book out of her mind.

  Suddenly, even a boring night with the vegans sounded better than another evening of worrying herself sick.

  Throwing open her suitcase—Suki never unpacked; what was the point for one night?—she began rifling through her stuff in search of the loose gold cashmere knit sweater she’d planned to wear tomorrow on the way home. That and her brown sweatpants would see her all right in this dump.

  A petite young waitress delivered her drink.

  “Thanks,” Suki said at the door, and scrawled her name and a big tip in the gratuity space, before taking her vodka and tonic off the girl’s tray. She always tipped well, no matter how broke she was. She’d done enough waitressing to appreciate the need. The faculty could afford a tip on her nonorganic drink.

  She added half the tonic and had it finished in five minutes. As the large dose of Stolichnaya, her favorite, hit her she finally began to feel buoyed up. The speech had gone well, they’d liked her. She still had it—why didn’t anyone realize that anymore?

  As she walked in to the sedate restaurant in the hotel, heads turned. They always did. Suki had been ultrablonde since she started using her pocket money to buy hair dye to lighten her natural fair color. Now, at forty-eight, her hair was a shoulder-length, swirling collage of honey golds. Her skin, too, was gold from the remnants of a summer tan and daily walks along the beach. The cheekbones and full lips that had been a siren call to Avalon’s men all those years ago were holding up well. If anyone looked closely, they’d see the slight hooding of her eyes, but she didn’t want anyone to look closely. Her gold sweater hung sexily from one smooth, tanned shoulder. Suki’s clothes always appeared to be holding onto her body for a fragment of time, as if they might come off at any moment.

  “You’re sex incarnate, honey,” Jethro had said in surprise the first night he met her, in the green room of the television chat show where they were both appearing.

  You too, thought Suki, but she hadn’t said it. After all, she’d been invited on the show so she could skewer his rock band’s treatment of women in their videos.

  And after she’d finished ripping him apart on-screen, unable to stop herself staring at him hungrily all the while, he’d pulled her into his dressing room. The sex later that day had been the best sex of Suki’s life, the best. Afterward, there were always drugs, but that first time, it had been her and Jethro, pure and clean.

  Mick was hideously jealous of her two years with Jethro, even though it had been over four years since she’d seen him.

  The jealousy was understandable, Suki knew. Michelangelo O’Neill played in a small-town rock band who’d never made it, while Jethro was TradeWind, one of the most famous bands of the seventies and eighties. TradeWind performed in stadiums and Madison Square Gardens, and MTV had practically played them on a loop during their big years.

  Mick and the Survivors had lost their residency in the Clambake Bar because the recession was biting, no matter what the folks in Washington said.

  The effects of the vodka were telling her she needed another drink and something carb-laden for dinner.

  “Table for one,” she said to the girl behind the desk, ignoring the man on duty. For all her outward sexuality, Suki Richardson had spent a lot of her life being
wary of men.

  At her table, she put on her glasses, took out a novel, a notepad and her pen—men were less likely to bother women when they had a pen and notebook—and set about trying to think her way out of trouble.

  Through pasta starter, a steak so bloody that a good vet could have brought it back to life, and the hideous yet delicious concoction that was chocolate and banana caramel pie, she did her best to plan an escape clause.

  She could throw herself on the mercy of Suarez: Don’t write about me, I was so young, I didn’t know what I was doing. I can tell you everything else about the Richardsons . . .

  No, unlikely to work. She’d read his Jackie Kennedy book, his Nancy Reagan book and the Bush series. He’d have too many insiders telling him everything there was to know about Suki Power. And if she spilled on the Richardsons, they’d find out and her name would be mud.

  Meet him and tell him the truth . . . ? Well, some of it. God forbid that she should tell the whole truth. Only Tess knew . . .

  Tess. In that instant, Suki realized that all the damage limitation in the world wouldn’t fix it if Suarez got to Tess.

  Not that her sister would say anything. Loyal to the end, that was Tess. No, Tess wouldn’t talk. But she was an innocent. If someone like Suarez turned up in Avalon, he’d ferret out the truth all right.

  Suki’s lovely dinner began to churn inside her. There was nothing for it: she’d have to go home. Back to Avalon.

  Not yet, though.

  She didn’t have the money, and Mick was so down about the band having nowhere to play that she couldn’t go off and leave him, much as she wanted to escape sometimes. His sadness sapped her energy, made the house feel full of misery and apathy.

  No, she’d phone Tess and talk to her. Tess would understand. They might be like chalk and cheese, but they were on the same wavelength.

  She’d talk to her sister, figure out what this damn Suarez guy knew, and then take it from there. She couldn’t cope with her life going into free fall again. She simply couldn’t.

  3

  She shouldn’t have come. Why had she come? In the ballroom of a small, pretty castle outside Kildare, Mara Wilson stood behind a pillar and wondered if it wasn’t too late to sneak off. To pretend a migraine. Sudden onset of shellfish poisoning. A suppurating leg sore that could be fatal . . .

  “Mara, sweetheart! You came!”

  Jack’s mother grabbed her in a hug and Mara knew the moment to escape the love of her life’s wedding was lost.

  Resplendent in mother-of-the-groom cerise pink with what looked like half a flamingo’s plumage pinned on to her head, Jack’s mother, Sissy, was half crying, half laughing as she heaped affection on Mara.

  “It’s been so long since we saw you and we miss you. Oh, remember the fun we had, that Christmas. You’re fabulous to come today, one in a million—that’s what I told Jack: Mara is one in a million.”

  Unfortunately, Mara thought, smiling back grittily, Jack Taylor had decided that he didn’t want to marry one in a million. He’d chosen someone else. Tawhnee, of the long, long legs, long black hair and olive skin that looked fabulous in virginal white. Mara had stayed discreetly at the back of the church for the ceremony, on the inner pew so she wouldn’t be in the bridal couple’s eyeline when they made their triumphant walk down the aisle. But even from inside, with a woman in a cartwheel of a hat outside her, she’d still been able to see her rival and the man Mara had loved.

  Jack looked like . . . well, Jack. Handsome, louche, a man’s man with a naughty smile on his face and his fair hair chopped to show off the clean jaw. And Tawhnee resembled a model from a bridal catalog. Gleaming café au lait skin, courtesy of her Brazilian mother, long black hair and a smile on her beautiful face. She was the perfect bride and as Mara stared at her she finally realized it was over: Jack had married Tawhnee. Tall, elegant Tawhnee, as opposed to short, curvy Mara. He’d never be with Mara again. It was all too late.

  When Tawhnee had arrived in Kearney Property Partners straight out of college, she’d been assigned to Mara.

  “I can’t hand her over to any of the men,” Jack had confided to Mara at breakfast one day when she’d stayed over at his place and they were having coffee and toast before rushing to the office.

  “Why not?” Mara had demanded.

  “She’s too good looking. And young, very young,” Jack had added quickly when Mara had poked him with one of her bare feet. “She’s just a kid, right? Twenty-three or -four. I need a woman to take care of her. I need lovely you to do it.”

  “Lovely me?” Mara got off her seat and slid onto Jack’s lap.

  He liked her body on his, her curves nestled against his hardness.

  They’d woken at six and made lazy, sleepy love. She felt adored and sensual, like a cat bathed in the sun after a hot day. Jack didn’t invite her to stay over often and never midweek, so it was a real treat.

  “Yes, lovely you,” Jack said, and kissed her on the lips.

  “I’ll take care of her,” Mara said, visualizing an innocent young graduate who’d gaze up to her new mentor. In fact, Mara had had to look up to Tawhnee, who was at least five nine in her bare feet. She was an object of sin in a dress and during the five days Mara mentored her, not a single man—from client to colleague—could set eyes on Tawhnee without their jaw dropping open.

  “It’s sex appeal, that’s what it is. Raw bloody sex appeal,” Mara told Cici, her flatmate.

  “So? You’re not the Hunchback of Notre Dame yourself,” snapped back Cici. “She’s nothing but a kid.”

  “You are not getting the picture,” Mara said. “This girl is Playboy fabulous. I have no idea why she wants to work for us. She could earn a fortune if she headed to a go-go bar.”

  “She might want to make money from her mind,” Cici pointed out loftily. “You’re labeling her. I was reading a thing on the Web about how beautiful women aren’t taken seriously and other women are jealous of them.” Cici loved the Internet and had to be hauled away from her laptop late at night to get some zeds.

  “True. I’m being a cow,” Mara said, sighing. “I’ll try harder.”

  She didn’t have to. Tawhnee was suddenly and mysteriously whisked away to work with Jack.

  He was director of operations. It was unusual for such a lowly trainee to be working with Jack, but as he said himself: “She needs to get to grips with this side of the business. What film should we go to see tonight? You pick. We’ve gone to loads of films I’ve picked. It’s your choice.”

  In retrospect, she’d been very trusting. All the “let’s go and see a film” and “shall we have dinner out” had kept her fears at bay. Her boyfriend was being ultra-attentive, therefore there was no way he could be lusting after Tawhnee, even if every other man in the office was.

  Like, hello!

  And then it was too late.

  Mara was under her desk, trying to find her favorite purple pen when two of the guys came into the office after an auction.

  “Lucky bastard,” said one. “I wouldn’t mind doing the tango with Tawhnee.”

  “Yeah, Jack’s always had a way with the girls. I thought Mara had settled him down, but a leopard—”

  “—doesn’t change his spots,” agreed the other one.

  “And she’s hot. An überbabe.”

  “Mara’s lovely and she’s great fun but not—”

  “Yeah, not in Tawhnee’s league. Who is, right? Don’t get me wrong, Mara’s cute and she can look sexy, it has to be said, but she wears all those mad old clothes and she is short. Basically, compared to Tawhnee, she’s . . .”

  “Yeah, ordinary. While, Tawhnee, phew! She’s so hot, she’s on fire.”

  “Yeah, spot-on. Tawhnee’s a Ferrari, isn’t she, and Mara . . . Well, she’s not, is she?”

  Under the desk, Mara wanted to dig a hole so deep that she came out in another country. Another planet, even. She stayed where she was for a few moments, like an animal frozen in pain. It was hard to know what hurt
most. The realization that Jack was indeed cheating on her with Tawhnee, or the knowledge that the men she worked with and lunched with and joked with saw her simply as an ordinary but occasionally sexy girl who liked “mad old clothes.” All those times she’d thought she’d pulled it off and camouflaged herself successfully into something different—something chic, elegant, stylish—with her fabulous vintage outfits, she’d been wrong.

  Talent, kindness, laughing at their bad jokes . . . none of it meant anything compared to being tall, slim and hot. She was ordinary beside the Ferrari that was Tawhnee.

  She waited till the phone rang to crawl out the other side where a handy filing cabinet hid her, and ran from the room to find Jack.

  He was in his office alone, eyes focusing on his mobile, texting. At the door, Mara stared at him and wondered if she’d been nothing more than a diverting, wait-till-the-Ferrari-comes-along girl for him too.

  He’d said he loved her, loved her shape, her petiteness; he’d called her his pocket Venus, and said he hated skinny women who nibbled on celery.

  “You grab life with both hands,” he’d murmured when they were lying in bed after the first time they made love.

  “And I eat it!” said Mara triumphantly, wriggling on top of him to nuzzle his neck. She’d never met anyone who shared her sensuality until she’d found him. They were so well matched in many ways, but none so much as when they were in bed.

  For the first time in her life, Mara Wilson had met a man who loved her as she was—with the wild, red curls, an even wilder dress sense and an hourglass body, albeit a short one. Jack adored her 1950s clothes fetish. He told her she looked fantastic in fitted angora sweaters and tight skirts worn with red lippie, Betty Boop high shoes and eyeliner applied with a sexy little flick.

  And all the while he probably thought she was ordinary too. She was his ordinary fling while he waited for something better to come along.