Crystal Clear

by Jane Heller

  “Technically, I work for Mrs. Reid,” she explained, “but since Mr. Reid has been between books for some time and hasn’t had a publisher to promote him, he’s needed someone to keep his name out there.”

  “And you’ve been the someone.”

  “Yes. And it’s been a joy.”

  “Harrison Reid must be pretty special,” I said, curious about the legendary novelist with the legendary writer’s block.

  “Oh, gosh. Where do I begin?” Jennifer sighed after taking a sip of her soda. “He’s a genius, for one thing.” And a womanizer, for another, I thought. “His ideas aren’t just profound, they’re completely original, fresh, innovative. And yet he doesn’t pontificate or force them down your throat. He’s…well…he’s a man of greatness. When you’re in his presence you feel his greatness.”

  I stifled a laugh as I pictured the adoring Jennifer Sibley in bed with the legendary Harrison Reid, feeling his greatness.

  God, I had to get my mind out of the gutter. Maybe Rona was right: the fact that I hadn’t had a good shtup in a while was warping my perceptions.

  “Is Mr. Reid ever going to write another novel?” I asked Jennifer.

  “As a matter of fact, he’s just started one,” she said, as proudly as if she were the book’s author. “I’m not supposed to say anything, but Mr. Reid confided to me that he’s thinking of making the heroine a publicist named Jennifer.”

  Ah, so that’s his line, I thought. He promises them he’s going to put them in a novel and then he gets them to feel his greatness.

  After Jennifer went to powder her nose, I ambled over to the sofa and sat down next to Michael Mandell.

  “How’s the accountant?” he asked, putting aside his notes.

  “Pretty good. You?” I said.

  He leaned closer so he could whisper: “I’d like to catch the first plane out of this nuthouse. That’s how I am.”

  I laughed. “It can’t be that bad, can it?”

  He nodded. “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing here, writing about Amanda Reid and her New Age clothes line. I’d like to wrap a clothesline around the woman’s neck. She’s a joke. The story is a joke.”

  “Then why are you here?”

  “Because Personal Life wanted a story on Harrison Reid, but he wouldn’t talk to us unless we did a little gem about Mrs. Reid. She wears the balls in the family, obviously.”

  I didn’t comment.

  “So here I am,” he went on, “stuck in this one-horse town where everybody’s on some kind of screwball head trip.”

  I must have looked wounded because Michael clarified his position. “Well, not everybody.” He smiled at me. “You seem dangerously normal.”

  “Looks can be deceiving,” I replied.

  “Not when it comes to Amanda Reid. I mean, come on. Do I care if she wants to take that Indian guy’s Vision Quest and commune with coyotes on some mountaintop? Does anybody care?”

  “I don’t know. You’re the journalist.”

  “Was the journalist. When I started in this business, I did investigative reporting, wrote stories with depth, stories I was proud of. But investigative reporting went out with Woodward and Bernstein and now, if you don’t do the celebrity fluff, you don’t pay your bills. It’s the way things are, but I’d give anything to cover a real story, something readers can sink their teeth into, something that will get me out of this rut I’m in.”

  “I really relate to your rut,” I said. “I came to Sedona hoping to pull myself out of mine.”

  “Any luck so far?”

  I shrugged. “It’s too soon to tell.”

  Michael sank back onto the sofa. “I think it’s too late for me. My fate is sealed. For the rest of my life, I’ll be writing about pampered, self-absorbed, empty-headed celebrities like Amanda Reid, people whose idea of a ‘cause’ is doing anything they can to get their names in print. God, I make myself sick when I have to dig up dirt on these space cadets.”

  “What sort of dirt?” I asked.

  “How about the fact that the millionaire heiress told me she’s changed her will for the zillionth time and is now giving half her estate to The Clearing House.”

  “That place on 89A?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “But why on earth would she do that?”

  “So they’ll have the money to hire more ear coning specialists or something. God only knows.” He shook his head. “Last year, she said she was leaving a pile of money to the researchers who came up with that fat substitute that gives people diarrhea.”

  “Swell.”

  “And the year before that, she was supposedly bequeathing a tidy sum to WAM.”

  “Which group is that?”

  “Women And Men. You know, it’s that organization that promotes better communication between the sexes, even though women are from Venus and men are from Mars. Personally, I think Amanda Reid is from another solar system.”

  “So she actually changes her will every year?”

  “Just about. The woman has the convictions of Jell-O.”

  “How does her husband feel about this?” I asked, thinking of Harrison Reid, of how he had to be counting on inheriting Amanda’s money, all of her money.

  Michael grinned. “That’s one of the questions I intend to ask him during our interview.”

  “Dinner is served,” Amanda said, appearing in the living room. “At long last. It seems Marie had a run-in with nearly every piece of china in the place.”

  “Whatever she’s prepared, it certainly smells wonderful,” I said. “Thanks again for inviting me, Amanda.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” she said. “I thought it might be a treat for someone like you to dine with someone like me.”

  Michael elbowed me, but I kept a straight face.

  “It is a treat,” I assured her. “One I’ll never forget.”

  Marie’s roast turkey was very tasty, despite the plastic bag of giblets she’d forgotten to remove from inside the carcass. The mashed potatoes and stuffing were good, too, and since I was sitting next to Marie, I had the opportunity to tell her so.

  “They are good, no?” she said.

  “No. I mean, yes,” I said.

  “No,” Amanda snapped.

  “Yes,” Tina said. I think Tina was disagreeing with Amanda, but who could tell with all the yesses and noes?

  “Have you been Mrs. Reid’s chef for a very long time?” I asked Marie.

  “Two years,” she said as she downed a whole glass of wine in one swallow. “But maybe I don’t work for her much longer.”

  “Oh? Why is that?” I asked.

  Marie nodded at her employer, who was holding forth at the head of the table, yammering on yet again about Will Singleton’s Vision Quest. “I worry she is not satisfied with my work. I make mistakes.”

  “Don’t we all,” I said, trying to sound encouraging.

  “Yes, but I heard she is interviewing other chefs,” Marie revealed. “People talk, no?”

  “Yes,” I said. Especially this crew. They weren’t shy about spilling their guts to a complete stranger.

  “The situation concerns me so I get nervous and make even more mistakes,” said Marie. “I’m not young anymore, you know? The jobs are not as plentiful as they used to be. Society women like Madame Reid”—she nodded at Amanda again—“they want handsome young boy chefs now, chefs who think food is paint.”

  “I’m sorry, Marie. I’m not following you. Paint?”

  “These boys don’t prepare mashed potatoes, like you see here on this plate. They ‘create’ mashed potatoes. They pipe mashed potatoes into little swirls. They make tall buildings out of mashed potatoes. They put garlic and cauliflower and—Mon Dieu!—sushi into their mashed potatoes. I have become passe, no?”

  “No, Marie. No,” I reassured her. “If it doesn’t work out with Mrs. Reid, there will be other jobs.” If you cut down on the booze.

  “Thank you for saying so,” said Marie. “But what I am hoping
is that Monsieur Reid will convince his wife to keep me. He is my only hope.”

  “Mr. Reid likes your mashed potatoes?” I asked.

  “Oh, yes,” Marie said, beaming. “He makes butter swimming pools in my mashed potatoes. He pays me compliments on my cooking. It is Madame Reid who is not happy with me. If it were not for her, I could keep my job.”

  I nodded or shrugged or made some other gesture of sympathy. I felt sorry for Marie, but I had my own employment problems.

  At some point during the meal, she announced that she was going back into the kitchen to put the finishing touches on her dessert, a blueberry pie. When she was gone, I turned to Tina, who was seated on my other side, and tried to strike up a conversation. She wasn’t a barrel of laughs but she was probably my best shot if I wanted to snare Amanda as a client. She’d certainly been Billy’s ticket into the Reid household.

  “So,” I said to Tina. “Are you looking forward to the second day of our Jeep tour tomorrow?”

  “The Jeep tour? Tomorrow?” Suddenly, her eyes darted around the table. She seemed afraid, suspicious, jumpy, the proverbial deer caught in the headlights. “Why are you asking me that?” she demanded in a hoarse whisper.

  “No reason. I was just wondering, that’s all.”

  “Because you think I’m not looking forward to the Jeep tour? Because you think I don’t believe in this whole vortex thing? Because you’ve decided that I’m angry and resentful that I was dragged along on this trip in the first place?”

  I was stunned by Tina’s outburst. “Actually, none of that even occurred to me,” I said. “It was an innocent question. I wasn’t insinuating anything. Honest.”

  Jesus. Talk about a woman who needs her aura cleansed, I thought. I’ve never met such a defensive person. And jittery. All through dinner, she bites her nails and plays with her hair and fidgets in her chair. And now I merely mention our plans for the next day and she freaks out. Maybe Michael was right about working for Amanda; it does take its toll. I realized that now was not the time to even broach the subject of Amanda becoming a client of Duboff Spector. Not with Tina, anyway.

  During dessert and coffee, the phone rang in the casita. Tina made a move to answer it, but Amanda insisted on taking the call herself. She was gone ten minutes or so—I assumed it was her husband on the line, calling to say: How are you? Having fun? Sweet dreams, darling—but when she returned to the table she was rather coy, giving us no hint as to the person she’d been speaking to.

  “I hope y’all don’t think I’m terribly rude, but I think I’ll say goodnight and go upstairs to bed,” she said instead. “The hiking has done me in. Just done me in.”

  “What is it, your left hamstring again?” Billy asked. Amanda’s left hamstring, as well as her other body parts, were his responsibility, after all.

  “I hurt everywhere,” said Amanda. “I’m not as young as I used to be.”

  My, I thought. That’s quite an admission, considering that Amanda was younger than she used to be, if you believed the various ages she attributed to herself in the media.

  “Tina, you see to it that everybody has a nice time, while I toddle off to sleep,” she said.

  “Thanks again for dinner,” I called out to her as she ascended the staircase in her purple jammies.

  “No thanks necessary,” she called back. “As Mr. Singleton would say, I was simply being one with the universe.” There was a pause. “Or would he say that the universe was simply being one with me?”

  Oblivious to how idiotic she sounded, Amanda Wells Reid waltzed down the hall to her bedroom.

  Chapter Fifteen

  I awoke early on Thursday morning after sleeping fitfully. When I’d returned to my casita after dinner, there’d been another message from Steven, this one announcing that he was definitely headed for Sedona but not until Saturday, due to complications concerning a case he was working on. The hotel operator had reported all this to me with her usual remarkable attention to detail, not only spelling Steven’s first and last names but offering to have the bell-boy deliver a written transcript of the message, which I’d declined. I fell asleep soon after and dreamed that Steven had arrived in Sedona, but instead of heading straight for Tranquility when he hit town, he’d driven over to The Clearing House and said, “I’d like my aura cleansed, no starch.” That’s when Jazeem entered the dream, and the two of them proceeded to have sex on a bed of burning sage leaves.

  As it was another warm, sunny day, I ate breakfast on my patio, washed and dressed, and walked over to the courtyard adjacent to the lobby. There was a little spring in my step as I walked, which is another way of saying that I was excited by the prospect of seeing Terry again, which is another way of saying that I was feeling hostile toward Steven because of the dream, which is another way of saying that I was as confused about my place in the cosmos as I’d been before I left New York.

  When I made it to the courtyard at about five minutes of nine, I discovered that Terry and his Jeep were already there, waiting. His glossy brown hair glistened in the morning sun as he leaned against the Jeep, reading a magazine, his long, jeans-clad legs crossed at the ankles. He looked as self-confident as he’d appeared back in college, but more relaxed now, less restless, definitely “comfortable in his own skin,” as that dopey but nevertheless apt expression goes. Was it just the passage of time that had matured him? I wondered yet again. Was it living in a laid-back place like Sedona that had calmed his antsy-ness? Or was it his precious Annie?

  Of course, the bigger questions were: Had he changed? Did people change? Were people really, in the final analysis, capable of change?

  It’s so odd, I thought, as I continued to observe him from my vantage point under a tree. I still feel something for this man. In spite of the fact that I am not a stupid person, in spite of the fact that I have firsthand knowledge of his shortcomings, in spite of the fact that he and I lead different lives on different coasts, he still matters to me.

  “Hey there! Are you hiding from me?” he called out suddenly, before I had a chance to make my presence known.

  “Hiding? Not me,” I said casually, ambling toward him. “When I didn’t see you or Amanda or anybody, I decided to wait in the shade instead of out here in the hot sun.”

  He nodded with a little grin, as if he didn’t believe me for a second.

  “How was dinner last night?” he asked, tossing his magazine into the Jeep. I had assumed it was Sedona: Journal of Emergence, the one about life on Neptune, but when I caught a glimpse of the publication, I saw it was Business Week.

  “Entertaining but a little disconcerting,” I said. “I kept feeling as if everybody was in the cast of a bad play and I was the only one without the script. They all seemed to have an agenda, a Big Secret. It was one of the strangest evenings I’ve ever spent. But then, I don’t get out much.”

  “You? Don’t tell me your fiancé doesn’t wine and dine you.”

  I laughed. Steven whined and dined me. The last time we went to his favorite Pakistani restaurant, he spent the entire meal complaining about his mother. “He doesn’t have a lot of time for wining and dining,” I said. “We both work late. Our jobs are incredibly demanding.”

  “So you’ve said. You two sound very compatible.”

  “Oh, we are.” A lot more compatible than you and I ever were.

  “So where is the guy? You said he was flying out to Sedona yesterday.”

  “There have been problems with a client. He’s coming on Saturday.”

  Terry looked heartened. “Perfect. Then you’ll be free for dinner tonight. My house. Seven o’clock. Done.”

  “But what about Annie?” I protested, groping for a new excuse. “Won’t she need advance notice that you’re bringing someone home for dinner?”

  “Crystal,” Terry said tolerantly. “You’re not ‘someone.’ You’re the woman I was married to.”

  “All the more reason why Annie wouldn’t want you to spring me on her. Ex-wives aren’t people you w
ant to spring on anybody.”

  “Annie can’t wait to meet you. When I told her you were here in Sedona, she was jumping up and down.”

  “Was she on a trampoline?”

  Terry laughed. “Actually, she was. We have one in our backyard. But I meant that she was very enthusiastic.”

  Boy, I thought. She’s fetching and she jumps up and down on a trampoline. This Annie must be beautiful and athletic. I was about to succumb to Terry’s invitation when Amanda’s troop appeared, minus the millionaire heiress.

  “Morning, everybody,” Terry said to Tina, Billy, Marie, Jennifer, and Michael. He checked his watch. “It’s a few minutes after nine now. Is Amanda on her way?”

  Tina looked surprised. “Mrs. Reid isn’t around?”

  Terry shook his head. “I’ve been standing right by this Jeep since 8:45 and I haven’t seen her.”

  “Neither have I,” I volunteered.

  “That’s weird, because she wasn’t in her casita when we all stopped by to pick her up,” said Tina.

  “I’ll bet she’s in the gift shop, buying souvenirs,” Jennifer suggested.

  “I guess I should go and see,” Tina said resignedly and wandered off inside the lobby.

  “Perhaps Madame Reid decided to take her breakfast in the hotel restaurant this morning,” Marie offered. “She did not telephone me to come and fix it for her. But after the problem with the turkey last night—”

  “They have a fitness center at this place,” Billy interrupted. “She could have gone there to work out, but I doubt it. She doesn’t flex her pinky without talking to me about it first.”

  “Did anyone speak to her this morning?” Michael asked our group.

  Nobody had.

  “She went to bed early, I know that,” I said. “She could have gotten up early, too, taken a walk, done a little exploring on her own.”

  Michael waved me off. “That doesn’t explain why she hasn’t shown up for the Jeep Tour. She’s so gung-ho on this Sacred Earth business, let us not forget.”

  “Maybe one of you should call her room now,” Terry advised. “She could be there, changing into her cowboy outfit, on her way out the door.”