First Frost (10 page)

“Anyone else?” Claire asked the other stylists.

One of them, pink-haired Janey, said, “A café americano.”

“I don't have any money,” Violet said woefully from the reception desk.

“You got paid yesterday,” Janey said, clearly not Violet's biggest fan.

“I'm saving,” Violet said.

“I'll get it,” Sydney offered. “What do you want, Vi?”

Violet perked up and said, “A club sandwich, chips, extra pickles, and two cans of Coke.”

Janey gave Violet the stink eye from across the salon.

“What?” Violet said. “I didn't have breakfast.”

Sydney nodded to the cash she'd just given Claire. “Would you get some bananas and Cheerios at Fred's market, too? I usually keep some for Charlie in the break room, but I think Violet ate the last of them yesterday.” Claire must have given Sydney a look she'd seen before. “Don't say it.”

“I didn't say anything,” Claire said.

Sydney turned off the blow dryer. Madison Elliott hadn't heard a thing. She looked up from the magazine she'd been reading and smiled. Her hair looked stunning. Sydney was always booked. She could do magical things with hair. When someone got a cut by Sydney, it was always a perfect day—DMV lines were always short, bosses gave raises, and kids made their own dinner and went to bed early. Claire felt a pinch of envy. Sydney never had to work very hard for her gift. She'd worked harder at denying it when they were younger. It seemed to come so easily to Sydney and Bay and their old cousin Evanelle. But Claire worked tirelessly. She always had. And it felt even more difficult lately.

Claire had just collected the money for the rest of the lunches when Bay walked into the salon. Her pale skin was shining, her cheeks pink, as if she'd swallowed something bright and it was now glowing from within. Everyone stopped what they were doing, knowing something was up.

“I'm going to the Halloween dance,” Bay announced.

Claire almost laughed at her sister's reaction. Sydney's arms fell to her sides, as if in defeat. “You've got to be kidding me.”

“No,” Bay said. “I'm not kidding.”

“You've known about this thing for weeks, and
now
you're deciding to go? You don't even have a costume!”

“I don't need a costume.”

“Of course you need a costume!” Sydney said. “Girls, do any of you have a Halloween costume Bay could use tonight?”

“I have a slutty vampire costume,” Janey said.

“No.”

“Slutty nurse?” Janey said.

“No.”

“Slutty—”

“Nothing slutty,” Sydney interrupted. “Oh, God, this is a disaster. Come here. Maybe I can do something with your hair.” Sydney patted her chair as Madison Elliott left, and Bay walked over to her, head down, beyond embarrassed. She didn't meet Claire's eyes as she passed, and Claire suppressed a smile. Once Bay sat, Sydney whipped off her baseball cap and Bay's long, dark hair cascaded down. Sydney ran her fingers through it, watching her daughter in the mirror.

Lined around the mirror in front of Sydney's chair were photos of Bay. One when she was six, lying under the apple tree. One from her ninth birthday party when Claire had made her a blackberry cake. Another from when she was twelve, standing beside Phineus Young at the bus stop, the first time Sydney had let them wait alone. And now here Bay was in the middle of the mirror, fifteen and getting ready for her first dance.

Sydney seemed to sense the moment Bay was going to say something about her mother's banjo eyes, so Sydney cleared her throat and called to her receptionist, “Violet, when Mrs. Chin comes in, have her wait a few minutes, then shampoo her for me.”

“But what about lunch?” Violet said.

“Claire hasn't even gone for it yet. You'll have time.”

Bay squirmed in the chair. “Mom, costumes are optional. This is not a big deal.”

“This is your first dance. It
is
a big deal. I will not let you go without a costume. Does anyone have any clothes from the eighties?” she asked her stylists. “I do excellent mall hair.”

Claire finally decided to throw Bay a rope. “Grandmother Mary had a few old dresses I kept. Long, filmy things, like party dresses from the 1920s. I think they might have belonged to her mother.”

Sydney smiled, as if remembering something she'd almost forgotten. “I used to think you were the only person in the family to ever throw parties in the garden, like your first frost parties, but now I remember that Grandmother Mary once told me about picnics she had in the garden. She would invite people in and dress like a garden nymph.”

“That's what I'll be, then,” Bay said quickly, definitively, wanting to put an end to this. “I'll wear a Grandmother Mary dress and be a garden nymph.”

Claire and Sydney exchanged glances. This was a big step for Sydney, accepting this about her daughter. Bay was a Waverley who wanted to dress up like a Waverley, and not in jest, like the time when they were kids and Sydney dressed up as Claire one Halloween, wearing a long, black wig that covered her face and an apron that said
KISS THE COOK
, which she'd thought was funny, because no one had wanted to kiss weird Claire. Of all the things Bay could be, a Waverley is what she'd chosen. That's who she was. It wasn't really a costume at all. Sydney gave in, ultimately lured in by the possibilities of styling Bay's hair. Bay had only let Sydney trim it for years.

“Fine,” Sydney said, pumping up the chair. “Claire, will you pick up some flowers at Fred's so I can put them in her hair?”

“I'll be back as soon as I can.”

“Wait, get me some pie, too, will you?” Violet called as Claire passed the reception desk and walked out.

*   *   *

When Claire stepped outside, the autumn light was slanted and orange, like the noontime sun had fallen to the ground somewhere far away in the flat distance. The light at this time of year had a different feel to it, like a beacon slowly fading.

She was about to turn right, toward the café and Fred's market, but to her left she caught the glint of something silver, and she turned to see two ladies standing outside of Maxine's clothing store, speaking to an elderly man in a gray suit.

It was
him.
The old man she'd seen outside her house, twice. She hurried up the sidewalk toward them, bypassing a group of college students who had stopped in the middle of the sidewalk to take a group selfie, as if the act of walking on the sidewalk itself needed to be documented. Claire hedged around them, losing sight of the old man for a moment.

When she looked again, he was gone.

Puzzled, Claire approached the ladies. She knew them well. Claire used to cater all of Patrice's anniversary and birthday parties. Patrice was with her sister, Tara, who often visited from Raleigh. Claire had gone to school with Patrice. Sydney put a lot of emphasis on her own high school years, how pivotal they were to her. And Sydney wanted so much for these years to be good for Bay. But Claire could honestly say she didn't remember much of her own high school experience. She went, kept to herself and waited to go home in the afternoons so she could join her grandmother in the kitchen. It was, like most things in Claire's experience, something she glossed over in favor of better memories. Sydney called it her revisionist history.

“Claire, we were just talking about you,” Patrice said. She was in her early forties and fighting it. Her hair was long, super-blond and shiny. Facial fillers kept her mouth from moving too wide, so she spoke with a slight fish-face expression. Her blue eyes were deeply rimmed in black eyeliner, a look she wasn't young enough to pull off, and her pupils were always a little dilated from taking one too many anti-anxieties, though she thought no one noticed.

“That man, who was he?” Claire asked, trying not to sound like it was urgent, because it wasn't really urgent. At least, she didn't think so.

“What man?” Patrice said.

“There was an elderly man standing here a moment ago,” Claire said. “He had silver hair. He was wearing a silver suit.”

“There was no one here,” Tara said. Tara was older than Patrice and not fighting it as well, in large part because Tara didn't have the kind of money Patrice married into. Her hair was darker, and she wore tunics covering a perfectly acceptable middle-aged belly, hiding it from her go-to-the-gym-every-day sister.

“He was right here,” Claire said, getting frustrated. “Right where I'm standing.”

“I'm sorry, Claire,” Patrice said. “We haven't seen anyone like that.”

“You were
talking
to him,” Claire said, frowning.

“We were talking, but just to each other,” Tara said. “What was it we were saying?”

“I don't remember,” Patrice said.

Tara laughed. “That's funny, I don't remember, either.”

“We came out of the store, and you walked up to us. I thought we'd been talking about you, but I suppose we hadn't.” Patrice shrugged.

Claire said good-bye and walked away, leaving Patrice and Tara staring off into space, as if someone had put them in a trance.

Someone who smelled like smoke.

 

6

Back at the Pendland Street Inn, Anne Ainsley stood outside room number six with a set of fresh sheets in her arms.

“Mr. Zahler?” she called as she knocked.

He didn't answer. She knew he wouldn't. She'd seen him leave for downtown after breakfast.

She unlocked his bedroom door and entered.

In every one of Anne's three marriages, she'd found herself surprised by her husbands' lies. Genuinely, knocked-off-her-feet surprised. After her third husband cheated on her and emptied her bank account of the last of the money she'd inherited from her parents, she swore she would never allow herself to be surprised like that ever again. Men lied. She accepted that now. They couldn't help it. It was their default position. They denied it, but that just proved her point.

Russell Zahler was lying about something. And she truly didn't care. It actually gave her some satisfaction that Andrew was being conned. But she was curious and bored. Andrew didn't let her have a television in her room. There wasn't a television in the whole damn inn.
It isn't authentic to the house,
Andrew would say. Sometimes she wanted to say,
What about electricity, Andrew? That's not authentic to the house, either.
God, he was so much like their father sometimes. So, Anne had to find her own entertainment.

Her entertainment mostly consisted of the Internet on the front-desk computer, and spying on guests and rifling through their things when she cleaned their rooms. She never stole anything. Andrew would toss her out in a millisecond if she did that. She just liked to see what people brought from their homes, what their perfumes smelled like and what sizes they wore. She liked the stories she would make up about them.

Anne had always been a bit of a sneak. She knew that about herself. Anne and Andrew's father had been an optometrist and their mother had run his office, but their mother had also secretly sold naughty lingerie in her spare time, mostly to the Clark women in town, who were known for their sexual prowess and always married well because of it. Their father had never known about their mother's side business. And Andrew had been aghast when he'd found their mother's catalogs and wares after she died.

But Anne had known all about it. She'd found the stuff when she was ten, after discovering the locked trunk in the back of her mother's closet. She'd searched all over the house until she'd found the key to it hidden in the toilet tank.

Their parents had died on their first road trip after they retired. They'd saved a fortune and had intended to live very well into their old age. The several hundred thousand they'd left had made Anne soft in the head. That's the only explanation she had for letting Andrew have the house. She'd been married to her first husband back then, and Andrew had still been living at home. He'd always been a prissy man. Women made him uncomfortable and he never dated, so Anne had thought she was being magnanimous by letting him have a place to live out his lonely years.

Two husbands later—two husbands and their two failed businesses, both of which Anne had funded—and Anne was broke. For the past five years, she'd been living here in her childhood home, which Andrew had turned into an inn. She'd always secretly felt it was a little creepy, like creating a shrine so people could visit their dead parents. Andrew gave her room and board (their two tiny bedrooms were now in the basement) and minimum wage, which she spent on beer, cigarettes and magazines. This was her life now. She accepted that. She was fifty-nine, so close to sixty she could taste it, and she had no expectations for her own happiness anymore.

She closed the door to Russell Zahler's room behind her. This was officially called the Andrew Ainsely Room. It was even written on a small plaque on the door. This was Andrew's old bedroom from when they were children. It was decorated in dark purples and aubergines, which Andrew called royal colors.

He'd named Anne's old bedroom the Hopes and Dreams Room.

She wasn't sure, but she thought that was a dig.

She set the sheets on the queen-sized bed and looked around. Russell Zahler had left the heat turned up and the clear glass lamp by the bed on. But he hadn't hung anything in the closet, and there were no toiletries in the small attached bathroom. There was only his large leather suitcase on the luggage rack at the bottom of the bed. She walked over to it and clicked it open. There wasn't much inside. Another gray suit and a white shirt, folded; a threadbare pair of pajamas; that outlandish lord-of-the-manor robe he'd worn that night he'd walked into the kitchen and scared Anne to death because she'd thought it was Andrew, catching her smoking again; socks and underwear; and a black toiletry bag containing a comb, toothpaste, a toothbrush, deodorant, a bar of soap, a razor and a bottle of aspirin.