Claire and Present Danger Read online

  “I am both, but truly, the so-called investigation work is part-time, and almost one hundred percent clerical work. I’m helping someone out, and it’s nothing like in the movies. Beth likes to tease me about it, and she was including you in the joke this time.” I busied myself spearing a reluctant piece of roasted red pepper. “Was it difficult, moving to Philadelphia?” I asked. “I met a woman who told me this is a tough place to be a newcomer.”

  “The City of Brotherly Love isn’t?”

  “Apparently, you have to be here a few generations before the love turns on. Or so I hear.”

  “It wasn’t particularly hard on me,” she said. “Probably because when you move into a school situation . . . And I was living at my cousin’s, so I was a part of an established family. And my ex’s family’s been here for eons, so when I married and moved back here, there wasn’t a problem.”

  “Guess that’s it,” I said. “That woman who said it was a tough city is grown and our age, and I don’t think she has children—they sometimes make it easier. You can always join the PTA.”

  Vicky Baer wasn’t interested, but until the speaker got up on the podium, her options were pathetically limited. She had the nodding silent woman on her left, and she had me and, sporadically, my sister, who was working hard to appear disinterested. So mostly, Vicky Baer had me, and she listened, and even if she didn’t pretend interest, she didn’t dump her salad remnants on my head and tell me to shut up.

  “I always feel personally responsible,” I said. “As if this is my city—in more than a symbolic way, and I’m in charge of making it nice for new and old-timers. I wonder if there are newcomer groups to help people like her along.”

  “Where does she live?” That was Beth, jumping in—meaning she was monitoring our every word no matter what else she seemed to be doing—and, as always, eager to be helpful. Or maybe this time, simply eager to be in further conversation with the consultant without seeming as if that was her intention. Every sentence she uttered, despite its actual vocabulary, could be translated as: “I’m not blatantly soliciting your business, though you could be of incredible help to me, and I hope you’ve noticed the exquisite discretion and tact that I bring to the jobs I am assigned.”

  “Not far from you,” I told my sister. “In Villanova, I think.”

  Vicky shifted in her seat to allow the waiter to remove her salad plate. He was as good an excuse as any for letting me know how little she cared for my chatter.

  But there was Beth, bless her. Beth, who could not seem to stop talking. “I know really nice people near her in St. David’s—and a lovely book group in Radnor. Book clubs are a wonderful way to meet new, bright people. Give me her name and maybe I can help. I don’t want to give her the wrong idea of this city.”

  “I think I wrote it down,” I said. “My memory . . .” I began to reach under the table, then sat back up. “I remember—Emma Cade.” I didn’t want to say her silly-sounding nickname.

  Beth had taken out a small notebook and now, she wrote the name down. “I hope she’s in the book,” she murmured.

  I turned to include Vicky Baer in the conversation, or to look as if I were. I wanted to check her expression, and I was gratified. She looked like Macavity when he thinks he’s heard something crawling in the walls. If her ears could have become erect or swiveled, they would have. “You look as if you were about to say something,” I said.

  “It’s Emmie, not Emma. I know her. And she’s not in Villanova. Not anymore. She’s in Center City. Right off the Square.”

  “Really? I must have missed . . .”

  “Good, then.” Beth snapped shut her red-leather-covered-notebook. “You were worried about something that isn’t a problem at all.”

  “You know her,” I said. “Amazing. Cliché or not, it really is a small world.”

  “Six degrees of separation and all that,” Vicky said. “The Main Line isn’t that big, then you break it down into age groups, it approaches tiny. How’d you meet her?”

  I decided it was okay to have met Claire Fairchild. “At her future mother-in-law’s place,” I said. “How about you?”

  “I knew her back in high school.”

  “Shipley? I thought she said she was new to—”

  “In Ohio. She arrived in tenth grade. She called herself Mary Elizabeth then. M. E. Her initials, not Emma.”

  I couldn’t help but think of all the Emma-related names I’d scanned this afternoon, of all the time I’d wasted.

  “I didn’t see her again till college—”

  “Two schools, then. Cornell, you said.”

  She nodded. “—she called herself Betsey in those days. Then she dropped out and we completely lost touch until a year ago, when I bumped into her in San Francisco. She was calling herself something else again. I don’t know why. She somehow needs . . . disguises. Anyway, now she’s here, so we see each other sometimes.”

  “You know, now I’m remembering more, and the fact is, she said she moved here because she knew someone—that must be you.”

  Vicky Baer frowned. “Me? Moved here because of me? Like I said, I knew her, but not like that. That’d be frightening, to be responsible for somebody’s cross-country move. She must mean somebody else.” She looked at me. “It’s like with her names. She’s got an imagination. Take everything she says with a grain—or a bushel—of salt.”

  Two things were apparent. First, Vicky Baer didn’t sound like much of a friend to Emmie Cade. She seemed, in fact, barely interested in her. Second, I hadn’t thought my pitch all the way through. I should have come up with a better hook than the lonely newcomer angle, because now we were out of material and prompts.

  I ate chicken and tried to avoid its fanciful packaging. The chef, in a fit of insanity, or misogyny, had created a chicken something or other, dripping butter and cream and wrapped in puff pastry. It was a given that two out of three—if not three out of three—women in this room were on diets and every one of us picked at the concoction, protesting politely, pretending not to eat the forbidden parts and failing utterly because they tasted so good. This time, when I looked over at Beth, my expression was, at best, quizzical.

  “I did not make up the specifics of the menu,” she said. “The woman who did looks like she has a metabolic problem, and kept saying that everybody had paid so much for this dinner, she wanted it to be special. So live it up—tomorrow, we diet.”

  Given all the food that was going to be returned to the kitchen, I was relieved that we weren’t raising funds for the homeless or the starving. I turned back toward Vicky. She was a disciplined woman, and her dinner was largely untouched, but she wasn’t a subtle woman. She showed her displeasure and abstinence from fattening food and, possibly, from further conversation, by folding her hands in her lap.

  I couldn’t let my font of information dry up this way. I turned to Beth and whispered. “Ask me something—anything—about the newcomer I met. Or newcomers, or—”

  “Why?” she whispered back.

  I shook my head. “Just ask—I’ll explain some other time.”

  “But I . . .” And then she got it—or thought she had, and unfortunately, it was the same thing in the end. “Ooooh,” she said. “You’re—” her eyes darted toward Vicky “—but you can’t—her?—I can’t believe she—”

  “Not her. No. But—ask, okay?”

  She nodded, and I turned back to Vicky Baer, who looked abstracted until she noticed I was angled toward her and became alert again. “Sorry—I was lost in thought,” she said. “And it wasn’t worth a penny, so don’t try to bribe me.”

  “I never would.”

  “Amanda,” my sister began.

  “That woman, Emmie,” Vicky said at the same time. “Why would she tell you she was—”

  “—is there a Center City version of a Newcomers Club?” Beth continued. “Do you think—”

  I put my hand on Beth’s knee and squeezed.

  “But you—”

  I pressed
her knee again. She winced. But she also stopped talking.

  “—lonely, or having problems?” Vicky finished her question. “She’s engaged. Leo knows lots of people.”

  “You know what,” I said. “She hasn’t been here long, and she’s engaged, so she probably knew her fiancé before she moved here. I’ll bet he’s the one person she knew and that’s what she meant.”

  Vicky shook her head. “She was married, you know. Widowed not that long ago, in California, right before she moved here.” She laughed, though it wasn’t a particularly happy sound. “Besides, I introduced her to Leo. At a party at my house, so I fear, by default, I must be the person she meant. And you’re right. It’s been a whirlwind affair, but you know, when a man’s ready, he’s ready. And it was certainly high time for Leo. It’s nonetheless amazing that Emmie Cade so quickly got herself through the poisoned brambles.”

  “Meaning?”

  She looked at me as if deciding what to say, how honest to be. “His mother,” she said. “I hope I’m not out of line—you said you met Emmie at Mrs. Fairchild’s, and I don’t mean to say anything against the woman, but . . .” She shook her head and grew quiet, poking her fork into the puff-pastry crust around the chicken.

  “I don’t really know her,” I said, stepping carefully, hoping an explanation for how I do and don’t know Mrs. Fairchild would form as I spoke. “We . . . the school is having a ‘good-neighbor’ campaign. You know, heading off at the pass the kind of complaints you get from people who live nearby, so . . .” I let it go at that, and hoped Vicky Baer’s need to express her opinion was stronger than my ability to come up with a reason I needed to hear it.

  She raised an eyebrow, and put down her fork. “Claire Fairchild is nice enough—unless she thinks you want a piece of what is hers. That applies to her possessions, which includes her things, of course, her money, and most of all, her son. She’s destroyed every relationship Leo ever had, and I know this from personal experience.”

  “You and Leo?”

  She made a mock pout. “Let’s just say she wasn’t exactly a help. My point is, there’s no reason to think the old lady won’t destroy this one, too. Poor Emmie. You’d think it was time for her luck to change.”

  “She’s had a bad mother-in-law before?”

  “Just a virulent variety of bad luck. Her last husband drowned. That was horrible. And I understand that her first husband was a general rotter. Of course, Emmie was pretty wild herself. Ran off during her freshman year with a guy . . .” She seemed a little lost, remembering.

  “Her first husband?”

  She shook her head. “Just a passing fancy. Then I lost touch. The rest I only learned later on, when I bumped into her out west.”

  Two marriages behind her, then, not one. And a third waiting in the wings, and she was younger than I was. A prodigy.

  Vicky gave in to hunger and pulled apart a dinner roll, slowly eating a segment of it.

  “Bad luck indeed,” I murmured, noticing that somehow, my chicken en croute was nearly gone. “She’s awfully young to be marrying for the third time.”

  “There was a near fourth,” Vicky said. “An engagement. But he died in a motorcycle accident two weeks before they were supposed to be married.”

  Two husbands, a third pending, two violent accidental deaths, one by motorcycle, one by drowning. I couldn’t help but remember that red paper with AND THERE’S MORE DEAD!!! on it.

  “The fates seem lined up against poor Emmie,” she said. “She’s a bad luck girl. I don’t know how else to describe it.”

  We both sat in silence, Vicky chewing her single bite of dinner roll, when we heard a tinkly version of the opening of Beethoven’s Fifth.

  “My phone,” she said. “Sorry. I forgot to shut it off. I’ll take it outside.” She checked her watch. “Be back in ten minutes,” she said. “Might as well go water, walk, and medicate Bruno.”

  I sat there thinking about what she’d said. I agreed there was bad luck aplenty in the story I’d heard, but I wasn’t sure whether it was aimed at Emmie Cade or whether she held the franchise for bad luck, and she was the one doling it out to the hapless men who crossed her path.

  Eight

  “GOOD work,” Mackenzie said when I told him all I’d found out within a few hours of meeting Mrs. Fairchild. “Especially with next to nothing to go on. But don’t count on coincidence striking twice. Or ever again in this lifetime.”

  I knew that, but I tried explaining why the evening’s find had been lucky, but not exceptionally coincidental. It had been more like finding a bird in its expected roosting spot. “As soon as I saw her photograph, I was going to get Beth’s Main Line tom-toms in action. The surprise was that it went from thought to actuality without any action in between. A miracle.”

  His nod of acknowledgment slid toward nodding off, his head lowering toward his open text for Quantitative Methods in Sociology, his hand still holding his pen, resting on his notebook. I had glanced at the book and found it largely unintelligible, and all through our mutual descriptions of our varied days—his classes and his work with Ozzie, my classes and ditto—he’d rubbed his eyes, stifled yawns, and insisted he wasn’t tired. Now he snapped back up, cleared his throat, and said, “What’s next?”

  “Check with Shipley and find out Vicky’s Ohio school, call there, see when Emmie—who I think was Betsey then, but I’ll check—attended, her address, parents’ names, if she transferred in or out, then from and to where—whatever else I can find out. Forwarding address, I suppose. Maybe something will lead to the first husband—the rotter. Or the fiancé who was killed. Can I say I’m considering hiring her and doing due diligence on her résumé?”

  He shrugged. “Most people don’t check back to high school.”

  “They might, since she didn’t finish college. I don’t want grades or anything personal, just her stats. Would Cornell have records of however long she was there?”

  He nodded again, though he was so tired, that was a dangerous bit of body language, too tempting on the downward motion. “Don’ forget the San Francisco stuff.”

  Embarrassing not to have already mentioned it. It was so obvious as, possibly, the real smear on what’s-her-name’s record. I appreciated the gentle, nonsuperior way he’d mentioned it, as if anybody would have needed prodding about it.

  “—the marriage records,” he was saying. “Maybe mention of how that first marriage ended. An’ the transcripts of the inquest. I’ll start that in the mornin’, before class.” He leaned back and stretched his arms. “I am beat,” he said, standing up. “So—what’s your take on Ms. Cade?”

  “In person? Absolutely charming. It’s only all this . . . confusion surrounding her.”

  “Con men—and women—have to be charmin’. It’s part of their basic equipment kit.”

  I nodded acknowledgment. “Creepy, too. First of all, she said Victoria Baer was her great good friend, or that’s the impression I got from Claire Fairchild. But that seems a gross exaggeration. Makes me wonder how stable Emmie Cade is, how tight her grip on reality is. She said she moved here because of Vicky, but Vicky acts appalled by the idea that she had anything to do with it. At best, she acts as if they are casual acquaintances from way back—a year of high school, a year of college, a surprise encounter in San Francisco, and no more than that.”

  He yawned and opened his eyes close to bug-eyed wide, trying to appear alert.

  I pretended his ruse had fooled me, so I could justify continuing. “Mostly, I don’t get it about the name changes, not to mention two dead guys. She’s been awfully busy on the romantic and death front for one young woman.”

  “Or she’s a total flake with amazingly bad luck,” Mackenzie said.

  “I don’t much believe in luck. Except when it seats me next to the person I’m looking for.”

  THE NEXT MORNING, before I was fully dressed, let alone en route to school, the phone rang.

  “Has to be your mother,” Mackenzie said from across
the room. He’d been up for at least an hour and was already studying. What a good student he was. Wish I had him in my class.

  “That didn’t take deductive powers,” I answered.

  “Maybe they’re calling off school because of the rain,” he said amiably. Above us, the skylight drummed with water and had been since a massive electrical storm around midnight.

  “Maybe they’ve changed their minds and aren’t coming,” I said.

  “Let us hope.”

  I took a deep breath and lifted the receiver. “You said you’d explain,” the voice said by way of greeting.

  “Beth?” She really was mutating into our mother at an ever-accelerating speed.

  Mackenzie returned to his coffee and studies.

  “Explain what? When did I say . . .” I could only find one of my favorite black shoes, and I looked at Macavity suspiciously, though he was far too indolent to drag a shoe under the bed. I held the phone between my shoulder and cheek and got onto the floor to search. The cat stood next to me, peering in the same direction. I wondered what he thought he was looking for. It’s pathetic and loveable when cats pretend to know what’s going on. Then he gave up, lay down on his back, figuring that since I was in the neighborhood, maybe it was for a belly rub.

  “Don’t act naÏve,” Beth said. “I’m your sister—not a spy—and you know what I’m talking about: Vicky Baer. You asked me to keep her talking last night about newcomers, or that newcomer. You said you’d explain. Were you or weren’t you investigating her?”

  “I told you I wasn’t.” I’d spotted the shoe in the absolute midpoint under the bed. The impossible-to-reach point. I stood up and went in search of a broom with which to snag it. “Am not.”

  “Then why did you ask me to ask about that newcomer when we’d finished talking about newcomers?”