Hit and Run (3 page)

Phyllis visibly softened. After so many years of serving other people Thanksgiving dinner at the restaurant, maybe an invite somewhere else was unexpectedly appealing. ‘What's this shindig about again?'

AnnaLise considered soft-peddling, so Phyllis wouldn't make a scene. On the other hand, it was important that AnnaLise get the restaurateur on her side and, as a result, Daisy as well. And that would happen only if Mama's interest was piqued.

Her prurient interest, that is.

‘Hart wants to invite all of his former lovers for the weekend.'

Phyllis' eyes went wide, her mouth dropping open. Nothing escaped, though, except a ‘No!' which sounded more like a thrilled gasp than a dictionary word.

‘Yes.' AnnaLise was nodding. ‘But we're shortening the list to just those with any children he may have fathered by them.'

‘Oh, dear.' Now Phyllis looked unhappy.

Had AnnaLise lost her or was there yet another Sutherton secret revolving around Dickens Hart and his sex life? ‘What?'

‘Oh, nothing, but … doesn't that mean you'll have to split the retrobate's fortune once he's on the wrong side of the grass?'

AnnaLise sat back. ‘Mama, I don't want Hart's money. We've gotten along fine on—'

‘Whether you want it or not, you're his only blood, leastways that I know of for sure. What with your mother's memory spells and all, you never know. We may need that money.'

We
. The mothers-and-child union had always seemed comforting. Now it carried a faintly conniving thorn. ‘I thought you hated Dickens Hart.'

Phyllis shrugged. ‘Doesn't mean I can't like his money. Or what turns into yours, eventually.'

This was a new wrinkle. And a fresh side of Phyllis, one AnnaLise could incorporate within her reunion campaign. ‘Dickens wants to do right by me and all his heirs.'

‘So there
are
others?' Mama asked as a couple passed them on their way to the front counter to pay.

‘None confirmed yet. And there won't be for at least a couple of weeks.'

‘Thanksgiving.' Phyllis was stroking her chin.

‘Exactly. Now, think about it. Don't you want to be there? Don't you think Daisy should be there, too? Meaning the both of you with
me
, protecting my interests?'

The ‘ring-for-service' bell next to the cash register sounded. Twice.

Phyllis ignored it, except to raise a palm toward the front counter. ‘'Course you should be there, AnnieLeez. In your lawful place, by your father's right hand. And Daisy and me, we'll be there, too, aside you.'

Ahh, the sweet smell of success. And tuna noodle casserole, if AnnaLise was any judge of the odor wafting from the kitchen. ‘Perfect. Whither thou goest, Daisy will, too.'

The bell sounded a third time.

‘Hold your horses,' snapped Mama over her shoulder. ‘Now, AnnieLeez, you shouldn't try to get around your mother like—' A thought seemed to strike the older woman. ‘You know, I have this restaurant to consider. What time will we be eating on Thanksgiving, do you suppose?'

‘It's still up in the air. People should be arriving Wednesday night and Thursday morning, and Hart is inviting everyone to stay the weekend. Or at least, that's his plan.'

‘The whole long weekend?' Phyllis' eyes narrowed. ‘Up in that big house?'

AnnaLise nodded.

‘Bet he has servants, Dickens Hart.' Mama was gazing off into the distance.

‘I've only seen Boozer Bacchus, but I assume Dickens has someone else to clean and so on.'

‘Oh, I'm sure,' Mama said. ‘A big place like that doesn't run itself. I'm seeing a real opportunity for an entry-penner like me to appreciate how everything runs.'

‘Entrepre— Oh, never mind. Sounds like you want to stay over.' AnnaLise had been thinking the three of them would attend Thanksgiving dinner, then return home to post-mortem the event. Maybe go back again as visitors on Saturday or Sunday. But Phyllis obviously had more in mind. ‘What about the restaurant here?'

The ‘entry-penner's' eyes fell, then came back up, shining brightly. ‘No problem to close down for the holiday itself. And the whole weekend falls in our quiet time anyway, what with the pretty leaves on the ground from that last hard rain and its wind. No snow for the skiing yet, so our winter tourists—'

The bell interrupted again. One, two, three, a nearly unimaginable
four
times. And hard, like a fist was pounding on it.

Phyllis Balisteri more grunted than sighed as she began sliding out of the family booth. ‘That invitation, now – you respond civil-play to it, AnnieLeez. We're entitled to a break – all three of us.'

‘I'
m still not sure this is a good idea,' Lorraine ‘Daisy' Kuchenbacher Griggs said on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

Mother and daughter were in Daisy's bedroom on the second floor of the two-story building she'd lived – and worked – in most of her life. The storefront that had been Griggs' Market took up one-half of the ground floor, its entrance fronting diagonally on the corner of Main Street and Second. That space was now rented to young Tucker Stanton and had been transformed into a coffeehouse/nightclub called Torch.

Around the corner on Second Street, you'd find the entrance to the Griggs' over-and-under apartment. The door led directly into the kitchen of what to others might seem like an unconventional living space, but AnnaLise just called it ‘home.' At least, she had until she'd gone away to college in Wisconsin, returning only for short visits.

And even those, as both Daisy and Phyllis liked to remind her, had become sporadic at best.

‘I know it's my first Thanksgiving here in years,' AnnaLise said as Daisy picked through her lingerie drawer. ‘But look at it this way. You won't have to cook. According to Boozer Bacchus, Dickens Hart has brought in some high-powered chef from Las Vegas for the weekend.'

Her mother snorted, turning from the drawer with what looked like a very expensive – and skimpy – thong in her hand. ‘A chef – I can't wait for Phyllis to hear that. Besides, you know full well that I never made a holiday dinner. Thank the Lord, that's always been at the restaurant.'

And, therefore, a supermarket-case turkey with pop-up timer, stuffing from a box, and canned green beans and mushroom soup, topped with crunchy French-fried onions. Also canned.

None of which AnnaLise could ever remember sneering at.

‘… oyster stuffing,' Daisy was saying, ‘which they'll call “dressing,” of course. And maybe fancy cranberry-orange relish. I'm sure this chef—'

‘Cranberry-orange relish?' AnnaLise interrupted, nearly reconsidering the campaign to shepherd her two mothers to Hart's mansion for the holiday. Even after leaving home, AnnaLise insisted that
her
Thanksgiving berries be jellied and capable of slithering like a short, squat snake from can directly onto plate.

Tradition was, after all, tradition.

‘Oh, I'm sure it'll be a fine meal.' Daisy picked out a few more lacy frills and dropped them into her overnight bag. ‘But it won't be Thanksgiving.'

‘Is that why you think our going is a mistake?' Not for the first time, AnnaLise reflected on the fact that Daisy – at age fifty – had an inventory of lingerie far sexier than AnnaLise did at twenty-eight.

Given they were leaving late that afternoon to spend a long weekend with her mother's one-night stand, along with his other former lovers and assorted ex-wives, it didn't seem to be the time to ask about the origins of the underwear collection.

Either that, or perhaps the perfect time to ask, though AnnaLise was damned if she would. Way too much information was to be had and, on that front, the last two weeks had been tough enough.

She'd finally found Hart's ‘Big Black Book' and dutifully – if gaggingly – gone page by page, recording ‘pertinent data' on each woman listed.

In total, there were sixty-three possibilities BV – or Before Vasectomy – that she'd passed on to Boozer Bacchus. Amazing, but then AnnaLise had honestly expected worse, or probably ‘better,' from Hart's point of view – given the man's self-proclaimed reputation as a ‘hound.'

There were further encounters, mentioning even more females, but the descriptions were pretty sketchy. Sketchy, that is, in the completeness of information Hart had provided. AnnaLise resisted judging the character of his conquests, as God knew both Daisy and she harbored their own glass-house problems in that regard.

Hart had been right about Bacchus' investigative abilities, though. Boozer and his ‘emissaries' had been successful at tracking down nearly eighty percent of his boss' encounters. How they'd winnowed those down from there to focus on just those who may have the potential heirs, AnnaLise didn't know. But she had been told that at least three of Hart's former lovers would be joining them for Thanksgiving and bringing along their respective flesh-and-blood tickets in the legacy lottery – two boys and a girl.

‘… powder keg.'

AnnaLise, who'd been sitting on her mother's bed lost in thought, looked up. ‘I'm sorry, Daisy. What were you saying?'

The older woman sighed, then zipped up her bag. ‘I was just answering your question about why I think this is a bad idea. However, that's neither here nor there. We're committed.'

‘No, but we should be,' AnnaLise said. ‘
Committed
, I mean.' She rolled her eyes and stood, too. ‘Come on, let's get this party started.'

T
he plan was for AnnaLise to drive the three of them in Daisy's Chrysler to Dickens Hart's estate. Even if AnnaLise's own Mitsubishi Spyder had been big enough to fit the trio and their luggage, two months earlier that beloved convertible had met an untimely – not to mention violent – end on a mountain road.

‘Can't say this place has been boring,' the dual-daughter muttered, moving the gearshift into reverse so she could inch the car out of the old and narrow garage her mother shared with their octogenarian neighbor, Mrs Peebly.

‘It was before you came back,' Daisy muttered in reply, alternating glances between her own and AnnaLise's side window. ‘When are you going to buy a new car?'

‘Getting tired of my using yours?' Safely out of the garage, AnnaLise stepped on the brake before pressing a button on the remote to close the garage door.

‘Getting tired of you dinging my side mirrors, that's for sure.'

‘Side
mirror
, singular. Besides,' AnnaLise struggled to pay attention as the garage door refused to close, ‘I don't know why you need a car this size in the first place. It's too big for the mountain roads and barely fits into the garage.'

‘It's only a mid-size,' her mother said. ‘You should have seen the land-yachts your grandfather managed to squeeze through these doors.'

Speaking of which, AnnaLise stabbed at the remote again. ‘Why isn't this thing working?'

‘Sorry, dear, I forgot. I had to pull out the doo-hickey this morning to open it.'

The ‘doo-hickey' being the cord that hung above each car's space and allowed a person to disengage the automatic garage door openers that AnnaLise had had installed at some expense and one gigantic helping of aggravation from both Daisy and Mrs Peebly.

‘You …? Why?' AnnaLise put the Chrysler into drive and pulled forward to the curb.

‘The electricity was off, and I needed to go to the store.'

‘It was? The power, I mean?' AnnaLise frowned, trying to imagine her tiny mother hitching herself up on the car to reach the cord. ‘I didn't notice.'

‘The house was fine,' Daisy said, opening the passenger door. ‘I'll get the door.'

‘Oh, no you won't,' AnnaLise said, swinging the driver's side open as well. ‘That thing weighs a ton.'

‘I'm fifty, not a hundred and fifty, and you and I are the same height,' her mother said. ‘If I can lift the thing I can certainly lower it.'

‘But—'

Too late, her mother was pulling on the garage door, which rolled down with a thud, nearly catching Daisy's foot like a guillotine for toes.

‘They had to take the springs off when they installed the automatic opener,' AnnaLise explained as Daisy climbed back in.

‘More trouble than it's worth. And I recall telling you not to bother in the first place.'

She had indeed, as had Mrs Peebly even more vociferously. In fact, AnnaLise wouldn't put it past the older women to have sabotaged the garage's electricity to unfairly advance their point of view.

When AnnaLise had decided to have the door installed, she'd intended to be safely back in Wisconsin on her reporter beat while the cranky Mrs Peebly came to terms with the technology. But AnnaLise's month-long leave of absence to deal with her mother's troubles – and to
not
deal with her own, up north – had stretched to nearly twelve weeks now.

With Daisy safely back in the car, AnnaLise pulled the hulking Chrysler away from the curb and to the stop sign at the corner. Turning left onto Main Street, she promptly pulled into an angle parking spot on the beach side of the road across from Mama Philomena's.

‘Spooky, isn't it?' Daisy said, looking out the car's rear window toward the restaurant.

AnnaLise nodded, taking in the battened-down shades of the restaurant and the hand-drawn ‘Closed 'til Monday' sign behind the plate-glass window. The two-foot-high letters overhead that usually spelled out Mama Philomena's in green neon were dark. Three p.m. on a Wednesday and the place was shut up tight. ‘Spooky doesn't begin to capture it.'

‘In all these years,' Daisy said slowly, ‘I can't remember Mama's ever being closed for an entire weekend, much less a five-day one.'

‘Well, then she certainly does deserve a vacation.' AnnaLise tapped the horn to signal to Phyllis that they were waiting. While they all had gathered regularly in both the restaurant and Griggs Market when it was open, Mama guarded her privacy to the edge of zealotry. AnnaLise could count on her thumbs the number of times she herself had actually entered the small apartment behind the restaurant.