Fast Women

by Jennifer Crusie

  “And then he died of a heart attack,” Nell said.

  “And then Stewart locked him in the freezer,” Gabe said, “and waited until he was dead, and put him in his bed upstairs, and we never knew the difference. The doctor signed the death certificate without an autopsy.”

  Nell felt her breath go. “How—”

  “Trevor told me,” Gabe said. “About an hour ago. The police found the letter in the files and took it to him this morning. They also found Stewart thawing in the trunk of his Mercedes. He’s trying to explain everything away by blaming it on everybody else: Stewart killed my dad, Margie killed Stewart, Jack killed Lynnie and burned your apartment, and Trevor’s just trying to keep the scandal quiet so the family won’t suffer.”

  All that death, Nell thought, all because Trevor didn’t want to be married anymore. Helena, getting ready to kill herself because she didn’t know who she was if she wasn’t married. Margie, hating Stewart but sticking because they were married and, fifteen years later, smacking him with a pitcher because she couldn’t stand being married. Lynnie, marinating in resentment because Stewart hadn’t kept his promise to come back so they could get married. She and Tim, mutilating each other because they were stuck together, married. Jack imprisoning Suze and Suze not even trying to escape for fourteen years because they were married. It should be harder to get married, she thought. You should have to take tests, get a learner’s permit, you should need more than a pulse and twenty bucks to get a license.

  “You wouldn’t believe some of the explanations he’s been giving,” Gabe said.

  “How much do you believe?”

  “I believe Stewart killed my dad. Margie didn’t kill Stewart, though. When the coroner unwrapped him, his fingernails were torn. Trevor put him in the freezer alive and then went back and wrapped him up and buried him under his own grilled porterhouse when he was dead. I think he did it on purpose. I think it was payback for my dad.”

  “Eleven years later,” Nell said. “Trevor waited a long time for that revenge.”

  “It’s what he’s good at,” Gabe said. “I think he killed Lynnie, too. I think she pushed him too far and he hit her and put her in the freezer and then waited to see if anybody would find her. I think he tried to frame Jack for the fire in your apartment. And I know he tried to kill you.”

  Nell thought of being helpless in that freezer again. “How’s he explaining that one?”

  “Accident. He didn’t realize you were still in the freezer when he shut the door.”

  “You are kidding me.”

  “Well, he has a concussion. Also, nobody ever crosses him. He’s been getting away with murder for years. Nobody’s ever made him accountable.” Gabe met her eyes. “He didn’t have anybody like you.”

  “I missed a step there,” Nell said.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Gabe said. “That letter got lost because my aunt was such a lousy secretary. If my mom had been here, she’d have turned the letter over to the cops as soon as my dad died. There’d have been an autopsy. Stewart would have gone to jail, so Margie wouldn’t have stayed married to him for fifteen years and then hit him with a pitcher, and Trevor wouldn’t have frozen him to death. Or Lynnie. Or burned your place and tried to kill you. Or wrecked my car.” He sounded most bitter about the last one.

  “Not just a secretary,” Nell said.

  “And the reason she wasn’t here,” Gabe said, “is because she and my dad had fought over what he was doing, over the car, over his not telling her what was going on. If he’d come clean to her in 1978 when Helena died, if he’d listened to her, Stewart wouldn’t have been around to kill him four years later.”

  “If you weren’t so controlling,” Nell said, “you wouldn’t have called to make sure I’d locked everything up. You wouldn’t have rescued me. I’d be dead. You can play the ‘if’ game forever. It’s the past. Let it go.”

  “You’re not listening.” Gabe got up and came around to face her, bending over her to put his face close to hers, his hands on the arms of her chair. “It doesn’t matter, seven months or twenty years, that doesn’t mean a damn thing. We’re not equal partners. We’re never going to be. We balance each other. We keep each other in check. We’re necessary to each other’s survival.”

  “Oh,” Nell said.

  “We can get married,” Gabe said. “I get it now. No resentment. I need this, too. I don’t want to be my dad.”

  “You’re not your dad,” Nell said, outraged that he’d think he was.

  “Good.” Gabe straightened. “We need an office manager. Riley’s out on a background check, and Suze went to give Becca the good news. If you want the job, it’s yours.”

  “I want the job,” Nell said, and remembered the last time she’d said it, in a gloomy office with the blinds pulled down, thinking he was the devil. She looked around the spotless office at the restored leather furniture and gleaming wood, at Marlene basking trenchcoat-less in the sun, at Gabe, looking as tired as he had then but different now. Happier, she thought. Because of me. “What good news?”

  “Oh. Becca’s guy was telling the truth. Suze ran the check yesterday. Becca will be vacationing at Hyannis Port.”

  “You’re kidding,” Nell said. “Well, good. Somebody deserves a happy ending.”

  “Hey,” Gabe said.

  “Besides me,” Nell said. “And you. And Suze and Riley.”

  “That one remains to be seen.”

  “You’re such a cynic.” Nell looked around the room again and thought, The rest of my life. “I, on the other hand, am an optimist. I’ve decided it’s a good thing Trevor burned my china.”

  Gabe looked taken aback. “You have. And that would be because…”

  “It was my past,” Nell said. “And you have to let go of your past to make a future. Same way with your car. Trevor did you a favor by destroying it, it was a bad memory. Now you can forget it and go on.”

  “I liked that car,” Gabe said, sounding a lot more exasperated than the situation deserved.

  “I liked my china, too,” Nell said, equally exasperated since once again he wasn’t getting the point. “But it’s good that it’s gone.” She frowned at Gabe. “You have to stop mourning that car.”

  “I’m over the car,” he said, “but I just dropped seven grand on a wedding present you don’t want. You have to keep me in the loop on this stuff.”

  “Wedding present?” Nell said, and Gabe sighed and pointed to a large cardboard box next to his desk.

  “UPS just delivered it. Welcome to the past.”

  She sat on the floor and opened it to see a lot of bubble-wrapped china, and when she unwrapped the first piece, it was her Secrets sugar bowl. “You bought it back,” she said and her breath went. “You bought my china back.”

  He sat on the edge of the desk beside her. “So the past is okay?”

  She ran her fingers over the flat side of the bowl, over the two houses sitting close together, looking down over the hill at the river running blue and free. “This isn’t the past,” she said, knowing that every time she looked at it, she’d remember Gabe had rescued it for her, had been there when she’d needed him. “This is you.” She looked at the houses again, balancing each other at the top of the hill, the smoke streaming from their chimneys side by side toward the sky. “This is us.”

  “Good,” Gabe said. “Because I don’t think the guy is going to take it back.” His voice was light, but when she looked up at him, his eyes were dark and sure.

  “I love you,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” he said. “Let’s make it legal.”

  He sat there in the sunlight, the devil made flesh, tempting her into an eternity of heat and light. Marriage is a gamble and a snare and an invitation to pain, she thought. It’s compromise and sacrifice, and I’ll be stuck forever with this man and his damn ugly window.

  Gabe smiled at her and made her heart clutch. “Chicken.”

  “Not me,” Nell said. “I’m getting married.�
�

  This book takes place in 1992.

  Because.

  Chapter One

  Andie Miller sat in the reception room of her ex-husband’s law office, holding on to ten years of uncashed alimony checks and a lot of unresolved rage. This is why I never came back here, she thought. Nothing wrong with repressed anger as long as it stays repressed.

  “Miss Miller?”

  Andie jerked her head up and a lock of hair fell out of her chignon. She stuffed it back into the clip on the back of her head as North’s neat, efficient secretary smiled at her, surrounded by the propriety of his Victorian architecture. If that secretary had a chignon, nothing would escape from it. North was probably crazy about her.

  “Mr. Archer will see you now,” the secretary said.

  “Well, good for him.” Andie stood up, yanked on the hem of the only suit jacket she owned, and then wondered if she’d sounded hostile.

  “He’s really very nice,” the secretary said.

  “No, he isn’t.” Andie strode across the ancient rug to the door of North’s office, opened it before the secretary could get in ahead of her, and then stopped.

  North sat behind his walnut desk, his cropped blond hair almost white in the sunlight from the window behind him. His wire-rimmed glasses had slid too far down his nose again, and his shirtsleeves were rolled up over his forearms—Still playing racquetball, Andie thought—and his shoulders were as straight as ever as he studied the papers spread out across the polished top of the desk. He looked exactly the way he had ten years ago when she’d bumped her suitcase on the door frame on her way out of town—

  “Miss Miller is here,” his secretary said from behind her, and he looked up at her over his glasses, and the years fell away, and she was right back where she’d begun, staring into those blue-gray eyes, her heart pounding.

  After what seemed like forever, he stood up. “Andromeda. Thank you for coming.”

  She crossed the office, smiled tightly at him over the massive desk, decided that shaking his hand would be weird, and sat down. “I called you, remember? Thank you for seeing me.”

  North sat down, saying, “Thank you, Kristin,” to his secretary, who left.

  “So the reason I called—” Andie began, just as he said, “How is your mother?”

  Oh, we’re going to be polite. “Still crazy. How’s yours?”

  “Lydia is fine, thank you.” He straightened the papers on his desk into one stack.

  A lot of really big trees had died to make that desk. His mother had probably gnawed them down, used her nails to saw the boards, and finished the decorative cutwork with her tongue.

  “I’ll tell her you asked after her.”

  “She’ll be thrilled. Say hi to Southie for me, too.” Andie opened her purse, took out the stack of alimony checks, and put them on the desk. “I came to give these back to you.”

  North looked at the checks for a moment, the strong, sharp planes of his face shadowed by the back light from the window.

  Say something, she thought, and when he didn’t, she said, “They’re all there, one hundred and nineteen of them. November nineteen eighty-two to last month.”

  His face was as expressionless as ever. “Why?”

  “Because they’re a link between us. We haven’t talked in ten years but every month you send me a check even though you know I don’t want alimony. Which means every month I get an envelope in the mail that says I used to be married to you. And every month I don’t cash them, and it’s like we’re nodding in the street or something. We’re still communicating.”

  “Not very well.” North looked at the stack. “Why now?”

  “I’m getting married.”

  She watched him go still, the pause stretching out until she said, “North?”

  “Congratulations. Who’s the lucky man?”

  “Will Spenser,” Andie said, pretty sure North wouldn’t know him.

  “The writer?”

  “He’s a great guy.” She thought about Will, tall, blond, and genial. The anti-North: He never forgot she existed. “I’m ready to settle down, so I’m drawing a line under my old life.” She nodded at the checks. “That’s why I came to give you those back. Don’t send any more. Please.”

  After a moment, he nodded. “Of course. Congratulations. The family will want to send a gift.” He pulled his legal pad toward him. “Are you registered?”

  “No, I’m not registered,” Andie said, exasperated. “Technically, I’m not even engaged yet. He asked me, but I needed to give you the checks back before I said yes.” She didn’t know why she’d expected him to have a reaction to the news. It wasn’t as if he still cared. She wasn’t sure he’d cared when she’d left.

  “I see. Thank you for returning the checks.”

  North straightened the papers on his desk again, and then looked down at the top paper for a long moment, as if he were reading it. He’d probably forgotten she was there again because his work was—

  He looked up. “Perhaps, since you haven’t said yes yet, you could postpone your new life.”

  “What?”

  “I have a problem you could help with. It would only take you a few months, maybe less—”

  “North, did you even hear what I said?”

  “—and we’d pay you ten thousand dollars a month, plus expenses, room, and board.”

  She started to protest and then thought, Ten thousand dollars a month?

  He straightened the folder on his desk again. “Theodore Archer, a distant cousin, died two years ago and made me the guardian of his two children.”

  Ten thousand a month. There had to be a catch. Then the rest of what he’d said hit her. “Children?”

  “I went down to see them at the family home where their aunt was taking care of them. They’d been living there with their father, their grandmother, and their aunt since the little girl was born eight years ago, but the grandmother had died before Theodore.”

  “Down? They’re not here in Ohio?”

  “The house is in a remote area in the south of the state. The place is isolated, but the children seemed fine with their aunt, so we agreed it was best that they’d stay there with her in order to disrupt their lives as little as possible.”

  And to disrupt yours as little as possible, Andie thought.

  North waited, as if he expected her to say it out loud. When she didn’t, he went on. “Unfortunately, the aunt died in June. Since then I’ve hired three nannies, but none have stayed.”

  “Lot of death in the family,” Andie said.

  “The children’s mother died in childbirth with the little girl. The grandmother died in her seventies of a heart attack. Theodore was killed in a car accident. The aunt fell from a tower on the house—”

  “Wait, the house has towers?”

  “It’s a very old house,” North said, his tone making it clear that he didn’t want to discuss towers. “The battlements are crumbling, and she evidently leaned on the wrong stone and fell into the moat.”

  “The moat,” Andie said. “Is this a joke?”

  “No. Theodore’s great-great-grandfather had the house brought over from England in the 1850s. I don’t know why he dug a moat. The point is, these children have nobody, and they’re alone down there in the middle of nowhere with only the housekeeper taking care of them. If you will go down there, I will pay you ten thousand a month to … fix them.”

  “Fix them,” Andie said. Ten thousand a month was ridiculous, but it would pay off her credit card bills and her car. In one month. Ten thousand dollars would mean she could get married without debt. Not that Will cared, but it would be better to go to him free and clear. “What do you mean, fix them?”

  “The children are … odd. We wanted to bring them here in June after their aunt’s death, but the little girl had a psychotic break when the nanny tried to take her away from the house. The boy was sent away to boarding school at the beginning of August, but he’s been expelled for setting fires. I need som
eone to go down there and stabilize the children, bring their education up to standard for their grade level so they can go to public school, and then move them up here with us.”

  Andie shook her head and another chunk of hair slipped out of her chignon. “Psychotic breaks and setting fires,” she said, as she stuffed it back. “North, I teach high school English. I have no idea how to help kids like this. You need—”

  “I need somebody who doesn’t care about the way things are supposed to be,” he said, his eyes sliding to her neck. “I think that’s where the nannies are going wrong. I need somebody who will do the unconventional thing without blinking. Somebody who will get things done.” He met her eyes. “Even if she doesn’t stay for the long haul.”

  “Hey,” Andie said.

  “I would take it as a personal favor. I’ve never asked you for anything—”

  “You asked for a divorce.” As soon as she said it, she knew it was a mistake.

  He looked at her over the tops of his glasses, exasperated. “I did not ask you for a divorce.”

  “Yes you did,” Andie said, in too far to stop now. “You told me that I seemed unhappy, and if that was true, you would understand if I divorced you.”

  “You were playing ‘Any Day Now’ every time I came up to the attic. As hints go, it was pretty broad.”

  He looked annoyed, so that was something, but it didn’t do anything for her anger. “There are people who, if their spouses are unhappy, try to do something about it.”

  “I did. I gave you a divorce. You had one foot out the door anyway. Do we need to review that again?”

  “No. The divorce is a dead subject.” And the ghost of it is sitting right here with us. Although maybe only with her. North didn’t look haunted at all.

  “I realize you’re getting ready to start a new life,” he went on. “But if you haven’t made plans yet, there’s no reason you couldn’t wait a few months. You could use the money for the wedding.”

  “I don’t want a wedding, I want to get married. Why are you offering me ten thousand dollars a month for babysitting? You didn’t pay the nannies that. It’s ridiculous. For ten thousand a month, you should not only get child care, you should get your house cleaned, your laundry done, your tires rotated, and if I were you, I’d insist on nightly blow jobs. Did you think I wouldn’t notice that you’re still trying to keep your thumb on me?” She shook her head, and the lock of hair fell out of her chignon again. Well, the hell with that, too.