Authors: Maggie Barbieri
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In memory of my good friend Neil Ferraiolo.
I hope this book is as slammin’ as you were.
Acknowledgments
Thank you, as always, to the wonderful team at Minotaur Books: Kelley Ragland, Matt Martz, Elizabeth Lacks, Sarah Melnyk, Hector DeJean, and Andy Martin. I am lucky to have one of the kindest and most astute editors in the business editing my series—Kelley—and I am grateful every day for that gift.
Thanks to my fantastic agent, Deborah Schneider, and her equally fantastic contracts/rights/account manager, Cathy Gleason, both of whom bring good cheer, humanity, and great business sense to everything they do.
A big thank you to my gals at NYU, as always: Anna, Kathy, Rajni, Crystal, Caroline, Rosie, Nurse Joanne, Queen. Keep fighting the good fight.
And to my family, Jim, Dea, and Patrick: Thank you for the support, encouragement, and the willingness to look over the take-out containers that accumulate when I’m knee-deep in a book.
Contents
One
I wish I had seen that coming.
By “that,” I mean a beautiful crystal vase, one that my mother had lovingly carried across the border from her native Canada, rocking precariously after being knocked into by one of my party guests. My best friend, the former Father Kevin McManus, jumped to his feet, the muscle memory from his days as a boxer coming in handy as he leaped, one foot extended behind him, and caught it before it crashed to the dining room floor.
I mouthed a thank-you to him. The party was getting out of control, and as I try to live the most boring life possible, that was at odds with my usual Saturday nights in my small Westchester County village.
“Sing it, everyone! ‘And you look like one, too!’”
That’s my friend Max’s customary coda to “Happy Birthday,” a joke that never gets old. Well, maybe a little old. Thankfully, she was singing it at a birthday party for two nineteen-year-olds who were not above a little song, a little dance, and a little seltzer down your pants, as Chuckles the Clown used to say, but the rest of the partygoers were a little perplexed. Nobody really ever gets used to seeing a grown woman who is the size of a large child standing on a chair at the dining room table, wearing a paper party hat and Kanye West novelty sunglasses, singing at the top of her lungs.
But that’s Max and that’s how she rolls, as she reminds me every few days, when I try to point out that we’re getting past the age of wearing miniskirts, thigh-high boots, and blousy shirts with sayings on them. The closer we get to forty, the more she has begun dressing like a sixteen-year-old. Her husband, the gargantuan Fred Wyatt, didn’t seem to mind—he apparently preferred his wife to dress like a hipster going to an Arcade Fire concert than like the savvy businesswoman she used to portray and actually is.
My husband, Bobby Crawford, had brought two children into our marriage, twins Meaghan and Erin, both of whom looked a little shell-shocked to be surrounded by so many loved ones at one time, particularly on their birthday. Their mother, Christine, was in attendance with her second husband and family of four young stepchildren, two of them just past toddlerhood. In addition to the twins’ birthday, it was her return to the States after the family had lived in London for the past few years that was the occasion for this celebration. The girls were beyond thrilled; their mother had been gone too long for their liking, and they were happy to relieve me of my duties. Although I was not as close to Erin as I was to Meaghan, Erin and I had reached détente and she no longer referred to me as a word that rhymes with “witch.” I was just as happy as they that their mother had returned to mother them, allowing me to retire from my temporary career as “Alison Bergeron, Evil Stepmother.”
Christine’s brothers were also in attendance, including the girls’ inexplicably named Uncle Chick; they hadn’t laid eyes on him in a few years, but he had reappeared in the not-too-distant past and wanted to reconnect with his family. He rivaled Max for the title of “life of the party.” Chick, clad in bright red pants, white bucks, and a tight white T-shirt that gave new meaning to the expression “painted on,” gave a little bump and grind at the end of the song, knocking into the dining room table so hard that the cake jiggled in the center. I righted a bottle of wine that tipped perilously close to the edge and gave Crawford a look. In a case of “no good deed goes unpunished,” I had agreed to host this party and invite the two families together, not entirely sure what I had gotten myself into. Now it was clear: I had gotten myself into a raucous gathering of two very disparate tribes and wasn’t really prepared for what would transpire.
Chick held up an almost-empty bottle of Chardonnay and waved it in my face. “Do we need to make another run?” he asked.
If so, it would be our third run to the liquor store that night. The Stepkowski clan, Christine’s side of the family, had drunk every ounce of vodka, tequila, and wine that we had in the house. I’m married to an Irish cop and can drink with the best of them myself, but the Stepkowskis took the cake. Maybe that was what years of hanging around their father’s Upper West Side bar had done for them; they were hollow-legged, one and all. I looked over at Crawford, my eyes begging for a little help. “I think we’d better wrap it up on the liquor runs, Chick,” he said, a suggestion that Chick seemed to take in stride. It wouldn’t have surprised me to learn that he had his own stash of booze in his car or even planted somewhere in my house, just in case of emergency.
Christine’s other brother, Pavel, a.k.a. Paulie, wasn’t quite as accepting of that news. “You always were a killjoy, Crawford.”
Crawford, ever stoic, accepted this pronouncement with far more grace than it called for and disappeared into the kitchen. Kevin, bless his heart, attempted to engage Paulie in conversation, and Paulie’s attention was momentarily diverted. One thing I’ve found is that even if you aren’t a priest anymore, the fact that you were, to old-school Catholics, is enough. Nobody has the cojones to ignore—never mind disobey—the defrocked Kevin McManus.
I followed close behind Crawford, leaving Fred to cut the cake and shovel it onto paper plates so that we could call it a night.
It wasn’t that long ago that Crawford had put in his papers to retire from the police department, thinking that a life of leisure would suit him just fine. His “retirement” had lasted exactly two days and one house project gone horribly awry. (Suffice it to say that you shouldn’t attempt to replumb the basement for a new bathroom if you have spent your entire adult life solving homicides.) A mere forty-eight hours after he had turned in his badge—a development that I was overjoyed to see—I was begging him to reverse his decision and don the blue blazer, white shirt, rep tie, and dress slacks that he wore every day to a very dirty and very dangerous job. The saggy gym shorts and soiled T-shirt, his new uniform, just weren’t cutting it for me. It was shortly thereafter that we had learned that Christine would be coming back to town, and his decision was made; his girls would have their mother back in their lives, leaving him guilt-free to return to the job that really was his reason for being, although he was loath to admit it.
I joined him in the kitchen. Beyond the house, in the backyard, the children of the various family members were all hell-bent, it appeared, on torturing my dog, the wonderful Trixie Bergeron-Crawford, by denying the animal her favorite tennis ball. I opened the back door and whistled for her to come in. She raced past me and flew up the steps to the bedroom, where she took refuge under my bed, if the thump above my head was any indication.
Crawford was wiping the same spot on the counter over and over and gazing out the window over the sink. “They don’t have matches out there, right?” he asked, throwing his chin toward the kids playing on the grass.
“I don’t know,” I said, alarmed. “Why?”
“It just looks like they are trying to start a bonfire,” he said, sounding far less concerned than I thought he should. I guess that’s what twenty-plus years on the police department, half of them as a homicide detective, does to you. If dead bodies were commonplace, what was a simple bonfire, assembled by the combined broods of your ex-wife’s extended family?
“You still want more kids?” I asked, harking back to a conversation that we had started the night before but never finished.
He looked less sure than when he initially brought it up.
I looked at him. “I love your girls, but this party is over,” I said, pulling open the screen door and going outside. “Hey!” I called to the group of kids huddled together over a pile of sticks. I hadn’t bothered to learn their names, figuring such information would take up too much space in my already overloaded brain. I decided right then and there that I hated other people’s kids, a quality that was probably not really desirable in a teacher, my chosen profession. I flashed on Crawford’s eager and earnest face every time he held a baby and decided that was just one more thing that separated us; he loved kids and I could go either way, my opinion of children having been shaped by these types of experiences. The kids looked up and dispersed, something they seemed used to doing with regularity. It came very easily to the multiaged crowd.
I put my hand over the pile of sticks, thankfully cool, and turned to confront the remaining children, but the backyard was empty. Satisfied that we were out of danger for the time being, I went back inside, where Crawford was handing Paulie his jacket.
“So good to see you,” he said with fake cheer, clapping his former brother-in-law on the back. He had confessed to me earlier that he had banked on never seeing any of the Stepkowskis again once he and Christine had divorced, so entertaining them was a huge sacrifice that he was willing to make for his girls.
“But I didn’t finish my cake!” Paulie protested, taking the coat and marching toward the back door. Crawford followed him with a plate of cake in his hands.
“Here.” Crawford shoved the cake into Paulie’s solar plexus. “You can enjoy it on the way home.”
“But it’s ice cream cake,” Paulie said.
Crawford thought about that a moment. “Fine. Come back in.” He took Paulie’s coat again. “But after you eat it, the party is officially over.”
Chick came into the kitchen. “Wait. We didn’t do presents yet,” he said, pulling two envelopes out of his back pocket. “I want to give my nieces their presents.”