by Lois Winston
“You make these?” I asked Cloris, stopping at the entrance to her cubicle, located directly across from mine, and pointing to the goodies on my plate.
She nodded. “You’re all my guinea pigs today. If everyone likes them, they go on my Thanksgiving menu.”
I groaned.
Cloris’s eyes widened, her eyebrows arching up toward the gingerbread-colored wispy bangs of her pixie haircut. “What’s wrong? You haven’t even taken a bite.”
“I’m sure they’re scrumptious. It’s the mention of Thanksgiving. I keep putting off thinking about it.”
“You can’t put it off much longer. It’s only three days away.”
I groaned again. “Don’t remind me.”
“Are you cooking?”
“Ira invited all of us to his place.” Ira Pollack was my deceased husband’s long-lost half-brother. He’d been married to trophy wife Cynthia before her father had her whacked. Look up needy in Webster’s, and you’ll find a picture of Ira. He’s been wheedling his way into our lives ever since he discovered our existence last summer. Unfortunately, he’s got the money to buy whatever he thinks will accomplish this.
I’ve tried declining his generosity, but I’m often guilt-tripped into accepting, either by Ira himself, my mother, or my sons. He’s currently trying to make up for introducing Mama to Lawrence—not to mention for Lawrence nearly killing us.
“Ira’s cooking?”
“I doubt he knows how to boil water. I’m assuming he’s having the dinner catered.”
Cloris wagged her finger at me. “You need to learn to say no.”
I shrugged. “I tried, but part of me feels sorry for him. He’s like a lost puppy.”
“And you’re a softie.”
“Maybe, but he’d only invite himself and his spoiled brats over to my house if I declined his invitation.” Ira’s first wife died of cancer, leaving him with three hellions who are experts in the art of wrapping their father around their pinkies.
Cloris shook her head. “No is usually one of the first words kids learn. You must have skipped the terrible twos.”
“I doubt Mama would agree with you. Anyway, at least at Ira’s house I won’t have to listen to his kids whine about Casa Pollack’s lack of amenities.”
“What’s wrong with your house? Last time I looked, you had indoor plumbing.”
“But no flat-screen TV, which places us squarely in the Dark Ages.”
“It’s a wonder you survive.” Cloris pointed to the pastry in my hand. “Eat a tart. You’ll feel better.”
I placed my coffee cup on the edge of her desk, lifted one of the tarts off the paper plate, and devoured half of it in one bite. Pumpkin, cranberry, pecan, and meringue exploded on my taste buds, creating a full-blown gastronomic orgasm in my mouth.
Cloris had created a shell made of brown sugar, butter, and crushed pecans. On top of the crust she’d spread a thin layer of cranberry compote, then filled the tart with lighter-than-air whipped pumpkin custard drizzled with more cranberry. She’d topped that with a perfectly flamed meringue. A bite later I’d devoured the entire tart without coming up for air.
“That was incredible,” I said, licking my fingers. “How could anyone not love these?”
She grinned. “Just had to be sure.”
I eyed the second tart. Before devouring it, I said, “Your false modesty would be extremely annoying if you weren’t such a fabulous baker.”
Before Cloris could mouth a comeback, her office phone rang. “I’ll let you get to that,” I said, grabbing my coffee cup and scooting across the hall.
As I settled into my desk chair I heard her say, “That’s odd. I’ll be right down.”
Five minutes later she returned, but instead of going into her cubicle, she stormed into mine. Wildly waving a fistful of papers in the air, she screamed, “I don’t believe this!”
TWO
I immediately rose to my feet. Very little ever flapped the unflappable Cloris and never into the manic frenzy I now witnessed. Seeing her doing a spot-on imitation of a purple-faced cartoon character, complete with an erupting head, scared the crap out of me. I thought she’d stroke out any minute. I reached for her arm and forced her into the extra chair in my cubicle. “Calm down.”
“Calm down?” Her voice climbed several octaves. “Not likely.”
I debated leaving her to grab a bottle of water from the break room but quickly decided against it. Having nothing else to offer her, I yanked the papers from her fist and forced the remainder of my coffee into her hands. “Fine. Don’t calm down. Drink this. Then tell me what’s going on.” Hopefully the caffeine wouldn’t contribute to her already stroke-inducing state.
Cloris took a few sips, followed by several deep breaths. As her complexion faded from apoplectic to several shades above nearly normal, my urge to call 911 abated.
“Well?” I asked after my non-medical expertise assured me she no longer stood on the precipice of death.
“We’re being sued,” she said.
“The magazine?” This made no sense. Why would the food editor receive this information before the cadre of corporate suits with their high-priced law degrees hanging on the walls of their corner offices? Unless… “Is someone claiming one of your recipes poisoned her?”
Cloris’s eyes widened. “What! Of course not! Why would you say such a thing?”
“But you just said the magazine is being sued.”
“Not the magazine. Me. And Gregg.”
I held up my hand. “Stop. Don’t say another word.”
I stepped out of my cubicle and scanned left and right, making certain no one was within earshot. Then I checked the cubicles to either side of Cloris’s and mine. All empty.
Still, no sense taking any chances. I grabbed Cloris’s arm and led her down the corridor to the conference room. Once inside, I closed and locked the door. “Okay,” I said. “Start from the beginning. Who’s suing you and why?”
“The people who bought our home. They claim the house has a stalker, that Gregg and I knew about it, and we deliberately withheld the information in our disclosure documents.”
“That’s absurd. You can’t stalk a house. It sits there on its foundation and never moves.” I’m intimately familiar with the stalker M.O., having recently dealt with my own stalker. Stalkers don’t stalk houses; they stalk people. Besides, if someone had at any time lurked around Cloris’s property, she would have called the police.
“Why now? You sold your house six months ago.” Cloris and Gregg had downsized to a townhouse in Springfield as a way to pay for their daughter’s college education.
“They were renovating the house—doing what, I can’t imagine.”
Neither could I. Cloris had owned a comfortable shabby chic Victorian that needed no updating, let alone a massive renovation. If any house needed renovating, it was my shabby, far from chic mid-century rancher.
“Anyway,” she continued, “they haven’t moved in yet. Now they’re saying they can’t because they’ve received threatening letters from some deranged psycho who’s claiming ownership of the house.”
“How does that have anything to do with you?”
Cloris drained the remains of the coffee and tossed the cup in the trash. “According to the lawsuit, we received a letter several days before closing and didn’t tell them about it.”
“Did you?”
“Of course not!”
“Then what proof do they have that you received a letter?”
“The psycho claims to have been in communication with us.”
“Well, that’s certainly credible evidence.”
“It gets better. Look here.” She pulled the papers from my hand and stabbed at a paragraph. “According to this, they received the first of several letters three days after taking possession of the house.”
“Yet they still went ahead with renovations and waited six months to file the lawsuit? Sounds to me like a case of buyer’s remorse. They’re looking for
a way to make you and Gregg pay for their mistake.”
“Not only us. They’re also suing our realtor, the title insurance company, and the escrow settlement company. And you know the worst part of all this?”
“What?”
Cloris dropped down into one of the chairs surrounding the conference table and lowered her head into her hands. “Defending this lawsuit could cost us all the profit we made on the sale of the house. Or more. We might as well not have downsized.”
Exactly my thoughts, but instead of agreeing and making Cloris feel even worse, I tried to downplay her fears. “Hopefully that won’t be the case. I can’t imagine any sensible judge not tossing this out as a meritless nuisance suit. For all you know, they wrote those letters themselves.”
“Let’s hope you’re right. My daughter’s college education hangs in the balance.”
“Have you spoken with Gregg yet? He must have also been served with papers.”
Cloris heaved herself from the chair as if she carried around a couple of hundred extra pounds on her ultra-thin frame. “He’s flying back from a business trip. For all I know, a process server will be waiting for him at the airport.”
“You need to call a lawyer. I don’t think you can use the one you used for the closing if he’s named in the suit.”
“I know. Today’s to-do list is getting longer by the minute.”
“Let me know if I can do anything to help.”
Cloris brightened. “Got a magic wand?”
If I did, I would have used it long ago to improve my financial situation. “Sorry, but if I find one, you’ll be the first to know.”
Cloris shrugged. “Moving on to Plan B, then.”
“Plan B?”
“You summon your inner Miss Marple to dig up some mud on these litigious lowlifes.”
That wasn’t the kind of help I had in mind, but ever since I began stumbling across dead bodies, everyone assumes I have some kind of crime-solving super power. In reality, my snooping has nearly gotten me killed on several occasions. My luck could run out at any moment. Besides, I had my kids to consider. They’d already lost their father this past year. I couldn’t get myself killed and abandon them to the care of their grandmothers. They’d kill me—except that I’d already be dead.
However, given that Cloris saved my life several months ago, I owed her big time, and thankfully, there were no dead bodies involved in her plight. I just wasn’t sure what I could do to help her with a lawsuit. Still, I felt obligated to try. “Get me whatever information you can, and I’ll see what I can do. Zack might have some ideas. Or maybe he can pick Patricia’s brain.”
Patricia was Zack’s ex-wife and an assistant district attorney in New York. They had the friendliest divorce on the planet. Her twins from her second marriage even called him Uncle Zacky.
“That’s the best news I’ve heard all day.”
I offered Cloris my best Pollyanna smile. “The day is young. You might hear some more before it’s over.”
“The way my luck is going?”
“Hey, I’m the one with the rotten luck. Your husband didn’t die and leave you one step from calling a cardboard box home.”
“No offense, but right now I’m beginning to think that rotten luck of yours is contagious. We might need to negotiate a two-for-one deal on inhabitable cardboard boxes.”
I certainly hoped not. I unlocked the conference room door, and we both returned to our cubicles. A few minutes later from across the hall I heard Cloris placing a call to her attorney. I jumped out of my chair and dashed across the short distance that separated our two cubicles. “What are you doing?”
Her brows knit together in consternation as she cupped her hand over the phone’s speaker. “Calling the attorney who handled our house sale to ask him for recommendations of other lawyers.”
I rolled my eyes at her. “Why do you think I stopped you earlier and dragged you into the conference room? You don’t want anyone overhearing your conversation.”
She slapped her forehead as she popped out of her chair. “See what this lawsuit has done to me? What would I do without you?” she asked as she scurried back down the hall.
I returned to my cubicle and fired up my computer. Time to rewrite my proposal in order to kill those two birds with one scrapbooking project.
~*~
I arrived home from work to find my mother-in-law and her commie cohorts, the twelve other octogenarian members of the Daughters of the October Revolution, had once again taken over my home to plan one of their protests. Judging from the dirty cups, glasses, and dishes scattered around my living and dining room, they’d also raided the refrigerator and pantry.
Harriet Kleinhample, a woman whose oversized attitude made up for her diminutive stature, shot me her trademark evil eye and demanded, “What happened to your printer?”
Several months ago I arrived home to find my computer printer plugged into her laptop and spewing forth page after page of full-color, high quality flyers that were quickly drinking up my last color ink cartridges. They’d also helped themselves to a ream of my paper. I learned my lesson. All of my supplies are now locked away in Zack’s apartment. Maybe I also needed to padlock my fridge and pantry.
“Looks like you have a printer,” I said, nodding at the one presently churning out more communist manifestos for their cause du jour.
“We had to buy one, thanks to your selfishness,” said Lucille. “I should deduct the cost from the rent I pay you. We’re all on fixed incomes, you know.”
And I’m not? My mother-in-law lives in her own reality. When I requested she kick in a nominal amount of money for her room and board after Karl left me in debt up the wazoo, she labeled me a slumlord.
What she didn’t know was that her precious Karl had plotted to kill her so he could abscond with the life savings she kept in shoeboxes under her bed. Although she survived, she was now penniless except for her monthly social security check and a miniscule pension. Tempted as I am to tell her the truth about her son, it would be an exercise in futility. She’d only accuse me, yet again, of besmirching his good name.
In no mood for a war of words with thirteen nasty old commies, I ignored Harriet, Lucille, and the rest of their gang and marched into the kitchen where I found the caked-on remnants of the lasagna I’d planned to serve for dinner sitting on the kitchen table. It’s a good thing my blood pressure normally runs on the low side. Otherwise, I might have blown a gasket at that moment. Instead, I stormed out the back door into the windswept, raw night and stomped across the semi-frozen yard to the garage. Zack opened the door and stepped out onto the landing before I’d climbed halfway up the staircase.
I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could utter a word, he said, “I know,” and handed me a glass of pinot noir. “The boys arrived home about fifteen minutes ago and told me,” he continued as I entered the apartment. “I sent them out to pick up some dinner for us.”
“My life sucks,” I complained, sinking into the sofa cushions.
He raised an eyebrow. “All of it?”
I sighed. “All except for you and the boys. And maybe Mama, but the jury’s still out on her lately.”
I polished off the remnants of my wine as I glanced around the apartment that less than a year ago had housed my home studio. Silently, I offered up a prayer of thanks to the God of Financially Strapped Widows. He could have sent me a couple of rowdy college students or a divorcee with several kids as tenants. Instead, he’d decided my bleak life needed a bit of eye candy and blessed me with a man whose genes spent time cavorting in the same primordial soup as Pierce Brosnan, George Clooney, Patrick Dempsey, and Antonio Banderas.
At first I tamped down my traitorous hormones. After all, what could a guy like Zack possibly see in me, a Bartlett-shaped mom with enough baggage to fill a tramp steamer? A lot, as it turns out. Not only did Zack Barnes upend every single one of my preconceptions, I’m convinced I never would have survived the past year without him.
Case in point, the collapsible metal table set up in the far corner of the room. Zack often used the table as a supplemental workstation when sorting through large numbers of prints from a photographic assignment. I rose from the sofa, crossed the room, and studied the table’s contents. A white sheet covered the table. On the far left Zack had created three neat stacks of snapshots, next to which he’d spread out a dozen more. The second half of the table contained yellowing newspaper clippings that he’d sandwiched between sheets of clear plastic. “You started without me?”
He shrugged. “I’m between assignments. I’ve got the time right now. You hardly have a moment to breathe during the week.”
Not that I had more than a few moments on any given weekend, either, thanks to the joys of single parenthood. At least Alex was now driving, which allowed for a divide-and-conquer approach to weekend errands.
I wrapped my arms around Zack’s neck and asked, “Did anyone ever tell you you’re too good to be true?” I then rewarded him with a kiss that promised more to come.
“Don’t get too excited,” he said. “I only scanned about a quarter of the photos so far.”
“And these?” I asked pointing to the newspaper clippings.
“Not scanned yet. Merely temporarily preserved. I couldn’t run the risk of moving them more than once. The plastic will keep them from disintegrating when we handle them. Once everything is scanned, we can sort through the images and articles to decide which ones to digitally restore for the scrapbook.”
I frowned at the clippings. “How good is your Spanish, really? I got the feeling Lupe might never be in the right frame of mind to translate any of this.”
“I’m fully fluent.”
I raised an eyebrow. “From all those alphabet agency assignments?”