Simmer Down

by Jessica Conant-Park

Adrianna nodded. “Well, Dora is stuffy and snobby and not my most favorite person, but she’s always spoken highly of Oliver. She seemed very off today. I almost feel bad leaving her by herself in that mansion. She and Oliver had been together for years, and she must be totally lost. Like I said, I think she’s in a state of shock and has no idea what to do with herself.”

  Throughout the short drive to Sarka’s, I continued to press Adrianna about Dora and Oliver’s marriage, but nothing I heard suggested a motive for Dora to have murdered her husband. Oliver had clearly been an ass of some sort, but whether or not Dora knew it was questionable.

  “Why are you so interested in her?”

  “No reason. Just wondering about the lifestyles of the rich and widowed,” I said innocently. “And we’ll see about Sarka.”

  “So now you think Sarka killed Oliver?”

  “No, but maybe we’ll get some juicy information from her,” I said.

  THIRTEEN

  AS Dora had said, Barry and Sarka Fields lived nearby. After a four-minute drive, we arrived at what turned out to be my dream house: a traditional two-story colonial painted gleaming white, it had black shutters, an attached garage, and a white fence topped with lattice-work. Christmas lights and garlands were strung around the bright red front door, and on the door itself was a big fresh wreath. There was even smoke billowing out of the chimney! I was ready to move in.

  Not knowing what Sarka wanted done with her hair, Adrianna and I unloaded all of her bags again, went up the brick walkway, and rang the bell.

  The door opened, and there was Barry, dressed in an expensive navy suit, clearly ready for a workday. “You must be Adrianna. Thank you for coming on such short notice.” He reached out and shook Ade’s hand and then realized that I was standing there, too. “Chloe? What are you doing here?”

  My cover had been blown. “Adrianna is a good friend of mine, and I’m just tagging along with her today to get a feel for the business. I’m writing a paper,” I said vaguely. “On, you know, self-employed women who…work.” I’m not always quick on my feet.

  Barry, however, apparently accepted my feeble explanation. “Oh, well, great. Ladies, please come in out of the cold. It is finally starting to feel more like winter around here, don’t you think?”

  We stepped into the warm house and hung our coats in the entryway. The look and the ambiance here were completely different from what I’d noticed at Dora’s. The living room walls were a rich red; the trim, a warm ivory. Everything was cozy and comfortable and totally livable, as if the Extreme Makeover team had just left. There were two big, soft couches and a matching chair and a half (one of those oversized, cushiony armchairs I’d been wanting and for which I lacked the funds and the space). The rest of the furniture was, I guessed, from Restoration Hardware or Pottery Barn. A fuzzy rug covered the center of the room. A real wood fire burned in the fireplace, and the mantel held lighted tapers in a natural honey color. In a corner of the room a Christmas tree was smothered in ribbons, bows, vintage-looking ornaments, and string after string of lights. I sighed. I’d have given anything for a living room like this. These people had somehow leaped into my brain, extracted my fantasy house, and set it up for themselves.

  As if reading my thoughts, Barry said, “Make yourself at home.” He gestured to the comfy couches, and I somehow controlled the urge to hurl myself onto the overstuffed pillows. “I’ll go find Sarka. I’ve got to go do some work today, and she didn’t have any plans, so I thought it might be nice for her to do something for herself while I’m gone. I hope it wasn’t inconvenient for you to come over today?”

  “Not at all,” Adrianna said. “Dora is a regular client of mine, and I’m more than happy to see one of her friends.”

  “That’s great. Thank you. I’ll be upstairs on the computer, and I’ve got tons of phone calls to make. There are still so many people who haven’t heard about Oliver, and Dora is really not up to making those calls.”

  When Barry left the living room, I was tempted to trail behind him to sneak a look at the rest of the house.

  Adrianna was as awestruck as I was by the beautiful room. “Well, this definitely looks nothing like Dora’s house, that’s for sure.”

  “You’re not kidding. There isn’t one smidge of bad taste in here, is there?”

  Sarka appeared a few minutes later, her hair wet from the shower, her face bare of makeup. If she hadn’t been so scrawny, she’d have been stunning. She wore a matching white zip-up sweatshirt and pants that mercifully covered what must have been visible bones.

  “Hello, I’m Sarka. It’s nice to meet you. Dora says wonderful things about you.” She smiled softly at Ade. “And you must be Chloe? Barry says we met briefly the other night at the gallery. I’m so sorry I don’t remember.”

  My memory of Sarka that night was that she’d looked exceedingly bored, so I wasn’t surprised that she’d forgotten our introduction. “That’s okay,” I said. “There was a lot going on that night.”

  Adrianna lifted up her bag. “Where would you like me to set up?”

  Sarka waved her hand around the room. “We can stay in here if you like. I’ll just pull a smaller chair in from the dining room, and we can sit by the fire.”

  The suggestion astounded me. My graduate-student living room was nothing by comparison with Sarka’s, but when Adrianna did my hair, we used my bathroom or kitchen. The chemicals she used for color were, by definition, designed to tint what they touched, and I didn’t want a hennaed couch or highlight-splotched pillows. Furthermore, there was already more than enough of Gato’s fur everywhere without the addition of the trimmed-off ends of my own hair. Even though Sarka could clearly have afforded to replace anything that was stained and ruined, and even though she undoubtedly had cleaners to vacuum up hair, why use the living room? Even if she merely wanted Adrianna to put up her hair without tinting or trimming, it struck me as odd and inappropriate that she wanted us to stay here instead of moving to her bathroom or bedroom, or even to her kitchen. Was she in the habit of blow-drying her hair in the living room? Did she brush her teeth here?

  “Would either of you like some coffee or tea?” Sarka offered. “Or there’s some frittata left over from breakfast, if you’d like.”

  “Actually,” said Adrianna, “I’d love a piece of frittata and some tea, if you don’t mind. I didn’t get a chance to eat breakfast.”

  “Oh, you must be hungry. I’ll bring out food for all of us, then, okay?”

  I nodded happily, and Sarka left for the kitchen.

  “I can’t believe she wants her hair done in this gorgeous room,” Adrianna said. “I hope she doesn’t want color, because I might have a panic attack if I spill anything. I wonder if I have a plastic sheet I could put across the floor.” Adrianna rifled through her bag.

  “You can’t do color in here! We’ll have to move to the kitchen or bathroom.”

  Moments later, Sarka returned with a tray that she set down on the coffee table. “The frittata has Cheddar cheese, jalapeños, sun-dried tomatoes, and fresh basil. I hope that’s okay? Have a seat and help yourself to whatever you want.”

  “It smells delicious. Thank you,” I said, sitting down on one of the plush sofas. The frittata was spicy from the jalapeños and had a hint of sweetness from the tomatoes that cut the heat. “It’s incredible. Where did you get this?” I wondered aloud.

  “Oh, I made it. I love cooking, and this is a new recipe I found in a magazine. The secret is that you add some of the liquid from the pickled jalapeños to the beaten eggs. I never would have thought to do that, but it really works, I think.”

  I wouldn’t have pegged Sarka as a cook, since she’d snubbed Josh’s food at the gallery and looked as if she subsisted on water, with the occasional bite of celery stalk as a special treat. So far, however, she was much warmer than the icy woman I’d met the other night.

  “So, what would you like done with your hair today?” Ade asked between mouthfuls of the egg dish.

 
; “Oh, I don’t know. I don’t get my hair done very often. I usually just tie it back in a ponytail, but Barry wanted to cheer me up. He thought it would be fun for me to have something new done for tonight. I feel sort of silly having someone come to the house just for me, but it was really sweet of him. Because of Oliver, we’re coming a bit unraveled. Whatever you want to do is fine.” Sarka helped herself to a thin slice of the frittata. So she did, in fact, eat!

  Adrianna took a good look at Sarka. “Well, if you usually wear it pulled back, why don’t we let your hair down. It’ll still be simple, but something a little different from what you usually do.”

  “Sure. But nothing too fancy, okay?”

  I took her to mean nothing remotely like Dora’s elaborate updo.

  When we’d finished eating, Ade set Sarka up in a chair close enough to the fireplace to enjoy the warmth without roasting. She combed through Sarka’s long, dark hair with a wide-toothed comb. “I’m just going to trim your ends, if that’s okay. And if you’d like, I could add some long angles through your hair to give you a little bit more shape.”

  “Angles? Oh, okay. If you think that would be nice. I’ve always had just a straight cut, but I guess I could try something new. Why not? It’s New Year’s.”

  “Are you sure you want me to do this in here? I’m going to get hair all over the floor. I don’t have anything to put under you,” Adrianna apologized.

  Sarka shook her head. “Don’t worry about it.”

  While Ade got to work on Sarka’s hair, I decided to get going on my own task. “I imagine it must be very difficult for all of you to lose Oliver. I heard he and Barry grew up together.”

  Sarka nodded. “Yes. I’ve known Oliver since Barry and I have been together, which is almost fifteen years. I met Barry when I first moved to Boston. I had a little apartment by myself in Somerville, and we met at a café where I was waitressing at the time. I had almost no money, and he and Oliver were just starting the Full Moon Group, so we were all young and broke, but all very happy. The four of us spent all our time together. Oliver was practically family to us. As difficult as he could be, it’s just unimaginable that he’s gone.”

  “Fifteen years,” I echoed. “A long time.”

  Sarka smiled. “Barry and I got married six months after we met. We just had a small ceremony with our families and a couple of friends. I wanted to keep it simple, and I couldn’t see paying thousands of dollars for one day, even though my parents wanted us to do some big, elaborate ceremony. Do you know the original Filene’s Basement downtown? I got my dress there. I was even on television that day. All the news stations were down there filming the annual wedding gown sale, and there was a shot of me pulling a dress up over my clothes. Barry and I thought it was hysterical—my parents would’ve had a fit if they’d found out I bought my dress for only two hundred dollars. I told them I went to New York and bought one at Kleinfeld. Why waste all that money when I could go to Filene’s Basement? Oh, it was such fun!”

  It was hard to reconcile the Sarka who’d had a great time getting a bargain wedding dress with the snooty, haughty woman she’d been at Food for Thought. I bent my head down as I sipped my tea in the hope of hiding the expression on my face.

  “Sounds like you got to have just the kind of wedding you wanted,” Adrianna said, tilting Sarka’s head to the side while she shaped her hair with scissors.

  “It was. My parents said that if I wanted a simple ceremony, we could all fly out to Greece, and they’d arrange everything. That was the last thing I wanted. I spent my entire childhood traveling from one country to another. Not that there weren’t nice things about traveling, but I didn’t have any kind of stability growing up. The minute I made friends at one school, my father would be transferred for work, or my mother would decide we needed to experience Africa, so we’d pack everything up and relocate. I think that’s why I don’t like to travel anywhere now. I just want time at home with my husband. Barry loves to travel, though, so we’ve just decided that he should go alone when he wants to, and we’ll just make time for ourselves when he returns from his trips.”

  “Well, your house is just amazing,” I said. “It’s such a nice place for the two of you to be together. I really admire how you’ve decorated. Did you do this all yourself?”

  Sarka nodded shyly. “Thank you. I’m still a bargain hunter. Some of the furniture I’ve redone myself. I got that coffee table at a Boy Scout fund-raiser for sixteen dollars. I stripped it down and then stained it, and I think it came out pretty well. Even the couches I got when a furniture store was going out of business.”

  “Tilt your head down for a minute,” Adrianna instructed Sarka. “Is Barry going to be working more now that Oliver is gone? I imagine there’s a lot that needs to be taken care of.”

  “Oliver had him working all the time anyway, so it won’t be much different now. There were times when it felt like we never saw each other. Oliver was exceptionally good at the financial aspects of their clubs, but Barry is the one who really knows how to open a new place and get it up and running and keep it successful, so he was dealing with a lot of the daily grind of owning so many places. I’d like things to calm down a little, maybe have a baby. I’m not getting any younger, so if we want to be parents, we should do it sooner rather than later.” Maybe getting pregnant would encourage her to eat enough to put some weight on?

  She continued. “But we might adopt. As much as Barry wants to open a fine dining restaurant, he’s very good at what he does for Full Moon, and he doesn’t want to lose that. I’ve told him he should sell his share and open the kind of restaurant he’s always wanted. Like the restaurant we’re going to tonight with Dora.”

  “Dora told us you were going to Simmer. My boyfriend, Josh Driscoll, is the chef there, so we’ll be there, too,” I said proudly.

  “Oh, that’s right! Barry told me Josh made him a fantastic meal in the kitchen there. That was so generous of your boyfriend to do that. Barry really needed a morale boost. Opening a new restaurant must be so exciting for Josh. And for you. He was cooking at the gallery the other night, too, right? Those charity art events aren’t my style, but Barry and Oliver needed to go, and Dora asked me to go with her. She loves those things. Dora is sweet in many ways, but she and I are very different from each other. She’s a little older than I am, but it’s not the age gap thing. We just don’t have much in common other than the fact that our husbands are in business together. Or were in business.”

  For a second, it seemed to me that I’d misjudged Sarka the other night at the gallery by mistaking her boredom for standoffishness and arrogance. But did her boredom at Food for Thought really explain the difference between her coldness then and her friendliness now?

  “Dora seems like she’s holding it together, considering what she must be going through,” I commented.

  “For now. I don’t think it’s really sunk in yet, though. I asked her to come out with us tonight because I’m afraid if she sits in that house all alone she might suddenly realize how depressed she is and have a breakdown. It’s bad enough that her husband died, but the fact that he was murdered makes it even worse. At least she wasn’t the one who found him. Barry said he’ll never forget seeing Oliver like that. So, I just think Dora should be with friends right now. She was crazy about Oliver, and, in his heart, he was crazy about her, too, even if he didn’t always act that way.”

  “Did they fight a lot?” Ade spoke with clips held between her lips. “He was almost never around anytime I’ve been to their house.”

  Sarka shook her head slightly. “No, they didn’t really fight, but I think Oliver met and fell in love with Dora before he should have. Not to badmouth him now that he’s gone, but he probably needed a few more years to date other women before he settled down, if you know what I mean. He had a bit of a wandering eye,” she explained.

  “Really? I wouldn’t have guessed that based on the way Dora speaks about him.” Adrianna was very good at eliciting gossip from
people.

  “Don’t mention this to Dora, but Oliver was quite a flirt. Over the years he made a number of suggestions to me. You know, suggestions that we be more than just friends. I was never really sure if he was kidding or not, and I didn’t want to make a big deal out of it.”

  I perked up. “Did he ever try anything with you?”

  “Not really. But he would touch me all the time, you know, put his hand around my waist, hug me a little too long, that sort of thing. I think it bothered Barry a lot, but I asked him not to say anything to Oliver. There was no point, and I didn’t want to start a fight. Oliver never really crossed the line with me. It was more about the idea of crossing the line.”

  “Chloe, can you hand me the dryer?” Ade asked me. “Okay, Sarka. I’m done cutting, and now I’m just going to blow it out smooth and rounded under at the bottom. But you think Oliver was coming on to other women besides you?”

  “I don’t know for sure. Dora might have had her suspicions, for all I know, but it’s not the kind of thing we talk about. Dora is too proud to discuss anything like that with me. We spend a lot of time together, but we’re not really very close friends. She did seem jealous of that new girl that they hired to do publicity. Hannah something?”

  “Hannah Hicks.” I snarled and handed Ade the blow dryer.

  Adrianna rubbed a smoothing serum through Sarka’s hair and began pulling long sections through the brush as she aimed the dryer at them.

  “Yes, that’s her,” Sarka yelled above the din of the blow dryer. “They were spending a lot of time together working on new ways to promote the clubs. And I know Dora didn’t approve that the Full Moon Group was paying for that girl’s apartment downtown. As opposite as we are, I do have a certain loyalty to Dora, and I’d hate to find out that Oliver was cheating on her. But maybe Dora just resented the money it was costing. The fact is that she can be quite a cheapskate.”

  “Dora?” I blurted out. “I thought she…uh, I had the impression that she…” I just couldn’t finish the sentence, or I couldn’t have finished it without calling Dora an outright liar.