Sweet Revenge

by Diane Mott Davidson

  Arch groaned again and said he would. I disconnected and wondered how old Arch would have to be before parenting him came easily. Forty, maybe?

  “He’s having trouble finding his stuff?” Julian asked. I hadn’t even heard him come up to my side.

  “Arch used to be neat, almost obsessively so. But now he hangs on to everything. He’s become a bona fide packrat.”

  “Know what? I used to be one, too. Grace cured me. She helped me sort through my stuff when I moved into her garage apartment, and I ended up donating half of everything. Now I have all kinds of room, and less-fortunate-type folks are benefiting. Plus, the whole exercise gave me a huge amount of energy.”

  “D’you have any energy left over to help Arch?” The two of us circled the table Larry had wrecked. Julian had spread a clean tablecloth. All we needed to do was arrange new place settings. Grace had also laid her hands on a trio of tiny green candles, which she’d positioned in the table’s center to replace the busted floral arrangement. No question, the woman had the knack for minimalism.

  “I think our first guests are arriving,” Grace called from the French doors. “Didn’t you want to set out the door prizes?”

  The gingerbread houses! Julian and I bolted for the kitchen. We nabbed the cellophane-wrapped cakes and walked carefully to the Roundhouse entrance. Grace had pulled a table over to the door, and even managed to round up a basket for the tickets.

  Just in the nick of time, as it happened. Plodding up the steps was Louise Munsinger, the new president of the Aspen Meadow Garden Club. Louise, in her early seventies, had lost none of her vitality. Her wrinkled, rectangular face was topped with hair dyed jet-black. She wore it pulled back severely from her forehead and tied in a bun at the nape of her neck. Her bulldog frown and block-like body encased in a long sable coat put me in mind of Stalin. But a dictator was what the AMGC had needed, after a native-trees-only group had splintered off—their term, not mine—the previous year. Threatening them with the horticultural equivalent of disbarment, Louise had brought the rebels into line and reunified the club.

  “Will one of you be taking the tickets?” she demanded now as she shed her fur coat and tossed it at Julian. Julian, ever athletic, snagged it. “The tickets are numbered and perforated,” she went on, “so each one needs to be carefully torn, in order for each member to check her number for a door prize.” Louise lifted a thin black eyebrow at me, and I nodded.

  “We’ll be careful, Mrs. Munsinger,” I promised.

  She assessed the dining room with her icy gaze, and my stomach did backflips. She sniffed and said, “The dining room looks very presentable.”

  Well, thank God for that, I thought. And then a fur hit me in the face. I gasped, then grabbed it, the way I’d once caught Scout the cat when he’d jumped out of a tree. “Excuse me!” I couldn’t help crying, once I’d righted myself and pulled the pelt off my puckered mouth.

  “Aren’t you hanging up the wraps?” Elizabeth Wellington asked me. Her dark eyes were red-lined, as if she hadn’t slept much last night. Her bristly hair stuck up all over her head. I was surprised that she had come to the luncheon, given what had happened to Drew.

  “Uh.” I coughed and spat out a few animal hairs that clung to my lips.

  “Here, boss,” Julian said, “let me have it.” He relieved me of the stole and disappeared with both furs.

  “I want to talk with you later, Goldy,” Elizabeth said.

  Terrific. I so enjoyed these conversations with people who demanded to speak with me. Watching her retreating back, I noted Elizabeth was wearing a scarlet suit in that shade favored by older women. Marla and I had dubbed it “Menopause Red.”

  With Grace at my side, I put Elizabeth out of my mind and hustled to the kitchen. We checked on the chicken and gnocchi, brought out extra plates just in case, and looked for Julian. He’d hung up the furs on a makeshift rack and was taking—and gently tearing—the tickets for the first arrivals. He looked at me and gave a tiny shrug. Guess I’m manning the door. I nodded my gratitude.

  Once the women were seated, Grace, Julian, and I ferried out the chicken, vegetables, and gnocchi and placed them next to the salad platters on each table. Louise had insisted that the food be served family style, in order to avoid “those ridiculously long buffet lines.” We followed quickly with the hot rolls. Louise dinged a knife against her water glass, to indicate that everyone should be quiet. She gave a short welcome, pursed her mouth into a tiny O, and announced that she would be speaking briefly during the lunch, then drawing the door-prize tickets at the conclusion. With the tables now filled with garden-club members, dishes clanked as they were passed. When the conversation level grew to a low roar, we three worker bees retired to the kitchen for a brief respite.

  “Don’t tell me we’re not having wine,” Marla said over my shoulder. I jumped—she always managed to startle me—and said no, Louise hadn’t wanted any booze. In the fashion incarnation of Christmas, Marla was wearing a flowing, bright red silk dress with a holly-green cummerbund. “Louise is cruel,” she pronounced. “And just look at all these Christmas decorations. Cruel Yule.”

  Julian said, “Now there’s the holiday spirit.”

  “You bet.” Marla pulled a wine bottle out of her capacious Louis Vuitton purse—which purse she’d decorated with a red-and-white corsage all its own. “Open this for me, will you, Julian? It’s a Riesling spätlese, very rare, perfect with chicken and gnocchi.”

  I smiled in spite of myself. While Julian rustled around for a wine opener Grace shuffled and clinked wineglasses until she’d set out four of them on the oak farm table.

  “Who’s going to be using four glasses?” I asked mildly. “The staff here”—I indicated Grace, Julian, and me—“isn’t allowed to imbibe during working hours, sorry.”

  “Speak for yourself,” Grace said gaily as she clinked glasses with Marla. “I don’t want any pay. I just want some of this gorgeous wine.”

  Marla, happy to have drinking company, took a large swig from her glass. “I cannot bear to listen to Louise say one more word about the success of our—make that her—tree-planting campaign,” she began. “You’d think we were greening up Antarctica. And the trees we planted ended up being native pines and spruce anyway, so we didn’t need to have all that controversy, after all.”

  “Still,” Julian put in, “the fire in the wildlife preserve did destroy thousands of trees. It’s a good program, and the garden club is doing a super job, even if you don’t like to listen to her talk about it.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Marla replied. She took in the three of us with a devilish twinkle in her eye. “When I saw Elizabeth Wellington whack Goldy with her mink stole, I decided I had to sit next to the old battle-ax. All that anger had to be coming from somewhere, right?” She sipped her wine. “Poor thing, she was really, really in love with that ex-husband of hers. Talk about deluded, oh my God. There he was, this great-looking guy, he was her age but looked ten years younger. I mean, she used to love him so much. But not after what he did to her, she just told me.”

  “What did he do to her?” Grace asked. Something about Grace’s tone made me assess her. It was not an innocent question. Why would Grace care what Drew had done to his ex-wife?

  Marla refilled her glass. “You know Drew tried to have the DUI hushed up.” When we nodded, she said, “He’d had too much to drink at a funeral, is what he claimed. So sad about some fellow lawyer pal who died, and so on. But nobody bought it, and trying to keep the arrest quiet cost him the election. Case closed on the scandal? That’s what most folks in Furman County thought. Turns out, wait for it.” She drank from her glass, then went on: “Drew had a fifteen-year-old girl in the car with him when he was stopped. I knew there was some story about him with much younger women, I just didn’t know the particulars. Anyway, Drew insisted to the cops and Elizabeth that he was taking this girl home, but they’d already passed her house and his car was weaving back and forth on its way down a dead-end lane whe
n the cops pulled him out for a Breathalyzer test. Which he failed.”

  “Who was the girl?” I asked.

  Marla shrugged. “Elizabeth clammed up at that point. But when she left for the restroom, the gals at my table jumped in saying that nobody knew who the girl was because there was some privacy thing that her parents had insisted on. So it’s unclear exactly what he was up to with that girl. But Elizabeth must have had a pretty good idea, because she filed for divorce after the election.” Marla and Grace clinked glasses again, and sipped.

  “Which table is this?” I asked. “And are they still talking about Drew?”

  “Table eight,” Marla said obligingly. “And yes, they are still dissecting old Drew Wellington. One last thing that earned him Elizabeth’s hatred? You’ve heard about the two and a half mil?”

  I said that I had.

  “Well, I always thought it was a divorce settlement, but it wasn’t. In the course of the marriage, Elizabeth inherited some money. Now she’s sort of hinting that he got some of it before they were even divorced. I don’t know the details yet, and Elizabeth might not share those, ’cuz they could make her look stupid.”

  “And who inherits Drew’s money now?” Grace asked; too quickly, it seemed to me.

  “Don’t know,” Marla countered. “They didn’t have any children, so Drew could have left it to anybody. I haven’t found out everything.”

  “How’d you find out as much as you did?” Julian asked.

  Marla’s eyes twinkled again. “You don’t think I just brought one bottle of wine, do you? Though if you ask me, Elizabeth has been indulging since before the lunch even started. By the way, Goldy, Hermie MacArthur is at the table. Tonight’s your curry party at her house, and she’s still bemoaning the fact that Neil Tharp has invited himself in Drew’s place. Better get over there!”

  She swept out of the kitchen. Grace and I raised eyebrows at each other. I nabbed the ice-water pitcher while she grabbed a spare basket of rolls.

  “Ah, the Gossip Patrol,” Julian said as Grace and I made for the kitchen doors. “I’ll take care of the rest of the dining room’s refills. Just let me know what you find out at table eight.”

  Marla had reseated herself by the time Grace and I arrived, trying to look unobtrusive, at her table. Elizabeth Wellington was just outside the French doors, alas, speaking into her cell phone. There must be a fund-raising emergency somewhere.

  “I know what Elizabeth regrets,” Cecie Rowley said, her voice low. Cecie and I had served on several church committees and she nodded at me. “Or what she must regret,” Cecie went on. “That Drew made so much money after he lost the election, selling his real-estate investments and setting up as a map dealer. Rumor is that he was good for several mil.”

  The women murmured and cooed. Several mil! How many maps did you have to sell to make that much? Marla looked at me and raised her eyebrows. Clearly, neither one of us believed you could make that much in cartographic commerce.

  “Map dealer, schmap dealer,” said Rosie Barton, another woman I knew from St. Luke’s. Her voice was more bitter than cider vinegar. “Drew told my husband that if we bought a particular map of the East Coast, from Massachusetts down to New York Harbor, then in a year it would be worth fifteen thousand bucks. Well, a year later, we had a knock at our door from a private investigator. He said he represented what he called ‘Special Collections’ at Stanford University. He wanted to see the map…and said it was theirs!”

  There was silence at the table. I checked out Hermie MacArthur’s face. Under the heavy coating of powder, it had turned redder than Marla’s dress.

  Cecie said, “My land! Did you try to get a refund?”

  Rosie laughed. “Absolutely. Drew said he didn’t make refunds. He also refused to reimburse us for it. He said the investigator was full of it. Now we’ve had to hire a lawyer, and the whole thing is devolving into an expensive mess. I hate to speak ill of the dead”—Marla again raised her eyebrows at me; ever notice how folks spoke ill of the dead as soon as they said that?—“but Drew Wellington was a bastard.” Rosie looked up to make sure Elizabeth was still outside on her cell phone. “No wonder poor Elizabeth divorced him.”

  As if on cue, Elizabeth barged through the French doors and went hunting for her fur stole. Once she’d found it, she banged back out without saying farewell to anyone. Hmm. So much for our having a chat.

  There was an uncomfortable silence at the table. Finally Marla said, “Well, Rosie, you’ll just have to find something else to hang on your living-room wall.”

  Rosie snorted. “I’m putting up a map of Colorado. A contemporary one.”

  The conversation turned to other ways to make money, or to lose it, both sure bets for energetic conversation in Aspen Meadow. Grace and I finished refilling the water glasses and breadbasket, and hightailed it out to the kitchen.

  “Remember Larry Craddock said Drew was a crook?” I asked Grace. “I didn’t really believe him. I mean, Drew may have been an unsavory hypocrite, but this seems to be on a whole different level.”

  Grace tilted her head. Her white hair shone around her. “Perhaps not a crook. But certainly someone you wouldn’t trust when it came to investing in maps.”

  “They’re ready for dessert,” Julian announced from the kitchen doors. The three of us bustled about, ridding the dining room of serving platters, bowls, and entrée plates, and scooting back out with dishes of the ganache-topped chocolate cupcakes. As far as the dessert went, there was a general rule of catering: Serve women chicken or fish for a main course, and you must serve chocolate afterward. They’ll feel as if they’ve earned it.

  When the women had cleaned their plates, Louise Munsinger announced the door-prize winners, who joyfully accepted their gingerbread houses. Then Julian, Grace, and I passed around the bags of Christmas cookies for the “exchange.” The garden-club members oohed and aahed. They seemed happy, even thrilled, not to have to do any baking. As Marla had said, the Christmas season was so exhausting.

  When it was all over and most of the garden-club members had departed, Louise Munsinger approached me. My heart descended to the nether regions. What fault would she have found? But again she lifted her eyebrows, and I told myself she was smiling.

  “That was lovely. We can’t equitably divide up the extra cookies, so I hope you will keep them.”

  “Thank you, Louise. We’ll find a use for them.”

  She handed me the final check, then lifted an eyebrow in the direction of Grace. “Should you really have an older woman doing so much work?”

  “Not to worry,” I said hurriedly. “Grace is in better physical shape than I am. And she’s so impressed with what you all have done with the replanting of the Aspen Meadow Wildlife Preserve,” I lied, “she just wanted to be a part of it, somehow.”

  Louise straightened her shoulders, a gesture of pride. “We have done a lovely job, a very impressive job, Goldy, as a matter of fact. Even the Furman County sheriff, on behalf of his entire department, thanked us for our thoroughness.”

  “The sheriff thanked you?” I was bewildered. Tom had not told me about this.

  “Of course,” Louise replied brusquely. “You know, they thought that woman, that stripper who was poor Cecelia Brisbane’s errant daughter, might have died in the fire.”

  “Sandee, you mean.”

  Louise sniffed. “I never knew her name. I’m only aware that after the sheriff and his men couldn’t find her, he asked us to divide up the entire area of the fire into quarter-acre parcels. We paid for a surveyor to come help us. The sheriff said that they couldn’t risk young kids, you know, the Cub Scouts and whatnot, to go hiking in the summertime and find the skeleton of some woman who had run away from the police after she murdered…well, she murdered your ex-husband, didn’t she?”

  I nodded. “Yes. She confessed and then she ran into the fire.”

  “We were very thorough,” Louise said, her chin lifted. “We raked and replanted every quarter acre affected b
y the fire. And there was no skeleton of a missing stripper.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “She must have gotten away,” Louise said with another sniff before she marched out the French doors.

  Grace, Julian, and I set to work cleaning up and putting the conference-center dining room to rights. It took almost two hours to wash and replace all the silverware and glasses, water the centerpieces, pack up the rented china, and sweep the floors. When we were done, I turned off the holiday lights and joined my two-person staff in the kitchen.

  “You two were incredible,” I said. I handed them each a wad of cash. “I don’t want to hear a word, Grace, you’re taking it.”

  “I’ll just give it to charity,” Grace said. “But it’s certainly clear to me that the pair of you do earn your money. I’m exhausted.” I thought of what Louise had said as Grace ran her thin, spidery hands through her cloud of white hair. “And you said you had another event to cater tonight?”

  “We sure do,” Julian replied, smiling.

  “And are you going to get a nap between now and then?” Grace asked, her voice suddenly worried and nurturing. Julian couldn’t help it; he laughed.

  “We’ll have about ten more shots of espresso and be good to go, right, Goldy? And I’ll be putting sugar in mine, get even more of a buzz.”

  “Sounds great to me,” I agreed. “Let’s lock up.”

  I looked at the six extra bags of cookies Louise said we should keep. I had plenty more at home, so I gave Julian and Grace one each, then on impulse decided to take the last four dozen down to the Furman County Jail. Patricia’s desperate pleas from the night before still vibrated in my ears. In fact, just the thought of her sobbing voice, and the memory of her trying to wrench herself away from the policeman, filled me with guilt. She had begged me to help her, and what had I done? Asked a few questions at catered events, and tried to get Tom to tell me more than he should have.

  “I’m taking these down to the jail,” I announced as I dropped the extra cookie bags into my big carryall.