Claire and Present Danger Read online

  Beth’s expression suggested that I ran my knuckles on the carpeting while I spoke. “Of course not!” she said. “She’s at the head table.”

  “Then who—”

  “This woman who consults to nonprofits. What is there to consult about with groups like that except how to get more money? She’s very successful and the absolutely perfect contact. You’re sitting next to her because it would be too obvious if I were.”

  Her transformation from carpool mom to business magnate was nothing short of amazing, even though Business Beth’s skills had been obvious during her stay-at-home phase.

  “If you’re obliquely warning me to behave, so that I don’t mess up your prospect, I’ll try my best,” I said. “I remember about not making rude noises, not eating with my hands, not talking about politics or my sex life or yours—but I can’t remember the rest. Tell me.”

  She made a big-sister fake pout and fake-elbowed me in the side. “It’s good for you to meet these people,” she said, switching out of her tycoon mode.

  Luckily, I didn’t have to endure the cocktail hour for long. I’d arrived late and had about ten minutes to meet a sprinkling of women and discuss how great the weather had been until today, how wretched it was today, how hard it must be to teach what with how bad kids were and how bad the world was.

  All predictable, impersonal, and quickly finished, but even in that short period, my smile muscles were going for the burn.

  “I’m so glad you came,” Beth said as we went to our table.

  I felt a pang. She’d implied that I’d had a choice.

  “It’s great having you as a sister,” she went on. “Your life is so exciting. I feel as if I get vicarious points ’cause I’m related to you.”

  Since, as far as I knew, where Beth and my mother were concerned, the most exciting (and only significant) thing I’d done in the last thirty-two years was become engaged, I was astounded by her remark. Then I realized she meant my after-school job and that she, too, had been brainwashed by Hollywood. When we had more time, I had to find out what she envisioned me doing. It would probably be along the lines of what I’d imagined—back-alley crime and fast-talking men, not a wheezing old woman with a sobbing servant, or long lists of deceased Cades. And that was an exciting day, as compared with the ones where I simply organized papers and entered data on the computer.

  We reached a table draped in celadon cloth sparked by cobalt blue napkins and white dishes. Each table had a bonsai tree as a centerpiece. “Is that symbolic?” I asked Beth. “You know, like how we stunt the growth of those we beat up?”

  She laughed. “It’s pretty, and short enough to see over.”

  “Well, whatever . . . those battered women sure know how to throw a party.”

  Beth closed her eyes in exaggerated disgust with me. But I continue to have my problems with these events, so that I considered the beautiful table furnishings and wondered how much Beth had paid to rent them, and how much furniture or counseling that might have bought a battered woman.

  I wanted parties to be about having fun with people you already or might grow to enjoy, dinners to be about eating and socializing—and charity to be from the heart, and about the recipient, not the donor.

  The table slowly filled, and my sister introduced herself, and me, to each newcomer. Two women walked over together and settled down. “She’s Kay, I’m Fay. We rhyme,” the one in violet silk announced, insisting on shaking hands clear across the table, which made for a long, painful experience and a new appreciation for the diminutive bonsai. Her friend Kay opted to nod and smile instead.

  Millicent somebody joined us and said she worked for the sponsoring charity, and a Dorothy also sat down, barely got out her name, then folded her hands and looked away from us all, as if completely disinterested.

  “I’m Vicky Baer,” the well-tailored newest of the newcomers said as she sat down beside me.

  I missed a beat before I managed what felt like a normal smile and nod, but inside, I was all gasps and exclamation points to the point where I was afraid to look at her directly.

  I was as hyperastounded by being seated next to this woman as Beth had been at being placed at her table, and I couldn’t believe that we’d both been intent on finding the same person. I tried to keep my jaw from dropping.

  She was the woman in the photograph, the one in tailored slacks and shirt. The one who’d dressed like Beth. The one I’d planned to find via Beth’s Main Line tendrils. And here she was among her peers, in her natural habitat. Not all that remarkable—and yet, completely astounding. It took my innards a while to stop turning cartwheels.

  “Glad to meet you,” I said, after identifying myself and hoping the time lag between Beth’s introduction and my response hadn’t actually been months, the way it felt.

  “I think we’ve met before.” Beth said to Victoria Baer across me. And she went on, charting where their paths had crossed, friends they had in common. In short, establishing her credentials as a part, however remote, of the same social circle. I barely heard the specifics because I was too busy concentrating on what I’d say and how I’d say it when I had the chance. I reviewed the great empty page I had on Emmie Cade and where her old pal could fill in the blanks. I debated how much I could ask, and considered the downside of asking too much.

  I thought about what I already knew. They’d met at school, though at what stage in their schooling, at what school, I didn’t know. I had to steer the conversation around to matters educational.

  And at that point, I realized Vicky was saying that she was a consultant to nonprofits, and my sister, possibly afraid of showing her business hand and seating plan by responding with her own profession, chose that moment to include me in the conversation.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said to me with exaggerated party manners. “Didn’t mean to talk right across you. Everybody—this is my sister, Amanda.” Only Vicky Baer and the pale, smiling, silent creature on her other side could hear. The silent woman was also nameless. She’d whispered something inaudible as she’d seated herself, and since then, she’d nodded—silently—at anything anyone said. She nodded now, her smile implying that of all the names Beth’s sister could have had, mine was the best, pure music to her ears.

  Beth rolled on, possibly believing that her duties that evening included emceeing the event itself. I relaxed. This was going to work out amazingly well, and I was delighted that I’d come. “Amanda’s keeping quiet like this because—” Beth said.

  End of relaxing. I tensed up, hoping against hope that she wasn’t headed where I feared.

  She was. “—she’s a sleuth. Be careful what you say or do!”

  And like that, my sister had taken my amazing, serendipitous proximity to Victoria Baer—my incredible good fortune—and blown it to smithereens.

  Did she think P.I. stood for Public Investigator? I kicked her under the table.

  She looked at me in honest surprise, then moved her feet, as if that had been her fault. Then, her humor restored, she winked. “She’s entirely too modest,” she told the table in general.

  “Excuse me?” Victoria Baer said. “It’s so noisy in here. What was that? What did you say you did?”

  “Fact is, I didn’t say—”

  “A private investigator. Isn’t that a hoot?” Beth’s voice had climbed to new eager-anxious hostess heights. “You know, like Miss Marple.”

  “She wasn’t a—”

  “Okay, like Columbo.”

  “He was a cop.” Not that I cared about her imagery. I cared about how she’d wrecked my stroke of good fortune, and I wanted to throttle her.

  Violence wasn’t going to get me anywhere. Surely I could rethink the situation, turn this to my advantage or at least neutralize the damage. Sure, the bad news was that Vicky Baer would now be suspicious if I moved beyond table-talk pleasantries to anything specific. But given bad news, wasn’t it a cosmic necessity, then, for balance’s sake that there be good news, too? I was hard-pressed to
think of what it could be, until I reminded myself that Beth hadn’t told Victoria the precise facts I needed to know.

  Of course, that was because Beth didn’t know them, but all the same, I clung to that. Victoria Baer didn’t know me, and the odds of bumping into her again were slim, so I could return to plan A and ask away.

  Most of all, Vicky Baer didn’t know that her friend was being investigated and would have no reason to imagine such a thing unless I stuck both my foot and leg into my mouth.

  “She’s modest about it,” Beth said, still replying to Victoria Baer’s question, which, I was sure, had been polite conversation that didn’t warrant a dissertation. “I don’t know why.” She smiled, or at least bared her teeth, waiting for a response I truly couldn’t muster. The things I could think of would have broken my promise to mind my manners.

  “Truly,” I finally said. “I help out in an office a few hours a week. I file papers, but Beth has me confused with Sam Spade.” Ha-ha, laugh it off, forget about it, please, Ms. Baer.

  “Or Emma Peel in The Avengers,” Fay—or Kay—said from across the table. “I always loved the way she dressed.”

  “That’s precisely how it is. And how I dress, too,” I agreed.

  “It sounds exciting and . . . dangerous,” Victoria Baer said.

  “Filing? The only dangers are paper cuts and being bored to death.”

  She smiled politely and, as two more women joined us, completing the table, the conversation turned to them, much to my relief. Except, of course, that at the next lull, Beth again felt the need to introduce me to them as her sister, the shamus. Time to either gag my sibling or take over the conversation myself for damage control. “Beth doesn’t want you to know that my actual job is quite ordinary and seldom glamorized by Hollywood productions. I teach high school English. Now you know the dull truth, and please don’t think less of Beth because of how boring I am.”

  “Teaching’s probably more dangerous than we thought your other job was. Kids today.” The speaker was one of the newcomers, an elderly woman with unnaturally black hair through which her scalp showed. I wonder when “kids today” became shorthand for how drastically the human race was in decline. I suspected that the phrase was one of the first the Neanderthals expressed.

  “They’re not that bad,” I said.

  “Everything I hear, I read . . . where do you teach, then?”

  I told them.

  “A private school,” the black-haired woman said. “No wonder.”

  I took that as the perfect cue. I sat further back in my chair, withdrawing from the table-wide conversation, and turned my attention to my left. “To tell the truth, I sometimes dread saying where I work, because so many people are hostile to the very idea of private schools, and I understand their point of view. I do. Free education and public libraries—access to information and knowledge, how to use it—that’s the basis of democracy, if you’ll forgive my getting on the soapbox.”

  Ms. Baer raised her eyebrows and shrugged a “what can you do with people who don’t like whatever—but don’t take my sympathy to mean I’m wildly interested in this topic, either” sort of gesture.

  “I gather you’re not one of the people in the antiprivate schools camp,” I said as a salad was placed in front of me. The greens gave me something to poke and cut so that I didn’t look too eager for information.

  “It would be hypocritical to attack private schools, because I attended them from kindergarten on,” Vicky Baer said. “And I deal with them professionally now. I consult to nonprofits that need to find ways to raise funds.”

  “Really? That would certainly include the private schools I know,” I said. “Your work sounds like fun. Or at least, if it’s not, you’re not stuck in that school forever.”

  She’d been toying with her fork, but I could almost see through her skull as she recategorized me from ignorable dinner partner to: Contact. She put the fork down and reached under the table. “Here,” she said. “Let me give you my card. And I have a brochure that explains more of what I do. In case your school ever . . .”

  I wonder what percentage of cards exchanged in this random, optimistic, and hopeful way ever result in a sale or a job, or even a phone call. I certainly had no clout with either Havermeyer or the trustees about how or through whom they should raise money. And yet turning down a card seems a deliberate insult, like blatantly saying, “I am not interested in you and I have no desire to know how to reach you.”

  She groped under the table and, at one point, grabbed my ankle. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s gotten wedged—” And then she pulled out a pocketbook that might have been a briefcase, or was both things. It had pockets and flaps and zipper compartments, but nonetheless, as she lifted it, the contents spilled onto the table, the floor, and me.

  Vicky Baer looked crestfallen. Her façade of professionalism wasn’t quite as smooth at the moment, and she seemed profoundly stunned. I, on the other hand, am so used to my mask of competency shattering that I can almost take it in my stride, apply emotional bandages, and put myself back together. Vicky, however, lowered her lids, shutting out the sight of her possessions, then she opened her eyes up again and, lips tight, carefully replaced a lipstick, a small bottle of aspirin, a telephone, electronic calendar, and compact, while I transferred a miniature staple gun, a roll of quarters, a vaporizer, a tin of breath mints, a small unopened packet of tissues, a black felt-tip pen, and an unused packet of plastic file tabs.

  “There are times you’re really relieved that no men are around, aren’t there?” Beth asked from the other side of me.

  “I didn’t want to carry an actual briefcase tonight,” Vicky Baer mumbled. “I thought this would hold it all, but I forgot to zip the top when I sat down.”

  I wanted to tell her that it was all right. That everybody on earth had upended a purse, and nobody cared.

  “Oh, God, even this. How did this get in there?” She lifted a rawhide dog chew—used—off the floor and, frowning, dropped it back into her purse along with a white plastic square I recognized as containing floss. Then she smoothed her skirt and sat up straight. “My dog,” she said, glancing at her watch. “That was a good reminder, I guess. I’ll have to go see to him in a few minutes.”

  I looked around and she shook her head. “Poor Bruno’s in the car,” she said. “All safe, windows open, in case you’re worrying. His joy in life is the car, and he’s a well-behaved creature, so, since he needs regular medication, it’s easiest to take him with me when possible.”

  Beth made sympathetic noises.

  And then, Vicky Baer remembered her original mission and unsnapped a comparment of the bag and handed me one of her cards, satiny and impressively embossed V. S. BAER, INC., IDEAS UNLIMITED, and underneath, ECONOMIC CONSULTATION TO NONPROFIT INSTITUTIONS. The card was clipped to an equally lush, heavy-stock brochure.

  “I’ll pass this on,” I said. “My school’s fund-raising efforts are pretty lame.”

  “Could I see your brochure?” Beth asked, and Vicky Baer, recovered from her faux pas and, recognizing interest, perked up. “Here, have your own. You don’t have to share.”

  Then I, too, remembered my original purpose. “That private school you attended—was it one of ours? I mean here, in the city?”

  “Eventually. I lived in Ohio,” she said. “Till eleventh grade, and then I was here, at Shipley.”

  A prestigious school on the Main Line, but Emmie Cade hadn’t lived in these parts till now, as far as we knew. Cleveland, however, had been a stop along the corporate route. “Good school,” I said. “A lucky move, although I suppose that’s provincial of me. Your Ohio school might have been just as good.”

  She shrugged and nibbled a leaf of frisée.

  “Did your family move around a lot? I’ve had students whose parents relocate almost every year, and sometimes it creates problems. Any advice?”

  The salad was crisp and deliciously dressed, and after a moment, when Ms. Baer appeared to have decid
ed against speaking again, I turned to Beth to congratulate her. “This is terrific,” I said. “Pretty room and tables and great salad.”

  Beth beamed when Vicky came out of her silence to agree that this was indeed a fine event. She’d decided to speak, after all, but just as she began to talk about her schooling again, Beth decided it was appropriate to admit that she had organized tonight’s fine event, and that yes, that was her business and she had a card, too, and would Vicky want one?

  I started to kick her again under the table, but she wouldn’t know why I was doing so, so I controlled myself while the two women smiled and nodded and calculated how much business the other might generate for her.

  Finally, Vicky Baer remembered my question. “The thing is,” she said, “I have no wisdom to impart because we never moved. I did. My family stayed in Ohio. I lived with a cousin here till I graduated, then went off to Cornell. It was all my decision.” She returned to her salad, and I to mine.

  I had what I’d needed. Emmie Cade had never lived in the area before. Cornell had not been mentioned, but Ohio had. I could find out what school Emmie had attended in Ohio through Vicky’s transfer records and then, her parents’ names, her address, and her former and possibly next address as well. I had a friend who taught at Shipley and I was betting she could help me out with the innocuous but meaningful information.

  “Did you study fund-raising? Is there such a major?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of. I majored in biology, believe it or not. I thought maybe I wanted to be a doctor, but . . .” She shook her head. “Other options seemed more appealing, at least at the time.” She smiled at the memory of her young and presumably naÏve self. “You know, the whole shebang—husband, white picket fence, and two kids.” She flashed another, possibly insincere smile, then looked down at what was left of her salad. “Unfortunately, almost the same day as I was married, I realized that none of those things appealed to me. Now, I’m single and in love with my job and my dog, and that suits me fine, and I still don’t want to be a doctor. How about you? Why did your sister say you were an investigator if you’re an English teacher?”