Christietown (4 page)
Authors: Susan Kandel
“I spent a whole weekend with her,” Bridget went on,
“eating cocktail wieners and frozen quiches out of chafing
dishes. It isn’t fair.”
“But you love junk food,” I said consolingly.
“Real junk food,” she said. “Black junk food. Not the WASP version.”
“The woman is going to come around.”
“No, she’s not.”
“Yes, she is.”
“You don’t know that,” she said with a stamp of her elegant foot.
“What is this? You are Bridget Sugarhill!”
“You’re right!” Bridget exclaimed, sitting up. “And I want a Big Mac!”
It’s a process. Today went more quickly than usual.
Maximilian trotted over to get his man bag from behind the desk.
“One for you, one for me, one for doggie Helmut,” he recited. “And perhaps it is better the single patty, no bun, for your friend?”
Ignoring him, I asked Bridget if she could recommend something for Wren to wear.
“All taken care of,” Bridget said. “She was in a few days ago, and I gave her a Holly’s Harp dress in soft fleece with a lace collar.” Holly’s Harp was a legendary, now sadly defunct, bou
tique on Sunset Boulevard catering to rich hippies and rock-star girlfriends. “Wren looked like an angel, with that crazy red hair. But poor Liz.”
“What do you mean?”
“She showed up yesterday. We found something perfect. You can take it with you when you go. Stockings, shoes, the whole shebang. But I’m telling you, it took forever! She tried
on my entire inventory. Everything made her look like an old frump.”
“She’s supposed to look like an old frump,” I said. “She’s playing Miss Marple.”
“Whatever. She’s taking this whole thing very seriously. Do you know she’s been out there, to Aggieworld, three or four times, just to get the lay of the land?”
“Christietown. And you’re kidding.”
“Nope. Anyway, she’s got horrible posture. And needs her nails done desperately. And a decent hairdo. And those aller
gies.” She made a face.
I remembered how beautiful Liz looked in Lou’s arms, how graceful.
“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I said.
“That’s tripe,” said Bridget. “Jesus H. Christ! There’s lint all over this chaise!” She leapt up in horror. “Maximilian is getting a spanking.”
I tried to keep the image from forming in my mind.
“Let me get the outfit for you.” Bridget went into the back. I followed.
“By the way,” she said, handing me a gray garment bag, which I draped over my arm, “I absolutely adore the governess, Estella Raven. What a mouth she has on her! It’s like you wrote the part just for me.”
“I did.”
“You want to see what I’m wearing?” she asked, her face aglow.
“Surprise me,” I said. We chatted for a while, then Bridget walked me to the celadon-and-gold front door. A pair of teen-starlet types with big heads and tiny bodies brushed past us on their way in.
“Welcome,” said Bridget coolly. “Have you been here before? No, I don’t believe you have. I know my regulars. Please refrain from tugging on the hangers, and don’t even THINK about removing the plastic.”
At that, one of the girls dropped her Gucci handbag right on its bamboo handle. The other one hastily scooped up the goods and pulled her friend toward the Azzedine Alaïas.
“Do you have to be so mean?” I asked Bridget.
“Believe me, I do.”
“It’s a miracle anybody comes here.”
“Forget about them,” Bridget said in a hushed voice. “Listen. I have a theory about who the killer is. In the play. And I’m dying to know if I’m right. So would you please tell me already? I can’t wait until tomorrow. Come on, Cece. Who did it?”
I thought about how that old frump Miss Marple might answer the question.
“You don’t need me to tell you,” I said. “If you’ve got a theory that fits the facts, then it must be the right one.”
HAPTER
3
gatha was wearing a fur coat, brown fur-lined gloves, and
a small green velour hat on the night she drove away from Styles, her sprawling, mock-Tudor house on the border of Surrey and Berkshire.
It was early December, but there was already frost on the leaves. Winters in this part of England came on early and hard. She wrapped her gray cardigan around her lumpy body. She couldn’t even look in the mirror anymore. She was afraid of what she’d see. Shadows, folds, furrows. She was only thirty-six years old. She felt a thousand.
It was at Styles that her marriage had broken into pieces. The house was unlucky. The last three owners had suffered there. She’d wanted to move farther into the country—a cottage, it needn’t have been anything grand. There were only the three of them, after all. But Archie had insisted on being no more than a ten-minute walk to Sunningdale Station. She sped past it now, its blue-and
yellow sign enveloped in fog. Monday through Friday, since he’d come back from the Great War, he’d commuted into London for
work, twenty-six miles to the south. City life. How ill it suited him. Mornings were worst. He’d lurch into the station so late he had to run across the lines in front of the approaching train to reach the far platform to board. He had to be more careful. Accidents did happen. She closed her eyes for a moment, envisioning the scene. The screams. The crowd. The sirens. Then her eyes blinked open. She was fooling herself. Work wasn’t the reason he needed to be close to the station, not the real one, at any rate. London was where his mistress was. He needed to be close to her.
It’s over, Archie had said. I want a divorce.
What about me? Agatha had cried.
Who are you?
It was not an unreasonable question.
The girl Archie had met all those years ago at a dance given by Lord and Lady Clifford of Chudleigh at Ugbrooke House in Devon—the girl into whose ear he’d whispered such lovely, wicked things—was gone. In her place was a hag as chatty and ridiculous as his mother, fat in her stockingette skirts and staid jumpers. The smell of her repulsed him, the taste of her. No wonder. Agatha tasted like tears now. Her mother was dead. All she could do was cry. And Archie had warned her—had he not?—that he couldn’t bear unhappy people.
Her hands clenched the leather-wrapped steering wheel. She looked at them in disbelief. Were they actually hers, the veins so blue and ropy and twisted? Yes, those were her hands, her blood, her veins. Odd that they pulsed so violently when she felt so dead inside.
The road was deserted. It was ten at night. Darkness had fallen like a heavy, woolen blanket. The stockbrokers, the bank
ers, the gray-haired MPs and their dutiful wives and children were tucked between sheets that had been laundered and starched
and ironed by silent servants, gossiping family retainers, indigent
third cousins.
All were fast asleep, dreaming of the day ahead.
She no longer dreamed of the future. She dreamed of the past.
Suddenly, something dark passed in front of her windshield. She braked. Was it a deer? She pulled over to the side of the road, switched off the headlights, turned off the motor. She stepped out of the car, a Morris Cowley. It was a four-seater. How she adored that car. She stroked the front bumper absently. Dust. She must speak to someone about that. She’d bought the car herself, for two hundred and twenty-five pounds. She was a successful author now. A wealthy woman in her own right. A wealthy woman alone. A wealthy woman who saw things. A deer! Impossible, of course. She suffered, Archie always said, from an overactive imagination. Worse yet, from an excess of false gestures.
False gestures. False life.
Later that night, back on the road, she threw her wedding ring out of the car window.
What, she wondered, would darling Archie make of that?
HAPTER
4
am a superstitious person.
I believe that you don’t toss anything out of a car window, that you don’t give a knife as a housewarming present, that cut
ting your hair on Good Friday prevents headaches, and that the spouse who falls asleep first on the wedding night will be the first to die.
I get it from my mother, which is probably enough said.
So by all rights I should have lost it when Gambino crawled into bed sometime after midnight Friday, armed with a French
Vogue
and a box of See’s chocolates and broke the news that he couldn’t be my soldier of fortune in the morning. But I was strangely calm—tranquil, even. I thanked him for the presents. I assured him that everything would be fine. Of course, his case came first. Of course, his witnesses couldn’t wait. After that, I don’t remember anything. I must’ve dropped off to sleep. The strain of being reasonable had clearly exhausted me. But maybe I’d finally learned to roll with the punches. Dispensed with all that nonsense about omens.
Or maybe I’d had an inkling that losing my soldier of for
tune would be the least of the day’s disasters.
Saturday morning dawned bright and hopeful. I stretched lazily, then wrapped my arms around my sleeping fiancé. After mumbling what sounded like an endearment, he rolled onto his stomach and started to snore. I tucked the covers around him and glanced over at the clock: 6:19. I’d beaten the alarm by eleven minutes.
Ian Christie’s call beat the alarm by five.
“Good morning, Miss Caruso,” he said, sounding near tears. “I mean, Cece. I simply can’t get out of the habit of ‘Miss This’-ing and ‘Mr. That’-ing everyone. Shows my age. My, oh, my, it’s a big day today. Sun’s shining. SPF fifteen for all. Ha, ha! Quite a gamble we’ve taken with this enterprise. Well, me. Quite a gamble I’ve taken.” He stopped himself dead.
“Good morning, Ian,” I said in a voice meant to inspire confidence. “Are you feeling better today?”
“Yes, thank you. You were an angel of mercy yesterday, Cece. By the time I got home, I decided it must’ve been the flu, which has been going around, you know. My assistant was out four days last week. Of course, bad luck’s her middle name; her husband broke his leg recently. But the incubation period for flu was up days ago, so it had to have been food poisoning. I love kebabs, but they don’t love me!”
Yesterday afternoon, after I’d left Bridget’s, I’d gone out to Christietown to go over some last-minute details with Ian. Poor man had thrown up all over the sales office front desk, perilously close to the $25,000 scale model of Phase 2 that had just arrived from Browning McDuff, the building firm. Even before that, he’d soaked through his festive Tommy Bahama shirt and scratched obsessively at a rash on his cheeks. I think
they call it being betrayed by your body. I shuddered to think what was going to happen to him if he didn’t sell a whole lot of houses today.
Not my business, I reminded myself.
What was I going to wear? Now there was a real concern.
While Ian prattled on, I lay in bed visualizing the contents of my closet. Normally, this was a pleasant diversion. Today, all I could conjure up were tangled piles of mismatched items and the occasional close-up of a stain. I blinked a few times. Hmm. Something was coming into view. A toffee-colored silk blouse cut close to the body and white, high-waisted trousers cinched with a gold mesh belt. Lauren Hutton in
American Gigolo
? I liked the concept. Of course, she’d gone braless, which I could hardly get away with, but at least I didn’t have to hire my lovers.