Killer WASPs (2 page)

Waffles, sensing that he was part of this story, went around my desk to Bootsie and
pawed at her leg, then unleashed a pint of drool on her knee. Bootsie glared at him,
and rose to leave.

I love that dog.

“Why were we at Sanderson?” I repeated. “Well, Waffles really had to go. You know
him—­he bolts sometimes, and I can barely hang on to the leash. He took off for the
bushes at Sanderson last night. Sometimes he just wants to, um, do his business there!”
This was mostly true. Waffles does sprint to Sanderson sometimes, but he doesn’t do
his business just anywhere. He’s partial to a certain bush in my backyard where he
enjoys complete privacy, and if desperate during the workday, he’ll make use of a
grassy nook behind the store. He’d never sully the gorgeous lawns of Sanderson.

Waffles whined, then went over to his dog bed to lie down. He knew he had just been
dissed.

Bootsie laughed, picked up her tote, and strode in her whale-­print sandals toward
the door—­finally. She even acknowledged Waffles by nodding at him on the way out.
“That dog’s got good taste. I love that he likes to take a crap at Sanderson!”

Chapter 2

S
O
I
HADN’T
told Bootsie every little detail about the night before
, I thought, as I continued taking inventory of the store, working from front to back,
starting with an over-­the-­top gilded console table in the front window that I had
accessorized with an antique mirror and a pair of pretty vintage sconces. I’d been
honest with the police (make that singular—­Bryn Mawr only has one full-­time policeman,
Officer Walt) about the events of the previous evening, which was the important thing.
The little bit I hadn’t told Bootsie had nothing to do with Barclay Shields. It had
to do with the instant crush I’d developed on Mike Woodford.

The full story was that yesterday after work, Waffles and I had gotten home feeling
hungry, tired, and irrationally angry at the store for not doing better and making
more money. I’d actually berated a chair (1940s slipper chair, found at a flea market
in New Hope) for not selling as I’d locked up. Usually, walking into my cottage, with
its ivy-­covered front porch and gabled windows, felt reassuring. I loved my house,
which I’d inherited upon my grandfather’s death last year, but given the neighborhood’s
hefty real estate taxes, I wouldn’t be able to afford to live there much longer if
the store didn’t suddenly start doing more business.

This I had found out earlier in the day in a depressing call from The Striped Awning’s
landlord, a normally kindly man named Mr. Webster, who’d sounded quite pissy as he
reminded me that I’d been late with my rent payments for every one of the past six
months . . . and that I still owed him for this month. Unfortunately, business had
been dismal over the past twelve months. My grandparents, who had been married fifty-­six
years and died within months of each other, ran the store for decades. They’d made
it seem effortless to run a small business, but I didn’t seem to possess the same
equanimity. Lately, I’d found myself contemplating harebrained schemes just to lure
customers inside, and was currently debating placing a sandwich board on the sidewalk
in front of the shop proclaiming “Free Mojito Thursdays!” Maybe, I thought hopefully,
I could become an authorized Powerball ticket vendor. Then again, Powerball doesn’t
seem to come around more than a few times a year.

I’d spent most of my thirty-­three years working at the store, helping out weekends
and in the summers during high school, and the presence of my grandparents there,
cheerfully presiding over a quirky inventory of everything from Indian tea tables
to English buffets, had always been an anchor, especially after my parents had moved
away from Bryn Mawr when I was seventeen. My father, a math professor—­he possesses
a rogue logical gene never before or since found in the Clark family DNA—­had been
offered a job as head of the math department at Central Arizona College, in Winkelman,
Arizona, the same month I graduated from high school. Just like that, he and Mom had
gone southwestern, moving to the desert without a backward glance. Mom had opened
a small art gallery, and the two had embraced a lifestyle of adobe and 110-­degree
days with enthusiasm.

Winkelman had some amazing mountains surrounding it, and more than its share of hot
guys, including one Joe Manganiello look-­alike who worked in a local quarry and with
whom I shared several steamy make-­out sessions during a two-­month fling. But in
my opinion, Winkelman bordered on the too-­rustic. Actual restaurants included Antlers,
a local watering hole, and the Butcher Hook (where I met the aforementioned hot quarry
guy at Rockin’ Rib Night, held every Thursday).

Even the excellent margaritas at Papi Juan’s, in nearby Vega, Arizona, where the management
wasn’t overly concerned about whether patrons were of legal drinking age, couldn’t
numb the pangs of homesickness. I sweltered through three months in Winkelman the
summer after high school, then immediately fled back to Bryn Mawr, where I helped
put myself through college working at The Striped Awning, spending holidays and vacations
out in Arizona with my parents. While Bootsie embarked on her newspaper job after
Duke, and my closest friend, Holly Jones, focused on spending a hefty monthly stipend
from her dad, who’s loaded, I couldn’t imagine a career other than running the store—­despite
repeated remonstrations by Holly that it was a “furniture graveyard” constituting
a dusty social death. This was pretty much true. I’d found myself involved with several
be-­scruffed carpenters and artists over the past decade, most of whom had gone through
an early midlife crisis and moved to Southeast Asia a few months after I’d started
dating them. “There’s something about you that sends guys running to the other side
of the world,” Bootsie had told me recently. “No offense.”

Despite my epic-­fail romances, though, I sincerely enjoyed running The Striped Awning.
I loved attending estate sales and auctions to unearth pieces to sell at the shop,
then polishing, painting, and restoring these treasures, and watching customers fall
in love with a funky chandelier or vintage mirror. In my grandparents’ day, the store
had been successful enough to support a quiet, low-­key lifestyle, in which the biggest
splurge was their membership at Bryn Mawr Country Club. Until the 1990s, the Main
Line—­the suburban area anchored by Bryn Mawr and named for the well-­traveled commuter
train lines that ferried lawyers and bankers into Center City Philadelphia—­was a
fairly subdued community. Everyone knew one another, and socialized with no great
distinction in social strata. At any Friday night gin-­and-­fondue-­fueled cocktail
party in the 1970s, you could find members of the Potts family, who reigned over the
lordly grounds of Sanderson, side by side with longtime residents such as my grandparents,
who had been in Bryn Mawr forever, but had no great wealth or social status. But over
the past two decades, thousands of new homes had been built on the Main Line, and
its residents had gotten decidedly more glitzy (this was largely due to the fact that
a sumptuous Neiman Marcus had opened in the 1990s, just a few miles away off the main
highway to Philly).

Business at The Striped Awning had slowly fallen off as new houses constructed by
­people like Barclay Shields rose up around Bryn Mawr. The new houses were centered
around vaulted “great rooms,” and featured kitchens bigger than Barbados and bedrooms
the size of hockey rinks. These mansions-­on-­steroids required giant furniture, not
antiques, and consequently, my shop was foundering. Holly would happily lend me money
to help pay the mortgage or help keep the store afloat—­no questions asked—­but I’d
rather die than accept it.

Anyway, Mr. Webster had strongly suggested that I pay the rent owed on the store in
a timely fashion, or eviction might ensue. I couldn’t think of any way to raise funds
other than taking out a mortgage on my inherited cottage, which would eventually only
add to my financial woes.

Despite the warmth of the evening, I shivered as I looked around my beloved home while
Waffles inhaled his dinner of kibble. While the house itself is tiny, the property
is beautiful. With its location right across from Sanderson, the acre-­and-­a-­half
lot is a builder’s dream, even in the current dreary economy. Someone like Barclay
Shields could buy it, tear down my place, and bang out a massive new mansion in less
than six months.

I felt like crying at this gloomy prospect, so I did what anyone would do under the
circumstances. I went to a party and got drunk.

“This is
not
a Gap kind of event,” Holly had told me when she showed up at six-­thirty and announced
that I was going with her to the opening of Restaurant Gianni. (I started to defend
myself, but then realized I was in fact wearing a yellow sundress bought on final
sale at the Gap for $17.99.) Holly was holding a pink, knee-­length Trina Turk dress
in a hanging bag in one hand and a pair of high-­heeled sandals in the other, both
of which she handed to me as she ordered me upstairs to straighten my wavy hair. Her
best guy friend, Joe Delafield, the area’s self-­proclaimed foremost interior designer,
came through my back door right behind her.

Joe had arrived at our high school in tenth grade after his family had relocated from
New York City, and within a week convinced school administrators to let him repaint
the student lounge a natty, Billy Baldwin–ish chocolate brown. This was the birth
of a stellar design career, during which Joe attended Parsons and interned at Philly’s
most insultingly pricey decorating firm, owned by a trio of willowy blond socialites
who have convinced many a Main Line ­couple that not one stick of furniture can be
installed until the clients and decorators have made at least four field trips to
the Clignancourt furniture market in Paris on the client’s dime. Joe’s currently running
his own design business, with Holly as his star client. And truthfully, his sense
of color is unerring: Tonight, he had on a pale green checked sport coat, a striped
pink-­and-­green shirt, and impeccable khakis. Joe may be the only straight decorator
in the tri-­state area, and he’s definitely the best-­dressed straight guy anywhere.

“Gianni’s party is going to be obscene!” announced Joe, who immediately started rearranging
my furniture, which he always does whenever he comes over. “Three truckloads of illegal
baby lobster arrived at the restaurant an hour ago from Maine, and they’re grilling
as we speak. Get dressed.”

I ran upstairs, did my hair, loaded on as much extra makeup as I could, and put on
my borrowed Trina Turk (two hundred and seventy-­eight dollars, according to the tag
that still hung from it). I felt better immediately. It’s amazing what berry-­colored
lip gloss can do for your mood—­I mean, imagine the percentage of women walloped by
major depression if they’d never invented makeup, I thought, as I looked in the mirror.
I knew men would slobber over Holly at the party tonight in the manner of Waffles
presented with a leg of lamb. With my brown eyes, small nose, and long wavy brown
hair, I’ll never be able to inhabit the gorgeous-­tanned-­blond realm in which Holly
wafts through life, but with a ton of mascara double-­wanded onto my lashes and my
hair free of its usual ponytail, I felt quite festive in my borrowed pink frock. I’m
not as tall or model-­skinny as Holly, but I’m lucky to be able to fit into most of
her dresses, since I‘ve been so broke lately that I’ve been living on cans of Progresso
soup.

Joe pulled into the immaculate, beige-­pebbled driveway at Gianni at seven-­twenty,
while Holly checked her makeup. She had on a short black Jason Wu dress with skinny
straps that looked amazing on her, since she subsists on champagne and shrimp cocktail.
“You look great!” I told her as we got out of the car.

“I know,” she said blithely. “It’s because of the divorce. I feel horrible, but I
look amazing.” I’ve noticed this among everyone I know who’s in the middle of bitterly
dividing up marital assets amid mutual recriminations: Anyone going through a divorce
tends to look fantastic, thereby proving to their ex how little the split is bothering
them.

“Well, at least they didn’t totally ruin the place,” said Joe, as he tossed the keys
to a valet parker and eyed the restaurant’s elegantly weathered stone façade, its
doors flanked by potted lemon trees, its French windows anchored open, and a jazzy
bossa nova percolating from an indoor/outdoor sound system. More accurately, Restaurant
Gianni—­named, of course, for its chef/owner, Gianni Brunello—­looked absolutely beautiful.
You’d never know that until a few months ago, it had been the old firehouse, a stone
and stucco building built in the early 1900s, with eaves and a slate roof. Bryn Mawr’s
volunteer fire company had just moved to a new, state-­of-­the-­art building over
by the post office, and now, thanks to some artful masonry restoration and the addition
of new dark green shutters flanking floor-­to-­ceiling windows, the old firehouse
resembled an Umbrian villa. The level of manicured, obsessive-­compulsive perfection
in evidence was truly impressive: The circular driveway of tiny stones looked as if
someone raked it every five minutes, whether it needed it or not.

“I would have gone with a cerulean blue for the front door,” said Joe, gesturing dismissively
at the spectacular scene before us while the ridiculously delicious scent of grilling
shellfish wafted our way. Clearly, since he hadn’t been awarded the job of designing
Gianni’s restaurant, Joe had come to the party only to catalog the nonexistent flaws
in its decor. “And they should have added about seven hundred more of those dinky
lemon trees and a vintage Etruscan trellis to form an arbor . . . what is that
racket
?”

Blood-­chilling, horrific screams had erupted from the restaurant. The teenage valet
parkers looked scared.

“That’s the chef, having one of his tantrums,” said Holly, tipping a valet ten bucks
as she dashed up the smooth stone steps to the front door of the restaurant. “Hurry,
we don’t want to miss it.”

We all rushed into a beautiful terra-­cotta colored room lit by a huge old wooden
chandelier, with a long mahogany bar and lots of white-­cloth tables in a roomy dining
area. Over by the bar stood the eponymous Chef Gianni, who had arrived five years
ago from a verdant corner of Tuscany to conquer the Philadelphia dining scene. A slim,
muscular man dressed in chef’s whites above the waist and MC Hammer–style parachute
pants below, he had a glistening bald dome and spoke with an accent as thick as a
Parma ham.

“What the fuck is this?” screamed the chef, his crimson face nose-­to-­nose with two
cowering, well-­dressed young men, waving what appeared to be an invoice at them.
As usual, Gianni wore orange Crocs in the manner of Mario Batali, his culinary idol,
and had his sleeves rolled up to reveal intricate tattoos including the Italian flag,
the distinctive boot-­shaped map of Italy, and a lavishly rendered façade of St. Peter’s
Basilica along his forearms.