by Lois Winston
“From all those photographic assignments.”
I smirked. “Of course.”
“You’re never going to believe me, are you?”
“Methinks the gentleman doth protest too much. I’ll believe you when you tell me the truth.” I was convinced Zack’s photojournalism was a cover for his real job as a government operative.
“You have an overactive imagination.”
“So you’ve said.” On more than one occasion. I still didn’t believe him and probably never would. The man owned a badass gun, and he knew how to use it. Not that owning a gun made him a spy. However, combined with his frequent secretive trips and all the people he knew who had all sorts of information at their fingertips, even a math-challenged crafts editor could put two and two together and come up with SPY.
Still, a part of me hoped Zack was right about my overactive imagination. I’d experienced too many encounters with the seamier side of society over the past year. Far too often I’d spent the night tossing and turning, unable to sleep from fear for my own safety and that of my kids. I didn’t need to add Zack into the mix. As it was, every time he left on a photo assignment, I conjured up all sorts of lurid images of him stepping into traps set by smugglers, gangbangers, or terrorists. I’m not sure I could deal with knowing those possibilities were far more real than imaginary.
In any case, at that moment all conversation regarding Zack’s true profession came to a halt with the sound of footsteps on the outside staircase leading up to the apartment. A moment later the door flew open, heralding the arrival of Alex and Nick, along with the aromas of Moo Shu Shrimp, fried rice, spareribs, and spring rolls.
Throughout dinner I noticed Alex and Nick exchanging silent communications. At first, I dismissed it. My teenage sons are certainly allowed conversations that don’t involve parent participation. However, these generally don’t occur literally under my nose. After the third semi-surreptitious sideways glance at each other, I called them on it, “What’s going on with you two?”
“You tell her,” said Alex.
“You’re older,” said Nick.
“Out with it,” I said.
Alex inhaled a deep breath. I’d never seen my seventeen-year-old so nervous. I tamped down the panic building inside me and silently fired off a plea to the heavens that he hadn’t gotten some girl pregnant. Karl had assured me he’d had “the talk” with both boys the moment they’d entered puberty as well as countless times since. But since Karl had lied about so many things, after his death I broached the subject with Alex and Nick. The last thing a teenage boy wants is to talk to his mother about sex, but both my sons made it clear they weren’t about to screw up their lives. They told me not to worry. But isn’t that what all teenagers tell their mothers?
No, I quickly assured myself. It’s got to be something else, something not as life shattering as a teen pregnancy, given that Alex had urged Nick to take on the role of spokesman. Panic returned as I stared into the blue-gray eyes of my youngest son. Nick might be fifteen, but he was still my baby. Surely, he hadn’t—
“We refuse to go to Uncle Ira’s for Thanksgiving,” said Alex.
My relief burst forth in an uproarious belly laugh. There have been times when my sons have looked at me as if I had two heads, both covered in pink and purple polka dots. This was one of those times.
I waved away their looks of concern and surprised them by saying, “I don’t want to go, either.”
“Then why are we going?” asked Nick.
“Sometimes gifts come with strings attached. Ira has been very good to you...to us. We owe it to him to show up.”
“So we have to do what he wants from now until forever?” asked Alex.
“He’s a lonely man who’s been through a lot,” I said. Within the span of a few years Ira had lost both his parents and his wife to illnesses. Then he discovered he had a long-lost half-brother, only to find Karl had recently died. A few months later, a murder orchestrated by Ira’s father-in-law claimed his second wife. Was it any wonder the guy was so needy that he tripped over himself trying to buy his way into our lives?
“Maybe it’s time we had a short respite from Ira,” said Zack.
“How about permanent?” asked Nick.
I speared him with my mom look before asking Zack, “How do we do that without hurting his feelings?”
“His feelings?” asked Nick. “What about our feelings? We’re the ones who have to put up with his spoiled brats.”
“Uncle Ira wouldn’t be half-bad without Melody, Harmony, and Isaac,” said Alex.
“Unfortunately, they’re a package deal,” I said.
“I think it’s time for some tough love,” said Zack. He pulled his phone from his pocket.
“What are you doing?” I asked.
“Temporarily relieving some of the stress in your life.” Before I could say anything, Zack tapped his screen a few times, placed the phone to his ear and after a short pause said, “Hello, Ira. This is Zack Barnes…Fine…Listen, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but Anastasia, her mother, the boys, and I won’t be able to make it for Thanksgiving…No, no one is ill…No, you can’t bring Thanksgiving dinner here. We won’t be home…It’s a personal matter. We’ll be in touch after the holiday…I’ll tell her.” With that he hung up the phone.
“I don’t believe you just did that,” I said, but at the same time I realized Zack’s proactive actions had lifted a huge weight from my chest.
He winked at me. “Someone had to.”
“What did he ask you to tell me?”
“He said if there’s anything he can do to help, you shouldn’t hesitate to call him.”
“He can help by not constantly butting into our lives,” said Nick.
“So, what are we going to do for Thanksgiving?” asked Alex.
“We’re dining out,” said Zack. He placed another call and made dinner reservations for six at one of our favorite Westfield restaurants. To my amazement, they actually had a table available for Thursday evening.
“Six?” asked Alex when Zack disconnected from the call.
“It wouldn’t be right to leave Lucille to fend for herself on Thanksgiving,” said Zack.
“Why not?” asked Nick.
‘Nick!” I glared at my son.
“She hates us,” he said. “Why can’t she spend Thanksgiving with those nasty old commie friends of hers?”
“Maybe she will, but we still have to extend an invitation,” I said. “Remember, she does live here.”
“Kind of hard to forget,” said Nick.
THREE
After dinner the boys excused themselves to tackle their homework while Zack and I headed into the house to wrestle the mess Lucille and her minions had left before taking off to foment revolution somewhere—or watch Dancing with the Stars on Harriet Kleinhample’s sixty-inch flat screen TV.
Who knew octogenarian commies had a thing for B-list celebrities and former politicians prancing around in sequins and stilettos?
Of course, Lucille hadn’t bothered to take Devil Dog with her, which meant one of us would have to walk him at some point if I didn’t want to wake up tomorrow morning to find doggie pee or worse soaked into my carpets.
The pooch in question was a lazy, lumbering French bulldog, much like his owner, minus the French connection. I would have thought a Russian wolfhound more in keeping with Lucille’s political leanings, but maybe the breed was associated too closely with Russian nobility. I knew little about the preferred pets of the czars and even less about Russian wolfhounds in general.
Or Lucille’s choice in dog may have had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the minimal square footage of her former apartment. Since our conversations never progressed beyond her grievance du jour, I’d probably never know the reason for her choice of dog breed. Truthfully, I didn’t care.
Lucille had named her precious pooch Manifesto, after the communist treatise of the same name. I can’t imagine anyone, with the possible exception of Vl
adimir Putin, giving a pet such a name. Anyway, the dog had made it crystal-clear that he didn’t want to live in my home any more than I wanted him here. So much to my mother-in-law’s displeasure, I’d taken to referring to him as Mephisto the Devil Dog.
However, last summer Mephisto and I formed a détente of sorts. He even had a hand in saving my life, and now he prefers my company to Lucille’s s’mothering. This definitely does not sit well with my mother-in-law. She’s taken to punishing us both by taking off without notice for hours at a time, leaving me with one more household responsibility.
Mephisto was currently slurping water over my kitchen linoleum in a semi-futile attempt to transfer the liquid from his bowl to his mouth while maintaining a fixed gaze on Ralph, who surveyed the activity from his favorite perch atop my refrigerator. I’d inherited Ralph, an African Grey parrot, several years ago from my Great-aunt Penelope. At the time I would have preferred her collection of Royal Doulton china, but the talented bird has since grown on me, and unlike Mephisto, he’s completely toilet trained and grooms himself.
“Heaven forbid those women bother to bring their dirty dishes into the kitchen, let alone load the dishwasher,” I said as I deposited dried lasagna-encrusted plates and utensils on the counter. “So much for their communist work ethic. They act more like entitled nobility than the proletariat.”
Zack stood at the sink, scraping food into the garbage disposer. “How was work today?” he asked.
I cocked my head and raised an eyebrow. “My, what a subtle segue.”
“Face it. You’re never going to change Lucille, so I might as well take a stab at changing the subject to reduce your blood pressure.”
“First Ira, now Lucille, huh? Zachary Barnes: photojournalist, government operative, and shrink extraordinaire.” I threw my arms up and laughed in spite of myself. “You win, Dr. Freud.”
Why do I bother letting Lucille get under my epidermis? Best to take a more Zen-like approach to my mother-in-law. If I adjusted my attitude, I might even eliminate the acid reflux I’d developed shortly after she moved in with us.
So if Zack wanted to move the conversation in a different direction, I could accommodate. “Cloris and her husband are being sued by the people who bought their house.”
He paused from his scraping and turned to look at me. “Seriously?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“Why?”
I told him what I knew of the situation. When I’d finished my recap, I said, “Is it just me, or does something not sound quite Kosher in all this?”
“Forget non-Kosher. It sounds downright fraudulent.”
“The fraud of men was ever so, since summer first was leavy,” squawked Ralph. “Much Ado about Nothing. Act Two, Scene Three.”
Thanks to decades of sitting in on Great-Aunt Penelope’s Shakespearean lectures, Ralph’s tiny brain contained an encyclopedic knowledge of every play and sonnet ever written by the Bard. This had given him an uncanny talent for squawking situation-appropriate quotes.
Zack grabbed a chunk of tomato from the lasagna pan. After carefully inspecting it for any cheese, he rewarded Ralph with the morsel. Parrots are lactose intolerant, and along with doggie pee, I didn’t need parrot poop all over my house.
“Did you have a chance to read the lawsuit?” asked Zack.
“Only the section that mentions the letters the buyers supposedly received.”
“Did you know that when a lawsuit is filed, it becomes public record?”
As usual, Zack’s brain overflowed with all sorts of knowledge that seemed unusual for a photojournalist—unless at some point in his past he’d sued someone or been sued. However, I decided to save that conversation for a future date. No point opening another can of fish bait this evening, given our earlier discussion regarding his spying duties. “Meaning?”
“We can probably find the lawsuit on the Internet.”
After finishing the cleanup, I made Alex and Nick promise to walk Mephisto before they hunkered down to a post-homework evening of video games, then I returned with Zack to his apartment.
Within minutes we found a treasure trove of information about the lawsuit, thanks to the media already picking up the story. “Certainly didn’t take them long,” I said, scanning down the column of articles that had popped up in our Google search. Not only did we find the lawsuit posted in its entirety, within hours of the suit being filed, the story had gone global.
“Is it any wonder?” asked Zack as we read through the lawsuit. “This has the makings of a blockbuster horror movie. I’m betting the bidding war has already begun for the story rights.”
According to the suit, the author of the letters, who called himself The Sentinel, claimed his family had kept watch over the house since it was first built in the nineteen twenties. He’d taken over the duties after his father’s death two decades earlier. The Sentinel claimed he told Cloris and Gregg to move because now that their daughter had gone off to college, it was time to fill the house with fresh young blood, something the house needed to sustain itself while awaiting its second coming.
“The house’s second coming? What does that mean?” I asked.
Zack shrugged. “Beats me. The guy is obviously nuts.”
The lawsuit claimed the Sentinel went on to say in one of the three letters that both he and the house were extremely unhappy regarding the renovations done by the new owners. “How can a house be unhappy?” I asked.
“You can’t look at this through a lens of logic,” said Zack. “The guy is deranged. I can understand why the new owners refuse to move in. He’s made overt threats to them and their children.”
“He’s also insinuating something is hidden in the walls and the attic. Wouldn’t the contractors have uncovered whatever he’s alluding to during the renovations?”
“I suppose it depends on the extent of the renovations. If they didn’t open any walls, something could be hidden behind one of them.”
“I was in the attic once. It’s bare sheathing, studs, and rafters. Cloris and Gregg only used it to store their Christmas lawn ornaments. There’s no place to hide anything.”
We continued reading to the end of the lawsuit. “Interesting that the letters stopped after the third one,” said Zack. Months had gone by without the new owners hearing further from The Sentinel. “Maybe he died or was arrested for another crime and is now in prison.”
“Or maybe he never existed,” I suggested. “What we haven’t found in our Internet search are the actual letters posted anywhere online, only summaries and pull quotes. What if the new buyers are scam artists?”
“Another possibility. The police will investigate. I’m sure they’ll check for fingerprints on the letters— ”
“If there really are letters.”
“If the new owners can’t produce the letters, this becomes a fraud investigation.”
“And if the letters exist?”
“The police will get writing samples from Cloris, Gregg, and the new owners.”
“They’re certainly not going to find Cloris or Gregg’s fingerprints. Why would they send the letters? This is one huge headache for them, not to mention how much it’s going to cost them to defend themselves.”
“I know, but as absurd as it sounds, the police have to eliminate them as suspects.”
I wondered if Zack’s knowledge of police procedure stemmed from personal experience or from watching Law & Order. I filed that topic in the back of my brain for another day. “What can we do to help?”
Zack raised an eyebrow. “We?”
“Cloris is my closest friend. She saved my life. Literally. I have to do whatever I can to help her clear her name, and you’ve got all sorts of professional contacts—”
He raised the other eyebrow. “Alphabet agency contacts?”
“I didn’t say that, but since you brought it up...”
Zack huffed out a lungful of exasperation with a chuckle along for the ride. “As hard as you find it to believe, I do
n’t have those sorts of contacts, but what I can do is see if Patricia has any suggestions for them.”
I kissed the tip of his nose. “I’m sure Cloris would appreciate that.”
“That’s all I get?”
“Come to think of it, I do also owe you for rescuing us from Thanksgiving Hell.”
“Damn straight.” Zack pulled me into his arms and initiated a real kiss. I certainly didn’t object. Afterwards he nodded in the direction of the apartment door. “Should I lock it?”
How I needed some real alone time with Zack! But as I was about to give in to temptation, out of the corner of my eye I caught a glimpse of the folding table covered in snapshots and newspaper clippings. Guilt immediately tossed an icy wet blanket over my raging hormones.
Zack followed the direction of my gaze and sighed. “Business before pleasure?”
I nodded.
He dropped his arms to his sides and sighed again. Then he stepped over to his desk and retrieved two pairs of white cotton gloves from a drawer. Handing one pair to me, he said, “You sort; I’ll scan.”
“Are these really necessary?” I asked as I donned the gloves.
“It’s a precautionary measure. Any oils and acids from our skin will speed up the deterioration process, and this stuff is already in really bad shape.”
We walked over to the folding table, and as Zack explained his system to me, he pointed from pile to pile. “These have already been scanned, these are the ones I separated out to scan but haven’t gotten to yet, and these are photos we needn’t bother with.”
“Why not?”
“They’re either out of focus, duplicates, or too far gone to use.”
I pointed to the dozen photos spread out on the table. “And these?”
“The ones I was about to make decisions on when you arrived before dinner.” He nodded in the direction of the suitcase. “There are probably several hundred more to go through when we’re finished with these.”
“Then we’d better get to work.”
To a background score of classical jazz instrumentals, Zack and I worked for several hours, sorting and scanning the snapshots, newspaper clippings, and various other mementos of Carmen Cordova’s Cuban heritage. The work was tedious, made that much worse by my poor Spanish skills and the struggle to decipher nearly undecipherable handwriting on the backs of many of the photos.