The Summer We Read Gatsby (29 page)

“What ghost?” Lucian asked in excitement.

I quickly reassured them. “It’s just a story
some people
like to tell. There’s no ghost.”

Biggsy swung the video camera into my face. “Of course there is. He likes to play backgammon.”

“I play backgammon,” the older boy, Dylan, said.

“I don’t want to live in a haunted house,” Poppy whispered to me.

“If you leave a backgammon game unfinished, the ghost will play it out. And red will always win,” Biggsy continued. “He takes paintings off walls and moves things around. He’s a good ghost.” Both boys deemed a ghost cool and awesome and Clementine didn’t care. Even little Poppy gazed up at me with total trust, believing the ghost was just a made-up story. So if he’d been trying to scare them, he was unsuccessful.

Biggsy clapped his hands, trying another tack. “Want to look in the refrigerator?”

The three older ones nodded warily while Poppy gave me a nervous glance. “That’s enough,” I said. “Show’s over, Fool. You can go now.”

He ignored me as the children stared up at him. “For some reason, people always want to open the fridge when they look at houses,” Biggsy explained to them. “We don’t know why. It’s just one of those nosy human things that we do. It’s instinct. Or habit. So go right ahead.”

Dylan hesitated for a few seconds and then pulled open the door to the refrigerator. They all examined our groceries.

Lucian was the first to notice. “What’s that?” He pointed at something.

We all looked more carefully. “It’s an arm,” Clementine announced in a bored matter-of-fact tone, as though it were not only normal but expected to find a severed limb in the fridge. After all, wasn’t that where they belonged?

“How did
that
get in there?” Biggsy directed his words at Trimalchio. The dog looked like a grand stage actor ready to take five, weary of a role he’d been playing for too long but for which he’d become famous.

In planning his little prank, intending to scare off another set of possible buyers, Biggsy had forgotten a most important rule: know your audience. The Bosley children were unfazed by the arm. Only four-year-old Poppy got excited about it, and that’s because she thought it was fantastic. In fact, they all seemed to think it was great, and they grew animated at the thought of living in such a fun house.

Laurie brought Ollie and Heather back to the kitchen amid the excitement. Ollie saw a severed arm as an opportunity to demonstrate his razor-sharp wit. “This house must be cheap,” he said. “It didn’t cost an arm and a leg. Only an arm.”

Laurie laughed as though those were the cleverest words ever uttered by a man. Clearly she must have thought the showing had gone well.

“Follow me, children,” Biggsy said, leading the four of them out the back door with Trimalchio following. I was about to suggest that we go too, rather than leaving the children alone with him, when Peck came into the kitchen in a cloud of freshly applied Jo Malone. She was wearing an old-fashioned bathing suit, the full one-piece armored kind. This one was red with white polka dots and made her boobs and butt look huge. She also sported an enormous straw hat, candy-red lipstick, and very high platform espadrilles.

“Welcome to Fool’s House,” she cried out. “Can I offer you a Bloody Mary? How about some fresh lemonade? Or pancakes!”

“The children might like that,” Heather suggested, somewhat flabbergasted by the sight of Peck in her elaborate getup, exactly the desired effect.

“Children? What children?” Peck’s smile faded a bit. She didn’t have much tolerance for small people who couldn’t partake of her famous Southsides and had little in the way of amusing anecdotes to share.

“I would take a cappuccino,” Ollie offered.

Peck made a face. I knew what she was thinking:
Some people
have such bad manners. This would be the perfect excuse for her to refuse to sell them our house, even if they did make an offer. “We do not,” she enunciated, “have a cappuccino maker.”

Laurie Poplin smiled coldly at Peck and said she hoped they hadn’t woken her up. “It’s almost
eleven
,” she pointed out in a snide way that made me think Finn had been right about her feelings for Miles Noble. She glanced toward the hallway before asking the Bosleys if they wanted to go back up and see the bedroom that they’d missed.

They shook their heads. “We got the idea,” Ollie said.

“We’ll probably want to come back at night,” Heather added.

Ollie only mentioned Harvard once. “I had a blanket just like that at Harvard,” he noted with enthusiasm, of the popcorn spread that covered the bed in my room. And Heather liked the studio above the garage, which she planned to use for her pottery and yoga and, as she put it, “my writing.” Their shift in attitude toward the place from the beginning of their visit until the end was palpable and Laurie Poplin bounced on the balls of her feet as she walked them to their car.

We stood on the porch watching them load the four children into the predictable hybrid. Biggsy had disappeared again, his motorcycle gone.

“I. Did. Not. Like. Those. People,” Peck announced as the Bosleys pulled out of the driveway while Laurie stood there waving at them.

Laurie had just pulled away in her own car when Miles Noble came out to the porch wearing Peck’s silk paisley robe. His hair stuck out from his head in tufts and his face was puffy. “What people?” He kissed her on the neck. “Hey, Stella.”

“People like that don’t deserve such a place.” She was still glaring down the driveway. “This house is special. And those people, your houseguests, were . . . uninspired. Uninspiring.”

Miles looked confused. “Which houseguests?”

“The Bosleys,” I explained, trying not to notice how the sash to Peck’s robe was coming loose—it was clear that Miles was not wearing anything underneath it. “We met them at your place on Saturday night. Remember? They said they wanted to look at our house?”

Miles barked out a laugh. “They did? A house they would actually
pay
for?”

“See,” Peck said to me in a quick shift. “They’ll never make an offer. This conversation is moot.”

Miles couldn’t keep his hands off her. “Moot,” he said, nuzzling her ear. “I want to moot you.”

“Miles,” she admonished. “Get a room.”

“Maybe I’ll buy it,” Miles said, grinning lazily. “I like it here.”

Peck turned to me. “Miles and I like it better here,” she said. “His house is too big.”

Miles nodded somewhat sheepishly. “My house is ridiculous.”

“Literally. I got
lost
,” Peck explained. “For like an hour. Plus, it’s horribly ugly.”

“It’s really ugly,” Miles said to me. “I should sell it.” He looked over at Peck and ran one finger along her cheek. “I’m going to sell it. I hate it. So, what’s for breakfast? Where’s that butler dude?”

“He’s disappeared again,” I said. “And I think he took Lydia’s copy of
The Great Gatsby
. I can’t find it anywhere.”

“Did you look up there?” Peck gestured toward the garage before turning to Miles. “He’s got pictures of me in his room. He’s been
filming
me.”

“He kissed your fucking shoe. You’re hot, babe, what can I say?” Miles tied the robe more securely around his thick waist. “Now, can we get some breakfast? I’m
starving
.”

“We should go up there again,” Peck said to me.

Miles gave her an exasperated look and headed for the door. “If we don’t get some food first, you can forget going to Paris for the weekend, babe. I’ll be in a starvation-induced coma.”

She grinned at me. “He’s always starving. I swear, the guy is all appetite.”

“Paris for the weekend?” I asked, surprised at how quickly their newly reignited love affair seemed to be progressing. She nodded. “Miles is taking me to the Ritz. We’re staying in the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite.”

Miles turned at the door and gave me a hangdog look. “I do what I’m told,” he joked, in the manner of a man who was used to having other people do what
he
told them and couldn’t quite figure out exactly how he’d gotten himself in this situation.

14

 

 

 

 

P
eck had acquired, somewhere, an original Pan Am flight attendant’s uniform from the seventies, and this was what she was wearing two days later when I came out on the porch to find her waiting for me. “When on a quest,” she announced, handing me a cupcake, “it’s important to dress appropriately.” She eyed the shorts I’d pulled on quickly. “Or not.”

Hamilton, never one to miss out on anything that smacked of an adventure, had orchestrated a day of what he called “sleuthing” for the three of us. I had a hunch he too would be dressed for our escapade and I wasn’t wrong. He strolled up the driveway wearing a safari-style jacket with loads of pockets, as though, should the occasion arise, he might reach into them to pull out tools or other necessities. He daintily clutched a small cooler from Petrossian Caviar in one hand like a purse. With the other hand he waved his fan. “Isn’t this exhilarating?” he called out to us as he approached.

Biggsy’s motorcycle had not reappeared in the two days since he’d left the Bosley children outside, so Hamilton had not yet had a chance to execute the first part of the plan he’d concocted. But in the meantime we were setting out on a fact-finding mission, attempting to figure out if the painting in question could, in fact, have been painted by Jackson Pollock. I wasn’t sure exactly how we were going to accomplish this but I loved the notion that we were on a quest. This kind of thing needed air, and Peck and Hamilton together were the kind of people who would breathe life into a speck of an idea until it became something entirely different, the way a kernel of corn could become popcorn when hot air was involved.

“First order of business,” she stated once Hamilton had stepped up onto the porch. Peck, whose favorite show was
Law and Order
, approached the day as though she were on assignment. “We go up to the studio to look for the
Gatsby
that Stella here thinks may be a first edition.” She pointed at the garage. “And we search for any other clues we might have overlooked the first time.”

I led the way to the garage and up the stairs to the somewhat stuffy second-floor studio. I half expected to find the space cleared out, indicating that Biggsy had pulled up stakes and taken off with our painting, but it looked exactly the same as it had the first time we’d gone up there, Biggsy’s shrunken suits and collection of hats still in the small closet, the piles of photographs and papers all over the table.

Propped up against a shelf along one wall was a large book, open to reveal an image of a painting on the well-worn page. “Check this out,” I said, closing the book to note the cover. “Jackson Pollock.”

“There’s a
clue
.” Hamilton was out of breath after the climb up the stairs. “I’d say that’s a start.”

I quickly flipped through the pages, many of which were marked with yellow Post-its or covered with ink where Biggsy seemed to have been making notes to himself in a scribbled handwriting that was impossible to decipher. I scanned the images to see if there were any that looked like ours, but none of them appeared to be an exact match, though there were some that seemed vaguely similar.

While I was flipping through the pages of the book that Biggsy or someone had clearly spent much time with, Peck held up a sheet of stationery that appeared to be a letter from Lydia, covered with her same round schoolgirl handwriting.

“Another letter?” I asked eagerly, closing the book and stepping closer to the page she was now inspecting with a frown. The sight of Lydia’s handwriting brought a swift pang to my heart as I reached for what I believed to be another communication from the aunt we’d all adored. And then the wrench of emotion turned immediately to anger when Peck showed me that what had appeared to be Lydia’s perfect penmanship was actually the same few lines written out over and over. Biggsy had copied them and then practiced them again and again to achieve the rounded letters and distinctive look of her handwriting.

“This must have been a practice sheet,” Peck said, her hand shaking slightly as she held the paper for the two of us to see.

“Damn that bloody snogger,” Hamilton exclaimed, now that he’d caught his breath and realized what Peck was holding in her hand.

“I knew there was something off about the way he suddenly brought out that letter,” I said, now seething at the thought of Biggsy digging around Lydia’s desk to steal some of her stationery and then copying out a few sentences from a letter she’d written to someone else, one of us perhaps. “It was a fake.”

“A good fake,” Peck pointed out, but she too looked angry. “Kid’s got talent.” She shook the sheet of paper as though trying to rid it of negative energy.

“The kid’s a menace,” I added quickly. “He’s been nothing but trouble.”

“Why would he create a fake letter from Lydia?” Hamilton wondered aloud. “Why go to all the trouble of perfecting her handwriting? Unless he was planning to falsify something else? A check, perhaps?”

I looked over at Peck. “We should find out if there were any checks from her account made out to him.”

Peck shook her head. “I don’t think that was it. I think he did it because he could. He wanted to lull us into a false sense of security. Like we’re all just one big happy family. But he’s going to rob us blind right under our noses and call it art.”

“We’re going to have to confront him,” I said, sifting through piles of papers and things in search of anything that might shed some light. “He could be more dangerous than we realize. Especially because he’s obviously not going to leave this place willingly.”

We didn’t find Lydia’s copy of
The Great Gatsby
or the painting or any other clues, and eventually Hamilton suggested we move along. “I don’t want to be in here when that chap comes back. He could be one of those violent types.”