The Hot Pink Farmhouse
( Berger and Mitry - 2 )
David Handler
The Hot Pink Farmhouse
David Handler
PROLOGUE
OCTOBER 21
This wasn’t supposed to happen.
She had made a solemn promise to herself about sneaking around in the night this way: Never again. I will not treat another man’s wife this way. I will not treat myself this way. But there was a mighty big problem with such a promise, she had discovered. It lasted only until it was put to the flesh test by a certain man, the right man, him. And then it went flying right out the window, along with shame, self-respect, and sanity.
I am not in control of myself, she realized as she steered the rocket-fast Porsche down the narrow, twisting country lane, its twin exhaust pipes burbling in the after-midnight quiet. I am a bad, bad girl.
She parked on Frederick Lane, a few houses down from the little inn, well away from its parking lot, and closed her door very softly when she got out. Sound carried in the village. And it was important that no one hear her coming to him in the night. No one.
The stars were out and she could see her breath in the light of the full harvest moon. There would be a frost come morning, first of the season.
She did not lock the car. No one who grew up in Dorset did. The newcomers locked theirs, of course. Sometimes, in the night, she could hear the alarms going off when raccoons jumped onto their fashionable Land Cruisers. What an intrusive, hostile sound that was. But she could not knock the newcomers. She would not have been able to stay here in her lovely little village, earning the kind of money she was earning, if it weren’t for them and their kids moving in.
Fallen leaves crackled under her feet as she strode softly toward the darkened inn. The earth smelled of rotting apples, a sweet, moldy aroma that reminded her of when she was a little girl on the farm. As she walked, she thought she heard somebody else’s footsteps in addition to her own. She paused, her ears straining, but now heard nothing. Her ears had been playing tricks on her. She resumed walking, her heart beginning to race with anticipation. It was after midnight and she was up to no good and she knew it.
This time her eyes were wide open.
They hadn’t been that first time, back when she was working as an au pair the summer after her freshman year of college. A wealthy Park Avenue couple had rented themselves one of the big summer bungalows overlooking the Sound. Two darling little girls they had. The wife was a society skeleton with a hyphenated name and an overbite. And Stephen was a grave, sensitive dreamer who yearned to write sonnets but traded in hedge funds because this was what was expected of him. How tragically romantic he had seemed. And sooo handsome. And then his hyphenate wife had to leave for Kennebunkport when Mumsy took ill. She moved into a guest room to see to the girls. And she and Stephen had talked and talked into the night. There had been soul-baring and there had been tears. And it had happened right there on the living room sofa. Three times, quickly in succession.
The poor man had been positively starved for her, she had told herself.
At summer’s end she had followed him into the city and their affair had continued in a succession of hotel rooms. She became something of an expert on the relative merits of their various accommodations. The mattresses at The Plaza were the firmest, the club sandwiches at The Carlyle the tastiest, the towels at the St. Regis the most luxuriant. After their trysts, she would ride home on the Metro-North commuter train, asking herself if these seasoned suburbanites could tell by her bruised lips and sated, dreamy countenance that she had just been ravaged by a married man. The career women stared at her with such flinty disapproval, she swore they could. The middle-aged businessmen, they just stared.
And then one day they were caught by his wife’s best friend as the two of them came out of the Waldorf. And she discovered that Stephen had done this many times before with many different young girls and she was not special and there was nothing poetic or glorious about it at all. She’d just been having a tawdry affair with a lying creep who should have been treating his wife, his children and any number of sweet young college girls a whole lot better.
That was when she swore it would never happen again. And it hadn’t. There was one boy, a boy she would have given everything to, but he broke her heart and she sealed it shut after that, and there was no one.
Until now. Now she could not help herself. She simply was not strong enough. Everyone who knew her thought she was incredibly tough. She was, in fact, weak. She was just very good at hiding it. Possibly, this was the one thing in life she was best at.
So every night she came sneaking to him like this, breathless with anticipation and desire.
The innkeepers locked the front door after midnight. But they kept a key to the kitchen door under a flowerpot on the back porch. She knew this because she had waited tables here in high school. There were very few jobs for teenagers in a village like Dorset. Every reasonably presentable girl in town had pinned up her hair and donned the blue gingham jumper at one time or another. It was a rite of passage, just like the prom-night kegger on White Sands Beach.
After she’d returned the key to its hiding place she slipped off her shoes and tiptoed barefoot through the kitchen, hearing the hum of the big refrigerators. It was still warm in there from dinner, and the scent of roasted duck lingered in the air. She passed through the swinging doors into the darkened dining room, careful not to bump into the tables that were set for breakfast. Up one step to the main hallway, past the sitting room to the curving staircase. It was a grand old three-story house, a sea captain’s house. There were eleven guest rooms in all. Up the stairs she darted, quick and light-footed as a girl, knowing it was wrong. Not caring. That was the truly crazy part-not caring.
No lights showed under any of the doors. The guests were asleep. She could hear snores coming from the second-floor front room-an elderly Jewish lady from Brooklyn, he’d told her. The old dear sounded like a French-Canadian lumberjack. Up to his third-floor rear room she ran, tapping on his door.
He immediately flung it open and she was in his arms and he was kissing her mouth and eyes and neck and it had never, ever been like this before. This intense. This feverish.
She broke away, gasping for breath. “My God, you are a total madman.”
“I’m just a sad case,” he said, his eyes gleaming at her in the light from the bedside lamp. “Haven’t you heard? Everyone says so.” He pulled her inside, closing the door softly behind her. The room was small and cozy, with a canopied bed, a rocker, a lovely old wardrobe cupboard. “I thought you’d never get here.”
“I had a little car trouble.”
He wore boxer shorts and nothing else. He wanted her badly. She could see this plainly.
“Well, that answers my first question,” she said tartly. “How you feel.”
“Terrific,” he answered exultantly. “Today was the best thing that’s ever happened to me. Well, second best…” His hands reached for hers. “I was lying here thinking you weren’t going to come. I didn’t know what I would do if you didn’t.”
“Perhaps what you need is a hobby,” she teased him. “Have you thought about making your own jams and jellies? Or whittling? There’s a grand old tradition of Yankee whittlers that goes all the way back to Ralph Waldo-”
He plunged his mouth down upon hers, his hands flinging her skirt and sweater off her. She wore nothing underneath. Naked, she leaped into his arms. He carried her to the bed, pulling her up and over on top of him, kneading her breasts with his hands.
“Ohh…” she cried softly as she felt the exquisite agony of him inside of her. The canopy bed creaking under their weight. In fact,
the whole bedroom floor creaked-God help whoever had the room directly below them.
“Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…” As he buried himself deeper and deeper in her. “Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…” As she raised herself up and down upon him…“Ohh…” As she felt herself going and going…“Ohh… Ohhh… Ohhhh…” Until at last he exploded within her and she collapsed upon him, quivering all over.
“Do you have any idea how beautiful you are?” he whispered in her ear.
“I don’t mind you telling me, if you feel like it.”
He felt like it, he felt like it.
Then she got busy straightening the covers around them and they lay there under the quilt, snuggling.
“I’m not liking this,” he confessed. “What we’re doing.”
“I’m not either. But if it feels this good, it can’t be all bad, can it?” She let out a soft laugh. “That sounds just like a Sheryl Crow song.”
“I wouldn’t know. I never pay attention to lyrics.”
“You don’t? But how can you tell what the song is about?”
“What’s to tell? They’re all about the same thing-love that’s starting, love that’s ending. Good love, bad love, love.”
“Okay, if our love was a song, who would sing it?” she asked, immediately feeling stupid. It was a high school date question.
He was silent a long moment. Was he carefully considering his response, or was he just asleep? It was only when they began to talk this way that she began to wonder if they had anything in common at all.
“Okay, I’m thinking Bonnie Raitt,” she rattled on. “Or maybe Sarah McLachlan. How about you?”
“I guess I’m thinking more along the lines of Roy Orbison.”
She cupped his chin in her hand. “Oh, honey, it’s not that bad, is it?”
“This has got to end. I have to leave town.”
“You can’t leave,” she protested, hearing the desperation in her voice.
“It’s too risky.”
“There are people who go through their entire lives without risking anything. We don’t want to be like them, do we?”
“But both of our lives could be totally ruined.”
“So we’ll leave town together. She’ll let us go. She’ll come to her senses. We just have to give her time.”
“And then what?” he asked miserably.
“And then we can start a new life,” she said, not even believing her own words. The utter and complete hopelessness was washing over her now, too. It was only their passion kept it at bay.
So they reignited it, much more slowly and tenderly this time. And there was this and only this. And it was so much better than it had ever been with anyone else. Until they were spent once again, and the despair came creeping right back, like a chronic pain that could only be dulled with stronger and stronger drugs.
They did not sleep a wink, not wishing to lose a single precious one of their stolen moments together.
The kitchen staff generally trickled in at about five-thirty to begin breakfast. Not wishing to encounter anyone, she kissed him good-bye shortly before five and tiptoed back down the stairs and out the kitchen door into the pre-dawn darkness, her clothing disheveled, hair a mess.
The village was still asleep. No dog walkers were out yet. No joggers. No one. It was quiet and calm and cold.
Shivering, she scraped the thin layer of frost from the Porsche’s windshield and jumped in and started it up with an indiscreet roar, wishing it weren’t quite so loud. Quickly, she steered her way back up Frederick Lane toward home, tearing past an enclave of precious antique houses that dated back to the early seventeen hundreds. They were set far back from the road and surrounded by lush green meadows and mossy stone walls. Many of them overlooked the Connecticut River. One by one the adjoining meadows were being transformed into building sites. Giant new prairie palaces with many wings and turrets were springing up alongside the lovely old houses, dwarfing them. Often, as she passed by these new showplaces, she made unkind remarks about them under her breath. But on this morning, as she turned north onto Route 156 and floored it up into the farm country, she was so lost in thought she barely noticed them.
It was no good and she knew it. Because his wife would never let him go. Because it was an illicit, unbelievably tacky small-town romance, and no good ever came of those. Because all three of their lives would be destroyed.
No, she was not tough. But she was stronger than he was. So it was up to her to do the right thing, the adult thing, the smart thing. End it. Right now.
As the dawn light came, the autumn leaves began to emerge from the darkness in their red and orange splendor. This was her favorite time of the season, just before the peak color, when there was still a good deal of lush green foliage remaining on the trees to offset the flaming color. At Winston Farms, a blanket of frost lay over the pastures, sparkling. It was as fragile and serenely beautiful a sight as she had ever seen.
Her turnoff onto Old Ferry Road was just beyond the Winston Farms feed troughs, where the cows were busy enjoying their breakfast. It was a hard left turn, and it required her to come nearly to a complete stop, even in the nimble roadster. As she did so, downshifting, she glanced at the dashboard clock. It was five-twenty. That left her just enough time to shower and change and start breakfast. Sleep? That would have to wait until after work, when she’d be able to close her eyes and take a deep breath and-
She barely saw the flash. It came from somewhere up in the rocks across the road. But this fact barely had a chance to register in her sleep-deprived brain. And she never did hear it because by the time the sound reached her, the car had already exploded and flipped over onto the hay trough, where it and countless bales of hay and several poor, unwitting dairy cows erupted in a fireball that rose over a hundred feet into the dawn sky.
The very last thing on earth she saw was that flash. It was the brightest light she had ever seen. Just like staring right into the sun. And then she was the sun. And she didn’t have to worry about their relationship anymore. Or about anything else.
The very last thing she thought was: This wasn’t supposed to happen.
But it had.
And now there would be hell to pay.
ONE DAY EARLIER
CHAPTER 1
Autumn’s arrival meant the onset of headless mousey season out on Big Sister Island. Or at least it did in Mitch Berger’s little corner of it.
Shortly before dawn, Mitch’s rugged outdoor hunter, Quirt, deposited a fresh head-free corpse on the welcome mat of Mitch’s antique post-and-beam carriage house and meowed to be let in. And meowed. And meowed. Upstairs in his sleeping loft, Mitch reluctantly stirred. Next to him on the bed, Clemmie, his gray-and-white short hair, did not so much as open an eye. Not even a hurricane could rouse Clemmie. In fact, with each passing day, Mitch was becoming more and more convinced that she had been genetically altered into a meat loaf.
Yawning, Mitch padded barefoot down the narrow stairs into the living room and waddled to the front door, flicking on the porch light to find one orange tabby who was immensely proud of himself and one white-footed field mouse who was missing his or her head.
It definitely took some getting used to as a morning wake-up call.
Quirt immediately made straight for the kibble bowl. The mouse stayed outside. Later, Mitch would bury him. Her. It. A small ceremony, nondenominational. Right now, he put the coffee on, watching Quirt chew his way steadily through his breakfast. Quirt had been a feral stray until he was six months old, same as Clemmie, but the two could not have turned out more different. Quirt remained a sinewy outdoorsman who did not linger inside unless it was raining. On those rare occasions when he would consent to sit in Mitch’s lap he’d squirm and wriggle and make this unbelievably strange noise in his throat that sounded more like Gorgo, the monster that rose from the ocean’s depths, than it did a pussy cat. Clemmie, on the other hand, never went outside, never stalked anything more threatening than dust and spent so much time in M
itch’s lap that he sometimes felt she was attached to him by Velcro.
Mitch had not actually chosen to adopt either one of them. The new lady in his life was one of those kindhearted people who rescued feral strays from supermarket dumpsters and she had, well, forced them on him. But now that they were settled in he could not imagine life without them.
While his coffee brewed, Mitch shaved and put on a baggy fisherman’s-knit sweater, rumpled khakis and his wading boots. Then he poured himself a fresh hot cup, topping it off with two fingers of the rich chocolate milk that came in glass bottles from a dairy in Salem. He stood there sipping it contentedly and watching the purple-streaked dawn sky through the big windows that looked out over Long Island Sound in three different directions. A few fishing boats were heading out. Squadrons of geese flew overhead, honking. Otherwise, it was so quiet he could hear the water lapping at the rocks outside his door.
This was his first autumn in the cottage on Big Sister, a family-held island off Dorset, the historic New England village situated at the mouth of the Connecticut River halfway between New York City and Boston. The summer people were gone now, the kids back in school. The water was bluer and colder, the sky clearer and spiced with the smell of wood smoke. Migratory barn swallows and monarch butterflies filled his trees by the thousands, pausing to feed on insects before they took off again like a cloud for the Carolinas. With each passing day, the afternoon shadows grew longer and longer.
Mitch was the only one on the island who was not a Peck by birth or marriage. Right now, he was also the only one in residence, which meant he could enjoy the rare luxury of playing his beloved sky-blue Fender Stratocaster as ear-splittingly loud as he pleased. There was a decommissioned lighthouse on Big Sister, the second tallest in New England. There were four other houses on the island besides Mitch’s, forty acres of woods, a private dock, a beach that Mitch alone used, tennis courts that no one used. A rickety wooden causeway connected it to the mainland at Peck Point, a preserve that belonged to the Nature Conservancy. Paradise. It was a Yankee paradise.
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