The Body In The Big Apple

“Is there a back way out of this apartment?” the young woman asked anxiously. The caterer turned in surprise. It was a line she had heard only in the movies. “There's a service door past the maid's room,” she answered, indicating the direction with a wave of her hand, still clutching the pastry tube she was using to pipe florets of dilled mayonnaise onto timbales of smoked salmon mousse.

The woman's next line, although equally surprising, was not from a script.

“Is that you, Faith? Faith Sibley?”

It was.

Faith put the tube down and focused on the person in front of her. Startlingly large deep blue eyes, chin-length burnished red-gold hair, skin like veritable alabaster. It was a measure of the kind of concentration that Faith brought to her work not to have recognized Emma Morris, now Emma Stanstead, immediately. They'd spent most of their school years together, in school and out.

“Emma!” Faith flung her arms around her friend, mindful of Emma's black Ralph Lauren evening suit and the dark mink over one arm. “Emma! It's been ages.” Emma hugged her back. No air kisses, just a good, hard hug. Air kisses—on both cheeks if it was a
really, really
close friend or celeb—the greeting of the eighties.

“But what are you doing in the kitchen?” Emma asked.

Faith would have thought her white jacket, checked trousers, and toque supplied the answer, yet Emma, while not stupid, had tended to approach life at a slower, more gentle pace than that of her fellow classmates.

“I'm a caterer now, with my own company, Have Faith. Surprisingly, I've gotten only a few calls from people looking for an ‘escort' service—or God. Most of the calls are to do parties like this, and things have been going amazingly well.” Faith stopped. She was gushing; plus, she was getting absolutely no response at all from her audience. Emma was listening with the air of a woman who is sure the ringing phone is going to be her doctor with news of a fatal diagnosis. Faith surreptitiously rapped her knuckles on the table for the continued prosperity of her fledgling business—and for her friend's well-being.

Her impression was confirmed by Emma's reply. “That sounds like fun. The food was lovely. Some little shrimp things?” Emma's voice trailed off and she looked in the direction of the exit. The earlier note of fear in her voice was back—full force.

“Are you okay? What's wrong?” Faith asked, putting her hand on Emma's arm and pulling her away from the kitchen bustle and over toward the windows.
Outside, the stars were obliterated by the lights of New York City, several million watts, brighter than usual at this holiday time of year. It was bitterly cold and those below on the sidewalk walked quickly, heads bent.

Emma seemed momentarily transfixed by the view—or some other view in her mind's eye. She looked very much the same as she had when they were in high school together six years earlier—extremely beautiful and not much older. So far as Faith could tell, the only changes were that she was a bit more slender, had cut her hair—and was terrified.

She released her grasp and faced her friend, repeating the question more forcefully. “
Emma,
do you need some help? What's wrong?”

“Wrong? What could be wrong?” Emma said. Faith's query had dropped a penny in the slot, and Emma began to move. She shrugged on her fur and pulled gloves from a pocket, dropping a Christmas card she'd been holding in the process. Faith bent down to retrieve it for her, but Emma swooped—all but knocking Faith over—grabbed the card, and was out the door in an instant. Since she was Emma and had been raised properly, “Thank you so much. Lovely to see you” floated back.

Faith stood staring after her, puzzled. Emma's perfume lingered, at odds with the fragrance wafting from the tray of bite-size wild mushroom quiches one of Faith's assistants was transferring to a serving dish.

“Put some of the crab cakes with those and they'll be ready to go,” Faith instructed, focus back. Emma receded.

Except Emma was back, and once more Faith was startled.

“Could you meet me tomorrow? At the Met. Inside the front entrance at noon?” she whispered in Faith's ear.

“Tomorrow?” Faith found she had lowered her voice in response to Emma's tone. Then noting the desperate look on Emma's face, she said, “I'll be there.” Emma nodded and vanished. This time, apparently, for good.

Focus now totally shot to hell, Faith tried to think what could be going on with Emma. They'd lost touch when Emma transferred to boarding school for her senior year, and then they'd ended up at colleges far apart, seeing each other sporadically when home. Faith had been invited to Emma's wedding when she'd married Michael Stanstead, a lawyer—two, or was it three years ago?—but Faith had been in Europe at the time.

Granted, it was a stressful time of year—as was life in the Big Apple at any season, particularly in the circles Emma traveled in—money had married money, and Stanstead was involved in politics, too. But the fear on Emma's face hadn't been that of someone worried about finishing her Christmas shopping or getting her cards out. It wasn't a “What am I going to wear to the United Nations Association benefit next week?” look or “Did I send our contribution to Covenant House?”

It was fright, as in “I'm scared.”

 

“You can go, Howard. The two of us can finish up. As usual, you were magnificent.” Faith blessed her lucky stars often; in this case, for delivering Howard, the perfect bartender/waiter. He was attractive, but not so arresting as to divert attention from the food. Bright and
funny, maybe the best thing about Howard was that he didn't want to be an actor. Or a writer. Or a composer. Or anything else except what he was.

It was after nine. Tonight, Faith could afford to take her time. She didn't have another job, or she would have been long gone. This one had been described initially as “cocktails for a few business friends with a few nibbles.” “A few” had become a crowd. The “nibbles” heartier. Howard reported that—as often happened—this
was
dinner for many of the guests—the “juniors,” he called them. Faith was glad she'd prepared plenty of food—filling food. She'd known from the host's choices that sashimi and white wine were out. These guys still ate red meat—and they were mostly guys with a few trophy wives or girlfriends scattered about the room like tinsel on a tree. She was cynical enough to know that the host would have asked some guests to bring arm candy and some not.

“A good party?” Josie, her full-time assistant, was looking for some strokes.

“A very good party—and I should know.” Faith smiled.

She'd been to enough of them over the years. Born twenty-three—almost twenty-four—years ago to the Reverend Lawrence Sibley and his wife, Jane, née Lennox, a real estate attorney, Faith had grown up in Manhattan with her sister, Hope, one year younger. Children's parties and the delights of Rumpelmayer's had given way to increasingly less innocent pleasures, culminating in New York's club scene and parties, endless parties. Wasn't that what the eighties were all about?

Unlike Hope, whose career aspirations had been
well defined by age ten, when she'd asked for a subscription to the
Wall Street Journal
for Christmas, Faith hadn't had a clue about her future for many years. It had been pleasant to consider the world her oyster and contemplate any number of possibilities for a while. Then one morning early in the fall after she'd graduated from college, she'd awakened—late—and realized she was very, very bored. The unexamined life was not worth living, she knew from her father's sermons—and Plato—so she'd lain back and thought. She could get married. There were several possibilities in that department, but she wasn't in love—and she wasn't
that
bored. She could get a job. Her mother had taken to leaving the
Times
on the kitchen table, open at the Help Wanted section. It made sense, but what kind of job? She could go back to school. Most of her friends seemed to find it necessary to add more initials to their names, yet Faith did not feel called in that direction.

It had not escaped her notice that lately she'd been paying more attention at parties and restaurants to the food—the way it was served and the way the table was set—than to her companions. And all with a highly critical eye. She'd always loved to cook and had taken as many courses as she could get away with in her college's famed culinary arts department while still earning a B.A. in English. She'd sat up in bed, the previous night's dinner still before her eyes. I could do that, she'd thought, and much better.

She'd traded her social life for an apprenticeship with one of the city's top catering firms and courses at the New School in how to run your own small business. Her family had watched with bemusement and some skepticism. Then, when Faith had announced she
was dipping into the modest trust fund left by her grandfather to launch Have Faith, she'd encountered some resistance.

“Have you considered the rate of failure for such ventures?” her mother had asked, pulling a computer printout from her Prada purse at lunch at Le Bernardin. The restaurant—new, hot, and specializing in seafood—was Faith's current favorite. She'd known her mother's spur-of-the-moment invitation had been as calculated as her own acceptance. She'd reached into her own purse—Longchamps—and pulled out the numbers she had crunched. Her mother had been surprised—and impressed. By the time the coffee had arrived—strong and black—Jane Sibley had seemed close if not to approval, then to acquiescence. But still she'd wavered. Faith could legally use the money as she wished, yet she had wanted her parents' blessing. Then she'd hurled her last spear.

“It's because having a daughter who's a cook doesn't give you the same reflected glory that having one who's cornering the market does, right?”

“Good heavens, no. The other way around these days. And what a mean thing to say, dear. I won't repeat it to your father.”

“Then what is it? You want me to get married? You want grandchildren?”

“Oh, you silly, I'm worried you're going to lose all your money, of course.”

“Well, I'm not. Trust me,” Faith had heard echoes of earlier talking-tos from mother—conversations about things like curfews.

Her mother had reached over to pat her hand. “I do.” And that was that.

Faith's aunt, Charity Sibley, had been enthusiastic
about the idea from the beginning. Stretching far back into the highest branches of the tree, the Sibleys had named the first three females in a family, Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith was convinced that the reason she had merely one sibling was her mother's aversion to the name Charity and her awareness that it was a tradition Lawrence wouldn't have even fleetingly thought to break.

Charity Sibley was a natural ally for Faith, having started her own extremely successful ad agency when she was only a few years older than Faith was now.

“Such a hot field,” she'd said, congratulating her niece. “After Black Monday in '87, everyone moaned and groaned about all the money they'd lost—serving spritzers instead of a glass of wine. All those boring purées and coulis—cheap, but not very filling. Happily, things are back to normal now and entertaining is entertaining. You can do my Christmas party. Lots of fun food and music. I don't want any sad faces.” She'd been alluding not to junk bonds, but to her decision to sell her business and her apartment at the San Remo, overlooking Central Park on the West Side. She'd already purchased a rambling old house with acres of land in Mendham, New Jersey—a decision that had shocked and saddened her many New York friends. “Jersey!” one had exclaimed on Chat's answering machine. “Why not Forest Lawn!” Chat had stuck to her decision, smilingly confident that anyone who really wanted to see her—and her pool, tennis court, whirlpool, sauna, and other amenities—would manage to find a way to cross the Hudson River.

“I always get lost in New Jersey” had been Faith's sole comment.

“I'll give you a map,” Chat had replied.

That settled, there was no question that favorite aunt and favorite niece would continue to see as much of each other as before.

Have Faith had edged into the highly competitive New York catering market in early fall and quickly established itself by word of mouth, lip-smacking mouths. Before, in many circles, snaring Faith Sibley as a guest had been considered a coup. Faith was not yet swamped by business, but the future looked promising. On the strength of the tide, she'd moved into her own place—a studio on West Fifty-sixth Street, but a studio with a doorman in a prewar building with an enormous, beautifully landscaped inner courtyard. Not that home, a spacious apartment on the East Side, was bad. Jane Sibley had married Lawrence, the son and grandson of men of the cloth, with the proviso that he find a calling on her own turf in Manhattan. God knew, there were as many lost souls on the island as anywhere else. She had hoped to maintain a modicum of privacy this way—privacy unavailable in the village-type parsonage of Lawrence's youthful dreams. Watching her struggle to keep the blinds drawn, as well as their father's only occasionally reasonable hours, had convinced both Faith and Hope to avoid men without button-down collars and Windsor knots.

Nesting into her studio, Faith didn't miss the larger baths and reliable heat across town. She was on her own at last. She had also recently signed a lease for a new, expanded location for the business. Grown-up papers to sign. Grown-up fees to a lawyer.

Yes, it had definitely been the right decision and she had never been so happy, she reflected. There had been
plenty of glitches and near catastrophes, but tonight's catering job had been a piece of gâteau. They were almost finished packing up. This had been one of the better kitchens to work in, recently remodeled and, from the sparkling appearance of the appliances, plus the absence of anything save champagne, orange juice, caviar, and DoveBars in the refrigerator/freezer, one seldom used.