Claudia retrieved Susan’s casseroles from the top step, then followed Ellen to the kitchen in the rear of the house.
“I don’t have much furniture yet,” Ellen said as she gestured toward two high stools near the work island in the center of the room. “I’m using the counter as a table for the interim.” She told Claudia about the beautiful light oak table and chairs she had found at an online furniture gallery.
Claudia deposited the trio of casseroles on the counter, then eased herself up onto the stool. It wobbled. She tried very hard not to notice how much. The older she got, the more vulnerable she felt. Things she wouldn’t have noticed ten years ago filled her with terror today. Her independence seemed sometimes to be a day-to-day proposition.
“You bought furniture online?”
“I would buy groceries online if I could.” She pulled two small plates from a box near the refrigerator and silverware from the dishwasher.
“Roberta has been trying to convince me to go online.”
“You should,” Ellen said, cutting two generous pieces of cake. “I don’t know how I survived without it.”
Ellen described the table she had ordered, right down to the depth of the chair seats. “They deliver on Monday.”
“I’m impressed,” Claudia admitted, “but I’m still not ready to give up going to a real store.”
Ellen complimented her on the carrot cake. She ate with an appetite that belied her slender form. The Galloway women had only to look at dessert and it miraculously appeared on their hips. Stanley bounded through the back door. He nuzzled against Ellen’s bare leg, paid his respects to Claudia, then barreled down the hallway and out the front door.
“I’ve been meaning to call and ask you about that secret panel in the pantry,” Ellen said as she sliced herself a second piece of cake.
“Oh, what a wonderful story that is! You see, the original owner was a man named Laidlaw who—”
The phone broke in with its shrill demand.
“I won’t be a second,” Ellen said as she went to answer it in the other room.
Normally Claudia would feel a trifle piqued if Susan interrupted her mid-sentence to answer the phone, but Ellen was a doctor, after all, and it came with the territory.
And would it be so terrible if she managed to catch a few words of the conversation while she waited?
* * *
“Thanks a lot, Suz,” Hall muttered as his old pal screeched down the street in her mother’s Chrysler. She picked a fight with him over who was carpooling to soccer practice three weeks from next Sunday, then took off, leaving her mother behind. She had made it look spontaneous, but he wouldn’t be surprised if she had planned the whole damn thing.
Okay, so maybe that was over the top even for his old friend, but she had been so volatile the past few days that she should be wearing caution signs on her back.
He loved Claudia Galloway, who had her own streak of volatility, but she wasn’t the woman he had been hoping to spend the evening with, and Susan was probably having a good laugh over it right now.
He whistled for Stanley, and the two of them strolled back into the house.
“Was that my car I heard?” Claudia asked as he entered the kitchen.
“Afraid so,” he said, snagging a piece of carrot cake from her plate.
“Did she forget something?”
“We had a fight about the soccer carpool, and she decided to make a grand exit.”
“I love my daughter, but she has been behaving like a horse’s hindquarters all week.”
“You noticed, too?”
Claudia’s lightly powdered cheeks reddened. “I won’t tell you what she said to us at the flower shop.”
“Annie told me.” He couldn’t hold back his grin. “She said Sweeney had to translate.”
“Anne usually displays more discretion.”
“You have to admit it was quote-worthy.”
Claudia made one of those ladylike Yankee sniffs that signified great disapproval.
“Chili mac!” he said, lifting the lid on one of the foil casserole pans.
She slapped at his hand. “Those are for Ellen.”
He glanced around. “Where is she?”
“Taking a phone call,” Claudia said. “There seems to be some health problem with her father.” She cleared her throat. “Not that I was eavesdropping, you understand. I couldn’t help but overhear—”
“I know all about it,” he said, making sure he held back this grin. Claudia’s eavesdropping skills were as well-honed as her daughter’s sharp tongue.
“Poor Dr. Markowitz,” Claudia said. “And if I recall, he has a young son.”
“Actually it’s not Cy who has the problem. It’s her biological father. Deirdre’s father.”
“It sounded very serious.”
“I think it has that potential.”
Claudia’s reaction wasn’t at all what he expected. Her eyes filled with tears, and she looked down at her hands.
“Claudia?”
“Don’t mind me. When you get to be my age, you’ll understand.”
“You were thinking about John.” Claudia had never gotten over the sudden death of her husband. For years this big house had been a shrine to his memory, the place where she felt closest to him.
“Actually I was thinking about you, dear.”
His look must have conveyed his surprise because she leaned over and patted his hand the same way she used to when he was ten years old and his world was coming apart at the seams.
“Oh, don’t look at me that way,” she said gently. “I’ve been around long enough to know men and women sleep with each other now and then. What would we talk about at the flower shop if they didn’t?”
He was over forty-five and a three-time loser in the marriage stakes. You would think embarrassment would no longer be an option, but it was. At least around Claudia Galloway.
“Any fool with eyes could see there’s more than just sex between the two of you. This has been growing for a very long time.”
“We’ve lost a dozen patients since Sunday night.”
“And they’ll come back before too long.”
“There’s no guarantee.”
“So you’ll find new ones.” Her tone shifted from gentle to fierce. “I wasted so much time worrying about what John’s family would think of him marrying a poor girl from the docks that we almost didn’t get married at all. I wish I could go back and gather up those lost hours and minutes and spend them all with him.”
“It still takes two and I’m not sure the lady in question wants to take a chance on a man with a track record like mine.”
“You’ll never know unless you try, will you?”
“Take a look around, Claudia. It’s Friday night. We were alone and you know I don’t make house calls.”
She looked at him and they both started to laugh.
“There’s no fool like an old fool, is there?” she asked, wiping away tears of mirth.
He could think of at least one middle-aged fool who might give her a run for her money.
* * *
Mary Pat might not have inherited their father’s musical ability, but she definitely had inherited his theatrical flair. She knew how to drop a bombshell better than the U.S. Army.
Her first words were “Deirdre’s gone missing,” followed by a word-by-word transcript of her entire conversation with someone at the Crooked Isle Inn who claimed she had never heard of a harpist named Deirdre O’Brien.
“I need to talk to her about Billy.” Mary Pat sounded annoyed, frazzled, like a woman who was rapidly approaching something too terrible to contemplate. “She’s been doing her best to avoid me, but she’s his daughter, too. She needs to be involved in the decision making.” Her voice broke and Ellen felt a surge of sympathy for the sister she barely knew. “Would you call Crooked Isle and see what you can find out? Tell them you’re a doctor. They might pay more attention.”
She wasn’t convinced flashing h
er credentials would make much of a difference, but it was worth a shot. Mary Pat gave her the number for the Crooked Isle.
“You’ll call me right back?” Mary Pat asked.
“I promise.”
It took a few tries, but she was finally put through to the right person. She repeated her question, and the woman’s words were lost in a gale of laughter floating toward her from the kitchen. She cupped her hand around the earpiece and strained to catch the woman’s words.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Would you mind repeating that?”
Funny how the woman’s huff of annoyance came through loud and clear. “I said there is no one by that name on our staff. You must have the wrong establishment.”
“Is this the Crooked Isle Inn?”
“It is.”
“And you’re in Bar Harbor?”
“We are.”
“Then I have the right establishment.”
“I’m sorry, miss—”
“Doctor.”
“I’m sorry, Doctor, but for the last time there is no Deirdre O’Brien on staff here.”
“She’s the new harpist.” Or harper. Or whatever they called people who played harps.
“As I already told you, we don’t have a new harpist.” She hung up and dialed Mary Pat back.
“The same thing happened to me,” she told her older sister.
“The woman said she had no record of a Deirdre O’Brien.”
“And she said they didn’t have a new harpist, right?”
“Right.”
“I knew she was up to something when she showed up with that monster of a dog last week, but I never suspected this.”
That monster of a dog was currently sprawled on his back across Ellen’s feet having his furry belly rubbed. “You don’t really think she had this all planned out.”
“Rescuing Stanley was probably spontaneous. Dumping Stanley on one of us took a little planning.”
“Her car is still here.”
“A fifteen-year-old Hyundai that’s laid up in the shop. She’ll never miss it.”
“She had Scott, the mechanic, drive her up to Bar Harbor. Why would she do that if she was looking to disappear?”
“I don’t have all the answers,” Mary Pat said, “but the fact remains that nobody at Crooked Isle Inn ever heard of her and you’re left holding the dog.”
“Well, I’m sure Scott didn’t run off with her. He has to come home sometime and then I’ll ask him.” Okay, so she wasn’t absolutely positive he hadn’t run off with Deirdre, just reasonably sure. Mary Pat didn’t have to know everything.
Ellen promised to call her sister tomorrow with an update, then hung up the phone feeling even more drained than she had that morning. Mary Pat had done a remarkable job of getting her emotions back under control. Some women ate chocolate, some women shopped to conquer stress. Mary Pat made lists. She read columns of To Do items to Ellen until she thought her ears would fall off and drop into her lap. Compassion had never been her first response to a conversation with her older sister, but this time it was. There was no way either one of them could deny Billy was in trouble. He refused to eat. He sat in the lounge chair in the family room and nodded off to Buffy the Vampire Slayer reruns when he wasn’t sound asleep in the guest room.
His doctor’s appointment couldn’t come fast enough for any of them.
“I’m so sorry,” she said as she rejoined Claudia and Hall in the kitchen. “Family difficulties.” She glanced around. “Where’s Susan?”
“We had words,” Claudia said.
“Then we had a fight,” Hall said, “and she drove off in Claudia’s car.”
“I have a good mind to call Barney and have him arrest her.” Claudia looked as if she meant every word.
“I can top both of you,” Ellen said as she filched a piece of carrot cake and popped it in her mouth. “Deirdre’s disappeared.”
Chapter Twenty-two
Deirdre didn’t mean to melt down right there in the lobby of the Crooked Isle Inn, but there was a first time for everything.
“We did everything possible to contact you, Ms. O’Brien,” Stephen Logan, owner of the Inn, backed away ever so slightly. “We phoned your manager, sent a telegram to you at your last address. We even tried to contact your last employer in case he knew where to find you. I can say with utmost sincerity that we exhausted every means at our disposal to let you know we didn’t require your services.”
“Are you telling me I’ve been fired?”
“No, no!” Stephen Logan looked appalled. “I’m afraid you were never hired.”
“But I signed the paperwork.”
“Yes, but we didn’t countersign.” He took her by the elbow and gently led her to the far corner of the room, where her sobbing wouldn’t upset the paying guests. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you, Ms. O’Brien. By that time our regular harpist had come back to us permanently.”
“But I’m here,” she said through her gulping tears. “I gave up a gig in New York to take this job.” Every time she went out looking for security, she ended up with a kick in the head. When was she going to learn?
“I understand your distress. We’re every bit as distressed as you are.”
She shot him a fierce look. “I doubt that.” The guy owned two hundred acres of prime property on Frenchman’s Bay. He hadn’t a clue what she was feeling.
“While we can’t offer you the job, we would very much like to offer you some small reparation for your inconvenience.”
She perked up just the slightest bit. “A month’s salary would be nice.”
“We were thinking of two weeks’ salary and a three-night stay in one of our best suites. All meals included, of course.”
She noticed Scott the Mechanic lugging her harps in from the truck. “A friend drove me up.”
She had to hand it to Logan. He didn’t even flinch. “He’s welcome to join you.”
At least she could see to it that Scott the Mechanic got a decent meal for his trouble. It wasn’t much, but it was better than nothing. She agreed to it.
“We’ll check you in at the front desk,” Logan said, “and we’ll see to it that a bottle of champagne is delivered to your room.”
Scott waited off to the side while she checked in. A member of the bell staff approached with a rolling cart, and she directed him to the harps and to her two battered garment bags.
“Suite 6B,” the desk clerk told the bellman, who headed toward the service elevator.
She walked over to Scott, who had been watching her with a look of concern and free-form irritation.
“What the hell happened?” he asked, looking at her tear-streaked face. “What did he say to you?”
“I’ve been fired.”
His jaw actually dropped. “Fired? You never had a chance to play.”
“Tell me about it.” She explained the situation as well as she understood it, garbling some of the words through a fresh onslaught of tears. “He’s giving me a three-night stay and two weeks’ salary as compensation.”
“He’s afraid you’ll turn around and sue his ass off.”
She started to laugh despite herself. “I couldn’t afford the lawyer.”
“Come on,” he said. “I’ll drive you back down to your sister’s.”
“I’m not going.”
“You’re not going to stay here, are you? The place screwed you over.”
“A free weekend is a free weekend. It’s not like I have any place else to go, is it?”
“You can stay with Ellen.”
The thought of crawling back into town with her tail between her legs was more than she could bear. It was one thing to know you were a loser. It was something else again for everyone else to know it. Especially when one of them was your sister the doctor.
“I’m staying here,” she said, “and unless you’re a fool, you’ll stick around for a free meal before you head back.”
He hesitated a few moments. She could almost see the w
heels spinning inside his gorgeous head. Stay. Don’t stay. Stick around. Dump her now.
“Okay,” he said. “Thanks.”
She had never seen that expression in his eyes before. There was a softness there as he looked at her. She hoped it wasn’t pity. She wasn’t even thirty-five yet. He should be looking at her with unbridled lust, not pity.
“Stop looking at me that way,” she said as they walked toward the curved staircase to the left of the check-in desk. “I like you better when you’re pissed off.”
He laughed. Thank God. There was nothing like a blast of pity from a guy like Scott the Mechanic to pull a girl up by her bra straps.
“Don’t worry,” she said. “I promise I won’t sob through dinner.”
“I was worried about that.”
The door to Suite 6B was ajar. The bellman was bustling around inside opening curtains, adjusting the air, generally keeping himself busy until she had a chance to reach into her pocket and pull out a tip.
He thanked her, glanced over at Scott, then left the room.
“Not bad,” Scott said as he bent to check out the Jacuzzi in the corner of the room.
She peeked into the larger of the two bathrooms. “My last apartment was smaller than this!” Gleaming white tiles, sparkling fixtures, a tub the size of her Hyundai.
He gestured toward the smaller bathroom. “Okay if I—?”
“Feel free,” she said, then disappeared into the porcelain palace where she made the mistake of looking into the mirror. Wouldn’t you think whoever had decorated the place might have dropped a few dollars into good lighting? The harsh white glare from the overhead light made her look like something that just crawled out from under a particularly nasty rock. Her skin was pale and pasty. Her eyes were red and puffy from crying. Her hair looked as if she styled it by sticking her finger into the nearest electrical outlet. And what was with that hideous top she had settled on? It made her look as if she’d eaten her way through the Ben & Jerry’s case at Yankee Shopper. No wonder Scott the Mechanic had looked at her with pity. She was pitiable. She wouldn’t be at all surprised if maybe Stephen Logan had taken one look at her, then fabricated that story about the return of the prodigal harpist. Who could blame him?
Girls of Summer (Shelter Rock Cove - Book #2) Page 26