How I Spent My Summer Vacation (8 page)

“My
shoot
! It’s supposed to be now! I hired an assistant and a stylist down here, and the assistant rented everything and she’s probably
there
. You have to call her, lie, make up some reason I’m delayed. A day, tell them. Say I’ll be in tomorrow and…” She lowered her eyelids and shook her head. “I’ll pay them for the lost time.” She sighed. “There go any profits.”

She told me how and where to call, and I agreed.

“Tell them I can’t be reached,” she said. I agreed to that, too. But I had great reservations, because I suspected that to fill the waiting time, the assistant might have already looked at the front page of the newspaper and figured out what was delaying Sasha.

When I finally did call the assistant, I told her that Sasha had been called away. That part seemed true, although
hauled away
would have been more accurate. I said she’d be gone three days, to give Sasha and the legal system some slack.

And that was that for the jailhouse visit, except that as she was being escorted away, Sasha half turned. “I forgot. The woman in the sari?” she said. “She had on sandals and a gold toe ring. Is that the kind of thing you want?”

If ever an accessory committed a crime, Sasha would be a perfect witness.

* * *

I relayed the bits and pieces Sasha had offered up to Mackenzie, then told him I wanted to go back to the casino. I wanted my earthly possessions back and that room of my own that Virginia Woolf said all women needed. She had also mentioned a small annuity, which wouldn’t be bad, but I doubted that the hotel would provide it.

The situation was stupid, perverse. What was I doing in a lavish Atlantic City hotel now that Sasha was bedding down in a cell? But how could I leave town while she was imprisoned—or afford to stay, once the saltwater taffy people noticed that their photographer was missing in action?

“No problem,” Mackenzie said in his off-in-space voice. “Gonna find me that Farmer boy, meantime. It’s too easy for them to think she made him up.”

“How?” I asked. “Can the police find the addresses of unlisted phones?”

He raised one eyebrow.

“Forgive me for questioning your powers. And thanks,” I added grudgingly. “This is really decent of you.”

He grinned, quite pleased with himself. “This whole business is an elaborate ruse to get your attention. I had a fear it was wanin’ back in the city, so I set all of this up.”

I put my arm on his sleeve. The feel of worn-soft broadcloth over worked-hard muscle was tempting. There were better ways to spend the day than what faced both of us, much better ways to perk up the waning attention. Although, of course, I had come here to decide whether or not perking was advisable, and just about decided last night that it was not. “C.K.,” I said before I thought it through, “we really do have to talk.”

His exhales contained an entire vocabulary that could have been translated into comic book cursing—little stars and question marks and exclamation points whooshing out of him. His accent became acute. Verbal farina. “Ah trust you’re referrin’ to a need for conversation ’bout Sasha and the business at hand,” I thought he said. “Your friend’s in deep trouble.”

I glared. Obviously my eyes did not speak the volumes that his exhalations did, or he would have been horrified. Instead, he went on figuring out what Sasha needed to get herself out of this mess. I couldn’t fault him for that—she was my friend and that was generous of him, particularly since he’d never approved of her.

I faulted him anyway.

* * *

The hotel management was not glad to see me. Somehow, they blamed me for what had happened in the suite. Who was I, anyway? Ms. Berg’s reservation had been made by her employer. Why was I there? Why did I exist? What was the meaning of life?

If they gave me—the person who shouldn’t have been there in the first place—a room, did I honestly think the saltwater people would pay for it?

“Listen,” I reminded them, “I’ve been grossly inconvenienced—and possibly endangered. What if I had been in that room? What kind of security do you have here that lets strangers break into somebody’s room?”

They huffed and they puffed. They took every precaution, they insisted. Not their fault, certainly. Never happened before. Spotless reputation.

What were my alternatives? Moving in with Mackenzie, even short-term, didn’t seem like a great idea when what I most needed was space and time away from him.

Home sounded lovely, but dangerously disloyal to Sasha. After all, I could have easily been the one to come back to the room first. I could have been the one in jail. Or another one dead.

I finally handed over my credit card as collateral for their least expensive room. If management didn’t relent, or Sasha didn’t return to snap photos and get a free room, I would check out tomorrow and commute from the city to Sasha’s rescue.

I tried not to remember that this was supposed to be my vacation. While the officious desk clerk grappled with finding me a lousy room, I tapped my too-tight loafers, readying myself for the next battle, the repossession of my wardrobe.

“Well, young sweetie! Look, it’s Sherwin’s granddaughter.”

Tommy and Lala seemed characters out of another, more comic, life. “Hi,” I said. “But weren’t you supposed to go back on that bus yesterday?”

“Well, if you recall, when you left us, we were having a drink and talking about Sherwin,” Tommy said. “One thing led to another, I guess, and we never did make our bus.”

Lala tittered. There was no other word for the sound that came from between her clenched lips. She batted her heavily mascaraed eyelashes at Tommy, her tormentor, her sexual harasser.

Tommy, dressed in his white shoes and seersucker, shorter than I remembered, bowed at me and grinned. “Tell Granddad that it’s too bad, but he lost out. Sweet Lala has honored me by promising to become my life companion.” He enunciated with great solemnity.

“His
wife
.” Lala eyed me intensely. “I’m marrying Tommy.” Did I get it? His sexual advances were going to be legitimized and therefore no longer offensive or unwelcome. She held out her hand on which glimmered a knuckle-sized diamond ring. “Bought it on the boardwalk last night, the impetuous man!” she simpered. “This big softie had a big win, and spent it all on me!” She winked at me.

“Told you my luck was changing,” Tommy said.

It would serve her right if the headlight on her ring finger turned out to be as fake as Tommy’s organized crime stories or his imaginary rival, Sherwin. This betrothed couple should skip the blood test and have a premarital lie detector test instead.

“Grandpa’s heart will be broken,” I murmured.

“What a day,” Tommy said. “Good news and bad. You heard, didn’t you?”

“About you? No, actually, not until you just said.”

“No, no. I mean the other news. Jesse Reese. It’s all over the papers.”

“Oh. Yes, I…I heard.”

“Remember who told you first,” Tommy said. I must have shown my confusion.

“In the lounge,” he said. “I told you he was in deep trouble with you-know-who. Only I was wrong on one point, I admit. I thought he had three days to live. I was two off the mark.”

Yesterday. In the bar. That man Tommy had used as one of his stories? I remembered a man in a suit—
the
man in the suit? The one that Sasha had mentioned? It had to be the same person; he was the only man in a business suit I’d seen in the hotel. That must be why the photo in the paper had looked vaguely familiar. Jesse Reese had been in the bar last night. Jesse Reese had been the man who’d joked about what was normally “his” suite. I took a deep breath and exhaled loudly.

I was disproportionately relieved, the doubts and nagging questions I’d had about Sasha now gone. Sasha had not known Jesse Reese, had no prior relationship—but she’d been honest enough to acknowledge a sense that she’d met him, had known him in some way.

And then I was disproportionately upset. What had happened in the bar after I left? Had Sasha really gone out with Dunstan? I remembered Jesse Reese tilting toward her, my sense that low-level flirting was under way.

Had Sasha perhaps switched from Dunstan to Jesse, in which case anything was possible? Had she gone back to the bar to make plans with Frankie—or with Jesse Reese? I hated thinking in these terms, but it would be foolish not to consider the possibility.

The desk clerk rang a bell—as if I had luggage.

“You and Granddad will come to the wedding,” Tommy said.

“If he can bear the heartache of the loss,” I said. With Sasha in jail and Mackenzie in limbo, it was good to have an imaginary friend as company for the ride upstairs. Just me, Granddad Sherwin, the dead Jesse, and a hundred million questions.

MY NEW DIGS WERE NEITHER gilded nor sophisticated. They were grudgingly designed in serviceable style for those who worried about money and weren’t likely to be real gamblers. A no-frills room. No hair dryer or complimentary bathrobe. A small clock-radio, and no premium channels or in-house movies on the TV. In their place, a VCR—bolted down—and a notice that nearby video rental stores would be glad to deliver one’s tape of choice.

I pulled the bedspread off one pillow, just to make a personal statement. Otherwise, I had nothing to unpack, nothing to mark the place mine, and no sense of what to do next.

I had detoured to the scene of the crime en route to this room. The men hanging around the place were unaware of how crucial, how central, a woman’s makeup is to her mental health. They insisted on continuing to hoard every bit of it, including my hairbrush. Either they were doing make-overs on one another or they were as sluggish and inept as I suspected.

Or maybe they’d cut an overnight deal for yet another instant crime-of-the-week movie and were already using the room as a set. I wondered who was playing Sasha. Cher had the right spirit, but was too short. Sigourney Weaver was the right size, but insufficiently wacky….

There had to be something more profitable to do with my time than casting the film of my friend’s worst moments. I thought about Dunstan—or was it Edgar—and I checked the clock. It was early morning in Trueheart, Wisconsin, and most public schools, unlike their private cousins, were still in session.

After several conversations with robots who knew phone numbers, I reached an actual human being, who identified herself, rather merrily, as “School office, Jean speaking.”

I was immediately suspicious. Not only did she not sound computerized, she also did not sound angry, grudging, or particularly wary. My experience with the guardians of attendance records and supply cabinets had not prepared me for civility. Maybe it was true what they said about the Midwest’s friendliness.

The unexpected cordiality made me stumble and stammer. “This is—I’m—This is so embarrassing!” I squealed. “I’m with Photos R Us here in New York. We’re a clearinghouse, you know, and—”

“
Just one moment!
With whom am I speaking?” So much for geographical differences. All school secretaries are sisters under the skin. They don’t burn out the way teachers do; they calcify.

“My name?” I decided to tell the truth. “Mandy Pep—” But why tell the truth about that when I was lying about the rest of the call? “—salt.” I never claimed to have much imagination.

“Mandy Pepsalt?”

“Right. So this man sent us photographs of Trueheart. Absolutely
brilliant
, and we want to hire him and use them for syndication, you know? Except—this is the humiliating part. Someone who shall remain nameless spilled her coffee all over the cover page, and the man had written in ink, and his address just floated off in a mess of coffee. We are
beside
ourselves here.”

“I’m quite busy, Miss Pepsalt, and I can’t really follow why you’re calling me from New York.”

“Because he’s one of your graduates. Grew up out there. His pictures are a photo essay called ‘Hometown,’ and I’m hoping against hope that you keep up-to-date alumni records and that you’ll know how we can contact him. Unfortunately, I can’t tell you what year he graduated because the, ah—”

“Coffee?”
Her tone was disdainful. She would never spill her coffee on an important document. She would never ingest anything spillable around an important document.

Dunstan had looked in his forties. “I think I see a six in that blur,” I said. “So he graduated mid- to late sixties, I suspect. I must assure you this has never, ever happened before. I don’t want you thinking we are anything less than meticulous in our care for our clients’ portfolios.”

“Miss Pepsalt! This is a small high school. I’m the entire clerical staff. If students contact me, fine. If they come in and visit me, fine. But this isn’t like a college that has a regular alumni news. If you knew his exact year—”

“Oh, if I had only taken proper precautions with my coffee! There! Now you know who the clumsy culprit is. Can’t you help me?”

“—and if that class had a reunion lately, the chairman of the event might have traced the man. That’s who does that kind of thing, calling parents and last known addresses and asking other people for information. I certainly can’t. I’m too busy with the current crop of students to bother with somebody who was here a quarter of a century ago!”

Now she sounded like a school secretary. It simply took longer to get up to speed in the Midwest.

“I know the ones who come say hello,” she said, “bring in their children and, a few times now, their grandchildren. But the others, no, so if that’s all you—”

“It sounds as if you’ve been there awhile. Perhaps you’d remember this man.”

“Only if he was exceptional. Good or bad. If I had to order engraved awards or trophies for him—or put him on the detention roster a lot of times. Otherwise, the hairdos change, the music gets worse, but all the same, they blur, Miss Pepsalt.”

“Does the name Dunstan Farmer strike a chord?”

She gasped. The chord had been struck. Would it be trophies or detentions she recalled?

“So you do remember him? The boy who moved there from England when he was young?”