“I wish I knew,” she said with the utmost sincerity. “Please just go now, will you?”
“Oh, of course, must mind the store,” Twelvetrees said, his ability to deflect disgust seemingly boundless. “May I just say how lovely your home is and—”
“Say that but no more, please. I beg you.”
“Ciao then …”
3
Seeing Red
When she returned to the kitchen, the genoise for her petits fours had cooled sufficiently to receive the requisite jam fillings and ganache icings. The operation took a good hour, and when completed, M. Anomie once again slid into view, glowering seductively from the pantry door. To keep him at bay, Maggie slapped together a brie sandwich, made more strong tea, and retreated to her safe, intimate, beloved sewing room upstairs.
There was the matter of Harold Hamish to be faced—their professional relationship beyond reclamation, she assumed. She was quite prepared to buy her way out of Trice and Wanker’s contract for Keeping House by simply returning the rather enormous advance, but would they let go? Unfortunately, her agent Joyce Munger was not answering her cell phone (meaning, most likely, that she was at that moment enjoying an amorous interlude in the Sherry-Netherland Hotel with her lover of several months, Dr. Nathan Toth, Ph.D., the phenomenally successful author of The Thirteen Sacred By-Laws of Successful Relationships and Everyman’s Guide to Marital Fidelity—the slut.
Why, Maggie despaired, did everyone have to confide in her? Why was there no one to whom she, Maggie, could turn? Of course, that very instant she realized such a figure had entered her life in the person of Christy Chauvin, whose telephone number she now dialed at once.
With each ring of the phone, Maggie’s pulse quickened. Was she crying on Christy’s shoulder too much? Would Christy think she was an emotional basket case? A pain in the ass who—
On the fifth ring the phone was picked up.
“Christy … ?”
“No,” a man’s voice replied.
“Excuse me? Is this 879-9673?”
“Yes it is.”
“Well, who’s this?”
“This is Lieutenant Pfeister.”
“Excuse me. Did you say this is 879-9673?”
“Yes.”
“Well, where is Christy Chauvin?”
“Who is this?”
“What does that matter?” Maggie retorted. “And where is Christy?”
“Are you a family member?”
“No, I’m a friend.”
There was a pause on the line, a kind of peculiar aural chasm above which Maggie felt suspended, like an experienced acrobat who has just slipped and discovers to her great surprise that she is about to fall a long way.
“Miss Chauvin is dead,” Lieutenant Pfeister said.
“What!?”
“I’m sorry,” Pfeister said.
“When? How?”
“I’m sorry, ma’am. We’re trying to keep this line open for family members—”
Maggie didn’t so much reply as let out an animal-like howl of grief.
“—it’s all in the papers if you really want to know—”
Maggie flung the cordless phone across the room, as though it were a piece of fruit suddenly discovered to harbor a disgusting infestation of moth larvae. It bounced off a framed watercolor of Vita Sackville-West’s white garden at Sissinghurst, breaking the glass. Maggie sat on the edge of her wingchair shuddering with loss and horror. Somewhere outside the dubious security of the little windowless room, a commotion seemed to rise, but Maggie could barely distinguish it from the commotion in her heart. A tsunami of terror swept through her veins and it was suddenly hard to breathe, as though the Atlantic had somehow inundated lower Connecticut, sweeping everything into a maelstrom. Thinking she was about to drown, Maggie bolted out of the suffocating room, raced downstairs, and fled out the front door.
4
The Storm
A fierce and abnormal wind out of the southeast swept so violently through the trees that the pale undersides of their leaves now turned up against the turbulent, darkling sky like the little white faces of lost souls crying for heaven. Maggie struggled up the lanes of the orchard toward the rose garden, the world itself seeming to come apart all around her. Her mental boundaries felt as though they were dissolving. She could hardly tell anymore what she was running from or where she was running to—only that existence itself had become wholly fearsome, detestable, and indistinguishable from her tortured self. She could not even hear herself bawling in the din. The wind’s velocity increased, bowed the trees, and made them groan. Then, things began to fly past her: branches torn off trunks, a blue tarpaulin, a squawking chicken, a peach basket. Something hit her in the back of the head and she went down like a hundred-pound sack of potting soil in the cold grass. What had at first seemed mere blunt force turned into sharp pain. She tasted dirt in her mouth. Then she felt herself virtually lifted, spinning, and carried—not on her own feet and not upright—an interminable distance and then dropped on a hard wooden floor in a very dark place. Something clapped and set the roaring world apart from her. Then someone was cradling her from behind.
“Don’t hurt me,” she heard herself say, thinking her own words very strange, even under these bewildering circumstances.
“It’s only me,” a voice said above the roaring.
“Kenneth?” she asked, stiffening.
“No, Walter.”
She yielded to his cradling embrace. He was warm and sinewy and smelled of clean earth. He was like something that had risen out of the very ground to hold her tethered to the planet against this terrible revolt of the earth’s elements. She recognized now that they were on the floor of the potting shed, braced in a corner among some old hardwood tomato stakes. When it seemed impossible that the wind could roar more loudly, an even greater and deeper tumult mounted behind it, not so much an atmospheric noise anymore but a tremendous basso vibration, as of tectonic forces cleaving the bedrock deep below Fairfield County. Then a fusillade of hailstones pelted the tin roof. She covered her ears and fairly burrowed under Walter’s arm. The little building shuddered. Its single window shattered with a barely audible ping. As an immense dark force rocked the little building, they bounced up and down on the bucking floor. Then all thought and sensation was subsumed in the sheer brute energies of nature. Locked in an embrace of resignation, they retreated into the personal citadels of their own mumbled prayers as the world seemed to pitch and yaw around them.
Maggie had lost all sense of time, but eventually the commotion ceased, the vibration stopped, the rat-a-tat-tat on the roof ended, the roaring died down and became a thin, forlorn, empty whistling wind. The sound of her own blubbering alerted her to the fact of her survival. She peeled herself warily out of Walter’s arms.
“What was that?” she asked breathlessly.
“I think it was a tornado,” Walter said. He was shivering, though it was not particularly cold.
“This is Connecticut,” Maggie said. “We don’t get tornadoes here.”
“The weather’s not what it used to be,” Walter said, laughing in release of his own terror as though at a quip from the Old Farmer’s Almanac.
“I don’t remember coming in—how did I get here?” Maggie asked.
“You were lying in the grass.”
“Oh, yes, something hit me!” She reached for her head. “Ooooh.”
“Let me see.”
“Here. Back of the head.”
“That’s quite a goose egg.”
“Stuff was flying all around. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
“It was goddamn scary, wasn’t it?” he said. “Wooooo … !”
“Thank you for … rescuing me, Walter,” Maggie said. A tender emotion so strangely incongruous with the day’s violent events stole through her like a warm cleansing current. “Walter …” she repeated to herself quietly as though practicing the sound.
“Yes?”
“I’ve never called
you that before.”
“No, you haven’t.”
“We’ve been so very … formal.”
“You seemed to want it that way.”
“Not really,” she said.
They exchanged fraught glances.
“Let me help you up,” he said.
“Is it all right then, for us to be just plain Walter and Maggie?” she asked. He had gotten off the floor and offered a sinewy hand to hoist her up.
“It’s funny,” he said. “My daughter refers to you as Maggie all the time. She’s a great admirer of yours.”
“I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“You’ve seen her a dozen times.”
“Huh?”
“The gal who picks me up every day. In the Volvo?”
“That’s your daughter?”
“Yes.”
It was Maggie’s turn to laugh. The laughter poured out of her as though a ferment of wishing and dreading corked in an enormous vessel had finally burst out as a sweet froth of hilarity. “What’s her name?” she asked.
“Sarah Jane,” he said. “She’s too shy to meet you.”
“Shy?” Maggie gasped incredulously.
“She worships the loam in your perennial beds.”
Maggie recalled the many instances when she’d seen Walter with the girl and stewed in preconscious resentment. “She’s a very attractive young woman.”
“You think so?”
“Obviously.”
“I’m her father. Of course I think she’s gorgeous. You know how fathers are.”
The image of her own father, Frank, flashed intensely through her memory, a snapshot of him out of the 1960s as a younger man than Walter. He’d been trying to grow sideburns in an attempt to look “with it,” as he always so embarrassingly said. The sideburns had lasted perhaps a year. By then, the family had broken up and Maggie was only seeing him on the occasional Saturday. He would drive into the city from Pennsylvania and take her to a different restaurant each time. He was a marvelously adventurous eater.
“I am such an ass,” Maggie mumbled, emerging painfully from the interior arcade of memories. “All this time I thought she was your girlfriend.”
Walter grinned. “Well, she thinks God’s a woman and you’re it,” he said.
Somewhere outside a rooster shrieked. Through the paneless window in the distance they could see the storm clouds breaking up and shafts of sunlight beginning to penetrate the gloom.
“What do you say we have a look around outside?” Walter suggested.
“Quite right,” she said, having a hard time taking her eyes off his. “Let’s.”
5
Debris
They emerged blinking from the potting shed. Broken branches lay strewn about everywhere. A rose arbor had blown clear over. The blue tarp had lodged in the crotch of the great white oak tree outside the north end of the ballroom. The house was still there, apparently intact, its roof in place. But as they made their way past the fern garden and the nuttery, Maggie could see that the intense storm had carved a path of devastation across the northwest corner of the property. At least three ancient maples along Kettle Hill Road had been savaged, uprooted, and toppled. The henhouse lay literally flattened and several birds stood dazed outside it like trailer park people in TV news footage of someplace like Arkansas. A beloved Magnolia grandiflora, the herald of spring at Kettle Hill Farm, tilted at a strange angle from partial uprooting, and many of its enormous shiny leaves had been stripped off. Her lovingly cultivated collection of rosemary topiaries on the terrace above the swimming pool was strewn about the flagstones, their terra-cotta pots smashed, and the pool itself looked like minestrone, there was so much vegetative flotsam in it. Maggie resumed weeping.
“Could have been a lot worse,” Walter observed.
“I suppose …”
They continued up through the vegetable beds. The rest of the crew was up there, standing around dazed like the chickens.
“You guys all right?” Walter hailed them.
“It was a twister, a goddamn twister!” cried Chad, an earnest towhead of nineteen with aspirations to become a wildlife ecologist someday. “Just like in the movies!”
“I actually prayed for the first time in my life,” said Ben, the youngest son of a boat-building family from Mystic, who was going to law school, nights, at UConn.
The hail had torn perfect bullet holes through the large rhubarb leaves. The first lettuce crop, nearly ready for the table, lay pummeled and shredded in its black earth bed. The sugar snap peas were ripped from their hemp supports. A marble sundial she’d found in Newport had toppled on the bluestone footpath and cracked into several pieces. Maggie gave up trying to compose a mental inventory of all the damage.
“I need a drink,” she said.
“I understand,” Walter said awkwardly.
“Don’t take that the wrong way.”
“No, I could use one myself.”
“Okay then, let’s go to the house. I’ve seen enough.”
6
A Cry for Help
Maggie filled two pony glasses with Armagnac and resumed weeping again right there in the kitchen. She emitted a high, thin, hopeless keening noise.
“The world is coming to an end,” she said.
“We’ll have this place back to normal in two days,” Walter said. “Just watch.”
“You don’t understand,” Maggie bawled, and she proceeded to not altogether coherently relate all the catastrophes of recent months, not in strict chronological order, beginning with the murder of Christy Chauvin and weaving in the failure of her marriage, the unraveling of her professional life, the loss of her trusted colleagues, the criminal dalliances of her son, the sordid goings-on in her household, and even vaguely alluding to the botches and disasters of her love life.
“… and now I’ve completely humiliated myself by telling you all this,” she concluded, burying her face in a kitchen towel.
Before Walter could even respond, the phone rang. Maggie looked up from her towel, flinched, and regarded it with the utmost suspicion. It rang a second time and then a third.
“That could be Sarah,” Walter said. “You know, the storm and all.”
“You answer it then,” Maggie replied breathlessly.
“Maggie Darling’s house,” he said with a sort of plain, cheerful assurance. “Let me see if she’s in.” He covered the mouthpiece with his broad suntanned hand. “Are you in?”
“Who is it?” she mouthed the words.
“Who’s calling?” he inquired. “It’s Lindy,” he said, lowering the phone. A barrage of harsh squawking issued from the handset.
Maggie lunged for it.
“I could kill you,” she said.
“I only borrowed it, okay?” Lindy protested.
“Borrowed it! You sold it!”
“How could I sell it? I’m talking on it.”
“Talking on what?”
“Your cell phone. I borrowed it.”
“My cell phone?”
“Yeah, from your car.”
“Oh, Lindy, you’ve become so wicked. You sold all my little treasures.”
“This isn’t the time, Maggie,” Lindy replied. Her voice was suddenly ragged and pitiful, a haunted cry from an abyss.
“Where are you?”
“Not sure. Oh, I know I’ve been bad. You gotta get me out of here.” There was some commotion in the background. Glass breaking, unintelligible cries, a profane objurgation, a groan. “I’m in hell, baby.”
“Where are you?”
“Hartford, I think. That fucker Julio got me so fucked up.”
“Julio … ?”
“He split on me.”
A woman shrieked in the background
“Lindy, who are these people—?”
“Oh, Maggie, don’t ask, don’t start with a million questions. He loved me for who I am, okay. He didn’t give a shit about Hollywood, or Smith College, or Great Neck or white people or black pe
ople or whatever.”
“So, why doesn’t he bring you home?”
“I told you, he split. Besides, I have no home,” she whimpered.
“Of course you have, despite everything.”
“Anyway, he’s out of the picture—hey, get the fuck away from me, asshole—!” Sounds of a scuffle, a thump, a cry of pain.
“Lindy!”
“I’m here, babe.”
“What is going on in there?”
“Fucking crackheads.”
“You’re with crackheads?”
“I’m in hell, Maggie, hell. Don’t you understand?” More bawling.
“Lindy! Lindy, this place you’re in—”
“A shitty hole in a shitty neighborhood in a shitty city.”
“What does the building look like? So we can find you!”
“It used to be a Masonic temple, I think,” Lindy said, suddenly giggling. “Greenish roof. Big brick monstrosity. There’s a park out there. Oh, I don’t know. I’m so fucked up, baby. You gotta help.”
“Lindy, Lindy, listen to me. Call the police and—”
“Are you crazy? I can’t call the police!”
“Why not?”
“These are, like, my friends.”
“Your friends!”
“Well, not my friends. But—ah, forget it.”
“Wait, wait, Lindy—”
“I’ll just fucking die here, okay? Bye, Maggie.”
Click.
“I can’t believe it,” Maggie muttered. “She hung up on me.”
“Who was that?”
“My college roommate. You’ve seen her around here, I’m sure. Dark hair. Very slender. Has a different boyfriend every week.”
“Uh-huh. I’ve seen her.”
“She’s been staying with me. Lots of personal problems. Her husband—it’s a long story. Too long.” Maggie fidgeted, turning this way, now that way, as if wondering where to move first.
“And you say she’s with crackheads?”
“Apparently so. Oh, Walter, we’ve got to go rescue her!”
“Hadn’t we better call the police?”
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