The Books of Fell
Authors: M.E. Kerr
fell
M.E. Kerr
a division of F+W Media, Inc.
part I
SMILES WE LEFT BEHIND US
On the night of the Senior Prom, I was stood up by Helen J. Keating — ”Keats” they called her in Seaville, New York.
This isn’t a story about Keats and me, and it isn’t about that humiliating event in my seventeenth year. But Keats is a part of the story, and that humiliation was responsible for everything that happened to change my life … and even my name.
The Keatings lived on Dune Road, at the top of a hill in a palatial home. Adieu, they had named it, and it looked down on Seaville as surely as they did. It was the last house Keats’s father would ever build — his good-bye to his profession. He was an architect of some renown, and certainly Adieu was an architect’s dream. It was anyone’s dream — who wouldn’t like living in that place?
But to me Adieu meant good-bye in another way, from the moment I first saw Keats up there. It meant hello and good-bye. It meant good-bye, you can never have that girl. Say hello; then say adieu.
What does your father do? was the second question I was ever asked by Keats’s father. The first one was How are you? Mr. Keating didn’t wait for an answer. He didn’t care how I was. He cared what my father did.
I said, “My father was a detective.”
“Was?” he said. “Is he dead?”
“Yes, sir. He died six months ago.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Fell. That’s your name, isn’t it?”
“Yes. John Fell.”
I would have liked to say (and Mr. Keating would have liked to hear me say), But, Mr. Keating, sir, I am heir to a fortune and descended from William the Conqueror,. bound for Harvard University when I graduate from high school, a Christian, a Republican, an honor student.
If I could have said those things, he wouldn’t have heard me anyway, for his plump behind was turned by then, and he was slapping his arm around Quint Blade, Keats’s football star boyfriend. All of them up at Adieu that day would be seniors in the fall. I would be a junior.
I had been invited to that pool party by a fluke. I had waited on Keats in Plain and Fancy, the gourmet food shop where I had a part-time job. She’d wandered in there one afternoon after school to buy truffles with almonds in them, a quart of Häagen-Dazs coffee ice cream, and fresh everything from cherries to strawberries — a shopping bag filled with goodies and charged to her father’s Diner’s Club account.
“Aren’t you the new boy at school?” she asked me.
“Sort of new. I’ve been here a year,” I told her. But I
was
new to her and her crowd. I was new to any crowd in Seaville. (And the less said about my old crowd in Brooklyn, the better.) That was when she invited me to Adieu.
In between that party up at Adieu and her Senior Prom, we fell in love, blown away by the kind of passion that made Dante write about Beatrice, Tristram hunger for Isolde, and my father’s last client dog the steps of his young, unfaithful wife, who sneaked off to roadhouses where the jukebox roared and men drank beer from the neck of the bottle.
My father died sitting outside one of those places, waiting for something to report back to his anxious client. My father was always waiting outside someplace. A detective’s life is not really filled with car chases and flying bullets. It is almost never what you see on TV. It is waiting with a thermos of coffee, and an extra pair of shoes in the backseat of your car, in case you’re somewhere all day on your feet.
I had inherited his patience and his determination … and I would need them to be Helen J. Keating’s lover. Love is never enough when there are parents whose dream for their only daughter does not include someone whose father had a heart attack in a 1977 Dodge Dart while waiting for a roundheels to leave a bar with someone she’d picked up inside. It does not include someone whose mother has gone over her $1000 limit on every charge card in her purse. (The morning of the Senior Prom, I’d found a Born to Shop decal in a store next to the florist, bought it, and attached it to the back of my mother’s rusting white Volkswagen.)
Keats’s mother we could handle. She was most famous in Seaville for her book reviews in
The Seaville Star.
She’d once reviewed a book called
Coke Is Not It!,
about kids who put themselves through college dealing drugs, with this lead paragraph:
If anyone’s child is using pot or cocaine, I have yet to meet the parents, and I pride myself on getting out and about in my community. So who is to believe this author with her alarmist Henny-Penny warnings?
That was Mrs. Keating … a tiny, smiling woman, suntanned in winter from visits to Palm Beach, forever warning Keats “Don’t tell Daddy!” when she allowed us to go places and do things Mr. Keating would have denied us.
Once Mr. Keating got the idea that Keats and I were captured by a chemistry between us that compelled us to head for the dunes, or the game room in the basement of Adieu, or the backseat of the old Dodge I’d inherited from my father, he began to put his foot down. But Mr. Keating traveled as a consultant and a lecturer, and his foot was often miles away from Seaville, New York.
One day in late May we felt the full weight of that foot when he arrived unexpectedly at Adieu. Mrs. Keating was off at a Ladies’ Village Improvement Society meeting, dealing with a way to prevent Dutch elm disease in the trees that lined Main Street. Keats and I were up in her yellow-and-white bedroom, listening to old tapes of Van Halen and Phil Collins, the rain pouring down outside. We’d just come from school, drenched, enough of our clothes drying over the backs of yellow chairs for Mr. Keating to see red.
“The Senior Prom is out of the question for you two!” Mr. Keating shouted. “Helen, the only way You’ll get to it is to get yourself another date!”
It was Mrs. Keating who finally said, “All right! All right! All ri
ght!
Go to the prom! I haven’t the heart to say no! But don’t tell Daddy!”
So with Daddy away, I went to Pittman Florist the day of the prom and ordered a white orchid sent to Keats. Across the card I wrote three words my father’s last client had had embroidered across half a dozen silk nightgowns he’d given his young bride for a wedding gift:
Thine until death!
When the box arrived at noon, Keats called me. “Oh, Fell! Thine until death! No one’s ever written anything so romantic to me! I can’t wait until tonight! Don’t come at eight, come at five to.”
“I’ll be there at quarter to.”
“No, come at twenty to.”
We were always doing that, making our dates earlier and earlier, unable to wait.
I rented a white dinner jacket and black tuxedo pants. I bought a red boutonniere, and put a shine I could see my face in on a pair of my father’s old black wing tips.
Maybe Keats and I were just narcissists, in love with our own reflections. We looked enough alike to be brother and sister. Both of us had blond hair and deep blue eyes, though Keats claimed mine were really purple. She’d say, “I’m in love with a boy with purple eyes.” Keats had shoulder-length hair, a long thin nose, and skinny long legs, and she always wore Obsession.
The rich don’t live right on the road. They live up, back, and behind. From the time you enter the property at Adieu, you have a good three minutes before you see anything but trees. Once you see the house, you have another three minutes before you pull up to it. So on prom night I had six minutes to anticipate seeing Keats. Six minutes to gloat over the idea that I, a lowly junior, had beaten out Quint Blade in the contest for Keats. Six minutes to imagine my white orchid pinned to her, and that smile of hers that lights up rooms already aglow.
Now, looking back, I don’t think anyone in Seaville, including my mother, ever thought Keats and I would make it through a year. We were a golden couple without a cheering section. No one was for us but us.
The Keatings didn’t call Eaton a butler, but that’s what he came off as, even though he doubled as caretaker. He wore an ordinary dark business suit when he answered the door.
“Good evening, Eaton!” I said jovially. Eaton could smile. I’d seen him smile. But he couldn’t smile at me, or wouldn’t, not even that night, when he must have known what I was walking into.
Foster, the black poodle, was sniffing my pants leg as though I were a suspicious character.
I’d never won the dog over, either.
“Mr. Fell,” Eaton said, “Miss Keating left you this note and this package.”
The note was one of those little white cards, folded over. Inside, her handwriting, with the circles over the i’s:
Daddy came back right before dinner.
He’s forcing me to go into New York City
with him and Mother. I tried to call you.
I’m destroyed over it, Fell!
Thine until death, and after, and after that!
K.
I looked up at Eaton, who had no expression.
I didn’t want to have an expression, either, for him to take any satisfaction in, so I turned to go. I wondered if I could still walk now that my heart had fallen down into my shoes.
But Eaton was not finished.
“You have another message, Mr. Fell.”
He handed me a small business card with raised print. On the front:
Lawrence O. Keating.
On the back, in a large, firm hand:
You are no longer welcome at Adieu! This ends it, Fell! L.O.K.
Foster punctuated the message with an angry bark.
I went outside in a blur, clutching the small, gift-wrapped package. My father used to tell me never be ashamed of your tears, only be ashamed when you don’t have any and the occasion calls for tears.
He would have been proud of me that night.
By the time I opened the gift from Keats — a purple silk bow tie — there were tears rolling down my face.
I shoved the tie back into its tissue and threw the box on the seat beside me. I took off with a lurch that kicked up the gravel in the driveway. I began to pick up speed as I headed down toward Dune Road.
Adieu is flanked by Beauregard on one side and Fernwood Manor on the other. All three driveways lead down to Dune Road.
The car I didn’t see was coming from Fernwood Manor.
It was a dark-blue Mitsubishi I’d seen going in and out of there before. But I’d never come as close to it as I did that night — I rammed right into its back end. Then I sat there with my horn stuck, waiting for doom to descend.
That was how I met Woodrow Pingree.