by Nancy Martin
"Hadley Pinkham is gay," Emma said. "And Jamie lives on cocaine."
Libby finally got her T-shirt off and stood in my kitchen wearing nothing more than an enormous brassiere, a pair of drawstring pants and her Birkenstocks. "Hadley's gay? How astonishing. I'm not good at figuring out that sort of thing. But I'll get better with practice." She peered into the box of chocolates again, letting her last remark float suggestively in the air.
Over her head, Emma and I exchanged glances.
I said, "What do you mean you'll get better with practice?"
"Nothing serious." Libby waved her hand. "Sometimes you need a man, that's all."
"Oh, God. Are you looking for another husband?" Emma demanded.
"I'd rather catch pneumonia than another husband. No, I need a Lamaze coach."
"I told you I'd do it," I said. "I'll be your coach."
Libby shook her head. "A sister isn't right."
"Why not, for crying out loud?"
"It takes a man. I know these things. Can you help me unsnap? I have a lifetime of childbearing knowledge stored up. I know what kind of coach I need." Libby struggled to reach her bra hooks. "I'm determined to do everything right this time. After all, this might be my last child, so—"
"Might be?" Emma repeated.
"—so I want everything to be perfect. The whole family will be there. Well, except for Ralph, of course. And we're videotaping this time. The twins are recording the birth for a class project."
"What class?" Emma demanded. "Who encourages thirteen-year-old boys to videotape their own mother in childbirth?"
"Well, they won't actually see much," Libby went on. "I'll be underwater."
I dropped the wooden spoon.
"Underwater with incense. It's very relaxing. Next week I'm having the incense specially mixed to match my pheromones. And, see? I've already started wearing my magnets and crystals." From inside the depths of her bra, she pulled a packet filled with colorful stones.
"Where," I demanded, "are you getting these crazy ideas?"
"I've been seeing this wonderful duenna. She's not exactly a midwife yet, but she's hoping to get certification soon. She's got a lovely Jacuzzi in her backyard."
"Oh, my God," Emma said.
"What's wrong with a nice, sterile hospital?" I asked. "And lots of drugs? Remember all those drugs you took when you had Lucy?"
"You don't understand," Libby cried. "Giving birth can be a magical experience wherein the mother bonds not just with the newly born, but with her entire family."
I put my hands on her shoulders and turned her around to face me. "Libby, your hormones have made you certifiable. Let me go with you to Lamaze class. You need somebody sensible by your side."
"No, you should experience childbirth for yourself first." Libby took my hands in hers and peered earnestly into my eyes. "Dear Nora. Trust me on this. Besides, I'd feel peculiar with a woman coaching me. I like panting with a man."
The hot chocolate boiled over.
"Now," said Libby, "who's going to smear me with Vaseline?"
"Speaking of unpleasant," said Emma with admirable self-control, "have you heard about Flan Cooper?"
"What about him?"
"You won't believe it." Emma drank another slug of beer.
I began mopping up the puddles on the stove, and Emma said, "Last night his wife, Laura, drowned herself in the family pool. He had to pull her out himself. She's dead."
All the sisterly squabbling evaporated in an instant, and some force of nature sucked all the air out of the room. I sat down hard on a kitchen chair.
Death has a way of overcoming me. I'm not physically fragile, or even especially squeamish. But terrible emotion can seize my heart and drain all the blood out of my brain. The doctors tell me it's all psychological, and it wouldn't happen anymore if I'd just start seeing a nice, calm therapist. But therapists cost money, which was in short supply for a person living in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse with a slate roof and plumbing installed in a previous century. So I faint a lot.
"Laura Cooper is dead?" Libby repeated, sounding far away.
"A shocker, huh?" said Emma. "Suicide. I heard she tied one of those concrete garden gnomes to her ankles and jumped into the pool."
Libby said, "Isn't her hubby an old boyfriend of yours, Nora? I can't believe he'd have a gnome in his garden."
I put my head between my knees. "Yes. Flan."
Emma instantly sounded contrite. "Oh, God, I forgot about that. I'm sorry, Nora. You okay?"
The gushing wave of blackness threatened to swirl up and overwhelm me. I couldn't gather my breath.
"Flanders Cooper." Libby's voice sounded about six miles away. "Now, there's a man with good genes."
"Shut up, Lib." Emma ran cold water into a glass and brought it to me. "Nora?"
I sat up unsteadily, accepted the glass and tried to sip. But I couldn't get my throat to function, and I choked on the water. Emma patted my back until I stopped coughing. When I finally managed a swallow, she eased the drinking glass out of my shaking hands.
In a moment, I croaked, "I saw them last night. She was fine. Laura was just fine."
"You were at their house?" Libby asked.
Emma remembered. "They were having a party for Oliver, weren't they? To celebrate his nomination for something or other? Were you there?"
I nodded.
Oliver Cooper was a millionaire several times over, thanks to his long ownership of Cooper Aviation, the aircraft-manufacturing company most famous for the Cooper Wolverine fighter jet. Oliver had been nominated by the president to serve as the next secretary of transportation. His family, pleased and proud, had thrown a party in his honor before the confirmation hearings began. It had been a joyous occasion. The hard-drinking, fun-loving Coopers threw open the doors of their family estate and blasted rock-and-roll music loud enough to make William Perm dance atop city hall in Philadelphia.
Emma sat down beside me. "You talked to Laura?"
"Yes, around nine o'clock. She was—she was—"
"It's okay." Emma hugged me around the shoulders.
Libby shoveled around in her handbag and came up with her handkerchief.
When I could speak again, I said, "She can't possibly have killed herself."
Chapter 2
Of course, my boss had not been invited to the Cooper bash. And Kitty Keough had chewed hard on her pride when she phoned me about the assignment that afternoon.
"Have you been asked to the Coopers' tonight?" she had barked in my ear with all the charm of an enraged Pekinese.
Rory Pendergast, billionaire industrialist, international philanthropist and owner of the less-than-respectable daily newspaper the Intelligencer, had hired me to write for the society column shortly before his death. Bless him, he found me a job despite my complete lack of employment history. I was better suited to hosting social events than writing about them, but I was learning fast, and some of my best lessons had come from Kitty herself, despite her dislike of me. The ironclad contract he created had so far prevented Kitty from getting me fired after my first fumbling attempts at journalism and encroachment on her territory. But I knew Kitty was still looking for a loophole to get me canned.
"Yes, I've been invited." I had endeavored to sound polite even though Kitty still treated me with less respect than she did the panhandler who hung around outside the newspaper office building. "Oliver Cooper's son Flan is an old friend of mine."
"Spare me the details of your teenage romances," she had snapped. "I just want to know if you're going."
"I am. But I've been invited as a friend, not a representative of the press."
"I'm not asking you to snoop in their bedsheets. Just get a couple of good quotes. If the old man gets rejected at his confirmation hearing, we'll need something juicy. See if you can handle that."
She hung up without allowing me to decline. That was Kitty's style. She'd been the poison pen of the Intelligencer's society page for more than a decade, a
nd readers loved her switchblade prose.
I couldn't imitate Kitty's style—not when my friends, the oldest and most distinguished families of Philadelphia, were often the targets of her cruel copy. As I saw it, our job was to cover the activities of the so-called high society as they helped and promoted various charities. But Kitty wrote an old-fashioned gossip column full of innuendo and character assassination. She was very popular with readers.
Some of our colleagues assumed I'd been hired to learn the ropes and replace Kitty when the newspaper's ownership finally managed to ease her into retirement. I believed, however, that Kitty was going to die at her keyboard, blood pressure exploding off the chart as she pounded out one last lambasting column. I toiled in her shadow and tried to keep my friends at the same time. I had bills to pay, after all.
So I had gone to the Cooper party with a notebook and pen in my beaded clutch.
More parties were thrown in Philadelphia from September through November than even Kitty could keep up with. The Coopers were lucky to find a night that wasn't already booked with two benefits and a dozen private cocktail parties, not to mention a noisy political fund-raiser or two. By luck, my calendar was free, so Reed Shakespeare, my driver, took me out to the Cooper estate just as a glorious Indian summer sunset began to blaze in the sky.
"Whoa," said Reed when we hove into view of the house. "You visiting Bill Gates tonight, or what?"
We both stared out the windshield at the new Cooper mansion. When Oliver Cooper divorced his first wife, he gave back her ancestral home on the Main Line and moved his new wife, the former Doe Slansky of Scranton, out into the county where they constructed a replica of the Vanderbilts' Biltmore at astronomical expense, mimicking every detail up to the chimney pots. Except alongside the driveway to the Cooper mansion was, as befitting an aviation king, a private airstrip.
As his four sons finished their MBAs at Wharton and joined the family business, Oliver built nearby homes for each of them in turn, along with more amenities than a luxury resort. The rambling houses were surrounded by pools, tennis and basketball courts, a nine-hole golf course, a stable for the Cooper granddaughters' ponies and lush gardens that Doe reportedly expanded every spring.
I had counted eight private aircraft parked on the grass near the family hangar that evening. One of the planes was a corporate jet with the name of an Atlantic City casino emblazoned on its tail. In addition to big military contracts, Cooper Aviation built custom aircraft for wealthy clients who sometimes stayed at the Cooper compound while perfecting the mechanics of flying their new acquisitions. You never knew who you might bump into if you visited Oliver. Movie stars, professional athletes, even teenybopper boy bands with money to burn all the jet fuel they wanted.
A cluster of security men stopped me on the driveway, asking to see my invitation, and told Reed to take the car about a mile away to a secured location. Obviously, Washington had already made some changes around the Cooper compound.
"Nora!" Oliver Cooper greeted me himself when I'd passed through the security checkpoint. Proud patriarch, he stood in the open doorway of the main house. His voice roared out at me over the thump of rock and roll behind him. "Nora Blackbird, how come you didn't marry one of my sons?"
"Hello, Oliver." I kissed his ruddy cheek and allowed the burly captain of the aviation industry to gather me up in a bone-crushing hug. I gasped, "Congratulations on your nomination."
"Thank you. Thank you." He nuzzled my ear before planting a hearty kiss on my cheek and setting me on my feet. "So nice of you to help me celebrate!"
He looked me up and down with the womanizing gleam that never seemed to leave his gaze. He was dressed casually in khaki trousers and a well-worn leather aviator's jacket, clearly a favorite item from his closet brought out to celebrate his latest career success. It suited his image—still the rough-and-ready pilot despite his stratospheric position in the corporate world.
I smiled, but stepped back to a safe distance. "How does it feel to be the next secretary of transportation?"
"I'm officially honored and humbled, if you're asking as a member of the press," he said with a laugh. "But if it's just you, Nora, I'm also pleased as punch. There's no guarantee I'll make it through the confirmation process, of course, but I'm going to give those bastards in Congress a piece of my mind if they start hinting I'm unfit for the job. By God, you look ravishing this evening. Your mama was a bombshell in her day, and I must say you're giving her a run for her money."
"Thank you, Oliver." I had the advantage of spotting his young wife coming towards us from inside the house, so I kept my voice light and cool. "Coming from you, that's high praise. Good evening, Doe."
"Nora," she breathed, as she double-kissed the air beside my jaw. She was careful not to touch me, however. Doe rarely made physical contact with another person, except her husband. "How delightful to see you."
She sounded convincing, but I could see her struggle to decide if I were there as a potential rival for her man or as a representative of the Intelligencer's society column. She must have decided the latter, because she smiled at last.
As blond and tanned as Malibu Barbie, Doe kept her eye-popping figure taut and her hair perfectly flipped up at her shoulders. Her silk sweater with its deeply cut neckline and the matching snakeskin pants were exactly the color of an Afghan hound. A diamond necklace as tight as a dog collar gleamed on her neck, heightening my impression that she was Oliver's sleek pet. Her toes peeked seductively from very pointed spike-heeled sandals.
The only flaw in her appearance was the condition of her hands. A gardener, Doe proudly wore her stubby nails as merit badges to her prowess with flowers. Otherwise, she was stunningly turned out.
Beautiful, slightly jealous second wives were not necessarily bitches, I reminded myself sternly. Doe did good work on the city's landscape board, and I'd recently heard she was helping organize a hospital fund drive. Unfortunately, she was as dull as a dial tone in social situations.
I knew Oliver's first wife, Annabelle, very well indeed. It was still jarring not to see tall, elegant Annabelle by Oliver's side—her distinctive white hair cut no-nonsense short around her aristocratic face, and her raspy, smoker's laugh ringing out with ironic amusement. The daughter of a prominent old family and a woman of exquisite taste and impeccable social grace, Annabelle had held her head high through her husband's many dalliances, worked hard for several unglamorous charities and nursed her father through colon cancer. She had been a wonderful mother to four rambunctious sons, too, raising them with a sense of humor as well as a firm hand. She was well read, down to earth and called 'em like she saw 'em. If you sat near smart, vivacious Annabelle at a dinner party, you undoubtedly had a great time. When I dated her son Flan, she'd welcomed me warmly despite rumors that my parents were fiddling while Rome burned. She was a class act. Oliver had earned every penny of his fortune, but he had needed Annabelle's polish to be accepted in the city.
She did not deserve the treatment she got when Oliver finally roamed too far. Because I loved Annabelle, it was hard for me to like Doe, who had all the bad taste her husband's money could buy.
I mustered a smile, though. "Your garden looks fantastic tonight. Doe. I love the cornstalks and Halloween decorations."
"Thank you very much. Gardening is my passion. Well, after Oliver, of course." She picked an invisible bit of lint off her husband's sleeve and tipped her face adoringly up at his. "I wanted the grounds to look spectacular in case a special occasion came along, and look what happened!"
"She's always ready to throw a party," Oliver said on a laugh.
Doe tried to look modest. "Oh, Nora goes to oodles of parties better than this. Are you here officially, Nora? I thought about inviting Kitty, but—well, Oliver is still angry about what she said the last time we asked her."
I remembered Kitty had chewed up Doe Cooper's party-throwing skills and spat them out for all Philadelphia to despise. Poor Doe had been unprepared for entertaining the people h
er husband enjoyed, and Kitty spotted every shortcoming.
"Oliver felt that since you were invited, we could safely leave Kitty off our guest list."
I could see her anxiety. "Kitty did ask me to write something about tonight, but I wasn't sure you'd want me to."
"Of course we would!" Doe cried, relieved. "We trust you, Nora. Don't we, Oliver?"
"Well, I hate to look like a publicity hound."
Most of the city's Old Money liked to keep their names out of print, whereas New Money worked hard to get themselves splashed around the newspapers. Oliver's reluctance almost rang true.
Doe pouted. "Darling, don't be silly!"
"I'll take it easy on you," I promised Oliver with a grin. To Doe, I said, "Do you suppose you'll move to Washington?"
"Oh, yes," she said quickly. "As soon as Ollie is confirmed, we'll start house hunting. It's going to be our primary residence."
Doe had never been embraced in certain circles of the city. Starting all over in Washington was probably exactly what she wanted—a fresh start towards becoming a respected member of a community in her own right.
"That sounds exciting," I said. "But you just built this wonderful new home."
"Oh, we might build the same house again. With my allergies, I need a home with absolutely no synthetic materials whatsoever."
"You should see her swell up around polyester," Oliver added. "It's not a pretty sight."
"Ollie!" Doe punched his arm affectionately.
"Well, you certainly did a bang-up job here." I indicated the enormous house.
"It's our dream home," Doe assured me. "I'll build it all over again if we can find enough ground. And I'd want all the same amenities. It's amazing what you can't give up once you have certain things—the home theater, the caterer's kitchen, the safe room, the wine closet—well, all of it! We want everything to be perfect for our friends."
Oliver groaned. "I'm going to have to ask the president for a raise!"
We laughed.
"But what about your family?" I asked Oliver. "They're going to miss having you right next door."
I must have said something wrong, because immediately both Oliver and Doe looked as if I'd just brought up a bodily function.