And the door opened. “Hey, Manda?”
I needed one minute more to get that thought into range, so I put up my finger in the universal signal of “hold it,” and C. K. stopped talking.
But not everyone did. “Our feet are killing us, so we thought we’d save time and come directly here instead of—whoops!”
Although her greetings had begun before she was visible, now, Gabby Mackenzie was inside the loft, which is, after all, one large cube, with only bedroom and bathroom partitions. And there we stood for a painfully long second, both of us wide-eyed with disbelief.
“Oh, my,” I heard from a male voice that was not my beloved’s.
My beloved, in fact, laughed out loud, which might be grounds for removing him from the category of “beloved” altogether. But I couldn’t give much thought to that, because I had turned my back and was running, hands clapped on my rear end, toward the sanctuary of the partitioned-off bedroom.
One thing about the experience was that it cured me of all concerns about what I’d wear when with my in-laws. As long as I wore something, I’d be ahead of where I was now.
Nineteen
BY the time we were en route to Gladwynne and dinner, I’d gained proper attire and hairstyle, but had long since lost or abandoned the thread of the idea I’d been pursuing. No matter, I decided. If I have questions, Emmie herself will answer them.
And then my niece and nephew, sister and brother-in-law were hugging me, and Horse the dog was bumping his head against my knees for attention and my parents and Boy and Gabby were cheek-kissing, hand-shaking and hugging, and round and round in every possible combination people demonstrated that an impending marriage trumps everything.
I relaxed into the confused merriment. Why not? We were an island of loveliness filled with happy cooking smells, the beautiful surrounds of Beth and Sam’s house, their adorable children, and almost equally adorable dog. It was, in fact, close to the picture of comfortable domesticity that’s always supposed to be either a bore or a sham, but certainly wasn’t in this case. I knew this from careful and cynical long-term observation. And like a delighted audience at this performance of marital possibilities, the two sets of parents cheered.
I didn’t think I’d ever seen my mother this happy, and it made me the slightest bit sad for all the times I’d been annoyed by her matrimonial nagging. Her hints and prods had been irritating, infuriating, and often ludicrous, but they were from her heart, part of a sincere belief, however antiquated and ridiculous, that to be married was to be safe in some way she passionately desired for her daughters.
Now, thanks to my unintentional announcement of a marriage date, she considered me safe. Her work was done, and on this, the seventh day, she rested.
And though I’d promised myself not to think about it this evening, my mother’s contentment inevitably contrasted with my memory of Claire Fairchild, who also only wanted her child to be safe. A wave of sadness took the edge off the bright evening.
But not for anyone else. By blundering into a wedding date, I’d defused the potential tension of this evening, and the two sets of parents, so dramatically dissimilar, were united and excited about seeing this through in style. I thought I’d be building conversational bridges all night long, but there was no need. I could have left the building and the party would have raged on.
I looked at my mother in her little black dress, the one she insisted be a part of every woman’s wardrobe, her proper patent pumps, and her mother’s marcasite initial pin. She’d have looked like a Puritan preaching to a lady of the evening, had both she and Gabby not looked so delighted with each other’s company. Gabby, towering over her, was laughing at something my mother had said. She looked like a tropical bird in the emerald brilliance of her dress—scoop neck, bouffant sleeves, skirts flouncing with blue and red embroidered tracery—the sort of thing Marie Antoinette wore when pretending to be a milkmaid, except for the strappy red high heels.
Even the fathers, Mackenzie, and Sam had found common ground, and all four were nodding in agreement with a topic I couldn’t begin to guess.
My sister, supervising her own daughter who was carrying a tray of endive piped with what appeared to be crème fraîche and caviar, caught my eye and gave the thumbs-up sign. And then Sam poured champagne all around, and Mackenzie and I were toasted with only one minor glitch when my mother called the groom-to-be “Chuck” and Gabby did a double-take.
Joy reigned in Gladwynne. Poor Olivia and dead Claire Fairchild and mixed-up Emmie Cade faded into the distance till they disappeared altogether.
Dinner was a fine medley of barbecued lamb and crisp green beans and more wine and much laughter with Gabby, mother of seven married children who’d had thirteen weddings amongst them, regaling the table with tales of outrageous mishaps and mismatches. My mother looked worried by the stories at first, and then gave up and laughed along with everyone else.
Even the children, sipping apple juice in wineglasses, behaved, and when they started to fade, I took them upstairs. My longstanding role as spinster aunt included reading them bedtime stories when I was around, a perk I intended to keep. Now that Alexander was of an age to have favorites, each session followed a long negotiation. “Not the poop book again,” Karen insisted. “Or else I get my own story.”
I didn’t have time for two books, and finally, they agreed on Best Friends for Frances, which seemed appropriately about siblings finding out they could be friends. I hadn’t realized or remembered that the book was concerned with Frances’s response to being excluded, but reading about it brought Olivia back into the room, the awareness of how much less aggressive and successful she’d been than a fictional badger.
Of course, badgers didn’t have to go to high school. That made their lives easier.
Beth, afraid I was being trapped by her children, came upstairs, and together, we finished the story and tucked them in.
And ultimately, it was a traditional ladies-cleaning-up scene, with all of us vying for the “most helpful” award, but thanks to Beth’s superpreparedness and modern conveniences like dishwashers, there was little washing, and no drying, and four women circling the kitchen until we divvied up the few chores. I was delegated to rescue the leftovers from Horse, which I did while we continued to talk about families, weddings, Beth’s event-planning skills, and how cute the children were.
The senior generation was in the dining room, clearing the tablecloth and protective pads while I put leftover mint sauce in the refrigerator.
“I like your in-laws,” Beth said. “They’re fun.”
“That they are. I can’t believe how it’s defused Mom. She’s kind of rolling with whatever anybody says.”
Beth raised her eyebrows. “Gabby is a bit . . . overwhelming,” she whispered. “But in a good way.”
“She’s such a happy person,” I whispered back, although the two mothers were talking at such a feverish pace in the next room, they couldn’t have heard us even if we were louder. “As if life’s a super game, and she’s on a perpetual winning streak.”
I wondered if I could adopt some of Gabby Mackenzie’s resolute joy, and then I accepted the fact that I was not made of the same material, and I closed the refrigerator, checking what new shots of the children or invitations Beth’s refrigerator sported. Snooping, to be blunt. I saw a mildly familiar item. Vicky Baer’s brochure. “What is she doing up here?” I asked. “The refrigerator is hallowed home ground.”
Beth laughed. “I haven’t actually had a chance to read it yet, but I want to check out whether there’s any crossover on there.”
“Meaning?”
“You know. She consults all over the place, to all sorts of nonprofits, and I’m putting together a little dinner party . . .”
“May I suggest that subtlety isn’t your strong point?”
“Come down from your ivory tower,” she said, and that made me laugh.
“What’s the opposite of an ivory tower?” I asked. “A mud trench? That�
��s more like Philly Prep.”
“I realized I know somebody at a foundation she works with,” she said, “and I thought it might be nice, since they already know each other, to invite them both. In fact, I called her—Vicky—right before you got here, but she was out. A woman who barely spoke English answered. I do wish people who have trouble with the language would simply leave an answering machine on.”
I made sure the wrap was tight around the last of the lamb and returned to the crammed refrigerator in search of a place for it. “So is she coming to your gala?”
Beth shrugged. “I only spoke—if you can call it that—to this woman, who said ‘the lady is with the friend who is feeling bad.’ It took me so long to get that, that I didn’t have the energy to try to leave a message. I’ll call her tomorrow. Check out the brochure. She’s got an impressive business going.”
I had zero interest in it. Besides, Vicky had given me one as well and it must still be wherever I’d shoved it, should I ever want to check it out. But Beth seemed to want me to acknowledge what a trophy she’d snared and how clever she’d been, to officially approve of her networking savvy, so I obliged her, opening and skimming through it.
Vicky Baer had indeed developed an impressive business. Or a sufficiency of people willing to lie and give her nice little endorsements. There were tributes about increased endowments, a revised and three-times-more-profitable fund-raising plan, good service that didn’t end with the contract, et cetera. I didn’t personally recognize any of the sources, except Shipley School, but there were lots of them with the quotes, and then a sidebar list of still more.
This was a career I’d never have thought of, almost an oxymoron, helping nonprofits make money. Helping herself as well, I had to believe. And sampling just a few names, she’d pleased the boards of the KBS Foundation in Philly, and One Hundred Percent for the Children in D.C. I had a brief and nasty moment thinking that nobody would know if she’d made these places up. A King Henry School, that should have been in England, but found itself in Chicago; another, a more plainly named Prep school in Baltimore; and two in upstate New Jersey, right outside New York; The Family Foundation in Altoona; and The Learning Project in San Francisco for starters.
That’s right—she’d bumped into Emmie while on business in San Francisco.
“I hope her success now extends to you,” I said, returning the brochure to its refrigerator magnet.
I meant it. I was impressed. But I was also . . . I don’t know what. Irritated by it. Something prickled, though I couldn’t identify it. I wondered if I was jealous of her remarkable success, and hoped not. But I couldn’t think why else her credentials annoyed me this way.
“One thing,” Beth said softly. “You were honest with me the other night, weren’t you?”
“About what? Of course I was. I always am, but what do you mean?”
“About Vicky. That she wasn’t the one you were investigating.”
“Absolutely not the one.”
“Because you’d tell me, right? I mean, even if it’s part of your job, and if you found out I was walking into something bad—there’s no code forbidding you to tell me, is there?”
“My code of honor would absolutely make me keep you safe.”
She exhaled loudly, as if she’d been holding her breath on this all evening.
I went back into the dining room to be certain that nothing edible was left in sight.
“You’re amazing,” my mother said as Gabby slid a drawer closed. “How did you know where that went? And before? How did you know where the table pads went, too?”
Gabby winked at me. “Magic?” she said.
“Beth’s magic, probably,” I said. “She’s the most logical person I’ve ever met, so everything is in—”
“He didn’t tell you, huh?” Gabby’s mouth curled in a tight, lopsided smile.
“Who? Tell me what?”
“My son,” she said in the most matter-of-fact way. “Tell you that I’m a witch.” Her smile expanded till it half-covered her face, and she laughed and pointed at me, at my expression. “Guess not!”
“What—what do you mean?” My mother had her hands raised, cupping the top of her head, all but drawing a pointed hat up there.
“No, no,” Gabby said, the half smile still on her face. We amused her. “Nothing special. Ordinary witchy things. I see things, commune with things.”
We all saw things unless we were blind. And communed, I had to assume, with something. But we didn’t see through solid cherry breakfronts, or commune with table pads as to where they belong.
“I’m not like an Orthodox witch,” she said. “I’m a sole practitioner. No coven, no big rituals, and most of all,” she said, looking around to make sure her work was done, “not that stupid bad-spell stuff in fairy tales. That’s not real. That’s just evil propaganda.”
“Of course it is!” my mother said, eager as ever to be prejudice-free. “But then . . . when? What?”
Gabby raised her shoulders and inhaled, then let out the air and relaxed. “I just have . . . powers, but I can’t truly say when it comes on me. It’s erratic. And between us girls, since the change, I think I’m mostly losing it. My grandmother said the same thing happened to her. I mean, look—it’s down to knowing where table pads go.” She shook her head, then smiled again. “Easy come, easy go,” she said. “And now, let us get our poor hostess out of the kitchen, and join our gentlemen friends.”
My mother glanced at me warily, quickly, then away. She obviously didn’t dare to say a word or think it. Gabby might have one of her rare postmenopausal second-sight bursts and read her mind. Besides, for all her marital advice and warnings, she’d never once told me to avoid men whose mothers were witches.
We reconvened in the living room, where the conversation rolled back and forth between the out-of-towners about their mutual visits. My mother almost visibly took herself in hand and rose above her reluctance to play with witches, and mentioned possible outings. I moved still closer to my Mackenzie, who put an arm around me and smiled. He was one happy man.
“Your mother just said she’s a witch,” I whispered.
His smile faded, and he closed his eyes for a second. Then he sighed and fixed his blue gaze on me. “I was hopin’ she’d skip that.”
“It’s not news to you?”
He shook his head.
“And you never felt the need to mention it?” It is hard to shout in a whisper, and my throat ached doing so, but I had no choice. There was suddenly an arid desert between us, littered with important things unsaid, secrets kept. I didn’t dare guess what else lay there. The fact that he’d kept it to himself was much more serious than Gabby’s beliefs. I was up on things. I knew that Wiccan was a feminist religion, a goddess religion, that it really didn’t have anything to do with the dreadful stereotypes fear had created through the ages.
Although I wasn’t sure anything much I knew applied to Gabby’s iconoclastic witchhood that seemed to depend on a ready supply of hormones.
“You were complainin’ this very week that you wished I’d never told you a thing about my past.”
“This is a little different, don’t you think? This would be like being frank with me about a genetic problem, or a history of . . . of—”
“Horse thieves?”
“Okay, not exactly, but—”
“She’s an entertaining, loving lady, isn’t she?”
“Is witchcraft what you meant when you always added ‘but eccentric’?”
He raised one eyebrow.
“Okay. One of the traits you meant.”
“She’s Acadian. They’re different, you know. Named for the great doomed lovers in Longfellow’s poem, Gabriel Lajeunesse and Evangeline Bellefontaine.”
“They’re fictional. She didn’t inherit this from them.”
“They were family ideals. And do you remember the lovers’ story? How they found each other again in Philadelphia?” He smiled, as if that made everything all right.<
br />
“Found each other in Philadelphia and promptly died,” I said.
He looked at me solemnly. “My sisters do not have the gift.”
“Let me be clear on this. Your sisters are not witches.”
“Correct.”
“And you? Men can be witches.”
He shook his head again. “Apparently, the Mackenzie DNA includes antiwitch matter.”
I couldn’t help but wonder what other family secrets lay in store and whether I was at all eager to enter that store. I just hated not knowing something that central about his family, and worried now that Mackenzie had carefully censored his words, as if he needed to protect me from the truth, or protect the truth from me.
I didn’t like either option.
I wondered if the surprise introduction of a witch in the family gave one an out from a wedding. I’d bet even my mother would accept that as an excused absence.
Twenty
“WHAT a good time I’m having,” Gabby said as the four of us walked to the car. It was still early. The dinner hour had been arranged for small children—and the originally planned arrival of the Mackenzies. The evening out here in the suburbs was lovely, with a faint whisper of autumn, a brisk edge to the soft night and, all around us, that wistful scent of the end of growing, of roses blooming for the last time.
“What a grand evening,” Gabby said. “Lovely day.”
“Evening’s still young,” Boy said. “Tell me it isn’t true about this city rolling up the streets and let us take you out for a nightcap.”
C. K. was grinning, contentment on every feature. He looked over at me. Apparently, he no longer cared about the stack of books he was supposed to be reading for school. He was definitely ready for more, but was letting me decide whether the good times kept rolling.
Claire and Present Danger Page 22