Extracurricular Activities (7 page)

I managed to get home without running into any of the other undesirable people in my life. I walked through the back door, closed it, locked it, and rested my head against the cool granite counter. I was starting to think that perhaps I should join an online grocery service and teach my courses strictly on the Web. Leaving the house was presenting a whole new set of challenges.

I filled Max in on Terri's story on our way to Boscobel. I finished with my account of running into Jackson on the street.

“The dog is the only one who doesn't turn my stomach right now,” I said.

Max responded with just the right amount of indignation and disgust the story deserved. “She needs to stay away from you,” she said, making a right onto Route 9D in Garrison. We were about ten minutes from Boscobel and it had taken me nearly the entire ride to tell her my tale of woe. “But let's think about this. I like Jackson as a suspect.”

It certainly made sense.

“Do you think he has the cojones to have killed Ray?” she asked, chewing the inside of her mouth.

“They're in counseling, Max. He seems like the ‘let's talk about this' kind of guy, not the ‘I'll cut you to bits with a chain saw' kind of guy.” I looked out the window and studied the scenery for a few minutes. “Maybe she did it,” I said.

“Now that's an interesting theory,” Max said. “She's potentially setting him up for the fall by using you. Framing the husband. Interesting. Let's ponder that.” She pursed her lips. “You know, we really need to Google this whole hands and feet thing. See where it comes from. It's clearly not an accident that Ray lost a few appendages. Maybe we've got a dormant serial killer on the loose again.”

The thought of that made me queasy. I was more comfortable with a crime of passion committed by my graphic-designer neighbor than with a roving serial killer.

I turned and looked out the window, hoping to see the yellow sign indicating that Boscobel was approaching. I remembered that I hadn't told her about seeing Gianna; her jaw fell open at that revelation. “And then she said this really weird thing, like ‘Peter says hello,' but in a very creepy way.”

“Ewww,” Max said. “He kind of sniffed around you in college, though. Remember?”

I grimaced at the thought of it. “No,” I said emphatically. “We took a class together, but that was it.”

She shook her head. “Whatever. I've been thinking about this ever since he reappeared. I definitely remember him being just the wee bit interested in you,” she said. “Remember how he was always offering you rides in his Trans Am?”

“I guess,” I said. “So you think Gianna has been carrying some kind of grudge for all these years, Max? Hardly,” I said. “Plus, she's gorgeous and he's a troll. That guy should thank his lucky stars every day.”

The yellow sign appeared and Max maneuvered into the parking lot, putting the conversation to an end. She was directed to a spot close to the great lawn of Boscobel by a green-shirted employee of the estate. Max had sold her Jaguar and bought herself a very un-Max-like car: a silver Volkswagen Beetle. It was quirky and sporty, and unlike anything she had ever owned. She explained it away by saying the Jag was too “conspicuous.” I actually thought that was why she liked it. Whatever her excuse, I hadn't seen her drive anything so small since the late eighties when we were both starting out in our careers and really couldn't afford anything bigger or better than a tuna can with wheels.

We got out of the car and opened her trunk to remove the picnic basket that I had packed. In it was all of the food I had gotten from Tony and a delicious German Riesling that I had found in the wine shop in my neighborhood. I had also thrown in some grapes and a couple of apples that I had bought earlier in the week at the A&P. Max had an old comforter in the trunk and she removed that for us to sit on while we dined. We made our way across the lawn and found a perfect spot near the estate, yet with a panoramic view of the Hudson River and West Point on its western shore. Max spread the blanket and I began taking the food from the basket.

“Any chocolate in there?” she asked, peering into the wicker basket.

“Yes, but not until you eat all of the other food that I brought.” If it were up to Max we would eat the chocolate, drink the bottle of wine, and skip everything else. I took out everything that I had bought and arranged it on the blanket. People were scattered all around the grounds of the estate, doing exactly as we were: drinking wine and eating dinner. There was a festive feel to the gorgeous evening and I rejoiced in being out of my house, with my best friend, and preparing to enjoy the performance.

Max pulled a white paper bag out of the basket and opened it. “Oh! Cookies!” she exclaimed, pulling them out.

I hadn't bought any cookies. Max held them up: two heart-shaped cookies with the word “amore” written across them. Tony.

She looked at me and gave me a sweet smile. “I love you, too,” she said, kissing my cheek.

“I didn't buy those for us, Max. I think maybe Tony, my deli boyfriend, put them in there.”

She dropped them back into the bag as if they had burst into flames. “Ewww.”

I opened the bag further but only the two cookies resided at the bottom. Thank God…I was hoping not to find an engagement ring embedded in a salami.

“Crawford could take a page from this guy's book. He's very romantic,” she said. Max stretched out on the blanket, her shirt riding up to just beneath her black bra, exposing her flat stomach. Max doesn't engage in any kind of physical activity besides yoga and sex, and both were keeping her in very good shape; you could bounce a quarter off her abdominal muscles. I pointed to her six-pack of muscle. “Sex or yoga?”

She picked her head up and looked at her stomach. “A little bit of both. You should try at least one of them.” She rolled over on her stomach and surveyed the crowd. She let out a disgusted groan as I saw her eyes fall on a couple a few blankets away who were rolling around in the throes of passion. “Get a room, for God's sake,” she said, and turned back to me. She popped a grape in her mouth and held out a wineglass for me to fill. “If
The Merry Wives of Windsor
isn't porn, then I don't want to be watching that,” she said, throwing her head in the direction of the amorous couple.

I stayed focused on the couple in question and almost threw up when the man rolled onto his back and off the woman; I got a look at his face and gasped out loud. The woman sat up and put her hand to his cheek. Her breathy giggle wafted over to our blanket on the fragrant breeze.

Terri. And Jackson.

It took me a minute to really understand what I was seeing. Fortunately for me, Terri never saw me, jumping on top of Jackson soon after I spotted them to resume their juvenile public make-out session.

“Look who that is,” I whispered. She turned her head to look and I hissed, “Don't look!” Max isn't really very good at the art of surveillance. But she did catch a look at my supposedly murderous neighbor and his supposedly terrified wife. I don't know—if you really think your husband is a cold-blooded killer, do you make out with him in public? I think not.

“It's Jackson,” she said. “I'd know that weak chin anywhere.”

“Does that look like a woman who's afraid of her own husband?” I continued to keep them in my peripheral vision; although they were far enough away that I could spy unobserved, I turned to the side in the hopes that they wouldn't see me.

Max eased up onto her elbows, looking like she was setting up her position in a foxhole. She studied them for a few minutes and then looked at me. “Do you really want to see this play?”

“Let's go,” I said, throwing all of the food back into the paper bag and rolling up the picnic blanket. I handed her the paper bag and threw the blanket over my shoulder. “But we're not breaking into their house,” I said, knowing that that was exactly what she had planned.

“Whatever,” Max said, walking toward the parking lot.

I grabbed her arm. “Promise me.”

“You don't have to break in anywhere. I'll do it.”

“Max, I'm serious.”

“‘I'm serious,'” she mimicked. “Well, I am, too. How do you expect to find Ray's killer if we don't do a little sleuthing?”

“Breaking in is not sleuthing,” I said. “It's a felony.”

She continued to walk toward the car with purpose. I ran to keep up with her, turning around every few seconds to see if Terri or Jackson had spotted us. They continued to roll around on their own blanket, seemingly oblivious to everything and everyone around them, so I figured we were safe.

We reached the car and put everything into the Beetle's miniscule trunk and started for home. She drove along Route 9D and came to the turnoff that would take us across Garrison and back toward the road that would take us to my house. “So, the Terri thing this morning was a giant setup.”

I was looking out the window and didn't really hear her. “What?”

“Terri. It was a setup. She's got something to hide.”

Of course, she was right. I had been had. And now, we had to figure out why.

Even though a steady rain had begun to fall, and lightning crossed the dusky sky, we made it home in record time. Max pulled into my driveway and turned off the car. She turned to look at me, her mouth set in a thin line of determination. “Are you in or out?”

I got that queasy feeling in my stomach that signals the onset of intestinal distress. “What do you think you're going to find? A bloody chain saw? A diary entry with ‘Dear Diary, today I killed Ray…get saw blade re-sharpened'?” I sighed. “Remember the last time we broke in somewhere? We almost got arrested!”

“Well, I guess I've got your answer,” she said, and got out of the car. She shimmied between the hedgerow and strode across their backyard with purpose. I didn't know whether to be in awe of or terrified by her force of will and lack of judgment.

It was in that instant that I remembered to tell her about Trixie, the massive golden retriever who, at ninety pounds, weighed nearly as much as Max. It was too late. By the time I reached the hedge, she was already on the ground, Trixie on top of her covering her with wet, sloppy kisses. As watchdogs go, Trixie sucks. But as a lovable family pet, she's clearly the tops. Max struggled beneath the weight of the dog, her white T-shirt covered with muddy paw prints, the back of her pants wet and soggy.

“A little help here?!” she gasped, her hands on the dog's belly in an attempt to liberate herself from Trixie's underside.

I plowed through the hedge. “Trixie! Here, girl!” I called and Trixie bounded toward me, freeing Max from her canine clutches. She tackled me, which left Max free to find access to the house. I wondered if Terri and Jackson ever let this poor animal in the house; every time I came home, she was outside and tonight was no different.

It was not unusual to find doors unlocked, even open, in our town. Nobody is too cautious about locking things up, especially when they've gone out for a short period of time. I, myself, had been guilty of this lax attitude toward security, so I wasn't surprised when Max opened up the sliding glass door on the patio and slithered inside the house. I guess it wasn't breaking in, technically, if the door is unlocked. I suspected, however, that Crawford might beg to disagree.

I sat with Trixie in the backyard, in the rain, and waited for what seemed like an eternity for Max to emerge from the house. As we sat and watched the back door for activity, my ears perked up to the sound of a car driving slowly up the driveway. The intestinal distress kicked up a notch as it dawned on me that the car belonged to Terri and Jackson. With the rain now coming down in a steady downpour, it was obvious that they had fled Boscobel rather than sit under the leaky tent where the play would be performed.

“Come up with a story,” I muttered to myself, stroking the dog. I looked deep into Trixie's eyes, hoping to figure out what to say when they got out of the car. I didn't know how I was going to keep them out of the house long enough for Max to leave but my mind was working overtime as I watched them make their way from the driveway to my side.

They were damp and looked a little bewildered as to why I was sitting in their backyard. “Hi,” Jackson said, a question in his voice. His hair gel had made his hair harden into a weird helmet that made him look like an extra in a Pompeii reenactment.

“Hey,” I said, drawing out the syllable for as long as possible. “Hey.”

Terri looked at me and furrowed her brow. Jackson produced an umbrella and gallantly put it over her head, leaving me to get soaked. “What are you doing, Alison?”

I got up from my crouch next to Trixie. “It started to rain and I saw the dog and she was wet and then I thought ‘gosh, the dog is wet,' and so I felt bad and then I thought I would come out here and get her and then I saw you drive up,” I babbled. I cast a nervous glance at the house but couldn't tell if Max was in or out. “Wow!” I screamed as loud as I could, hoping that she could hear me. “It's really raining!”

Jackson stared at me as if I had gone insane. “Well, we're back now so we'll take Trixie inside.” He took the dog by the collar and pushed her in the direction of the house. Trixie stayed firmly planted by my side.

“And I need sugar!” I cried. I pushed a wet lock of hair off my forehead.

“Okay,” Terri said. “Come inside and I'll give you some sugar.”

I followed them inside and stood at the edge of their kitchen, next to the sliding door, trying not to get their gleaming wood floors wet or muddy. Terri went into the kitchen and rooted around in the maple cabinets for sugar. She produced an entire five-pound bag and pushed it at me. “Here. Take the whole thing.”

“Oh, I couldn't!” I hollered, hoping that my voice was carrying throughout the entire house.

“Yes, you can!” she hollered back, convinced of my sudden onset of deafness.

I stalled for another minute, looking around the kitchen, which was attached to a large family room with a stone fireplace. Their wedding portrait, re-created in oil paints, had a prominent place over the mantel. It appeared that the antebellum South had been their theme. Terri was seated on what looked like a toadstool with a parasol at her feet; Jackson stood over her with one hand on her shoulder, the other in the pocket of his suit vest. He was sporting a Vandyke goatee/soul patch sort of thing on his chin which he had since had the good sense to shave off. Yuck.

I put my hand on the door handle and pushed the slider aside. “I'll be going now. Thanks for the sugar.” I stepped through the door and back out in the rain, offering a prayer that Max was out of the house and safe somewhere.

She was sitting at my kitchen table, in exactly the same place in which I had found Ray, waiting for me to return. She looked disappointed. “No bloody chain saws,” she said. “But did you get a load of the toadstool and the parasol?”

 

Crawford met his daughters at Grand Central Station early Sunday morning. The girls, twins, were going to be seventeen in a few months and their mother had finally relented to letting them take the train from Greenwich to Grand Central with the caveat that their father meet them at the train doors and make sure they were seated on the right train when it was time to go home. Crawford waited on the track, right where the third car would open its doors; it was their plan and it was foolproof. The doors would open and they would race out, as always.

Meaghan and Erin Crawford had been born three minutes apart in the midst of a December snowstorm; their mother had been escorted to the hospital by two police cars, her husband walking a beat somewhere in the Bronx and unable to get back to the Upper West Side to get her there himself. He arrived just in time to see Erin, then Meaghan, be born, the first blond, the other dark.

The train doors opened and Meaghan, a full six feet, preceded her smaller sister. She jumped into his arms and kissed him, forgetting that she was almost as tall as he and not a little kid anymore. He stumbled backward at the force of her embrace. Meaghan was the more gregarious of the two, an athlete and honor student. Erin was small, like her mother, and more reticent. Crawford didn't get a lot from her in terms of affection and had given up trying to figure her out. She was who she was and probably more like him than he cared to admit. Erin waited for her sister to finish before standing on her toes to kiss him on the cheek. They hadn't brought any bags since this was only a day visit; he had missed his Saturday-night visit with them but had made sure he could spend the entire Sunday with them.

Meaghan grabbed his hand. “Did you catch the skel?” she asked. Their mother had explained to them why their father had had to cancel his usual Saturday visit.

He turned to her, surprised. “Skel? Where did you hear that word?”

“I saw a documentary about the NYPD on television and they used that word a lot.”

He shook his head. “Okay, that's not a word we're going to use in normal conversation. Got it?”

She nodded. “Got it,” she said, flashing a grin that was identical to his.

Erin slipped her hand into his free one, smaller and more fine-boned than that of her younger sister. “What do you want to do today?”

He gave her hand a squeeze. “Well, Bea suggested we attend the Divine Mercy Hour at Trinity Church, but I told her we had a full day of Stations of the Cross on the agenda.” The girls chuckled; Aunt Bea was an old-time Catholic and hated the fact that Crawford didn't enforce a weekly mass ritual on Sundays. His time with them was precious; he didn't want an hour eaten up going to church. “What do you want to do?”

They walked across the wide-open space of Grand Central, the girls looking up every now and again to get a look at the beautiful planetarium scene on the domed ceiling; they never tired of it. Crawford ushered them up the great staircase that led to Michael Jordan's The Steak House on the right and the Campbell Apartment on the left, an intimate bar and bistro that he had never been to but had passed a hundred times. The girls told him that they were starving and wanted brunch. They exited at Vanderbilt Avenue and walked a block and a half to an Irish pub.

They took a booth away from the bar and toward the back of the restaurant. Crawford let them choose where they wanted to sit; they chose to sit together, across from him, where they could both see him.

The waiter appeared and asked them if they'd like a drink. Crawford looked at his watch and saw that it was just after ten. He ordered the girls their usual glasses of water and a coffee for himself.

Erin cut to the chase. “Mom said you're going ahead with the divorce.”

Meaghan shot her a look. “Nice going. Can we have a drink before we get into all of that?”

Crawford sighed. He and Christine had a relatively good relationship, amicable mostly, but sometimes, she let the girls in on things that he would just as soon keep between them. She was very open and, admittedly, he was a little closed. It had been one of the things that she had grown to dislike in him, but it was who he was and he was not great at change. He spread his hands out on the table, looking down at his fingers instead of into their eyes. “We're moving forward with the divorce,” he confirmed. Technically, that was true. But they still had the lengthy annulment process in front of them before everything was finalized. He didn't think Christine was signing the divorce papers until the process had at least commenced.

Erin's eyes filled with tears, something that he didn't expect.

“Hey,” he said, grabbing her hand. “Don't cry. Everything's fine.” He touched her cheek with his other hand. “Nothing's going to change. Everything is going to be exactly the same except that we won't be legally married anymore.”

Meaghan put her arm around her sister. “We've talked about this a lot, but she still thinks there's a chance.”

Crawford was puzzled. A chance?

Meaghan explained. “That you'd get back together.”

He hadn't considered that either of them would ever think that was a possibility.

Erin wiped her eyes with her napkin. “I'm sorry, Dad. It just makes things so final.” She let out a quiet sob.

He nodded. He understood. The holding pattern that he and Christine had been in for six years was hardly fair to anyone, least of all their daughters.

“Does it have something to do with the woman we saw at the restaurant that night?” Erin asked, keeping the napkin pressed to her eyes. “The woman from the hospital?”