Philly Stakes (24 page)

Her face flushed, she winced with pain, put her hand to her forehead and started up the stairs. “I need aspirin,” was what she said, but her eyes had flashed the message that now I, too, had joined the enemy camp.

* * *

“Nice place,” Nick said. He put two shopping bags on the kitchen counter, tossed his coat onto a stool and paced the downstairs room. He was wearing a light blue shirt and an argyle vest and he looked rather jaunty. “Nice,” he repeated, “nice sense of color, nice feeling.

“Pretty,” he said of the little Christmas tree. “Ummm,” of the suede chair. “Uh-huh,” of my mother’s slipcovered old sofa. The dining table and setting got a nod; a whimsical Klee print, a cocked head and wrinkled brow; the photos in little Victorian frames a long examination; the bookcase a more cursory one; a Dorothea Lange Depression print of a woman, a child’s face pressed into each of her shoulders and her own angular face looking for everything, finding nothing, generated a “hmmm.” He was interested, but decidedly nonverbal. It was a good thing he wasn’t writing architectural or design criticism.

His living-area survey completed, he moved into my miniscule cooking area, and inspected the cupboards. Open, peer, close. “Making pasta with”—open, peer, close—

“crab, shrimp and scallops in tomato, mushrooms, basil and garlic. My own recipe.”

“Sounds marvelous.”

“Think the kid will eat it? She’s around, isn’t she? I saw three place settings, but where is she?” Open, peer, shut. “Upstairs, not feeling too—”

“Good,” he said, slamming a door. “A big enough pot.” I wasn’t sure I could be close to his energy level for too long without getting radiation burns. He opened my junk drawer.

“Hey—I don’t let just anybody see that, you know,” I said “I am not that kind of girl.”

“Taking inventory,” he answered. “But maybe you’d prefer I ask you for what I need and you hand it over? Kind of kitchen doctor and nurse? Want some wine?”

“Yes, to both.”

“So,” he said, settling on the suede chair, “how was your visit with the blind lady and her pals?”

“You have a good memory.”

“Correct. So how was it?” He was never completely still. His left foot tapped on the floor, as if it had its own motor.

“Fine. Uneventful. She liked the cannoli. A friend of hers joined us and told me that she—the blind old lady—was
a
sexpot, or a siren. A Scheherazade, with stories that attract lovers, more or less. Perked things up
a
bit from what I’d anticipated.”

“What kind of stories?”

“Oh, you know. Stuff from her past. Memories. Old-lady stories. Speaking of which, how is yours going?”

“My old-lady story?”

“Your story. About Alexander Clausen.” The wine was delicious, far beyond the standards and budget of this household. I toasted him with my glass.

“Coming. Coming. Nearly done. Laura going to be much longer? You hungry?”

“I’ll check on her in a minute.” The pacing of the evening was way off. Maybe he was a restaurant kind of date, needing slow service, delays mandated by management. On his own, he chugged much too quickly. I tried slowing things down.

“Remember how you asked me about Clausen’s beginnings, about how he got his start? Did you ever find out?” What if nothing Minna had said was true?

“Why would you care about that?”

“Because Seventeen magazine always said to ask your date about his interests.” He took the time to smile. “Because putting together an article like yours sounds interesting. Sleuthing around for clues.”

“That’s an unusual way of describing it.” He stood up and stretched. “Makes research sound like detective work.”

“Isn’t it?”

He shot me a glance I couldn’t interpret. Maybe he thought I was making fun of him.

“Come across somebody named Donnaker in your research?” I asked.

“Why?”

“This old woman today…” I suddenly felt guilty, thinking of Minna. I couldn’t be free and easy with her story, not when she was, irrationally or not, terrified of its misuse. The ethical thing to do would be to first ask her permission, or see if she’d talk to Nick herself. “Nothing,” I said.

He waited, as if hoping I’d change my mind, and then he walked to the front of the house and opened the closet door. “Whoops,” he said. “Sorry. Listen, is there someplace to wash up before I start things going?”

“Upstairs. Can’t miss it.”

He took the stairs two at a time. Weird man. Too frenetic. If Mackenzie and Nick could be boiled up together, then melted down and reshaped, you’d get twins with about normal metabolisms. But since they couldn’t, I’d cast my vote on the side of the more relaxed tempo.

I pulled myself out of the chair and turned on more lights. It was dark as only the final edge of the year can be. The closet door was still ajar, a reminder that Nick’s coat was not yet in it, and my hostessing skills were not passing muster. I picked up the coat and was impressed by its softness. Not the coat of a man who writes for Oxlips, not the coat of a late bloomer. This must be one of the fruits of his short-lived real-estate deals. The wine was probably bought and stored during the same flush time.

I glanced at the staircase, and, the coast clear, I checked the label. It was indeed cashmere, hand tailored. Even the label was hand tailored. “Made by Alfred Boyer,” it said, “expressly for Dominick Riley.”

I hung it up carefully, smoothing the shoulders, carefully putting the white silk scarf over it.

Lots and lots of people were named Dominick. Nothing unusual about it.

Nonetheless, with heart pounding and a quick look up the stairs, I ran to the phone and dialed the Southland. It would take too long, require too much explaining to reach my other option, Minna White.

My mother barely got out her hello.

“Quick,” I said, “we never—Mom—what was Minna White’s first husband’s name?”

“Oh, dear,” she said. “Let me think.”

The toilet flushed upstairs.

“Don, I think. Yes, Donald sounds…”

“Dom, Dominick,” I said. “I know that part. His name was Dominick.”

“Of course—Dominick. She called him Dom, not Don—”

“Can you remember the rest?” Water banged through the pipes.

“Of course. It was the Dominick part that had me stymied because I knew Minna a lot better than I knew—”

“Mom!”

“What?”

“Minna’s last name.” I was whispering. The water had stopped. There weren’t a whole lot more things the man was about to do in my bathroom.

“What?”

“Her last name.”

“Riley. You knew that. Of course. You were so tiny and you thought Minna Riley was soup. You meant minestrone, but it was so cute, nobody corrected you, so you’d say, ‘I want Minna Riley for lunch,’ and we’d—”

I couldn’t hear much because I had suddenly developed the flu, jolting between hot flashes and chills, guessing what the odds were, whether Minna Riley’s son, Junior, he of the birthmark now hidden by a beard, the very same person who had learned his family history the day Jacob Donnaker found out the story of his betrayal, the same person who had pretended, probably, to be a free-lance writer profiling Clausen—the Junior who had called his mother today, after I had told him my destination—whether that son Junior’s presence in my house could be only an ironic, interesting, almost humorous coincidence.

I figured the odds at roughly a trillion to one.

And then they escalated as I watched four legs come down the staircase. First Laura’s, spindly and hesitant, and behind them, Nick’s, or Dominick’s or Junior’s. Well tailored and much more confident. As well he might be, since he, unlike his hostesses, carried a gun.

“One time in the market you shouted, ‘Minna Riley with crackers!’ Minna—”

“Hang up,” Nick-Junior said. His gun was aimed at Laura’s head.

“Mom, I have to—”

“Hang it up,” he said again.

“What?” my mother said.

“Hang it up or I’ll shoot it out of your hand,” he said. “After I shoot her.” He was inches away from me.

“There’s no reason for this!” I hissed.

He shook his head in disgust, and without waiting for the amenities, pressed the disconnect button. Then he removed the receiver from my hand and clicked it onto the telephone.

“What is this?” I said. “What does this mean?”

He didn’t answer.

I was pretty sure it meant we weren’t going to eat seafood pasta tonight.

Fifteen

“I DON’T GET IT.” I HOPED I WAS TELLING THE TRUTH.

“Nothing mysterious about it.” Nick seemed both grim and exhilarated.

“Why—why are you pointing a gun at us?”

“Saves time. More efficient. Laura wouldn’t come downstairs otherwise.” With his free hand, he directed both of us down onto the sofa.

It was not comforting to have a fidget aim a lethal weapon at me. I wanted to be sure he didn’t nervously tap his index finger. He had unbuttoned his shirt sleeves and rolled them up, the better to do his work, and I saw the edge of a large bandage. I remembered his awkward eating at the restaurant that night, the tennis-elbow story. I guess that made better table talk than calling it an “escape” elbow, or explaining how he’d gotten it, pushing his way through a window after murdering someone.

I squeezed Laura’s hand, trying to make the squeeze translate into “I never ever wanted to put you in jeopardy. Forgive me. Be brave. Help me be brave.”

“I’m sorry this has to happen,” Nick said. “But damn, it’s your own fault. Both of you. You, kid—if you hadn’t come downstairs that night…” He shook his head, still annoyed by Laura’s intrusion.

Laura’s eyes welled over, and she pulled her hand out of mine and wiped at them, almost angrily. “I do remember you,” she said with a shudder. “I thought it was just my imagination. A dream-memory. Something mixed up, but it wasn’t.” She was speaking to Nick, but she kept her head bent. She was almost doubled over, as if her stomach hurt. As if everything hurt. “This morning, outside the bakery, I thought—I got so scared when I saw you. It was like it cut my brain, it was so clear for a second. Then I was sure I was making it up. Imagining. But I saw you. I saw you standing where the tree had been. Just for a second, but I saw.”

“I know,” he said flatly. “I wish you hadn’t.”

“You would still have set a fire, wouldn’t you, though?” she asked, head still bowed. “So I’d be blamed.”

“Probably.” He tapped his right foot and scowled. I tried to scan his skull, read the brain paths, see his plan. His head went right to left, to the window, back to us, back to the window. He seemed ambivalent for a man who obviously had already reached some hard decisions.

“And you—” He meant me, this time. “All that crap about visiting this blind old lady-friend of your mother’s. All that cat and mouse.”

“But she was my mother’s friend! And that is why I went!” I realized, with a thudding fall that my reasons for visiting Silverwood might be innocent or guilty, but they were also irrelevant. I had gone and now I knew what I knew. And Nick knew what I knew. I fought off a powerful urge to abdicate, to curl into a fetal position and go to sleep, waking up someday, or not. I blinked hard, insisting on alertness. I was not going to spend my Christmas vacation getting killed.

There was reason for optimism, I told myself. For in fact, the living room lights were on, the curtains open, the street window at eye level. So if, for example, somebody decided to take an invigorating stroll in the cold and wet winter night air, and they chose my otherwise barely traveled street, and then they acted on a sudden urge to twist and contort so as to see around the Christmas tree boughs, we’d be completely visible. And surely, the passerby would then immediately run for help.

Maybe one of those “Little Streets of Philadelphia” walking tours was scheduled for tonight. Just because it was freezing and dark and the day after Christmas didn’t mean…

The fact was, I’d better think of a plan of my own that didn’t involve passersby.

“Right,” Nick was saying. “You didn’t know she was my mother. And sure, that wasn’t a game at the bakery this morning when you asked me who could have arrived at Clausen’s party in a taxi.”

“I never connected you with anything except that article you were supposedly writing. I didn’t even know your first name until five minutes ago when I hung up your coat.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Buy off the rack next time, Dominick.”

“And Laura’s being with you, that’s a coincidence, too, right?”

“Wrong. Laura’s with me for logical reasons. Her house burned down, and her father was killed. And her mother is not well. And her aunt and uncle are away. And I am her friend. And that’s why she’s here. The question is—why are you here?”

“Also for logical reasons.”

“I hope they involve shrimp and spaghetti.”

He looked at my Christmas tree. “I told you it was dangerous having a firebug as a houseguest. I warned you.”

I closed my eyes in a primitive denial reflex. He was going to burn us up. Repeat performance. “You have no imagination. It’s obvious that you’re not really a writer.” I opened my eyes. “There’s no deal with Philadelphia Magazine and no such thing as Oxlips, is there?”

“Hey,” he said, with a hint of the old smile. “We call it what we like. You say you’re visiting, I say I’m writing. Writing, visiting—”

“I know that one. The next line is ‘Let’s call the whole thing off.’ Can we?”

I had Sudden Stranger Syndrome with my own self. Who was this woman sitting straight as a cadet, heart in a prolonged aerobic workout, tossing second-rate lady-in-peril repartee around as if she were Myrna Loy with slingbacks and a dry martini? Nick didn’t seem overly impressed, but then, he wasn’t a Myrna Loy kind of guy. I couldn’t find out for sure, because our sophisticated banter was interrupted. Twice. The doorbell and the telephone both rang. “Ignore them,” Nick said.

I counted the phone rings. Eight. Nine. The doorbell rang a second and third time. Ten for the phone. A rapid knock at the door. Eleven.

The phone person obviously hadn’t read the telephone company’s suggested ten-ring maximum. Actually, in my house, three and a half rings is enough travel time from any point to an extension. At a saunter. My mother knows it, but she doesn’t care when she also knows I’m there. As when I’ve hung up on her in midcall.