“Isabel?” Amy, the high school student who helps out with the phones on weekends, interrupts her thoughts. “I’m forwarding a call to your desk.”
Well, speak of the devil. At least, Isabel hopes it’s Jason Hollander. Wouldn’t that be a nice way to top off the weekend?
Seeing Cameron’s wistful expression as she sits beside her silent phone, Amy adds, “He specifically asked to speak to Isabel.”
Meaning, he isn’t a random caller willing to be transferred to any available agent.
“Thanks, Amy.” Isabel lifts the receiver as it rings. “This is Isabel Van Nuys. How can I help you?”
A male voice clears its throat. Then an unfamiliar voice says, “Hi. I’m interested in relocating to Westchester County, and I was wondering if you’d be able to show me some properties.”
“Of course. We specialize in relocations, actually, so . . .” She picks up a pen and holds it poised over her notepad. “Is this a corporate relocation?”
“No.”
Too bad. When an employer is helping to foot the moving costs, people tend to spend a little more on the house itself.
“Do you have any idea what you’re looking for, Mr.—?”
“Gabriel.”
“All right, Mr. Gabriel, why don’t you give me your price range, number of bedrooms, desired location, when you’re moving, that sort of thing?”
There’s a pause.
She can hear a radio playing in the background. Sounds like an old Billy Joel song.
“Something medium sized, I guess,” he says. “In the, uh, five to six hundred thousand dollar range.”
“Mmm hmm . . .” She makes note of that. “And is it just for you, or . . . ?” She trails off tactfully.
He takes her cue. “I have a wife, and . . . and a baby. And we want to have more kids, so I guess we’ll need, uh, at least three bedrooms. Four would be better.”
He seems vaguely nervous. She doesn’t blame him. He’s about to spend a helluva lot of money on less house than he would get for half a million anywhere else in the country.
“Well, I have to assure you that Woodbury Hills is a wonderful place to raise a family.” Wonderful and outrageously expensive.
‘That’s what I hear.”
It occurs to her to ask him how he did hear, and how he happened to specifically request to speak to her. She opens her mouth but he speaks first.
“It sounds like you’re speaking from experience. Do you live there in town?”
“Right outside of town,” she tells him. “Now, let’s see, Mr. Gabriel, do you like old houses, or are you looking for something more modern?”
“Either, I guess.”
She scribbles the word flexible, and beside it, 27 Gilder Road?
That particular property has been on the market for at least six weeks, which is unusual in Woodbury Hills. Isabel isn’t surprised it’s been such a difficult sell so far. For one thing, it’s in a rather remote location as opposed to the widely desired family-friendly neighborhood within walking distance to town and the commuter line to the city. For another, the contemporary split level with a boxy stucco exterior doesn’t appeal to most buyers, who tend to favor classic clapboard houses with shutters, windowpanes, and redbrick chimneys.
Isabel realizes that Mr. Gabriel has fallen silent again.
“ . . . the sinners are much more fun . . .” Billy Joel sings in the background on the other end of the line.
“I’ll put together some listings, Mr. Gabriel, and I’ll FedEx them to you so that you can go through them with your wife and decide which ones you want to see. Then you can let me know when you’ll be in town so that—”
“Oh, you don’t have to send them to me first. I’ll just come up and you can show me whichever houses you think I’d like.”
“Are you sure? Sometimes it’s possible to weed out homes just based on the listing. It could save you”—and me—“a lot of time.”
“No, thank you. I don’t have time to see listings first. I’m, uh, actually going to be there tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow?” she repeats. “Well, that’s sooner than I’d expected.”
“Is that all right?”
“Of course. Of course it’s all right.” There goes her plan to drive up to Poughkeepsie and spend the day with Andrea. “I’ll get some listings together for you and we can meet here in my office in the morning. I’ll give you directions. Which airport are you coming from?”
“Oh, I’ll be driving down from Boston,” he says unexpectedly.
Boston? For some reason, she assumed he was relocating from someplace down South. What made her think that? It wasn’t an accent—he doesn’t have the slightest trace of one.
She gives him directions, arranges to meet him at nine-thirty, then hangs up to find nosy Mary looming over her desk.
“You’ve been pretty busy lately, Isabel.”
“Yup.” Smiling, she opens a manilla folder and hunts through it for the listing for 27 Gilder Road as the Billy Joel song continues to play in her head.
“Excuse me, Miss, did you want butter on that egg and bacon sandwich?”
“No,” Christine says automatically, her thoughts on the leaky faucet back home. She forgot all about asking Rose about her plumber.
Belatedly, it occurs to her that Ben would probably like a little butter on his sandwich. She opens her mouth to call the waitress back to the counter, but she’s already disappeared into the busy kitchen at the back of the diner.
Oh, well. Ben can always put butter on it at home if he wants it. For all she knows, he still hasn’t regained his appetite. Maybe a container of chicken soup would have been a better thing to bring him.
She eyes the desserts in the rotating glass case by the register as she waits for the sandwich. The carrot cake blanketed in cream cheese icing looks especially good, but she can’t indulge. Not today. Not for a while.
She can’t help wondering whether, if she takes off the extra twenty pounds or so she’s gained since marriage, Ben will find her more attractive.
If he finds her more attractive, he’ll be more inclined to make love to her during her next fertile period. Which means she has a little over two weeks to lose a few pounds.
She used to be skinny. Not as skinny as Rose Larrabee, but nobody would have called her chubby a few years ago.
These days, every time she looks in the mirror, the word chubby is what comes to mind—along with frumpy.
Not that Ben is currently the spitting image of his youthful self, either. For one thing, he had a hell of a lot more hair when they met, and it was less conservatively cut. He wore contacts instead of glasses, and his wardrobe wasn’t quite as—well, stodgy as it is now.
Of course, she looked different back then, too: a size eight when she met Ben, and wore tailored skirts and heels to work daily as an executive secretary just across Forty-second Street from his office. She used to see him almost every morning in Grand Central Station: a dark-haired, wedding-ring-free stranger who invariably rode up the escalator reading a hardcover novel in a transparent glossy cover. She was intrigued by this; not just by the fact that he read something other than the newspapers, but that he clearly got his books from a library.
So she knew right away that they had something in common. Christine was quite fond of the New York library branch near her Queens apartment. She never saw eligible-looking men during her weekly browsing visits there, just senior citizens, students, and the occasional story-hour-bound dad with toddlers in tow.
Now, looking back, she is amused that it never occurred to her that Ben might be using the library because he was too poor—or too cheap—to buy books.
She was too busy with her investigation, figuring there was a good chance that the library-book-toting commuter lived in Queens, as she had seen him exiting the number 7 train a few times. She hoped she might bump into him in the library stacks some day, as she couldn’t seem to work up the nerve to speak to him in the midst of rush-hour chaos.
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br /> Nor did it ever occur to Christine that Ben was noticing her as well. He seemed perpetually engrossed in his reading. Thus, she was utterly caught off-guard when Ben looked up from his Tom Wolfe novel one morning out of the blue and made eye contact with her as she was riding up the escalator two steps behind him.
She remembers what he said, and exactly how he said it. “How’s it going?” he asked, his voice cracking a little on the go syllable.
She has no idea how she responded. But the next thing she knew, he was asking her out for coffee. As it turned out, he didn’t live in Queens, but on Long Island—he transferred from the Long Island Railroad to the number 7 train each morning.
They started meeting regularly for lunch at Houlihan’s near their respective offices, moved into a Tudor City studio apartment together a year later, and were married two years after that. They were about to start trying to have a baby when she found the lump.
She sighs as the waitress comes out of the kitchen with a foil-wrapped sandwich and a steaming take-out cup full of coffee. The coffee smells wonderful—far more appealing than the cup of decaf she had with Rose. She doesn’t dare indulge in caffeine, just in case she might be pregnant.
She doesn’t want to get her hopes up, but her period was due yesterday. She doesn’t feel as though she’s premenstrual, but you never know.
“You want cream and sugar?”
“That’s okay. He’ll put it in at home.” Fumbling in her wallet for money, Christine comes up short. Oh, right. She put a twenty into the collection basket at mass earlier—a shameful attempt to bribe God into answering her prayers.
“Do you take credit cards?” she asks, fishing for her Visa.
“Credit cards, and checks, too, if you’re local.”
“I’m local, and that’s good to know. But I’ll use my Visa today.”
Christine doubts that any diner in Manhattan would take a check. That’s the nice thing about living in a small town. People get to know you. Especially in a place like this. Looking around, she decides that half the population of Laurel Bay seems to be waiting for a booth here, most dressed in their Sunday best, others in their comfy Sunday sweats or jeans. She even sees a few familiar faces, including a middle-aged woman who walks a German shepherd by the house every morning, and the guy who pumps gas at the full serve down the block, now wearing a suitcoat and carrying a little girl in a pink dress.
The waitress takes her card and runs it through the machine, then hands the slip to Christine, along with a pen that’s inscribed with the name of the restaurant. It says Milligan’s Cafe On the Bay, but she’s lived here long enough to know that nobody ever calls it that. It’s just “the diner.” Christine adds a tip, signs the receipt, and hands everything back.
“Keep the pen,” the woman says. “We have millions of ’em. They’re giveaways.”
“Oh, thanks.” Christine tucks it back into her purse, grabs Ben’s breakfast, and heads out the door, hoping she’ll find her husband in a decent mood for a change.
“. . . You had a nice white dress and a party on your confirmation,” Leslie sings along with the radio as she turns off the main road toward Shorewood Lane.
“Aunt Leslie? What’s a confirmation? Is it like a wedding?” Jenna asks from the back seat.
“Sort of. More like a first communion, though.”
“I’m going to make my communion next year,” Jenna proudly informs her. “And I’m going to get a beautiful white dress with a veil. Mommy said so.”
“So am I.”
“Leo! You are not!”
“I am too.”
Jenna sighs with the exaggerated exasperation of a seven-year-old sister. “Aunt Leslie, tell him he’s not.”
“Leo, you’ll make your first communion in a few years.”
“And you won’t have a white dress with a veil,” Jenna adds.
“I will too.”
And here we go again.
Spending time with her niece and nephew has been mostly a pleasure, but their constant bickering is really starting to get on Leslie’s nerves. At McDonald’s, where they stopped for breakfast after the kids decided the chocolate toast had just been a pre-breakfast snack, they argued over everything, from who got to sit on the same side of the booth with Aunt Leslie to whether Chicken McNuggets can be construed as a healthy breakfast.
Before they left, Jenna started crying because the Barbie doll she’d brought with her was missing. Leslie combed the car, the parking lot and the restaurant before spying a tuft of blond nylon hair sticking out of Leo’s coat pocket. Naturally, he said the doll got in there by accident.
“It did not!” Jenna shrieked so loudly that everyone in McDonald’s turned to stare. “You’re always stealing things! I heard Mommy say so.”
Leslie will be glad to hand them over to their mother again. How the heck does Rose do it? She always seems so patient. Maybe she just tunes them out.
Leslie tries to do just that now, turning up the volume and singing along with the radio, but the song is just about over.
The DJ announces, “That was Levittown native Billy Joel with ‘Only the Good Die Young,’ and you’re listening to Sunday Morning Oldies on WLIR. Next, here’s Petula Clark with—”
“Later, Petula,” Leslie mutters, pulling into the driveway behind Rose’s car and turning off the radio. Hmm. Peter isn’t here yet. He must have gotten hung up at the—
“Hey, what’s Mommy doing?” Leo sounds concerned.
“Uh-oh. She looks mad,” Jenna adds.
Leslie glances up to see Rose out on the front porch in her dress coat. She doesn’t appear to be coming or going, just . . . standing.
And she doesn’t look mad. She looks upset. Terribly upset.
Leslie’s stomach twitches. Has there been bad news?
Peter.
Oh, God.
Did something happen to Peter?
She opens her car door and hurries toward her sister-in-law as Leo hollers, “Wait, Aunt Wes-wee, get me out!”
“Rose? Is something wrong?”
Rose nods, her arms wrapped around herself as she turns haunted, frightened eyes up to meet Leslie’s expectant gaze.
“Someone’s been here,” she says in a low voice. “In the house. While I was gone.”
“Oh, Rose . . .” Leslie exhales in relief. “That was probably just Peter. He said he was coming over and that he had the key. He probably just ran back out to get a cup of cof—”
“No, Leslie, not Peter. Somebody else. Somebody who’s trying to scare the hell out of me.”
“What do you mean?”
“Mommy!” Jenna calls from the car. “I can’t unstrap Leo. Help!”
“I’ll be right there,” Rose calls as she reaches behind her for the knob and pushes the door open a crack. She whispers to Leslie, “Listen.”
Leslie leans in. Startled by the loud, pulsating sound, she looks at Rose. “What the heck is that?”
“It took me a few seconds to figure it out. . . . It’s Leo’s new sound machine. It has a heartbeat setting and somebody must have—”
She breaks off abruptly at the sound of gravel crunching and tires splashing along the wet road.
Leslie turns to see Peter’s truck pulling up at the curb.
“Mommy!” Now both Jenna and Leo are hollering from the back seat of her car.
“I’ll get them,” she tells Rose. “You just . . . wait here.”
“I don’t want the kids to hear it,” Rose protests. “They might be scared.”
“Of the sound machine? Do you want to run in and turn it off so that—”
“No! Leslie, I’m afraid to go into the house. Somebody’s been in there.”
Peter’s car door slams. “Hi, guys,” he calls jovially.
“Hi, honey. Maybe . . .” Lowering her voice, Leslie searches for something reassuring to tell Rose. “Maybe the sound machine’s on some sort of timer and it went on by itself?”
“It doesn’t have a timer. And we
keep it on the mountain stream setting, and never this loud.”
“Well, maybe Leo changed the setting and the volume,” she suggests, seeing Peter take a hardware store bag from the back of the truck.
“Yes, but Leo has been gone. The house has been empty since I left for church two hours ago, Leslie. I’m telling you, somebody came in. And it’s a heartbeat, Leslie.”
“So you think somebody is . . . I don’t know, teasing you? About the heart surgery?”
“Mommy!”
“Coming!” Rose shouts impatiently, then asks Leslie, “What do you think?”
“I think it’s your secret admirer trying to tell you he’s in love with you. I think that’s what the heartbeat means. And I think that the secret admirer is—”
“Hitch,” Rose says flatly. “I know you do. But Leslie, Hitch wouldn’t do something like this. He knows it would scare me to think that somebody’s been in the house when I’m not here. And in my car. And he would never call me in the middle of the night, either.”
“Well, you don’t know that that has anything to do with this. It was probably just a wrong number,” Leslie points out, watching Peter walk over to the truck where her niece and nephew are waiting restlessly. He reaches in to release Leo’s seat restraints.
“I didn’t feel like it was a wrong number. I know it sounds like I’m losing it here, but . . . Leslie, I can’t help being freaked out. Somebody was in my house.”
“What are you talking about?” Peter asks, coming up beside the porch, the kids trailing behind him. “Somebody was in your house? Who?”
“Shh . . .” Leslie raises a finger to her lips and shoots a meaningful glance at the children.
“Thanks for getting them out of the car.” Rose hurries down the steps and past him to hug Jenna and Leo, who are bickering about who gets to feed Cupid.
“Oh . . . the dog,” Rose turns toward Leslie and Peter. “She’s in the house. She was barking when I opened the door. I ran back out again when I heard—”
She breaks off, conscious of the children listening.
“Heard what?” Peter asks, looking from Rose to Leslie.
“Hey, guys, we forgot to get your overnight bags out of my trunk,” Leslie says brightly, taking her niece and nephew by the hand and leading them back to the car.
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