Collateral Damage

by Michael Bowen

  “I told Carrie to close the store at noon, actually,” Marjorie said. “If this morning’s sales cover the light bill, I’ll be pleasantly surprised. Snow they shrug off overnight in Detroit or Chicago paralyzes D.C. for a week.”

  “That does ring a bell,” Helmsing said, smiling slightly.

  Patrice Murchison Armour Helmsing was almost six feet tall. Her white skirt-and-jacket suit and the gold rims of her glasses stood out strikingly against her obsidian skin. Gentle waves of hair blacker than her body framed prominent cheekbones that kept her fifties-plus face from seeming fleshly. Eyes with charcoal-flecked, chocolate brown pupils took in the world with a steady, measured gaze.

  Helmsing had lived away from Washington for twenty of the last twenty-five years, but she still referred to her family as “the Washington Murchisons.” Black Murchisons were free residents of Washington, D.C., ten years before South Carolina fired on Fort Sumter. A generation later they were financially comfortable, and by the 1920s they were rich—part of a class as self-conscious as any collection of blue bloods in Boston or New York. They ran charities, sat on civic committees, funded scholarships, decorated corporate boards, and spent money and sweat battling for civil rights.

  A mantle of clouds turned the sky eggshell white from one horizon to the other as Marjorie and Helmsing crawled through half-plowed streets toward Calvert Manor. It was nearly three p.m. when they parked just outside the eight-foot evergreen hedge shielding the property. As soon as they reached the top of the driveway, they spotted a solitary, parka-bundled figure thirty feet away, vigorously attacking the asphalt with an ice chopper.

  “Which Shepherd is that?” Helmsing asked.

  “Catherine, I’m guessing,” Marjorie said.

  “Goddammit! Break, you miserable sonofabitch!” the figure barked at the ice.

  “Correction,” Marjorie said to Helmsing. “Cindy.”

  Five steps father down the driveway Marjorie raised her voice so that Cindy could hear it over the ice chopper’s tinny ring.

  “Where’s Catherine?”

  “Her serene highness stood me up,” Cindy panted. “About half an hour ago she breezed back here from someplace where people’s shoes match their purses.”

  “Where is she now?”

  “Inside. She was properly mortified and pathetically keen to pitch in, but I told her that perspiration wouldn’t coordinate well with the Laura Ashley Junior League Collection getup she had on. I sent her into the house to make herself useful there.”

  Sweat pasted Cindy’s hair to her forehead. A deep red suffused her face. Marjorie repented her mental disparagement of Cindy’s aptitude for hard work and was searching for some gracious way to say so when an inch-thick slab of ice the size of Marjorie’s back broke free. Spidery fissures snaked through the remaining layer. Cindy attacked these with atavistic avidity, quickly exposing another twelve square feet of asphalt.

  A Lexus pulled into the driveway.

  “Wilcox and Jenkins,” Cindy said. “Trustee and realtor.”

  When the two women who got out of the Lexus had made their way down the driveway, Cindy managed perfunctory introductions and offered distracted contributions to a bit of small talk, all punctuated by clanging blows of the chopper blade.

  “This is a magnificent piece of work you’ve done on the driveway,” Jenkins said to Cindy, who had by now produced clear pavement to just past the front walk.

  “Right,” Cindy muttered as she shouldered the snow shovel and ice chopper and started down the driveway toward the garage behind the house. “Now you do a magnificent job of moving this pile of prerevolutionary brick. Then we’ll both be happy.”

  Using Wilcox’s key, the four remaining women proceeded into the house without waiting for Cindy to return. They found the large living-room hearth glowing with a bright-flamed fire of crackling cherry wood. They saw fresh apples, oranges, and peaches heaped in a bowl on the dining-room table. Curtains parted on the south side of the house emphasized the cheering effect of the day’s scant sunshine. Marjorie surmised that Catherine had been efficiently busy since Cindy had sent her inside.

  Which was fine, Marjorie thought, but where was Catherine now? Moping with remorse or not, letting four people walk into her home without even a greeting didn’t seem like her style. So far, all they had was Cindy’s word about Catherine’s whereabouts today. A tiny bite of anxiety began to gnaw at Marjorie’s gut.

  She told herself she was being silly. Even so, she thought, it couldn’t hurt to keep her eyes open.

  “The inside looks fabulous too,” Jenkins said. “They may start wondering why they need me.”

  “Just persuade Ms. Helmsing to offer us a price that a court will approve if one of the little darlings decides two years from now to charge me with misfeasance,” Wilcox said. “As long as I can turn in a final accounting that’s pluperfect bullet proof, you won’t have to worry about what the Misses Shepherd think.”

  Taking the unsubtle hint, Jenkins clicked into sales mode. She adopted a prudently understated approach, letting the home speak for itself. It had plenty to say: colonial heritage, large bedrooms with individual fireplaces, library with oak shelving graced by calf-bound estate books dating to the eighteenth century, ample closet space, and modern plumbing and appliances.

  The undeniable downsides of a house more than three centuries old seemed pale in comparison to these features. Some of the renovations the home had seen over the years had been jury-rigged improvisations, resulting in anomalies like doors that opened out of converted bathrooms instead of into them. The door connecting one of the guest bedrooms to its bathroom had a sixty-year-old dead bolt snap lock that would have been more appropriate on an outside back door. When they got to that room, Helmsing seemed instinctively to suspect the weakness in the bolt’s spring and the play in its housing, which she promptly verified.

  But Marjorie figured things that a few thousand dollars and a little love could fix weren’t going to keep Helmsing from owning this house. During the tour of the first and second floors, Helmsing looked like a very serious potential buyer. While Marjorie made discreet forays into empty rooms in a vain search for Catherine, Helmsing turned on taps, flushed toilets, and felt for drafts at the cracks of window frames. When in the midst of viewing what had been the master bedroom she started taking measurements with a cased, metal tape, Marjorie thought the earnest-money check was as good as written.

  “If you’ll be here for a while yet, I’m going to excuse myself for a few minutes,” Marjorie said.

  Jenkins nodded while Helmsing scratched numbers in a small memo book. After exiting, Marjorie opened and closed the nearest bathroom door but didn’t go inside. She scurried instead toward the stairs. She’d had at least a peek at every room on two floors without spotting Catherine. The glimpse of lonely desperation she’d seen in Catherine’s eyes across her kitchen table slipped into Marjorie’s memory and wouldn’t go away.

  After a rapid and fruitless repeat run through the first floor, Marjorie took the kitchen stairs to the basement.

  “Catherine?” she called at the bottom of the stairs. Only the faintly mocking echo of her own voice answered her.

  Flipping on lights, she moved quickly through the musty cellar. The laundry room was spotless and uninhabited. The furnace room was piled high with empty boxes but showed no sign of recent human intrusion.

  She stepped from the furnace room into a spacious recreation room, paneled and carpeted and dominated by a massive pool table. Arrayed haphazardly on shelves around the room’s perimeter were the remnants of affluent childhood: board games in battered boxes, Ping-Pong paddles and discolored balls, odd lots of checkers, and the kind of educational books that are received at Christmas without being asked for and shelved by spring without being read.

  One last door presented itself to Marjorie. What might have been a small office or an oversize
d closet intruded into the far corner of the rec room. Cindy leaned against the wall next to the door, paging idly through a copy of Entertainment Weekly.

  “Where’s Catherine?” Marjorie asked.

  “Where she wants to be.”

  “I was looking for more specific information.”

  “It’s not your day to watch her,” Cindy said. She snapped the magazine shut. “Don’t worry about it. She’s a big girl.”

  “Do you mind if I take a look behind that door?”

  “Yes, I mind.”

  “I just want to be sure Catherine’s all right,” Marjorie said.

  “If there was anything wrong with her, do you think I’d be standing here like an airhead? She’s my sister.”

  “And coheir.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means I’d like to take a look behind that door.”

  “Listen. Carefully. Catherine and I are both grown-ups. As in of age. Adults. The answer’s no. No one’s bought anything yet. This is still our house. You go find your little friends and start collaborating on an article for Gracious Living.”

  “The group upstairs includes a realtor with keys and a trustee with authority,” Marjorie said. “Whatever’s on the other side of that door, would you rather all four of us saw it or just me?”

  “Jesus, you are a bitch, aren’t you?”

  “If you like.”

  Marjorie stepped toward the door. With a disgusted shrug Cindy stamped away. Marjorie turned the knob and pushed the reluctant door open.

  She walked into a tiny study, the kind of place a thoughtful parent might have rigged up for his daughters to use to do their homework. Felt-covered plywood laid across filing cabinets formed a makeshift desk against the back wall. Textbooks, spiral notebooks, and three-ring binders decorated with adolescent graffiti crammed a shelf above the desk. Posters of toothy young men with lots of hair whom Marjorie supposed she might have recognized if she’d ever watched the Fox network decorated the walls. In this room, the apparent epicenter of a charmed and golden early adolescence, Marjorie found Catherine.

  Catherine was standing in the corner. She had her head bowed and her hands clasped behind her back at her waist, like a parody of Norman Rockwell that might have been titled Schoolgirl in Disgrace. A white kitchen timer ticked on the desk. The contrast between Catherine’s penitent, juvenile posture and her matronly dress, sheer stockings, and elegant black flats seemed vaguely pornographic. Marjorie tried to banish an unwelcome mental image of lonely males in dreary hotel rooms flicking one-handed through magazines featuring pictures of scenes like this.

  Catherine’s shoulders stiffened and her ears pinkened when Marjorie entered the room, but Marjorie didn’t see any other reaction to her presence. Catherine stood rigidly in place, stoically enduring her apparent penance.

  “Catherine?” Marjorie said quietly. “Are you all right?”

  No answer. No visible reaction.

  “Is there anything I can do to help?”

  No response.

  “Satisfied?” Cindy asked icily from behind Marjorie. “Could you maybe just fuck off now and take a Metamucil break with your chums upstairs or something?”

  “Is that your best idea under the circumstances?” Marjorie asked, turning to face Cindy.

  “Look,” Cindy said wearily. “Maybe you mean well and maybe I’m being a shit. But I’ve been through this before. This is Cathy’s trip. This goes on until she’s ready for it to stop. The best thing you can do is leave. Tell your crew about our nice, dry basement and keep everyone else out of this room.”

  An abrupt rasp from the timer jerked their eyes back to the inside of the room. Turning from the corner, Catherine shut the timer off and without making eye contact with either Marjorie or Cindy walked wordlessly from the room. Cindy sighed and relaxed. Marjorie looked from Catherine’s retreating figure back to Cindy.

  “I don’t have any right to ask this,” Marjorie said, “but has this kind of thing been going on since your father died?”

  “You’re right. You don’t have any right to ask that.”

  Her pace unconsciously quickening as she reached the stairs, Marjorie almost raced out of a clean, dry, semifinished basement that suddenly seemed creepily gothic.

  She found Helmsing, Jenkins, and Wilcox huddled around the writing desk in the living room, poring over what looked like a building inspector’s report.

  “Oh, there you are,” Helmsing said as she looked up. She immediately turned back to Jenkins. “I’ll have a signed offer on your desk by Monday at noon. You’ll find it very attractive.”

  “I’ll look forward to it,” Jenkins said.

  “‘Attractive’ is a relative term,” Wilcox added casually. “I should warn you that you’re not the only party who’s recently expressed interest. I expect another offer to come in Monday morning. At or near the asking price, and without contingencies.”

  “Will I have a chance to beat it?” Helmsing asked.

  “I’ll do my best,” Wilcox said, “but I can’t guarantee it. The best thing would be for your first offer to be better than the other one I’m expecting.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind,” Helmsing said.

  Chapter Seven

  This has been an eventful Saturday,” Marjorie said to Michaelson at what was in fact one o’clock the following Sunday morning. “But the last place I would have expected it to end up is Avery Phillips’ condo.”

  “Knight to d-five,” one of two males sharing the couch with them said to the other. Neither chessboard nor chessmen were in sight.

  “I think the only reason Phillips finally returned my calls and halfway invited me over was that he assumed I’d bring you,” Michaelson said.

  He glanced again around the substantial gathering in the dim room, trying to spot Phillips. No luck. Knots of people here and there drank, smoked, and talked. Across the room a collection of guests seemed raptly engaged by the silent telecast of a basketball game. As background music they had chosen what you could call jazz if you weren’t particular about music or English.

  “Phillips apparently is going to make an offer Monday,” Marjorie said, having already updated Michaelson on Friday’s events at the Shepherd household. “That’s what made Saturday eventful, and it should make Monday both busy and complicated.”

  “Busy I can appreciate, but why complicated?” Michaelson asked.

  “Rook to e-seven,” the other male on the couch said.

  “Cindy wants to unload the place to any buyer who’ll pay enough to keep her trust fund healthy. Catherine would prefer a residential buyer because she thinks that’s what her dad would have wanted. The trustee doesn’t care as long as no one can take her to court over it. And then there’s Mrs. Shepherd.”

  “The girls’ mother?”

  “Yes. She’s been living in California since she divorced their father. She has to be consulted too. The realtor told Patrice Helmsing, who told me during one of the eight dozen phone calls I fielded on this topic this afternoon.”

  “Told you because—” Michaelson prompted.

  “Because she wants me to help her get the house,” Marjorie explained. “Wilcox has set up a mass conference call for Monday afternoon. She’s going to have everyone at the house on separate phones, Mom from California, and Phillips probably from here.”

  “It seems a bit baroque.”

  “She wants the entire discussion on the record,” Marjorie said. “Literally. She’s going to tape-record every word. If seller’s remorse sets in after closing, she wants to be sure she doesn’t get the blame.”

  “Fair enough. Then why can’t Ms. Helmsing find a phone herself and get in on the call?”

  “She’ll be on the call, but from Detroit, where she has a speaking engagement. She wants me on the scene to make sure no one tries any
funny business that couldn’t be spotted over the phone.”

  “Which answers every question but one,” Michaelson said. “Why has it suddenly become essential that a crucial conference call take place Monday afternoon instead of sometime when Ms. Helmsing could be physically present herself?”

  “Because Ageless is playing hardball,” Avery Phillips said as he strolled up. “I’ve already submitted an offer. If Wilcox doesn’t accept it by five p.m. Monday, it’s off the table. You’d have to have brass balls to walk away from it and she doesn’t qualify—even metaphorically.”

  “Bishop to b-four,” the male nearer Marjorie said.

  “White to move and mate in two,” Phillips said in his direction. “Now you kids quit showing off and run along. Go help Project with his basketball game. He took the Sonics and gave the points, and I understand the issue is in doubt.”

  “I gather, then,” Marjorie said, “that I’m here to be told that Patrice Helmsing is wasting her time and mine in trying to get her hands instead of yours on Calvert Manor.”

  “Bingo. She can increase my cost but she can’t get the house. I’m going to own it.”

  “It would be silly to ask you why you want it so badly,” Michaelson mused. “If you wanted me to know the truth, you presumably wouldn’t have lied in the first place. What I will ask is why the lie you picked was that nonsense about the European Union instead of something more straightforward that would have been harder for me to check?”

  “Mischief,” Phillips said. “Diplomatic allusion.”

  “Baloney,” Michaelson said undiplomatically. “I think its appeal was precisely that I could check it and thereby provoke the kind of inquiries I did. You used me to get ostensibly independent information about your interest in Calvert Manor into the national security bureaucracy.”

  “Don’t make things more complicated than they are,” Phillips said. He made the comment with casual flippancy, but he couldn’t keep his eyes from narrowing. “I thought the EU story was clever. Some junior analyst at Langley getting ambitious about your query on a slow day doesn’t mean there are spooks in the shadows.”