Fun With Problems (6 page)

"At the station? But I'm stranded. I'm marooned, you see, and I can't..."

"It's autumn break, Kimmie. You don't need to go anywhere." In the end, she had simply to insist. Kimmie had forgotten about the loan as a result of her medication. Or of not taking it. Or something. After a while she pressed the red button on Kimmie and switched the phone off. Then she checked on young Jim and went to bed.

It was midmorning when Cordelia and Slash arrived. Margaret looked them over in their bib overalls and work shirts. Cordelia's getup fit badly. She wore a Depression-style gray tweed cap turned backward.

"You're late. I hope you brought everything?" Then she performed a stylized double take. "By the way, your mustache is rat-like," she told Donny. "What have you done to it?"

Donny Slash, who had come in wearing a suave, cheery
smile, lost his composure. He was always trying to impress Margaret favorably. But Margaret's secret attraction to him was a gratuitous grace over which he had no control at all.

"Whattya mean, Slim?"

"Never mind."

Cordelia giggled. The twisted relationship between her mother and Slash amused her.

"I've identified this awful man," Margaret explained. She meant she had acquired bits and pieces of the Bowers' life and documents from an addicted antiques runner who had become aware of Mrs. Bower's collection. The man saw the Bowers regularly at auctions. On the day after Margaret's return from Kimmie's, the runner had spotted Bower at the museum and called her. Although Margaret had actually been a psychiatrist, her name was not Cerwin.

"By the way, Cordy, are you whacked, my darling?" She turned on Donny, who fidgeted and blinked under Margaret's fierce glance. Blinking was his shot at showing an honest countenance.

"Fuck no!" Cordelia said.

"Fuck no? Because your lips are purple. And your friend!" She addressed Donny with a humorless smile. "You're whacked also. And you smell of beer. You're drunk. You've both been up all night slamming crystal. God bless us and save us!"

"No, man," said Donny. "We're cool. We're down."

"Cool? How cool you're cool, you moron!"

"Hey, Slim, man," Donny said, repentant, "it's all good."

"Do you know what this means?" Margaret asked. "It means we'll have to call Desirée." Desirée was a Haitian girl who often minded the baby. "I'll have to cancel the Lascar. I'll have to expose my posterior on the open road. You can't drive." She turned on Cordelia. "Cordy can't drive. She has warrants. Oh, God," she moaned, "the two of you."

"Don't let her come!" Cordelia implored Donny. "It's such a drag when she comes."

"Yeah, sure," Slash said.

"Well, it is," said Cordelia savagely. "Mother." She pronounced the word with the irony of the street.

"Shame on you," Margaret said. "And take off that stupid hat."

It was close to noon when they arrived in Calverton and parked on the road a few yards up from the Bowers' house. Margaret looked as chic as a middle-aged woman in white coveralls ever could, but she was annoyed at the delays.

"Check it out."

Slash started out of the truck.

"Not you," Margaret told him. "Cordy."

Cordy returned to say that the coast was clear.

"No system?" Slash asked.

Margaret laughed bitterly, snorted. "He didn't set it. People like him often don't."

They drove up to the house.

"Even if they'd set the system," said Donny, "I coulda disarmed it."

"Yes, you're wonderful, Slash," Margaret said. She addressed him as Slash only to torment him. "Now check the weathervane." She indicated the metal instrument on the roof. It had the form of a killer whale and was handsomely wrought.

"Nice," said Donny.

"Nice. So can you?"

"Sort of a hassle. But yeah." He turned and looked down the wooded driveway behind them. "Think it's cool?" From somewhere in the middle distance they heard the whine of a chain saw. Someone cutting firewood. Cordelia, without her bomber jacket or tweed cap, was jumping up and down out of high spirits and to keep warm.

"Let it go," Margaret told him. "Maybe we can take it when we're weathervane shopping. Open the door, please."

"Deadbolt?"

"He didn't use two keys."

Slash tried and failed to open the door with a credit card. Then he applied the Halligan bar his cousins had stolen from a West Virginia state police car. The door, lopsidedly, fell open.

"Open fuckin' sesame! Perfecto Garcia!"

Margaret brushed past him and the couple followed her. Inside, they put on their rubber gloves and took up items as Margaret directed. As she watched through a window, they carried furniture and bric-a-brac outside and stashed it in the rental truck on padded mover's quilts.

"
Doucement,
" Margaret advised them. "Gently."

After their exertions her two assistants both began to tremble with cold and the drug.

"Let's go," Cordelia whined. She had begun jumping again, in the Bowers' living room, and was working herself into a state. "Let's go before some asshole comes. Like joggers or..."

Donny, annoyed, grabbed her arm to hush her and discourage her bouncing. Cold as it was, they watched Margaret unbutton her leather coat and take a pearl-handled straight razor from one of the pockets and hasten into the bathroom. Very shortly she emerged. Her face was contorted with what appeared to be rage.

"Let's go, Slash," Cordelia said, pulling him toward the door.

They stood just outside the crippled, half-open door. They could hear Margaret screaming inside, the smash of glass and crockery, the rending of cloth.

"What?" he demanded. "What the fuck?"

"You've never seen her do this before? This is like her signature mode." She moved from the door with an expression of pity and distaste. "Oh, Jesus, I hate it."

"Does what? What's she doing?"

"You'll find out."

Slash stepped inside and came out again.

"Jeez," he said, "she's cuttin' it up pretty good. She's wired. Bad."

Cordelia shook her head and sighed impatiently.

"Yeah, she's like loot and pillage."

He and Cordelia stood shivering, watching the driveway, until Margaret appeared. She looked quite composed, if a little unsteady and breathing audibly. Donny and Cordelia said nothing.

"Okay," Margaret said. "
Tout finis.
Let's roll."

They had driven the truck only a few miles along the highway when Donny saw a flashing bluey in his rearview mirror. A startling burst of siren rose and fell. Cordelia, crouching behind the seats, cursed and moaned.

"What?" Donny asked Margaret.

"Were you speeding?"

"No way."

"Well, pull over." She turned back to Cordelia. "Relax, dear. We'll survive."

The cruiser that had pulled them over belonged to the town cops. There was only one of them, quite a young man. He wore cheap sunglasses, so Margaret could not be sure how stupid he was.

"I only wear handcuffs when I'm being fucked," Margaret whispered. She was joking to encourage them. The cop got out and stood just to the rear of the driver's side door, looking in at Cordelia.

"License and registration," he told Donny. Donny had a forged but well-made Virginia driver's license. The cop gave them all the once-over and stepped back and away to read the documents. He did not return them. From her side, Margaret leaned across Slash to address the young policeman.

"A problem, officer?"

He looked at her without apparent expression.

"Where you all coming from?"

"From Princeton, New Jersey," Margaret declared. "Actually, we're on our way home."

"Where to?"

"Across the bay. I have a house in Fredericksburg."

"What about you, sir?" the cop asked Slash.

"Little Creek, Virginia. See, we're driving her. Moving some furniture." He was blinking stupidly in all directions. Margaret gave him an elbow.

"Didn't take Ninety-five?"

"Thirteen is so much more pleasant," said Margaret. "Sometimes faster, too."

The cop turned on Cordelia in her lair behind the seats.

"That true?"

"Yes, it is," Cordelia answered, sounding like her mother.

"This lady your mom?"

"Yes, she is."

"You family too?" the officer asked Donny.

"No," Donny said. He showed the officer his top-of-the-line smile. "Hired help."

"That right?" he asked the ladies.

"Well, yes," Margaret answered a bit impatiently. After a moment the officer handed Donny the registration and license.

"Have a nice day, ma'am." He took a last glance at Donny Slash. "Drive carefully, sir."

When the cop had vanished from sight, Donny and Cordelia whooped with joy.

"Oh, Moms! You're like so great!" She was, in the end, her mother's greatest admirer.

"Hey, Slim," Donny yelled. "You're awesome, man."

He took one hand off the wheel to offer Margaret a high-five. She condescended to return it.

"Everybody loves you when you're somebody else," she explained.

O
N A VERY FOGGY
late-autumn morning, a man named Eric Floss was wandering the quaint streets of a preserved Connecticut whaling town. He found himself walking scrubbed brick sidewalks that fronted the marble steps of exquisite Federal-style houses. Old ironwork bordered gardens grown with lilac bushes and hedged in boxwood. There were warmly lighted shops soon to open for the sale of antique ornamental pieces and vintage furniture. One place had antique willow-patterned china from the ginseng trade. Most of the windows, though, offered midlevel, tourist-standard marine studies. There was scrimshaw from the lathes of the Philippines and here and there some genuine old pieces, crude but authentic. A few shops had rows of jade and amber jewelry for sale and the odd lissome ivory apsara.

Floss had come to the town because it was where a ferry crossed many times a day to Steadman's Island, the only habitable point on a reef of rocky islands, a low-key resort where large holdings and a paucity of space and fresh water had made summering expensive and restricted. One section of Steadman's Island was called Heron's Neck, the site of the island's largest and most ornate summer cottage. The big houses were all called cottages.

It had become generally known that the owner of Heron's Neck, a friend of the Secretary of Defense, had made the place available to his friend for a few days. The Secretary liked to summon his political retainers to remote and inconvenient meeting sites to inform them of his wishes, and the island had become a favorite. That fall week he had called a conference to sic the dogs of his department on some of their opposite numbers in other government agencies.

Eric was a freelancer whose demonstrated unreliability had limited his prospects of journalistic advancement. It was not his reporting or the soundness of his prose that had failed to satisfy, but his tendency to overlook deadlines and even entire assignments once undertaken. This time he had signed for an article on the reaction of the year-round island population to the presence of the policy conference on its shores. The journal was a post-pornographic monthly that had passed into the hands of an old colleague of his. That fall, both Eric and the magazine were attempting to find their way back to seriousness. The magazine was cutting back on its ration of sexual fantasy and hard-core pix, running an occasional piece of political revelation. Eric had nearly stopped drinking and using recreational drugs.

The theory behind the story was that the locals might have some comments worth recording on the combination
of mystery and ostentation that surrounded such a high-level, high-security event. Moreover, Eric had what he thought might be a useful local connection. One of the year-round inhabitants, Annie Shumway, was the sister of a woman with whom Eric had traveled in the Middle East. It would be an interesting beginning, he thought, to visit them.

The fact was that his enthusiasm for the story had been waning since he had pitched it successfully to his acquaintance. Still, he thought that if he went to the island something original might present itself. And he would get to see the place and meet Lou's sister. There were no hotels, and both of the bed-and-breakfasts were serving as barracks for the security detail. So he had rallied some effrontery and telephoned Annie, who had, with obvious reluctance, invited him to dinner with her husband and herself.

He was a few weeks out of rehab in southern California, but contrary to its principles he had started smoking the odd joint and getting drunk by six. He had occasional blackouts once more and woke up with strange troublesome women. Still, he had allowed himself to believe that things were working out. Hanging around the classy mainland town, waiting for the next ferry, Eric found the fog, particularly, beginning to bother him.

On the Atlantic side of the island stood a cluster of small saltbox houses where the original farming village of Steadman's Island had been. Some of the houses were as old as the first settlement, and some were new, conforming to the original style. A few barns there had been converted to condos, over ineffectual opposition. Among the most vigorous opponents of the condos—of all exploitive change—were the Shumways, Annie and Taylor, who lived in one of the saltboxes. Taylor Shumway's family went back on the island for centuries. Annie, his wife, came from Oregon, where they had met at a seminar for eco-activists. Annie was not in her first youth, but no one would quite call her middle-aged. She was youthful, peppy and attractive. She wrote a gardening column in the island paper every week and taught two primary grades at the school.

That evening, she and Taylor were expecting Eric Floss, an old boyfriend of her sister Lou's, who had called out of nowhere. He was at the ferry on the mainland, waiting for a crossing. The piggy conference of fat cats on the Neck and the impossible visibility had stalled all transport. Eric claimed to be an alternative journalist who wanted to keep one eye on the conference. "One eye," he had said.

In the late afternoon, fog had settled so thickly over the island that it was difficult to see across the main street of the village or even the neighboring houses. The fog warning at Salvage Reef, off the northeast light, sounded at sixty-second intervals. Annie had never found anything dismal about the groaning of the horn. But in the faded gray light of that afternoon she had an unfamiliar sense of enclosure and isolation. She had never experienced so many days at the heart of such enveloping fog before. At the same time the air was wet and sweet with honeysuckle, bay and wild rose, maybe more fragrant for being confined.