The Misfortunes of Others

by Gloria Dank

  By the same author:

  FRIENDS TILL THE END

  GOING OUT IN STYLE

  AS THE SPARKS FLY UPWARD

  A PERFECT CRIME BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY DOUBLEDAY

  a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  666 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10103

  DOUBLEDAY is a trademark of Doubleday, a division of Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing Group, Inc.

  All of the characters in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Dank, Gloria.

  The misfortunes of others: a Bernard and Snooky

  mystery / by Gloria Dank.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Perfect crime book.”

  I. Title.

  PS3554.A5684M57 1993

  813′.54—dc20 92–27139

  eISBN: 978-0-307-81668-9

  Copyright © 1993 by Gloria Dank

  ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

  v3.1

  We all have enough strength to bear the misfortunes of others.

  —François, duc de la Rochefoucauld

  To Leif and Jacob

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  ONE

  THE PHONE rang at seven o’clock in the morning. Maya put down her pencil and took off her reading glasses.

  “Hello?”

  “Collect call for Maya Woodruff from Jean Jacques Rousseau,” said the operator, her voice made tinny from the distance.

  “I accept the charges.”

  “Thank you. Go ahead.”

  “Maya.”

  “Snooky, you beast.”

  “Did you know that Rousseau was born in Switzerland? Here I always thought he was French.”

  “Did you call me at this hour to tell me that?”

  “This hour? What time is it there?”

  “It’s early in the morning.”

  “Well, it’s early in the morning here too.”

  “Where are you? What part of the planet?”

  “I’m in St. Martin,” her younger brother said. He sounded cheerful. Of course, Snooky always did sound cheerful. “French Antilles. It’s beautiful here, Maya. You would love it. Sun, sand and surf. I’m visiting friends.”

  “Well, of course you are. When’s the last time you ever paid for a hotel room?”

  “You sound grumpy, Maya. It’s not like you. Is everything okay?”

  “Yes, everything is fine.”

  “Where’s Bernard?”

  “Snooky, I can’t believe I’m paying for this conversation. Think for a moment. It’s seven o’clock in the morning. Bernard is asleep.”

  “Oh.”

  There was silence, broken only by the crackle of the telephone line.

  “You don’t sound like yourself, Maya. You sound extremely grumpy. Usually you’re delighted when I call, no matter what time of day. I had a psychic intuition I should call you, so I did. Something is wrong, isn’t it? Is it you and Bernard? Are you getting divorced? I always thought you were such a solid couple.”

  “Bernard and I are not getting divorced.”

  “Are you ill? Is one of you sick? Should I come immediately?”

  “Neither of us is sick.”

  There was a brief silence.

  “You’re pregnant, aren’t you?”

  “Snooky, you are amazing. You can tell whether or not I’m pregnant over a telephone line long-distance from the Caribbean?”

  “You are pregnant.”

  “Yes.”

  There was a pause. “I’ll be there later today. Don’t bother to pick me up. I’ll rent a car in New York.”

  “Snooky—”

  Maya was left talking to a vacuum. The telephone crackled and hummed ethereally, the sound of the electronic muses. She sighed and placed it back on its hook.

  “Snooky diagnosed my pregnancy in a two-minute telephone call from St. Martin,” Maya told her husband later that day.

  Bernard, a large man with dark hair and a bristling beard, took a sip of coffee from the oversized coffee cup which he favored. He looked grumpy. “I assume we paid for that call?”

  “He knew right away, Bernard. Don’t you think that’s … well … unusual?”

  “Everything about Snooky is unusual. Unusual, you understand, in the sense of not quite normal.”

  “He really is psychic. Mother always said he was.”

  Bernard folded his newspaper. “How are you feeling today?”

  “Really awful.”

  “I’m sorry. Can I get anything for you? How about some decaf?”

  “I don’t want to look at coffee.” Maya scribbled irritably on a large legal pad she was holding on her lap. “I don’t want to look at tea. I don’t want to look at anything except maybe some celery. And in about two minutes I’m going back to bed for the rest of the day.”

  “I think we’re running out of celery.” Bernard cocked a worried eye toward the kitchen.

  “Go get some more.”

  “I never knew celery was a miracle drug for pregnant women.”

  “It’s not a miracle drug. It happens to be the only thing that settles my stomach and keeps away that awful fainty feeling. That blackout low-blood-sugar thing. Now leave me alone for a little while, Bernard. I’m struggling to get this article done, and it’s not easy.” Maya worked for a small magazine called The Animal World. “I don’t see how I can possibly write anything decent while I’m feeling like this. I’d like to see you work under these conditions.”

  “I haven’t gotten anything done for the last two months either, you know, sweetheart.”

  “Well, at least you don’t feel like this.” Maya leaned her head wearily against her hand. “I have no joy of living. I’ve lost my esprit. I have no good cheer. I am no longer a happy camper.”

  “You’re in your first trimester. You’re not supposed to be a happy camper.”

  “I don’t see how something that’s only a few thousand cells big can make a person feel this way.”

  “Can I do anything? Can I give you a back rub? Can I bring you some herbal tea?” Bernard hovered lovingly over her.

  “You can call all my so-called friends and tell them that when they told me the first few months weren’t so bad, they were wrong. Oh, by the way.” Maya lifted her head. “Snooky is coming. He’ll be here later on today. He didn’t say when.”

  “He never does say when. He just crawls up to the front door, like a cockroach.”

  “We’ll need stuff for dinner. I can’t think about it. Do you mind doing the shopping?”

  “No. I’ll make up a list.”

  “Get celery. And salad stuff. Oh, and Bernard—?”

  “Yes?”

  “Get about a million shrimp. I think I could go for some shrimp tonight.”

  Bernard was standing in the kitchen later that afternoon, watching the shrimp, cleaned, shelled and deveined, doing a macabre and ghostly dance in the pot of boiling water, when there was a hollow banging sound from the vicinity of the front door. He glanced at his watch, which read 5:00 P.M., and made his way slowly down the hall to the foyer. There were more loud banging sounds. Bernard did not hurry. When they had bought the old blue-and-white Victorian in a state of ill repair, worn down by the cen
turies and by the casual abuse of previous owners, there had been an elderly doorbell which chimed loudly when a button was pushed. Bernard had disconnected it shortly after he and Maya moved in. He loathed doorbells—agents of the devil, he called them. He hated jumping every time the bell sounded, he hated those particular chimes and he hated the artificial cheeriness of it. To Bernard, someone at the front door was not a cause for celebration. For a long time he had left the button there untouched, and many visitors and deliverymen had spent hours pushing it before going away unanswered, but finally Maya had persuaded him to put up a brass lion’s-head knocker of impressive weight and stature, which leered into a visitor’s face and (Bernard felt) made them think twice before knocking. It produced a very satisfactory brass clanging sound which, unlike the doorbell, he could ignore with equanimity. He had spent many happy hours ignoring it, closeted away in his study upstairs.

  Now as he came into the foyer, it became apparent that the banging sound was not coming from the lion’s-head knocker, but from an area several inches above the floor. Bernard grimaced and slowly unlocked the door. It opened to reveal a giant brown teddy bear.

  Bernard contemplated the teddy bear for a moment.

  “Snooky.”

  His brother-in-law’s head appeared next to the bear’s, an unlikely Medusa. “Bernard. So good to see you.”

  “Did you have to kick the door?”

  “I couldn’t reach that very impressive brass knocker you have there with my feet. I’m sure you understand.”

  “Come on in.”

  “Thanks so much.”

  Snooky put the bear down carefully on an antique hat stand with a wooden seat in a corner of the foyer, placed his suitcase on the floor, and turned to embrace Bernard in a tearful hug.

  “Bernard, I … I can’t express how I feel.”

  Bernard stood woodenly, in pained amazement.

  “I’m so happy for the two of you, I could cry.”

  “Please take your hands off me.”

  Snooky wiped his eyes and stood back. “I brought you a bear.”

  “So I see.” The bear was hard to miss, lolling drunkenly on the hat stand.

  “I know I’ve been an uncle before”—Snooky and Maya’s older brother, William, a corporate lawyer who lived in California, had two small children—“but as I guess you know, I can’t stand Anna and Buster. They drive me crazy. I’m hoping to have a better relationship with your child. I know I could be a good uncle if I tried. I’m starting now. I don’t want Maya to do anything. I’m going to take over running the house. She’ll sit for nine months with her feet up. You’ll see, I’m going to do everything.”

  Bernard stared at him gloomily. “Seven months.”

  “Seven months. I would have been here the first two months if you had told me. Did she tell you I knew over the phone? Do we have a connection, Maya and I, or what? Did she tell you I was coming?”

  “She warned me.”

  “Where is she now? I want to show her the bear.”

  “Snooky, she’s pregnant. Don’t show her the bear. It might scare her, and that would disturb the child.” Bernard stared at the plain brown suitcase Snooky had brought with him. “Since when do you have luggage? I’ve never seen that before.”

  Snooky, on his wanderings across the country and to various foreign lands, visited them often in the little town of Ridgewood, Connecticut. He had graduated from college several years before and had never yet held a job, so it made visiting very easy. He had inherited enough money from his parents’ untimely death to get by in the style to which he had always been accustomed—as his older brother William said, “He spent his life in training to do nothing”—and part of that lifestyle was to wander from place to place, never staying anywhere too long, renting instead of buying, visiting instead of settling down. The one place he returned to year after year was his older sister’s rickety old Victorian house in the idyllic suburb which was Ridgewood, a town of winding lanes, crystalline lakes surrounded by woods, and houses of every shape and color, from thatched cottages to modern steel-and-glass geodesic domes, tucked away into the scenic landscape. Snooky usually traveled light, which in his case meant weightless, i.e. no luggage at all, showing up at Maya and Bernard’s front door with grand plans to borrow a toothbrush and wear his brother-in-law’s clothes—not that they fit him, but he would wear them anyway, Bernard’s oversized outfits draped luxuriously on Snooky’s gangly frame.

  “Don’t tell me you brought your own clothes,” Bernard said.

  “No, no, don’t be ridiculous. It’s presents, Bernard—gifts. Small bits of this and that for Maya. My sister. My pregnant sister.”

  “Where’d you get the suitcase?”

  “I bought it at the airport. Nice, isn’t it? I’ll leave it here when I go. No point in traveling with luggage, it just means more waiting in line when you get off the plane.”

  Bernard led the way into the kitchen. “Maya’s asleep right now. At least she’s lying down. I don’t want you disturbing her, Snooky. She hasn’t been feeling well for weeks.”

  “So I gathered on the phone.” Snooky flopped down at the big oak table in the middle of the room. He glanced around in satisfaction at the big country kitchen, with gleaming pots hanging from the ceiling, ceramic tiles on the walls and vining plants tumbling in graceful green loops from the shelves. “This kitchen never changes. Nothing ever changes here. You fixed this place up nicely when you moved in, and now nothing is ever different. I love it here.”

  “I hope you don’t love it too much.” Bernard stirred the shrimp gloomily. “Maya said she wanted shrimp tonight. I’ve never made shrimp before. Is an hour too long to cook it?”

  “An hour?”

  “Too long, isn’t it?”

  “It depends. Is it the four-foot-long, twenty-pound jumbo shrimp of the Frisian Islands?” Snooky got up and leaned over the stove, to be greeted by a gust of steam from the pot. “No. Well, in that case, an hour is too long. By a factor of twelve.”

  “I don’t trust shrimp. You can get sick from it. I wish Maya wouldn’t eat it, but when she wants to eat, I want her to have whatever she wants, as long as it’s not obviously poisonous. Do you think it’s safe by now?”

  “Yes. I think it’s safe. It’s not edible, but it’s certainly safe. What else do you have in the fridge?” Snooky opened the door. “What is this, Bernard? A festival of celery?”

  Bernard shrugged.

  “Do you have any rice?”

  “I think there’s some in the cupboard.”

  Snooky rummaged around. “This is the most pathetic thing I’ve ever seen. This pantry looks like … well, like you’ve been doing all the shopping for two months. Never mind, I’ll find something for dinner. But for now, let’s talk, Bernard. We so rarely get a chance to talk, just the two of us. Tell me, how does it feel? How does it feel, knowing you’re about to become a father? I know how excited I am about being a new uncle. How do you feel?”

  Bernard stared at him in glum silence. This was what he hated most about Snooky’s visits—this, and the trail of misfortune and sudden death which always seemed to accompany his appearances. Bernard shared his soul with few people, and his brother-in-law was not one of them.

  “I feel pretty,” he said at last.

  “No, really.”

  “I feel frightened.”

  Snooky was interested in this. “Frightened? Is that so? Increased responsibility? The care and feeding of a helpless newborn on your hands?”

  “The prospect of you and William coming to stay permanently.”

  “Well, you don’t have to worry about William.” Snooky took out a dog-eared package of brown rice and inspected it from all sides. “This should be okay. Anyway, you don’t have to worry about him. You’ll be lucky if he flies in from the West Coast to inspect the newest member of the family, see if the baby is up to his high standards. Has Maya told him yet?”

  “No.”

  Snooky was gratified. He flas
hed Bernard a pleased smile. “I was first, then,” he said dreamily. “The first one she told. William doesn’t even know. That’s wonderful.”

  “She didn’t exactly tell you.”

  “No. I guessed. It’s a little gift I have. Psychic, you know. I can foretell the outcome of horse races, too. That’s why I don’t gamble. It wouldn’t be fair.”

  Bernard was not impressed. “Can you foretell when you’ll be terminating this visit?”

  Snooky turned back to the cupboard. “The future is hazy, Bernard. Hazy, and unexpected. Certain things are difficult to predict. It depends a lot on my sister. If she’s really not feeling well, I may be here for a long time. A very long time.”

  “Everyone says she should feel better in the second trimester. That’s in a few weeks.”

  “Could you tell me when she wakes up?” Snooky lifted the cover again and peered doubtfully into the pot. “I have a few little things I brought for her. I don’t think you have to worry about these shrimp, Bernard, they’re definitely dead.”

  When Maya opened her eyes an hour later, she was confronted by the sight of an enormous brown bear leaning over her, its flat button eyes gazing at her sympathetically. She smiled.

  “Thank you, Snooky. I love it.”

  “Well,” said her brother, putting it down on her bed and sprawling beside it, “it’s big, at least. It’s the biggest one they had.”

  “I love it. Have you named it yet?”

  “No. I left that up to you. I was too busy planning the games I’m going to play with my new niece or nephew. Do you know which it is?”

  “No, and if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.” Maya caressed the soft fur. “How about … hmmmm. How about Mabel?”

  “Mabel? Maya, this is a boy bear.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Of course I don’t know, but—well, aren’t they all?”

  Maya looked stubborn. A faint crease appeared between her eyebrows. “I want to call her Mabel.”

  “Mabel it is. And a good name, too. A fine name. Mabel. Yes. I hope the baby likes her.”

  “I’m sure Mabel will be a big hit.”