by Susan Conant
“Lemonade would be great. But I really came down here to help. Put me to work!”
The three of us spent the next five minutes ferrying appetizers and drinks to the yard. While Steve was out there starting the grill, I put the salad together, and Zara kept me company.
“Any luck finding out more about Frank Sorensen?” I asked.
“Not really. He’s not on Facebook, at least not under his real name. Gil Sorensen isn’t, either. Quinn gave me a list of the things that were stolen. I looked on eBay and Craigslist, but I couldn’t find anything.”
The back doorbell rang, but Izzy made the bell unnecessary. She started barking, bouncing, and working herself into a state of high excitement. Calm, demure Izzy?
“That’ll be John,” Zara shouted. “Izzy, cool it! Holly, I’ll let him in.”
John Wilson proved to be yet one more good-looking member of Rita and Zara’s family and one more carefully groomed one, too. He was maybe five ten, with even features, short sandy hair, dark brown eyes, and a deep, even tan. He wore a starched white shirt, a yellow tie, and a lightweight suit exactly the color of his skin. As he reached out to Izzy, who had the nerve to jump on him, I noticed that his hands matched her front paws in the sense that man and dog had manicured nails. His smile showed teeth so even and white that I wondered whether they’d been capped. I reminded myself that his job as a drug-company rep probably required a polished appearance. To his credit, instead of trying to protect his light-colored suit from Izzy’s paws, he grinned, put his face right in hers, and accepted her gleeful licking.
“Izzy, off!” Zara finally said. “Enough! Holly, this is John Wilson, my cousin. John, Holly Winter. You’re staying here. We both are. We’re all eating dinner here. Outdoors. You better change clothes. Where’s your suitcase?”
With Izzy’s paws back on the floor, John shook my hand and thanked me for letting him stay with us. “Just got off the plane.” He went on say that he’d rented a car at Logan.
I had him move the car from the street to our driveway, and when he got back in with a rather large suitcase, I showed him to a guest room on the second floor. By the time I got back downstairs, Rita, Quinn, MaryJo, Monty, Vicky, and, somewhat to my surprise, Uncle Oscar had arrived and were all out in the yard. For the next twenty minutes or so, I was busy supplying drinks, passing around hummus and the other appetizers, and making everyone welcome.
Vicky complained that the first chair she chose was uncomfortable, and when she moved to another chair, she shifted back and forth while making a sour face. “Zara, does that dog have to be here?” she demanded. “It’s not very sanitary to have a dog around while we’re eating. We could all catch something.”
Instead of informing her that our five big dogs played in this yard all the time, I said, “Another martini, Aunt Vicky?” Maybe you’ll get dead drunk and pass out.
“Not quite yet, Holly, thank you. And the next time, a hint less vermouth, if you would.”
Fortunately, John Wilson appeared, and the whole family, even Vicky, greeted him warmly. Izzy, instead of jumping on John, flung herself malamute fashion at his feet, and he obliged by rubbing her tummy. When John offered his congratulations to Quinn, whom he was meeting for the first time, I hoped that we’d have a happy discussion of the wedding, but as soon as John had shaken hands with MaryJo and Monty, Vicky launched into an account of the burglary and of Frank Sorensen’s subsequent death.
Looking annoyed, Quinn got up and joined Steve at the grill, which was at the far end of the yard, and I went indoors for more appetizers. Returning, I noticed that Rita was pale with exhaustion, her skin white beneath her careful makeup. I wanted to do anything to make her feel better, but by then, John was asking questions about the burglary, and Vicky, MaryJo, Monty, and Zara were answering him.
“How’d he know that the house would be empty?” John asked. “Or maybe he didn’t care.”
With unusual energy, Uncle Oscar said, “It wasn’t empty. I was there the whole time. I was upstairs in my room except when I went to the kitchen for some ice cream.”
Did Uncle Oscar remember getting the ice cream? Or was he saying what he’d been told? I couldn’t tell.
“To answer your question, John,” Rita said, “we think that he looked on that damned Facebook.”
“Blame Facebook!” Zara said. “Blame me!”
I watched Izzy, who kept her eyes on Zara but took no action.
“No one is blaming you,” MaryJo said.
“I did post that we were all going to Vertex,” Zara admitted. “And when we got there. And I posted some pictures. Rita, if it was my fault, I’m sorry.”
“Of course it wasn’t your fault,” Rita said. “How were you to know?”
“Common sense,” Vicky said.
“Aunt Vicky, let up,” John told her. “Zara, I saw on Facebook that someone tried to steal Izzy. Could that have been the same guy?”
It was a relief to hear the idea spoken aloud. Even so, I said, “But in that case, why take Willie? Who’d mistake a Scottie for a Lab? And if it was Frank Sorensen who tried to steal Izzy, he’d already seen Izzy. He’d’ve known that Willie wasn’t Izzy.”
“The damned things all look alike to me,” Vicky said.
To my annoyance, the conversation then degenerated into pointless questions and guesses about the burglary. Hadn’t the neighbors seen or heard anything? Had we noticed any strangers lurking in the neighborhood? Steve said that he’d seen a woman who looked like the young Elizabeth Taylor but that she hadn’t been lurking. Rita and Quinn added that since it was August, some neighbors were away on vacation. New people in our area could be house sitters and pet sitters. Also, since rentals turned over at this time of year, some strangers were bound to be new neighbors.
Dinner initially had the same happy effect on our guests as it does on our dogs, not that the dogs harp on a burglary when they’re supposed to be celebrating a forthcoming wedding. But they enjoy eating, and so did our guests. John displayed what I thought was a salesperson’s slickness in drawing out MaryJo and Monty, but at least he made them comfortable and got them talking about Cadillac Mountain, Otter Cliffs, and other famous spots in Acadia National Park that he said he’d loved too. With visible enthusiasm, he heard about their visit to Lexington and Concord. Steve, who was determined to like Quinn, asked him all about his new office, and I had considerable success in doling out positive reinforcement to Vicky when she exhibited target behaviors or approximations thereof, which is to say that I smiled at her, refilled her wine glass, or nodded in agreement when she addressed pleasant or neutral remarks to Zara—or even had a friendly expression when she looked at Zara.
Vicky, however, outfoxed me by redirecting her hostility elsewhere: She got in a dig at Steve and me by commenting on the informality of the meal (“How rustic!”), and she went after John Wilson about the failure of his marriage. “John had the most beautiful wife you’ve ever seen,” she told me. “Cathy was a gorgeous, gorgeous girl. I’ll never forget their wedding. There’ll never be a bride more beautiful than she was.”
Take that, Rita.
“And,” Vicky added, “John let her get away. Didn’t you, John?”
Zara, who was seated next to me, whispered in my ear. “Cathy was a drug addict and a thief. Otherwise, she was the perfect wife.”
When the time came to serve dessert, I was delighted. I’d had more than enough of Vicky, who made me long to have the dogs freed from their temporary confinement. Yes, dogs sometimes raise their hackles, bare their teeth, snarl, and even fight, but they never sneak in painful gibes, and they never go out of their way to make people squirm or feel small. Given a choice between an honest growl and a devious verbal dig, I’ll take the growl any day. And my dogs almost never growl.
chapter fourteen
The outside sensor for our new wireless weather station was on the picnic table when everyone except Vicky pitched in to carry the remains of dinner inside and to ferry the fruit salad, i
ce cream, coffee, and such outside. The weather station was a hostess gift from Zara, a present to thank Steve and me for our hospitality. She’d given it to us the previous day. Steve, who loves gadgets, had set it up and made sure that the indoor unit was reading the signals from the outdoor sensor, but we hadn’t yet mounted the sensor on a wall. Instead, we’d placed it on the picnic table, which was, I suppose, a silly place to leave it, but it was definitely there when I spooned fruit salad and scooped ice cream into our bowls.
Since there was no reason to keep a close eye on the little plastic unit, I didn’t, and in any case, I was soon diverted by Uncle Oscar, who amazed me by standing up and announcing, “I don’t want to let the evening end without thanking Holly and Steve and without paying a tribute to my grandniece and my new grandnephew.” He cleared his throat, smiled, and began to sing the romantic old song about a bicycle built for two. This from a man who’d spent most of his time in Cambridge asleep!
Anyway, with Uncle Oscar’s encouragement, our whole group joined in, and so successful was the bicycle built for two that with Uncle Oscar leading us in his on-key tenor, we sang along with him for four or five other songs, including “Oh! Susanna” and “Yankee Doodle.” MaryJo and Zara turned out to have lovely voices and a shared gift for singing harmony.
When Uncle Oscar launched into “Goodnight, Irene,” Rita drew me aside and murmured, “Holly, I’m fading, but I don’t want to spoil Uncle Oscar’s show.”
“He’s wonderful,” I said.
“He’s an Italian-American Pete Seeger, isn’t he? This is what he used to be like. I’m glad you’re getting to see him at his best. Anyway, I’ll just slip out through the kitchen. Thank you. I really appreciate everything you and Steve are doing.”
She quietly made her way up the stairs to the house. When the song ended, conversation resumed, but the sense remained of the individuals having become a group. In particular, MaryJo and Zara, bonded by harmony, had an animated chat during the course of which MaryJo remarked on Zara’s unusual name.
“I’m named for my mother’s college roommate,” Zara told her. “Is Quinn a family name? Your maiden name?”
MaryJo laughed a little nervously. “Oh, we didn’t name him that. I don’t know where he got it.”
I did: Bob Dylan’s “The Mighty Quinn.”
“He was christened Ishmael,” MaryJo said.
An innocent statement, huh? To say that Quinn overreacted to his mother’s revelation would be a whopping understatement. Rising to his feet, he took a couple of paces and then raised his right arm, bellowed, and drove his fist into the nearest object, which happened to be the wooden fence that separates our yard from the driveway.
Because of my friendship with Rita, I understand quite a lot about the value systems of psychotherapists—less than I understand about the value systems of various dog breeds, but more than a shrink-naive person grasps, possibly because shrinks’ values are weird and seemingly senseless. Dogs, I might mention, have practical and rational values. Border collies, for instance, believe in hard work and intelligence as effective means for imposing order on the universe. In the Alaskan malamute value hierarchy, food is right at the top, followed by companionship, entertainment, and frigid temperatures.
Psychotherapists, in contrast, place a high value on the expression of emotion and are never happier than when people are either crying hard or putting their feelings into words. As a general rule, smashing fists into fences is frowned upon, especially if the feeling-venter breaks his knuckles, as Quinn seemed to have done, but as Rita had explained to me, Quinn was in, I quote, “expressive psychotherapy” and was doing what she called “deep work,” and he’d certainly expressed his anger clearly and unambiguously. Besides, he’d probably earned shrink value points by smashing his fist into our fence instead of into his mother’s face.
Because we’d been keeping bottled water, soft drinks, and the white wine chilled, there was plenty of ice handy, and when Quinn had finished leaping around and groaning and clutching his hand to his stomach, Steve borrowed a clean white handkerchief from Uncle Oscar and fashioned an ice pack that he applied to Quinn’s hand.
“I wasn’t supposed to say that,” MaryJo told me.
“It was a simple enough request, MaryJo,” Monty said. “I don’t know why you couldn’t keep your trap shut.”
Addressing me, MaryJo said, “I really don’t understand my son at all. You won’t tell Rita, will you?”
“Of course not,” I said. “And there’s nothing wrong with the name Ishmael.” Ishmael was Abraham’s son by his wife’s maid, wasn’t he? And once Abraham’s wife, Sarah, produced a son, Isaac, trouble ensued. So, Quinn might’ve preferred the name Isaac to Ishmael, but not to the extent, I thought, of slamming his fist into other people’s fences.
Zara said, “Moby-Dick.”
Evidently misinterpreting the word Dick, MaryJo looked shocked.
“‘Call me Ishmael,’” I hastened to quote. “It’s the opening sentence of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick.” Sufficient? “The book,” I added. “The novel.”
This little interchange took place out of Quinn’s—Ishmael’s?—hearing. Steve had rather forcefully led him indoors to examine the injured hand in bright light.
“We won’t say anything to Rita,” Zara assured MaryJo. “It should be Quinn’s decision. If he doesn’t want to tell Rita, we won’t. Mom? John? Uncle Oscar? Promise?”
Uncle Oscar nodded.
“Of course,” John said.
“Ludicrous,” said Vicky. “But if that’s what he wants.”
“Steve won’t say anything,” I said, “and neither will I.”
This ridiculous episode of Quinn’s real name and his injured hand brought the evening to an end. Steve and Quinn decided that Quinn had bruised his knuckles but probably hadn’t broken any bones and didn’t need to go to an emergency room. Still, suffering more from embarrassment than from physical pain, Quinn decided to go home, and his parents, Uncle Oscar, and Vicky left with him. John and Zara wanted to help us clean up, but we let them carry only a few things from the yard to the kitchen before insisting that we’d do the rest ourselves. We said the usual things that gracious hosts say in this situation: No, no, you’re our guests, it won’t take us any time, and we know where everything goes, by which we meant that we could hardly wait to be rid of them so we could be alone with each other and our dogs.
To my relief, instead of hanging around, John and Zara decided to walk Izzy to Harvard Square, where they’d have a drink and maybe listen to some live music. I wondered whether Zara wanted to go to the Square to enjoy herself by being there or to acquire pictures and status updates for Facebook, but then I realized that from her viewpoint, being there and being there on Facebook were one and the same.
It was after they’d left, when Steve had moved the grill to the driveway to keep it away from the dogs and when we’d put away the food, loaded the dishwasher, and cleaned up the kitchen, that I checked the new weather station, which sat on the windowsill above the sink. “Steve? The weather station isn’t showing the outdoor temperature. Damn it! If it had to break, couldn’t it have waited until Zara was back in New York? Now she’ll see that her present has quit working.”
Steve never minds when electronic devices malfunction; he welcomes the chance to fix them. In this case, he said that the weather station probably needed to be reset, and when we went to yard with the dogs and some wine, the first thing he did was to look for the outdoor sensor.
“It was right here on the picnic table no time ago,” I told him. “I noticed it when I was serving dessert.”
“Well, it’s not here now.”
Our first thought was that John or Zara had carried it inside, but Steve insisted on looking in the kitchen even though we’d have seen the sensor when were cleaning up.
“Steve, if the sensor were in the kitchen, the indoor unit would still show a supposedly outdoor temperature, wouldn’t it?”
“It should
,” he said. “But the indoor unit could’ve lost the signal. There could be a problem with either of the units.”
There followed a fruitless search for the missing device. Although our outside lights provide good illumination, we used a flashlight to check under the tables and chairs, and we looked everywhere else, including in Sammy’s and Rowdy’s mouths. After going through the trash, Steve brought the indoor unit outside, reset it, and made it look for the signals of its missing half.
“The dogs couldn’t have swallowed it,” I said. “Besides, India and Lady wouldn’t, and Rowdy and Sammy are too interested in the food smells to bother with a plastic box. It’s what? Two inches by three inches? It wouldn’t have gone down smoothly. We’d have noticed if one of them had been chewing on it. We’d have heard. It’s just not here.”
“Someone took it,” he said. “Someone walked off with it by mistake.”
“Presumably by mistake,” I said. “But what could anyone mistake it for?”
We sat in silence for a few moments.
Reluctantly, I said, “Rita warned us that John was a pathological liar. You don’t suppose that he’s also—”
“A kleptomaniac? But we don’t know that he—”
“We don’t know that anyone took it. If we have to, we’ll order a new one. We have better things to think about. Or worse things.” Lowering my voice, I said, “Quinn. For a start, do you think that their marriage license is valid?”
“He could’ve gone to court to change his name.”
“Maybe he did. Or maybe the license is valid even if he didn’t. He wasn’t pretending to be someone else. Steve, what about his medical license?”
“Holly, that’s beside the point. The point is, what kind of guy gives himself a new name and keeps the old one secret from the woman he’s marrying? And slams his fist into a fence when his mother lets the old name slip out? It’s not normal. It’s crazy.”
“He’s a poseur. We’ve known that. The affectations. Always calling his car a Lexus instead a car. Rita has to notice how pretentious he is. I know that she does. But she wants to marry him anyway. She loves him, and I think that he loves her, at least to the extent that he can. Besides, he saved Kimi’s life. Without him, she could have bled to death. Steve, I think that his feeling for Rita and for the baby is genuine. God, I hope so.”