The Body in the Gazebo (20 page)

“And Arnold was freed right away?” Faith said.

“That very day. Father eventually found him a position as private secretary to a business acquaintance who was very open-minded—difficult to find any sort of job in those times and there was Arnold’s incarceration, however mistaken.”

“And what about you? It must have been hard to go back to Cabot after all these dramatic events.”

“It was. I’d never felt very comfortable there. I missed my old school. By the time I graduated it was understood that Arnold and I would marry. It was merely a question of when. He came out to Aleford often at my parents’ invitation. No one could ever take Theo’s place, but they began to rely on Arnold for advice and I think he brought them a measure of comfort—he’d been so close to Theo. I know it did me.

“Things had improved somewhat for Father, but I knew that going to college would stretch their finances considerably. I went to Katie Gibbs instead and got a job as a secretary in a large law firm—lawyers seem to figure prominently in this tale. Arnold wanted me to go to college—Wellesley, in fact, where dear Samantha went. I told him he could be my college and he took the job seriously. He would have made a wonderful professor, but his life went in another direction. We were married quietly at The Pines on Sanpere on my nineteenth birthday. Arnold had risen in the firm and eventually became a partner, but that was much later. We wanted to be near my parents and bought this house. You know the rest—or most of it.

“The day Arnold was freed, he came to the house for dinner. At the beginning of the meal, Father gave thanks. We all said ‘amen’ and Father added that from then on, we would never talk about what had happened again. And we didn’t.”

“Not even with your husband?” Faith found this almost beyond belief. She knew New Englanders were tight-lipped, but this was taking things to a whole new level.

“I imagine it’s hard for you to understand. You were raised in such a different time. It wasn’t a guilty secret, but it wasn’t something we wanted to trumpet from the rooftops. We needed to have a normal life again. When the children were born, we did discuss whether to tell them or not. We certainly wouldn’t tell them when they were young, and by the time they were older, there didn’t seem to be much point.”

Yet they had arrived at a point now. The point where the story ended and its purpose began.

“What do you want me to do, Ursula?” Faith asked. “Be with you when you tell Pix? Or tell her myself? Perhaps with Tom, as well?”

Ursula shook her head. “Not yet. I can’t think of that now. Go over to the window seat. There are two envelopes tucked underneath the cushion. The first arrived some weeks ago, just before I went to the hospital. The second more recently. Bring them here, if you would.”

Faith removed the envelopes and gave them to Ursula, who handed one back.

“Please open it and look at what’s inside.”

Faith read the contents, glancing quickly at the newspaper clippings, focusing longer on the words on the single sheet of paper:

Are you sure you were right?

“And now this one.” Ursula handed her the other envelope. It contained only the sheet of paper, apparently the same kind as the other. Again a single sentence:

You saw the knife in his hand.

“Do you know who’s sending these? Why would—”

“Wait, dear.” Ursula slipped a third envelope from her pocket, removed the letter, and handed it to Faith. Two lines this time:

Time will tell.

I’m waiting, but not for long.

“It came yesterday,” Ursula said. “I’ve been expecting it.”

N
ormally the Uppity Women’s Luncheon Club was Niki’s favorite gig. Years ago Sandra Katz, who lived in Aleford, decided that she had women friends she enjoyed being with who should get to know each other. What started out as a December holiday luncheon, which Have Faith catered, became an informal club meeting at various members’ houses several times a year. The only rule was no cooking—no pressure to match or surpass a fellow Uppity’s prior menu. For such a small gathering, only Faith or Niki needed to be there. After a while, it became clear that the women were getting a kick not just from Niki’s great food, but her sense of humor, and it became her assignment.

The women were married, divorced, or never married. They ranged from stay-at-home moms to a college dean, and were all now somewhere in their forties. Sandra, who worked raising funds for nonprofits, was the unofficial president and the person who got in touch with the catering company. Thinking spring, Niki thought of eggs—hard-boiled on the seder plate, hard-boiled and colored in an Easter basket. That took her to the idea of breakfast for lunch. Before she was married, exhausted after working all day, she’d often had breakfast for dinner—crispy bacon, maybe a sausage, scrambled or poached eggs with toast. Faith and she had been experimenting with an eggy breakfast puff. The batter was poured over a peach or pear half placed in a ramekin, and when it looked like a golden-brown popover it was ready.

Sandra loved the idea of the puff, and Niki thought she’d add mini BLTs using turkey bacon with tiny grape tomatoes. She’d also put out a large bowl of fresh strawberries—they were coming in from Watsonville, California, now and delicious. She’d toss them with a little bit of sugar to release their juice and set separate small bowls of several flavors of yogurt—the Greek kind, of course—alongside. The Uppities wanted a salad, so she’d do a simple one of fresh spring greens with a lemon–poppy seed dressing—also on the side. Some of the Uppities were always doing Atkins, Pritikin, or the grapefuit or cabbage soup diet. Before they sat down to eat, she’d serve Kir Royales—crème de cassis and champagne—both alcoholic and non, with cheese straws. A mild cheese so as not to interfere with the taste of the drink.

There would be more cheese for dessert. Sandra had said they were celebrating their tenth anniversary together and she wanted a cake—a chocolate cheesecake. What she’d actually said was, “Screw carbs. This is a celebration and we all look pretty damn good. Besides, isn’t chocolate supposed to be healthy now?”

Niki was with her on that one, and there
was
evidence that dark chocolate lowers both blood pressure and cholesterol, and it has eight times the number of antioxidants of some fruits, to protect the body from aging. The Uppities would appreciate this last tidbit of knowledge.

The food was packed and she was ready to leave. Should have left. Faith was at Pix’s mother’s house and Tricia was over at the Ganley café making sure everything was going smoothly there. Niki slumped into one of the beanbag chairs Faith had placed in the play area for her kids. It felt great. Maybe she could just sit here, letting the chair cushion her, for the rest of her pregnancy. It was appropriate. She’d resemble a beanbag herself by the end of it.

She got up, locked the door, and set out for the job. She hoped the women wouldn’t expect her usual “wit and charm”—a compliment passed on through Faith. She felt funny today, but not funny ha-ha.

Today’s hostess lived in a beautifully restored Arts and Crafts house with a decidedly nonperiod kitchen. It didn’t take Niki long to set up and another Uppity luncheon was launched. Going in and out of the dining room, she heard snippets of their conversation, which ranged from spouses to kids and a lot about politics in between—“My skipped period was early onset menopause! I was so relieved! The only diapers I want to change in the upcoming years are my grandchildren’s!” and, “It’s so nice when he’s away. The bed’s a snap to make and I can have a glass of wine and soup for dinner. But then if it’s too long, I don’t like it.” And, “Honestly, if I talked to my mother the way she talks to me, I wouldn’t have seen twenty.” The dean had addressed the whole table at one point. “ ‘Underachiever’! The boy’s drag-ass lazy, but if I told his parents that, I’d lose my job in a heartbeat—plus we could kiss those all-important future donations good-bye. These days my job is ninety-nine percent fund-raising and one percent education.”

The rhythm of their conversation, their lives, was ordinarily very comforting, but today Niki found herself feeling more and more depressed. What were she and Phil going to do? With a blatant view to the future offspring, both sets of parents had given the newlyweds the money for a down payment on a small house in Belmont. “Good schools,” her mother had assured her. She’d memorized
Boston
magazine’s annual ranking list. “And good property values.” She’d bought that issue, too. But now they couldn’t keep up the mortgage payments with what Niki alone made. In the past, various restaurant owners and chefs had offered her jobs that paid more money. She’d turned them down, cherishing not just the relationship she had with her boss, but the freedom she had to experiment with new things in the kitchen and her flexible work schedule. Three years ago, she’d taken several months off to travel, ending up in Australia and almost settling there. She knew that with the current economy the jobs she’d been offered before—and many of the restaurants—no longer existed. Even if she could tear herself away, it wasn’t an option.

True, the cheesecakes were selling well, but woman cannot live by cake alone. At that thought, she lighted the numeral ten candle she’d stuck on the top of the cake and opened the door, singing “Happy Anniversary to You.”

Sandra blew out the candle and Niki started to cut slices.

“I’ll do that. Why don’t you get the coffee, and Lisa, please get a chair so Niki can join us?”

Niki had been dreading this moment. Not joining them—she always did at the end—but the coffee.

“How about I serve and maybe someone else can bring in the pot?”

She’d plugged in the coffeemaker earlier and so far so good in the olfactory department. Pouring it out would be another matter.

Sandra raised an eyebrow. She’d never heard Niki say anything but “Sure” to a request.

“No problem, I’ll get it. Why don’t you sit here?”

Niki flushed and sat down at the head of the table, right in the limelight where she absolutely did not want to be.

“Great lunch as usual, Niki. I love that puff thing. Is it hard to make?” Pamela was tall and slender with the kind of short haircut that only the best stylist could deliver. She was a Wharton graduate. She and her husband had moved into town now that their children were out of the house. They lived in a condo at the Four Seasons and Niki was pretty sure Pamela’s cooking nowadays was room service.

“It’s very easy. I’ll e-mail the recipe to anyone who would like it.”

Sandra returned with the coffee and started pouring.

“I know you want some, Niki. And you take just milk, right?”

“I’ll pass today, thanks.”

“On the milk?”

“No, the coffee.”

“Okay.” Sandra pulled the chair Lisa had brought in up to the table. “You’ve been looking like you lost your best friend since you got here. What’s going on?”

“Nothing,” Niki said, and started to add a further denial, but one of the other Uppities interrupted.

“Come on, sweetie. You know all our secrets and then some.”

It was true. Over the years Niki had heard them unburden themselves to one another in sorrow and in joy.

She burst into tears.

“You’re pregnant!” Sandra happily clapped her hands together. “The smell of coffee and hair-trigger hormones, oh Niki!”

“We’ll make the next luncheon a shower,” Pamela said. “I love to buy baby things, and given my daughter’s track record with men, I’ll be a grandmother at eighty.”

“Is that biologically possible?” the woman next to her teased. “Isn’t your daughter twenty-eight?”

“So, she’ll adopt. I should only be so lucky.”

It was inevitable. Niki found herself spilling her guts to the roomful of sympathetic women. “Spilling her guts” was an apt phrase, she thought, as a torrent of words spewed forth. She told them about Phil’s losing his job and not wanting to burden him further with her news. And described how depressed she was feeling most of the time. During the rest, she was feeling nauseous.

She’d hardly finished when the Uppities whipped out their BlackBerries and iPhones, looking up contacts; making notes for themselves about Phil’s qualifications; and entering how to reach him.

“You may have heard about the old boys’ and old girls’ networks,” one said. “But they’re nothing compared to the Uppity Women’s.”

This was the woman, Niki recalled, who had a bumper sticker on her Lexus that read,
WOMEN WHO SEEK TO BE EQUAL TO MEN LACK AMBITION
.

“Now you go home and tell Phil everything,” she said. “It’s time for you to start enjoying being pregnant. Not the morning-sickness part, but the rest—and believe me, there will be plenty of joy.”

“Tell me about it,” Pamela said. “I never got so much action. I was horny; he was horny. That’s why pregnant women have such a glow.”

“It was the big boobs that did it for my husband,” Sandra said. “He went nuts.”

This led to a few more comments on sex and a discussion about getting picked up at Trader Joe’s, especially on Saturdays at the Sample Station.

“Forget Costco, it’s all families, although there is stuff to try that you’d normally never eat—deep-fried pizza last time I was there. The Roche Brothers cheese counter is good, too. I love the come-ons, ‘Do you think this Brie is ready—subtext, I am.’ Even you married gals should give it a whirl; it’s great for the ego.”

Niki began to laugh so hard she had to make a mad dash for the bathroom to pee. This was beginning to happen a lot lately and she’d seriously considered getting those nonsenior Depends-type things that Whoopi Goldberg was advertising to keep from “spritzing.”

They helped her clean up and sent her on her way. She decided to go directly home and bring the van back to work later. The Uppities should be cloned, she thought, and then changed her mind. She wanted to keep them all to herself.

“W
ho do you think is sending these?” Faith repeated her earlier question. She’d moved back to the window seat and had spread the letters out on the cushion.

It was still raining heavily, as it had been on and off for days. Every night the news showed footage of people near the swollen rivers being evacuated from their homes by Zodiacs and even canoes. Faith had received two reverse 911 calls from the Aleford police announcing road closures, and this morning she’d seen ducks swimming on her front lawn.