The donut money! She waves an empty manila envelope in my face. Sure enough, it's the dreaded donut envelope. As it turns out, Jane's mother accidentally took the money to work in a pile of folders that were in the front seat. Mystery solved. And I'm incredibly relieved that Jane's been cleared, because that points to Cheap Old Mr. Exner himself and I care a lot less about him.
However, it's obvious that Jane isn't as convinced that I'm in the clear. "You know, Hallie," she says, "I'd understand if you needed the money ... if you just borrowed it and you plan on paying it back as soon ..."
Oh damn. Not her, too. "Jane, I swear to you that I didn't steal any money."
"I just meant that it doesn't look very good ... to other people, you know?"
Yeah, I know exactly. She thinks that I did it.
When I return to the Stocktons' I'm not at all in a cheerful mood and in no way prepared for what greets me. Mr. Bernard and Mr. Gil and Ms. Olivia are gathered in the living room having a discussion, and they all stop talking and stare up at me the minute I walk in, as if I'm breaking and entering. Talk about the pot calling the kettle black! Maybe they consider larceny to be tackier than dealing drugs or selling forged art or laundering money or whatever it is that they do.
"Uh, sorry," I say. "The door was open ..."
"No, of course, come in," says Mr. Gil.
"It's only fair to tell you that Officer Rich phoned," says Mr. Bernard.
Gee, I never would have guessed. I don't even bother to enter the living room, because I figure I'll be leaving momentarily anyway.
"Listen," I say, still standing in the front hall, "I didn't do it. But I totally understand if you want me to quit."
"See, I told you," says Ms. Olivia and taps Mr. Bernard on the knee with her fingers.
"What do you mean you told me," Mr. Bernard snaps back. "I never said she took the money. I merely answered the phone, then related the officer's remarks to you."
"Of course we don't want you to resign," says Mr. Gil. "In fact, come and sit down."
"You don't?" I plop down on the couch, exhausted and defeated from all this craziness.
"No, no," agrees Mr. Bernard. "I told Officer Rich that with my business I leave hundreds of dollars lying around here all the time and that since you joined us nothing has ever gone missing and we trust you implicitly."
It's a fact that Mr. Bernard leaves money scattered all over the place. And it's true that I've never touched it and never would, though I rather doubt he would notice if I did. Just last week I handed him four fifty-dollar bills that I found sticking out from under a vase on the piano and he didn't even remember leaving them there.
"And tell her what you told him about the salary," prompts Ms. Olivia.
"Oh yes," says Mr. Bernard, "I explained how you've been laboring so intently for twelve dollars an hour in an effort to save for an automobile that I thought it highly doubtful you would be inclined to embezzle."
I'm grateful that the Stocktons have rallied around me, even if it's only an honor-among-thieves type of camaraderie. But I can't help sensing that the tide of public opinion has turned against me for good and even the people on my side must be having their doubts. When I stopped at the convenience store on the way home Hal the counter guy watched my every move, as if I was about to stuff a box of Twinkies under my sweatshirt. It's obvious that I have to determine what happened to that damn money, and not just prove that I didn't take it, but find out who did.
Chapter 24
The Best Game in Town «
The beginning of October brings many new experiences and surprises into my life. For instance, the discovery that small-town suspicion can wash a person away like a sand dollar in a tidal wave. The bell no longer tolls for me. Not the doorbell and not the phone. However, the fall does deliver an extraordinary amount of leaves that need to be raked, blown, and bagged.
The most exciting occurrence is full-time access to the QE2. At breakfast Mr. Bernard announces that Ms. Olivia is no longer approved to drive. Though he insists that she's perfectly capable of driving if only she'd pay attention "in lieu of composing heroic couplets in her head."
"Don't be ridiculous," she says. "There's nothing wrong with my driving."
"Mother, you hit a deer yesterday."
"Oh, Bernard. It was ceramic."
"That's exactly my point!"
Frankly, I don't understand how he knows whether she's composing poetry or pornography behind the wheel, but I have to agree with him that Ms. Olivia tends to be what my mother would call a daydreamer. Sometimes she's so lost in thought that it appears as if she might actually vanish into the air like a sigh.
It's a lovely fall morning at the start of Columbus Day weekend and we drive to Pymatuning State Park in Ashtabula County near the Pennsylvania border to watch the leaves change and try to spot a bald eagle. Ms. Olivia doesn't believe that bald eagles should be taken off the endangered-species list and that industrial lobbyists are fudging the increase in their numbers and therefore insists upon seeing one for herself.
A visiting nurse comes to stay with the Judge and so we're all able to leave the house for the entire day and experience autumn face-to-face. At least this is what Mr. Bernard claims is our mission; that we're setting out upon a journey of self-improvement and self-renewal through the appreciation of nature and all the earthly delights that we normally cavort right past in our frantic daily lives.
Only I wonder if this outing is in part to lift my spirits about the missing money, as Officer Rich has been phoning with pacemaker regularity to remind me that the longer I wait to confess, the worse the consequences will be. The past week I'd been moping around the kitchen and studying architectural drawings of the golf shop procured from town hall. I was testing a theory that someone could have tunneled in from the bookshop next door, or else lowered himself in through the skylight. Such exercises, combined with being the town pariah and family outcast, overwhelm all of my private moments with dread.
To whatever end Mr. Bernard is working to take my mind off this predicament, he also manages to map out a route that takes us past a large number of flea markets and tag sales. At each stop he organizes us like a military platoon commissioned to hunt for objects such as paperweights with silhouettes inside the domes, Bakelite jewelry, old jelly glasses, and lunch boxes from the 1970s. At least those are what he deems to be my areas of expertise. Mr. Gil is instructed to search for fountain pens, turn-of-the-century optical toys, clockwork cars, and something called Liberty pewter.
Meanwhile Ms. Olivia floats around and browses through old books. Mr. Bernard attempts to have her look for soup tureens and sauceboats, but she's continuously sidetracked by stacks of old Life magazines and hand-inked poetry chapbooks to the point where I have to hunt her down when it's time to leave. By the time we've scoured and plundered four garage sales, two flea markets, and one musty antique store and have our dusty treasures packed into the trunk, Mr. Bernard is in high spirits.
"Okay, Hoke, make a hard left at the purple wisteria and then a beeline toward the heliotrope." Mr. Bernard is always calling me names from movies such as Driving Miss Daisy. It amuses me, because after all his carping about Ms. Olivia being chauffeured around town from "protest to prison" he doesn't seem to mind being driven around himself.
Mr. Bernard's idea of a picnic is definitely not the annual exercise in softball playing and charbroiling hamburgers that my dad's office sponsors at the town park every August. He brings tins of caviar and serves it in a raised silver dish that comes with its own delicate shovel. After warming toast triangles over a can of Sterno, he applies a thin layer of tiny black marbles and then sprinkles it with chopped egg and onion. Following that we have marinated artichokes, oysters on the half shell with lemon juice, fresh ground pepper, and cocktail sauce, and smoked turkey sandwiches on French bread with a thick crust.
From crystal champagne glasses we sip mimosas or delicious sparkling lemonade that Ms. Olivia mail-orders from some village in F
rance. And for dessert there are strawberries and star fruit dipped in rich dark chocolate that Mr. Bernard and I had stayed up late the night before to make.
"Hallie, while you're up please liberate my sunglasses from the glove compartment," Ms. Olivia politely asks.
Ms. Olivia never asks anyone to get or fetch an item. She says free, emancipate, or unfetter. I had to look up the last one when I first heard it. And it's a good thing I did, because I almost plucked all the feathers off her hat in addition to removing it from the top shelf of her closet.
During lunch Mr. Gil plays Chopin etudes on his boom box. "Prelude in E-flat Minor" is his favorite. Ms. Olivia reads a few poems; something dreamy by William Wordsworth and an Edmund Spenser sonnet about death and decay and love and virtue. Ms. Olivia knows lots of poems about these subjects and many take place upon a strand. I kept thinking a strand of what until Mr. Gil informed me that it's a beach.
Ms. Olivia recites "Noon Walk on the Asylum Lawn" by Anne Sexton. It's very short and sounds almost like a church prayer. After this she has me read a poem by Sylvia Plath about a lioness followed by a child's cry and then suicide, or what Mr. Gil deems as a real womb-jerker. I can't help but wonder if my mother will eventually have a nervous breakdown from constantly giving birth and thawing chickens and eventually just toss off a sonnet or two before shoving her head into the Diaper Genie.
During the car ride home Mr. Bernard trills along to La Bohème and he has this hilarious falsetto voice that he uses for the girl who dies at the end. Then Ms. Olivia recalls the time Mr. Bernard was a toddler and they traveled by steamer to Ethiopia to protest corporate America's distribution of infant formula. As with most of the stories she recounts about her life and times as a young firebrand of a mother, she concludes by saying, "You certainly had an exciting childhood, Bernard."
It's at this point that we pass a sign for a triple yard sale—three neighbors pooling their castoffs—and Mr. Bernard excitedly yells, "Ready about, turn to starboard." And off we go.
Now, normally if someone had suggested a picnic and leaf drive with two guys in their thirties and an old lady I would have developed acute appendicitis real fast. But the Stocktons and Mr. Gil have a talent for making an ordinary afternoon into a once-a-year day, a unique experience that could never be replicated, but would provide pleasant memories for many months, like scoring a soccer goal from midfield.
Later that evening I'm in the living room giving Mr. Bernard his poker lesson when Mr. Gil asks me to help him decide whether he should exercise the stock options he's been issued at work.
"I don't even know what a stock option is," I tell him.
"It's just a matter of doing some math, which you happen to be very proficient at," he explains. "And then deciding whether the company is going to do better or worse than it is right now."
After reading the explanatory documents from his company, we look up the stock in the newspaper and also the fifty-two-week high and I try to determine the probability of the stock doing what the analyst in Mr. Gil's finance department thinks it should do, based on the current earnings and future projections. It's amazing how similar the stock market is to playing cards; so much of it depends on odds. And that's when it finally hits me— how to find the missing golf money. All this time I've been thinking in terms of MacGyver reruns—cat burglars climbing along the walls using shot put gloves as suction cups and a fishing rod to lift the cash from behind the counter so as not to leave a trail. When the solution is really just a math problem.
Chapter 25
Sweetening the Pot ♠
The minute the library opens the following morning I locate every book that they have on the stock market, spread out the Wall Street Journal and spend more than half the day poring over the jumble of numbers and definitions.
When I arrive at the Stocktons' at four in the afternoon to use their shower, Mr. Bernard asks me if I'm going to help him prepare dinner. After a month of slaving away as Mr. Bernard's cooking assistant, I no longer pose a health risk in the kitchen. At least not of the magnitude that Ms. Olivia does. The worst thing that's happened so far was putting the turkey en croute à la Oranges Orientales in the oven and turning on the light instead of the heat. But Mr. Bernard whipped up an appetizer of celery root pancakes and then served the turkey about half past ten. He insisted that it was more European to dine late anyway.
However, in spite of a sometimes painfully slow learning curve and a few minor setbacks, I am learning to cook. It's doubtful I'll ever have Mr. Bernard's passion for food preparation. Then again, I won't have to subsist entirely on Yoo-Hoo shakes and peanut butter sandwiches, either. Or else cook for my family in an Easy-Bake oven.
When we prepare dinner Mr. Bernard always puts on background music, Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach on his cello, Andres Segovia's Spanish guitar, or if he can't get the stereo to work right, which is often, the jazz radio station. Above the music he offers a steady flow of comments about the state of American produce and the progress of the meal. Mr. Bernard delights in knowing all sorts of unusual details about different foods. He discusses dinner the same way he piques the curiosity of his customers down at the store with engaging anecdotes about the history of any object in which they express an interest. When Mr. Bernard embarks on a story, I've noticed that people gather to him like iron filings around a magnetic pole.
"Chickpeas have of course killed people," he vigorously declares while I'm slowly stirring a pot of tomato lentil soup that smells delicious even though it's the color and consistency of what you'd expect to see splattered around a crime scene. Between making sure the hemoglobin soup doesn't permanently clot and burn, I stand next to him at the counter and mash cloves of garlic for the hummus. I've learned that if one is craving a supremely entertaining story from Mr. Bernard's repertoire, it pays to reward him with plenty of disbelief. And there is never a time I don't want him to tell a story, since once he gets started the time flies by, no matter what we're doing: planting bulbs, polishing brass, or just cleaning the icky old oven. He makes everything fun. And no matter how far-fetched Mr. Bernard's stories sound, they are almost always true, or at least they've been officially documented as hearsay. Like the fact that Oscar Wilde's final words were "Either this wallpaper goes or I do."
"You mean that people were shot with chickpeas out of a gun and died!" I say.
"Chickpeas shot out of a gun! Heavens to Betsy, no."
He turns and drops one of the raspberries he's washing into my mouth. To be honest, Mr. Bernard and I eat more food in the kitchen than we do at the table. And it's not like at my house, where you have to sneak food from the kitchen. He's constantly taking out forks and spoons and saying try this and test that and do you think this needs more anchovy paste? As if I would know.
By now I am desperate to discover how you can kill someone with a chickpea. It might be one of those life skills that could come in handy later on, like knowing how to remove chewing gum with lighter fluid. "So how do chickpeas kill people?"
"The Latin word cicer, or chickpea, found its way into Old French as chiche," Mr. Bernard announces as if he is making a proclamation, which in a way he is. "But speakers of Middle English adopted this name for the legume and tacked onto it a redundant pease, which is the same as pea—leave it to the English to complicate the language. Anyway, it wasn't long before the resulting compound transformed into the now familiar chickpea."
"But I don't see how anyone died by adding pea onto the end of chick." He purposely leaves out the good parts to see if I'm paying attention.
"Ah yes. In the Sicilian uprising against French rule in 1282, Sicilian rebels had orders to kill every French person on sight. But they were faced with the problem of determining who was or was not French. So they commanded every stranger they met to say cecceri, the Italian dialect expression for chickpeas. Strangers who failed to pronounce it correctly were killed." And with that Mr. Bernard switches on the Cuisinart with a flourish, as if to theatrically punctuate the end of his story
. Mr. Gil often refers to Mr. Bernard as "Our Lady of the Cuisinart."
"How do you know all this stuff?" I shout above the whirring avocado paste in progress.
"Much of it I learned from Mother. She home-schooled me for a year while protesting the local district for not wanting to integrate. First she transferred me to the all-black school the next town over, but the children's parents were told that I was an informant from the FBI and so no one would speak to me. Then Father put his foot down and said he wouldn't tolerate his son being used as a political platform."
"Is it legal to keep a kid home from school like that?"
"I thought you were the expert on the truancy laws in the state of Ohio," Mr. Bernard replies humorously. "Actually, believe it or not, Mother is a certified educator, though she's only worked a few years as a substitute teacher, and that was just to antagonize Grandfather Stockton, who believed that married women should remain in the home. She initially earned her teaching certificate to be able to join the Peace Corps, which she did. Mother worked in Burkina Faso in Western Africa to form farming cooperatives as a way of breaking the grip of the warlords."
"She's a certified teacher!" I exclaim in disbelief. I mean, I just can't imagine it.
"I appreciate your shock. The certifiable part is of course entirely believable," he says with a twinkle in his eye. "It's the teaching part that throws people."
Mr. Bernard demonstrates how to chop peaches for his "famous" raspberry-peach cobbler, just so. Too thick and you can't cut them properly with a fork; likewise, too thin and the crust flops.
"Peach is from the Old French peche, which is ultimately from the Latin for peach tree, persica," he says. "That's because it is a widely held belief that the peach has its origins in Persia, now Iran." Then he asks, "So what's happening with school?"
He catches me completely off guard and I accidentally allow the paring knife to fling a peach pit onto the floor, and it skids into the bottom rungs of the metal refrigerator grille. Up until tonight no one in the house has mentioned my ditching school. I'd assumed they'd all accepted it. In fact, I thought they rather prided themselves on being open-minded and tolerant about truancy.
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