The Summer We Read Gatsby (28 page)

Peck and Miles—at least I hoped that’s who it was—must have decided to slum it for some reason. I listened outside the door for some indication that the screaming couple might be slowing down or picking up the pace, as in reaching a climax, but this sounded like it was going to go on for a while. What were they doing at Fool’s House when there was so much more room to roll around over at his place? Besides, I had cleaned her room that morning, tidying huge piles of clothes that covered the floor and making the bed up with the throw pillows in anticipation of our real estate showing.

Finally I knocked. “Sorry to interrupt,” I called out.

There was no immediate answer but the screams subsided somewhat. Then muffled voices. I knocked again as the moaning sounded like it was picking up again. Either this was the most mind-blowing orgasm ever or one hell of an acting job.

Finally Peck shouted, annoyed, “Okay!”

“The Bosleys are coming to look at the house,” I said. “With Laurie Poplin. You might want to get up. They’ll be here soon.”

When I got to the foot of the stairs, still clutching the huge kitchen knife, I was startled to see that they were already there. A whole family of them, peering in through the screen door at me. Four children and their frazzled-looking parents—Heather in stained yoga pants and those strange plastic shoes with holes in them called Crocs, and Ollie in his Harvard crew shirt and his own pair of purple Crocs. The two of them looked deflated, as though their hopes—a charming and well-located house in the Hamptons they could actually afford—had been dashed by the sight of the rickety little shack with its sagging porch.

Ollie threw both arms in the air. “I didn’t do it. Wrong guy, I tell you, it wasn’t me,” he joked.

“Daaad,” the older boy drawled, admonishing him. He had shoulder-length hair and wore a purple rash guard and long shorts. “Dylaan,” his dad said, mimicking his tone.

“Is this a bad time?” their mother asked in a sharp tone. She held up a plate covered in tin foil as they all looked at me expectantly. “We made an appointment, remember?”

“My wife likes to be early,” Ollie explained, as though this was one of many things he found impossible to understand about the woman he married.

“Of course,” I said. “Come on in.” I inadvertently waved with my weapon, hoping Peck and Miles were finishing up and getting dressed.

“These are for you.” Heather gestured with her plate. “Health muffins. We baked them this morning.”

The littlest Bosley was too afraid to come into the house. “Oh, Poppy,” her mother said, glaring at the knife in my hand. “The lady was just using that for cooking. Like Mommy does all the time.”

Her older daughter corrected her. “You
never
cook.”

“I made the muffins,” her mother reminded her, using the same petulant tone as her daughter.

I led them into the kitchen, so I could put the knife back in its drawer. “There,” I said, kneeling down so I could face Poppy. “All gone.” She nodded warily and allowed me to take her hand.

“Try one,” Heather said of the muffins, thrusting the plate at me. “Homemade. So much better than store-bought.”

“This house is small,” the younger boy, whose name was Lucian, noted as Heather looked around at the worn-out kitchen with a defeated air. It seemed she’d had a much grander vision of her simple country house than ramshackle little Fool’s House. They had some money, Miles would tell us later. Ollie was a scientist and smart enough to have invested a little in biotech stocks, and had been somewhat successful. But not quite enough for the lifestyle they expected they were supposed to lead in New York City: a townhouse in Brooklyn with four kids at private schools, and nannies to make sure nobody was getting neglected, and orthodontists, tutors, coaches, vacations, and, naturally, a second home.

Fool’s House was the kind of place they might be able to buy, if they stretched and scraped and made do, spending vacations there instead of traveling, getting rid of a nanny or two now that their kids were a bit older. But it would never be the house of their dreams.

“Yoo-hoooooo,” Laurie called in through the screen door. “You were
early
,” she said to Heather in an accusatory tone. She wore a minidress, this one acid green and sleeveless to show off her bony shoulders, and she clattered in on high heels, distracted and glaring at her phone. “Did you
tell
them to come early?” she asked me, suspicious perhaps that I was going to cut her out of the deal.

I assured her I was not plotting anything and told her to go ahead and give them the grand tour. “You might want to avoid Peck’s room for a while, though. She and Miles are just getting up.”

“Miles Noble is here?” Laurie glanced quickly at me.

Ollie looked shocked. “What’s Miles doing
here
?”

I shrugged. “He’s with my sister.”

Laurie shepherded the Bosley parents into the living room after giving me a nasty look and they left the children with me in the kitchen. Dylan, the older boy with the long hair, wanted to know if we had any donuts.

“We’re not allowed to eat donuts,” explained Clementine, the oldest. She sported a midriff-baring tank top and terry-cloth shorts so tiny they really could have been more accurately considered an undergarment. In her mouth was a purple candy pacifier that made it look like she was wearing purple lipstick. “But we eat them all the time anyway.”

“Our mom’s too busy to notice.” Dylan looked around for the stash of sweets he seemed to know we would have.

“Stay-at-home moms are always busier than the working moms,” his little brother, Lucian, informed us. He sounded like he was parroting one of his older siblings or something he’d heard on television, but he spoke with conviction. “Everyone knows that.”

Clementine pulled the candy pacifier out of her mouth to explain. “The stay-at-home moms have to do all the work at the schools and the charities. But the office moms don’t have to do that stuff. They feel guilty for working and come home and bake cookies with you and stuff. Stay-at-home moms, they don’t have time to bake. Unless it’s for a bake sale. But then we’re not allowed to eat any of it.”

“So, are there any donuts?” Dylan asked again. He shrugged as though he knew he might sound slightly rude, but survival depended on it.

We didn’t have any donuts but there were plenty of freshly baked cupcakes, frosted in pink.

“Frosting, awesome!” declared Lucian, smiling at me as though his opinion of me had suddenly gone way up. They all seemed to view me differently now that baked goods—not rock-hard health muffins with bits of carrot and zucchini, but cupcakes, with frosting—had been provided. Little Lucian appeared to have fallen in love. He patted my hand as he stuffed half a cupcake into his mouth in one bite.

“My friend Jesse has a
Prada
mom,” Poppy declared through her own enormous mouthful of vanilla cake and pink frosting, quite proud to be able to offer something to the conversation. Then she quickly shoved the rest of her cupcake into her mouth, as though she wanted to get it finished before her mom showed up and took it away from her.

“What’s a Prada mom?” I asked, surprised by how much I was enjoying their company. I could actually imagine the four of them spending their weekends and summers in this house, reading on the porch, making forts in the small closet under the stairs, learning how to play tennis on the crumbling old court.

Poppy paused, unable to answer my question. Then she spoke through a mouthful. “I don’t know.”

Clementine had left her candy sucker on the counter and was pulling apart the cupcake I’d given her. “It’s a mom who wears cool clothes and is skinny and wears her daughter’s jeans. You know, a fashion mom. As opposed to, say, the office moms who wear suits—those are called power moms. Or there’s the Lilly moms.”

“What’s a Lilly mom?” Poppy asked the question for me.

Clementine rolled her eyes before answering, in that singsong teenage way that makes every sentence sound like a question that should be followed by a “Duh.” “The proud-to-be-preppy kind. The ones who wear Lilly all the time? Lilly Pulitzer?”

“What other kinds of moms are there?” I figured I might as well do some research. I hoped to become a mom myself one day.

“Our mom’s a yoga mom,” Dylan said. “There’s lots of those at my school.”

“They make you eat
edamame
,” Poppy complained. “And organic ketchup. It’s disgusting.”

“They don’t know
anything
about fashion,” Clementine added. “They try to make you buy no-brand jeans. As if.”

“They’re
obsessed
with summer reading,” Dylan added, making it sound like a disease.

“What’s wrong with summer reading?” I asked in amusement.

“Reading is
boring
,” Lucian explained in a gentle manner, as though he didn’t want to hurt my feelings by pointing out something so obvious.

“The woman who lived in this house was obsessed with summer reading too,” I told them. “She was my aunt. Her first question would have been ‘What are you reading?’ and if you told her, ‘Nothing,’ she would have screamed in horror. Then she would have gone to the shelf in her living room and gotten a book for you and made you read it. She would always say it was the way you learn what matters in life. And then she would probably tell you to try writing one of your own. She always wanted everyone to write their stories down.”

“Our mom always says she’s going to write a book,” Dylan said. “But she never does.”

“What kind of mom are you?” Lucian looked up at me, pink frosting on his nose and in his hair and on the tips of his very long eyelashes.

“I’m not one,” I said, wiping the frosting off his nose with a napkin. “Yet.”

“You can babysit for us,” Lucian said, gazing up at me again with those bedroom eyes. “Any time you want.”

“You have a husband?” Poppy wanted to know, like a journalist firing questions at a subject.

“That’s rude,” Dylan told his sister. “You’re a pimple.”

She let out an angry whine. “I am not a pimple. You’re a pimple. You’re a pus pimple.”

“You don’t even know what a pus pimple is,” Dylan pointed out. “And you have very bad manners.”

“It’s okay,” I said, grinning. With four kids in this small house, it would never be too quiet. “What about the dads? Are there different kinds of those?”

“The dads are stressed out all the time,” Clementine said.

Dylan added quickly, “The dads are the sports police.”

“What’s the sports police?” I asked, taking mental notes. Four kids seemed like the right number, and I found myself thinking Finn would probably want at least that many, after having grown up with all those brothers. Then I quickly dismissed that thought: What difference did it make to me how many children Finn Killian wanted to have? “Like referees?”

“Nah, they just force you to be on all these travel teams. Even if you don’t want to.” Dylan folded his arms over his chest as though he had decided then and there not to be a party to any of that sports ridiculousness ever again. “Even if you suck at sports. They sign you up without asking. And then they make you go to the games and practice ’cause they say you can’t let the team down. But you didn’t even want to be on the stupid team.”

“They’re the ones who coach stuff,” Clementine added for clarification. “Or get in fights on the sidelines.”

“Can moms be sports police too?” I asked her.

Clementine nodded. “They’re called soccer moms,” she said. “They try to pretend it’s just supposed to be fun. But they get really mad when—” All of a sudden she let out a loud squeal, startling all of us. “Look at him!”

She was pointing at the back door, where Trimalchio had appeared, draped in a velvet cape tipped in faux leopard. He looked ridiculous. And he knew it.

I opened the door to let him in. “Who did this to you?”

Trimalchio was a good sport, benevolently allowing himself to be caressed by four sets of sticky hands. Then Biggsy appeared behind him. He followed the dog with his video camera over his shoulder. Only he didn’t realize the screen door was shut and he walked right into it, thrusting his elbow through the screen, jabbing a large hole into it.

The two younger Bosley children, Poppy and Lucian, thought the hole in the screen was the funniest thing they’d ever seen and burst out laughing, as though it was a clown act and he’d done it on purpose. Maybe he had. “Hello, Cassie,” he said, all friendly. “I see you found the cupcakes I made.”

“
You
made these?” I was suddenly afraid he might have slipped something into the cupcakes.

“Just trying to help out,” he said, giving me a look. I wondered if he realized he’d become our number-one suspect in the mystery of the missing painting and now the case of the missing book.

“Do it again,” Poppy demanded. “Again.”

“Is that your dog?” The children clamored around Biggsy. “Why is he wearing a costume?” “Are you making a movie of him?”

Biggsy made a face at me, as if to say, See?
They
want me here. “Hey, kids,” he said to them. “Want to be in a film?”

The younger ones immediately said yes. Clementine wanted to know if their mother needed to sign a release.

“Hey, man, this is
art
,” he said, as he zoomed in on Trimalchio’s patient mug.

“
They
ate the cupcakes,” I said to him, in a warning tone. He was weird and probably a thief or at the very least a nuisance, but I didn’t think he would actually hurt any children. They were smiling happily, rubbing sticky fingers over Trimalchio, and none of the four of them appeared to be frothing at the mouth or writhing in pain from some sneaky poisonous ingredient.

“Weren’t they good? Did Miss Cassie tell you about the ghost of Fool’s House?” he asked, now focusing on tiny Poppy’s face, which immediately scrunched up in preparation for tears at the word
ghost.