“Tom,” I finally cut in, “you’re preaching to the choir here.”
“Oh!” He sounded startled. Then he said with an embarrassed laugh, “I’m sorry, Alice. I tend to get carried away.”
“I’ve noticed,” I told him. “It’s actually one of the things I really admire about you. How passionate you feel about these things.”
Again he took a moment to respond.
“And certain people, too,” he said.
“Yes,” I told him. “And those certain people have been thinking—as you suggested. I’m sorry about the way I behaved the other night. I want to make it up to you. Would you like to come over for a special dinner tomorrow night?”
“Yes, I would,” Tom said. “Very much. But if you’ve been on the road all day—as you’ll be telling Erlander, remember—I doubt you’re going to be in much of a mood to put a meal together. Why don’t you come to my place instead?”
“I’d like that.”
“Well, let’s see if you still feel the same way after you’ve tasted my cooking.”
33
The next morning I decided it would be best to just unplug from the world. My daughters, who usually stay with me over the Labor Day weekend, were busy elsewhere this year—Olivia at her in-laws’, and Franny and Owen visiting friends on Long Island.
“Are you sure you’re going to be okay on your own?” Olivia had asked me a few days before during one of our regular phone calls. I found it amusing how she’d started to mother me, routinely taking my temperature on Green Acres, the Mackenzie investigation, even my relationship with Tom. Though I don’t think she realized it, she was obviously in training for her next job.
“Oh, I’m pretty sure I can manage,” I’d told her. “How are you feeling? Morning sickness any better?”
“Finally! I can actually look at eggs in the morning again without gagging. I can’t believe you only had to go through this torture for six weeks!”
I was enjoying sharing pregnancy war stories with my older daughter. Being an expectant mother had softened Olivia’s hard edges and sweetened her more acerbic tendencies. There was an ease and flow to our conversations now that had all but dried up after Richard left—yet another thing to blame him for. Though we’d touched on it only briefly, I sensed she was thinking about him a lot these days and missing a father’s presence in her life. She was calling me more often and talking longer and more intimately than she had in many years.
“So we really don’t know anything about Daddy’s side of the family?” she’d asked the one time we discussed Richard directly. We’d been talking about physical characteristics and wondering if the baby might be a redhead like Allen.
“No,” I’d told her. “Your father was adopted, and he never expressed any interest to me in trying to find his birth parents.”
“I have such a hard time with that!” she’d said. “How can anybody not care about where they came from? About who they are?” But I understood that what she was really having a hard time with was the fact that half of her genetic makeup—and a quarter of her baby’s—remained a total mystery. And she was worried that there were unwelcome genes Richard might be handing down that she couldn’t know about in advance and prepare for.
“I think your father never felt loved as a child,” I’d told her. “He never felt he belonged. I really believe that did something to him, something that began to affect him more and more as the years went by. Your baby will be loved—and he or she will belong, so you have absolutely nothing to worry about.”
I spent the morning where I’m always the happiest: in the garden. I worked in the long border behind the house—where I couldn’t be spotted from the road—weeding, pruning, and deadheading. The warm, dry summer had taken its toll. The dahlias had shot up to almost seven leggy feet, and I had to stand on tiptoe to top off the blooms. The monarda that just a few short weeks ago had been blanketed with butterflies and hummingbirds was now covered in mildew, the once bright red bristling flower heads blackened as burnt marshmallows. I cut the whole patch down, folded the load into the wagon with the rest of the cuttings and debris, and started across the lawn to the woods where I kept the compost heap, pulling the wagon behind me. I was upending it onto the pile when I heard a car door slam.
Screened by the trees, I watched Gwen walk across the drive, knock on the kitchen door, and then lean over and peer in, shielding her eyes against the bright morning sunlight. Damn her timing! I thought. Though I was pleased that she’d finally come by, I knew how hard it was for me to hold anything back from Gwen. And what I’d learned about Mara and Mackenzie really needed to be kept under wraps for at least another day. That would be the safest and wisest thing to do. For Mara—and for me. I stayed where I was by the compost pile, not moving.
Gwen knocked again, called my name a couple of times, waited a minute or two, and then started walking back toward her car. But she stopped in her tracks after she’d taken a few steps. Something in her peripheral vision—my bag of gardening tools that I’d left by the border, perhaps?—must have caught her eye and made her turn around. Then she spotted my red plaid shirt through the trees.
“Alice?” she called across the lawn. “Are you hiding from me?”
“Of course not,” I lied, emerging from the woods and pulling the empty wagon behind me. “I didn’t see you until just now.”
“Really? I’ve been knocking on your door and practically screaming your name.”
“What’s up?”
“Well, it’s great to see you again, too.”
“Sorry,” I told her, leaving the wagon by the border and crossing the lawn to her. “I just didn’t expect you right now.”
“Well, excuse me. I’m obviously interrupting important work here.”
“I said I was sorry,” I replied. “Can we maybe just start this whole conversation all over again?”
“Oh, who are we kidding?” she said, touching my arm. “I know you’re still pissed off at me. And disappointed. I understand why. Let’s sit down somewhere and talk, okay?”
“Of course,” I said, relieved that Gwen herself would seem to be the main topic of conversation. “Grab a seat under the trees, and I’ll get some lemonade.”
“I want you to know that I really took what you said about me and Sal to heart,” she told me after we’d settled into the Adirondack chairs under the willows. “I may not act like it all the time, but your opinion means more to me than anybody’s. At first, I was really hurt and mad about how hard you’d come down on me. But then I began to remember the good things you’d said. That I was competent and capable, and that I needed to find a way to get the board back on my side.”
“I’m sure it wouldn’t be all that hard if you tried.”
“Well, I gave it a lot of thought,” she said, “and decided you were right, that the problem was the women on the board. I’ve been handling them all wrong. The truth is, it’s mostly the women who do the heavy lifting. Who get things done. So I sat down and reworked the strategic plan that I inherited when I took the job, reorganizing the restoration into three different phases—and lengthening the construction process by another year. That way, rather than having it look like we were way behind in our fund-raising, I made it seem that we were more than halfway to our goal for Phase I.”
“Pretty clever,” I said. “But don’t you think they’ll see right through that?”
“Oh, they did, all right!” Gwen said. “I invited the women on the board, and every female mover and shaker I could think of in the area, over for tea at Bridgewater House last Wednesday. I told them that I needed their advice. That I really believed in Bridgewater House, and I wanted more than anything to make the restoration a reality. But that I thought we’d maybe been setting ourselves up to fail. Maybe we should spread out the fund-raising schedule, and also come up with some real incentives for people to make major gifts. Gigi Lo
mbardi sniffed and said she thought that was my job, and if I couldn’t handle it, then maybe someone else should!”
“I can’t believe you included her in this, Gwen! I warned you about her. She’s out to get you.”
“I knew that, and I decided it was best just to look the tiger in the mouth—in this case, one wearing bright red lipstick. I said that of course I’d step down if that’s what the board wanted, but first I hoped they wouldn’t mind looking over some of my ideas. I put the new plan up on PowerPoint and walked them through it while they scarfed down éclairs from Lenox Patisserie. And then I showed them my mock-ups of all the naming possibilities. I’d taken a lot of photos and airbrushed in the engraved marble plaques to make everything look real.”
“What plaques?”
“The Trish and Maurice Moorehead Front Parlor . . . The Tifton Family Keeping Room . . . The Gigi and Salvatore Lombardi Dining Room . . . Well, you get the idea. I have to say, the photos did look pretty spectacular and I had them blown up into these easel-backed posters that they could take home with them. ‘Just to live with the idea a little,’ I suggested. They all just sat there, primly sipping their tea, totally noncommittal. I considered handing in my resignation after they all left.”
“But?”
Gwen sat back in her chair and took a long drink of lemonade, swirling the ice around in her glass before continuing.
“The phone rang about an hour later. Gigi wanted to know why she couldn’t have the front parlor. It was the biggest and most important room in the house, and she felt that she and Sal deserved it because he was board chair. Then Linda Tifton phoned to say she didn’t like the marble plaque. It looked too much like a tombstone. Perhaps something in gilded wood would be more elegant? And did we have to call it the ‘keeping room’? Did anyone even know what that was anymore? I got more than $75,000 in pledges by the end of the day!”
“That’s great, Gwen. See? I knew you could.”
“But wait—this is what I really wanted to tell you,” Gwen went on. “Sal and I had arranged to spend the weekend at a little B&B in Vermont. He gave Gigi some cock-and-bull story about a business trip, and we drove up together Friday night. We were both real quiet in the car. I kept thinking about how I’d pulled the campaign out of the fire and how great it was that Gigi had come through. I began to think about how I actually kind of liked her. Sure she’d shown her claws, but it was only because she really loved Sal and wanted to save her marriage. So what the hell was I doing? When we got to our room, I told Sal I was so sorry but I just couldn’t go ahead with it.”
“And?” I asked.
“And you know what? He was so relieved! I think he’d just been worried about me, honestly, and wanting to help out in some way. He said he still loved me and always would, but that he really didn’t want to break up his marriage or hurt Gigi. We had a good laugh—and then a good cry. He slept on the couch, and we came back down the next day, his meeting unexpectedly canceled.”
“Oh, Gwen! I’m really proud of you for the way you’ve dealt with all of this.”
“Yeah, well, it took me long enough to learn how to stand on my own two feet. And now that I have, I have to say I’m looking back with a lot of regret on how I handled things with Graham. I wish I’d listened to you then, too. You were right that I never should have gotten involved with him.”
“Sometimes the rules don’t apply,” I told her. “Not when your happiness is at stake. You said you felt an amazing connection with him. I understand you wanting to pursue that—wanting be with him. Sometimes you have to listen to your heart and everything else be damned.”
“Yeah, sometimes. But this wasn’t one of them,” Gwen said, setting her empty glass down on the grass. She rose and stretched and then perched on the arm of her chair, looking down at me. “I may have pretended otherwise. I may have even let myself believe we had something going for a little while. But underneath it all, I knew the truth. Graham was a lot of fun, but that was all it was ever going to be, Alice.”
“Okay,” I said, uncertain why she looked so upset. “So you’ve figured out how you really felt about him. At least you don’t have to worry that you lost the one great love of your life, right?”
“I lost something else, though,” Gwen told me. “And it has me really spooked. I keep debating with myself whether or not I should go to Erlander with it—but then I’d have to tell him about my relationship with Graham. And that would jeopardize my job just when things are starting to look up. I try to tell myself it’s not all that important, that I should just stop worrying. But I can’t help it. I’ve been waking up in the middle of the night, obsessing about it.”
“Why don’t you tell me what you’re talking about?” I said, realizing that this was the real reason Gwen had come to see me. “Maybe I can help you figure it out.”
“The truth is, Alice, I was furious with Graham when he died. I’d announced to the board a week or so before that I’d gotten this huge anonymous pledge, but then Graham told me he’d have to put it off for a while. And he was so vague about what was going on and when I could expect it! I finally decided I had to do something to pin him down. I prepared a printed pledge that would have committed him to making good on the money within the year, and I gave it to him the night before he died. But he refused to sign it. We had a fight and he ended up tearing the paper in half. He called me some pretty nasty things—mostly saying that I was only after his money like everybody else.”
“Well? Was he right?”
“Honestly? If I were to be absolutely, brutally straight with myself? Probably, yes. I left around midnight and went home and tried to sleep, but I kept worrying about that damned pledge. I didn’t want anyone to find it and see what he’d done with it. In the morning I went back up to the house. I was going to lie to him and tell him I was sorry, anything to get the damned thing back. But he wasn’t there. The pledge wasn’t either. I searched all over his bedroom suite. I was in a real panic! That’s when Eleanor came in—and when you must have heard us fighting.”
“Where do you think he was during all this?”
“I don’t know!” Gwen said plaintively, standing up again. I could tell she felt too restless to sit still any longer. I stood as well, and we started to walk up toward the haying meadow. “He’d been so erratic those last couple of weeks. And he wasn’t sleeping well. A couple of times I woke up and found him gone. He’d tell me that he’d been for a walk. He really loved your garden. I think it was the only thing that made him happy in the end. He liked watching the sun rise over the valley.”
“So, he might have just gone out for a walk like you said,” I told her. “Maybe he took the pledge with him and was thinking about signing it. Chloe or Lachlan probably went through his things at the hospital and tossed it.”
“No, that’s what’s really weird,” Gwen said. We’d reached the top of the meadow. From there we could see Powell Mountain rising over the town and Mackenzie’s sprawling house near the summit, the wall of windows glinting in the noonday sun. The gardens must be overgrown ruins at this point, I thought. Now that I knew how Mackenzie had died—and why—the place looked like an eyesore to me. As ugly in its own way as the torn-up countryside around Shalesburg. What a waste of time and money and property! For a moment, preoccupied with my own thoughts, I lost track of what Gwen was saying.
“I’m sorry?” I said. “What happened?”
“Someone sent the pledge back to me in the mail. Taped back together. No message. Typed envelope postmarked ‘Woodhaven.’ But why would somebody do that? To relieve my mind? Or to put me on some kind of notice? It just feels so creepy! And I know this is going to sound kind of paranoid, Alice, but I feel like I’m being watched. Watched and judged.”
34
I knew exactly what I was doing later that afternoon when I showered and put on the black lace-trimmed bra and panties I’d been keeping in the back of my l
ingerie drawer. Gwen had encouraged me to buy them a year or so ago when we saw the matching pair on sale at the outlet mall.
“What for?” I’d asked her then.
“I think you mean who for,” Gwen had replied. “Well, you just never know. Maybe it will be like Field of Dreams. Buy it and they will come.”
I turned around in front of the full-length mirror in my bedroom. Gardening is great exercise, keeping me toned and limber, and my hair was shot through with blond highlights from working outside all summer. All in all, I decided I didn’t look too bad for someone who was going to be a grandmother in another few months. I knew Tom liked to keep things casual, so I pulled on a pair of faded chinos and a lightweight cashmere sweater. But I purposely chose clothes that would feel good to the touch and that, yes, would slip off easily. Just as when I brushed my hair up into a loose French twist, I was really thinking about how it would look when it tumbled down again around my shoulders, Tom pulling me closer to breathe in the perfume that I applied with a liberal hand.
I’d been to Tom’s house only once before, earlier in the summer when we’d stopped by to pick raspberries. This was when we’d first started seeing each other, and he hadn’t asked me inside. I’d appreciated his reticence as well as the glimpse he’d given me of where and how he lived. I was intrigued by the simple but extensive single-story structure he’d designed and constructed for his family, built halfway down a wooded rise overlooking Powell Mountain Brook. He’d planted a large fenced-in garden in the sunny field to the north of the house, with dozens of raised beds and rows of berry bushes and fruit trees. And he’d proudly explained that the house was totally green and off the grid: solar-powered, built with sustainable materials, and including energy-saving lighting, eco-friendly fixtures, and composting toilets.
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