The Red Hat Society's Queens of Woodlawn Avenue (18 page)

“I’ll just get the milk. Please, have a seat.”

I made my escape to the kitchen, took a deep breath before pouring the milk, and then mustered all my sophistication so I
could return to the dining room calm and poised.

“Have you uncovered new evidence?” I asked as I set the milk down in front of him. I took a seat on the opposite side of the
table, putting as much distance between us as possible. I had to lean over a bit to slide the plate of cookies toward him.
“Here. Help yourself.”

“Thanks.” He scooped up two cookies and took a big bite from the first one. Then he chewed thoughtfully for a moment before
nodding in approval. “Nice.”

“Thanks.” I sipped my milk and waited to see what he had to say. He wiped his mouth with a napkin he’d plucked from the holder
on the table and then pulled out his pad and pen from his shirt pocket.

“The ADA has a court order to exhume Mrs. Davenport’s late husbands.”

“All three of them?” A huge weight crushed my chest. “Is that really necessary?”

“We won’t know until we’ve had new autopsies performed.”

My heart ached for Grace, and I wondered if she knew yet. She didn’t deserve any of this, and I was the responsible party.

“That seems like a lot of trouble without any proof that Grace had a part in Marvin’s death.”

“We have some evidence that she and Mr. Ethering-ton were romantically involved.”

I choked on the bite of cookie I was swallowing and had to stop and cough before I could clear my throat and speak. “What
kind of evidence?”

“I talked to some of his co-workers from that time. They all said he was carrying on with a married woman, a neighbor, and
that his wife was livid about it.”

I looked at the half-eaten cookie on the napkin in front of me and bile rose in my throat.

“But Grace and Flossie were best friends. She would never have slept with Marvin.”

“People do strange things, Miz Hall. Act in ways you’d never suspect.”

Well, I couldn’t argue with him there, given my recent experience, not only with my husband’s defection for a Hooters waitress
but also my own relationship with Henri.

“What about other neighbors? There had to have been a number of married women on this street at that time.”

“I’m checking into that.”

He certainly was being thorough just for the sake of an incident report. “Couldn’t you do that before you dig up Grace’s husbands?”

He paused, a cookie halfway to his mouth. “Are you asking me for a favor?”

My pulse skyrocketed. What was he going to do—arrest me for attempted bribery by tollhouse cookie?

“No, not a favor.”

He smiled, then, for the first time. “That’s a shame. I wouldn’t mind you owing me.”

“Why?” I asked the question before I could stop myself.

“Miz Hall…Ellie…” And then he blushed. Actually blushed. “I know I’m not…” His voice trailed away. “That is, I was wondering…”

“Yes?” Did he want me to go undercover? Wear a wire and lure my friend into a confession?

“I was wondering if you would have dinner with me sometime.”

“Oh.” I jerked back, and my hand bumped the glass of milk on the table. It sloshed over the top. “I’m old enough to be your
mother,” I said, dabbing at the spilled milk with a napkin.

He blushed even more. “That’s not a problem for me.”

A light bulb went off in my head. I’d heard about young men with a penchant for older women. I’d even seen it on TV and read
about it in books. But, honest truth, I never, ever thought I’d be on the receiving end of it.

“Urn…well, I’m actually seeing someone right now.” Thank God for Henri, even if I hadn’t actually seen him much in the last
few days.

“Oh.” He looked like a crestfallen adolescent who’d just had the girl of his dreams turn down an invitation to the prom. I
felt sorry for him. I also felt a little grossed out, too, as Courtney would have said. And, secretly, a
part of me was very flattered, even if his attraction to me was only slightly less creepy than a shoe fetish.

Only why did it have to be that a younger man liking older women was weird? I mean, look at Jim and Tiffany. A younger woman
throwing herself at him probably earned him a lot of “atta boys” and pats on the back in the locker room at the country club.

Just then, Officer McFarland’s eye landed on the pad of paper I’d been scribbling on while I searched for private security
for the ball.

“What’s this?” He frowned. “Is someone bothering you? You need protection?”

The way he bristled on my behalf was actually quite sweet, although the only person I needed protection from at the moment
was quite possibly Officer McFarland himself.

“No, I’m trying to line up some security officers for a charity event, but I’m not having much luck.”

“Why not?”

I wiped the table again, even though the spilled milk was long gone. “The date got moved forward six months. It’s only a few
weeks away, and everyone’s booked.”

“When is it?”

I told him.

“Maybe I could help you with that.”

My pulse shot up again. Relief mixed with triumph mixed with wariness. “Really? How?”

“I know some guys who might be willing to pull an extra shift. How many officers would you need?”

I told him, and he nodded. “Tell you what, you have dinner with me and I’ll get you the security detail.”

Okay, we were both on pretty shaky ethical ground here, and there was the possibility I might wind up in some stalking situation
that would one day become a Lifetime movie, but what choice did I have?

“As long as you know it’s only dinner. And only once,” I said in my best scolding-mother tones.

He grinned. “Until I convince you to change your mind about that.”

His smile wasn’t wolfish or disturbing, just filled with the confidence of someone who hadn’t fully been squashed by the realities
of adulthood. Shoot, if a cute, younger man wanted to buy me dinner, and I got security officers for the Cannon Ball out of
the deal, what could it hurt?

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

T
hat Saturday night at the regular Queens of Woodlawn Avenue meeting, we had a surprise guest. We met at Jane’s house, and
her sister was visiting from out of town. Which wouldn’t have been a problem, except that her sister—when she wasn’t one of
the foursome—liked to sit beside me and give me helpful advice.

“No, that’s not what you should say to your partner’s short club.” Elaine was as tiny as Jane, but her hair was jet black
rather than blonde and she wore an excessive amount of red lipstick.

“Short club?”

“A 1? opening bid means that your partner has a really strong hand, but it’s spread over several suits. She has a lot of strength,
but no length.”

“What am I supposed to do?” The more I learned about bridge, the less I felt like I knew. It was a pretty good metaphor for
my life at that moment, actually.

By this point, Grace and Linda were frowning deeply, clearly disturbed to have the bidding process—which was supposed to be
entirely neutral—laid out in such explicit terms now that I’d passed the rudimentary stage.

I heard Jane mumble something under her breath. Her sister’s spine went ramrod straight. “Did you have something to say, Jane?”

Growing up as an only child, I’d often wished for a sister. But since the tension between these two sisters could be cut with
a fairly dull butter knife, my lone child status didn’t seem so bad at the moment.

Jane just glared at her. “I said that we don’t need a kibitzer.”

You’d have thought that Jane had called her a name not used in polite circles.

“Fine.” Elaine leaped to her feet and stalked from the dining room through the diamond-shaped arch. A moment later, I heard
a door in the back of the house slam.

“Thank heavens,” Grace said. “I thought I was going to have to whack her on the head with something.”

Jane and Linda laughed, and I pretended to. Because Officer McFarland and his suspicions about Grace were never far from my
thoughts.

“So, really, what do I do about the short club?”

Jane arched an eyebrow. “Use it on my sister?”

I
didn’t have time to see Henri all weekend due to the demands of my other clients—the elderly matron and the professor—as
well as citing my standing Saturday night Red Hat commitment. He hadn’t taken it well, but
then, he was French. He should be used to disappointment. Weren’t they always losing every war they fought?

To tell the truth, I was still struggling with the remnants of my feelings for Jim. And I didn’t want to go any further with
Henri until I resolved them. So I hadn’t made the extra effort to see him that I might have even a week earlier.

By Monday night, though, I couldn’t avoid Henri any longer. I was preparing dinner for him and a client at his apartment,
and he had asked me to stay and play hostess. I’d have been more enthusiastic about the additional billable hours if even
one of the invoices I’d sent to The Triumph Group so far had been paid. Maybe that was another reason I’d been avoiding him.
I was going to have to confront Henri about the unpaid bills after dinner, and I was looking forward to that experience even
less than to telling him I wasn’t spending the night. Jane had advised me to address it directly, without emotion, but then
Jane didn’t know how many nights I’d been spending in Henri’s bed.

Dinner was simmering on the stove when Henri arrived, half an hour earlier than I’d expected. He rarely made it home before
six o’clock, and it was barely half past five.

“Henri? Is that you?”

“Yes, Ellie. It’s me.” He sounded tired. Since the last time we’d made love, he was using fewer and fewer of the French endearments
that had so captivated me when I’d first met him.

“What time is your client coming?”

He frowned. “Actually, there is no client.”

My stomach sank to the cold Mexican tile beneath my feet. “No client?”

“I wanted to see you, and since you’ve been avoiding me…

He’d lied to manipulate me. Of course, my passive-aggressive approach of telling him I was too busy to go out to dinner or
a movie over the weekend wasn’t much of an improvement on his plain, old-fashioned untruth.

“Well, then, we can have a lovely, quiet dinner,” I said with an enthusiasm I was far from feeling.

“I’d like that.” He looked so vulnerable at that moment that guilt yanked my stomach back up to its normal resting place and
squeezed it tight.

“Can I get you a glass of wine?”

“Yes, please.”

The habit of fussing over an exhausted man who had just come from the office was as inbred in me as not wearing white shoes
after Labor Day or throwing my arm across the chest of the child in the passenger seat of my car when I had to slam on the
breaks. I poured Henri a glass of an impeccable chardonnay, and then I poured an even bigger one for myself. Because although
he might be exhausted, I still had to ask him when my invoices were going to get paid. I’d been living on credit in anticipation
of that income, and the limit on my Visa was fast approaching. I hadn’t even bought a dress for the Cannon Ball. I hadn’t
really allowed myself to think about how I was going to swing that.

Henri sank onto the leather sofa and I followed him, but I left a cushion between us whereas before I would have cuddled up
right beside him. The way his eyes nar-
rowed told me he noticed the difference. Funny, that had happened with me and Jim, too, although over a longer period of
time and in that instance, I’m not sure either of us noticed when it started to happen.

“I want you to tell me the truth,” Henri said, twisting the wineglass stem between his fingers. “What’s his name?”

“Whose name?” I decided to take the coy approach. Answer a question with a question.

“The other man. There must be someone, because suddenly I am like…,” he paused, “…a burden to you.”

He sounded like a hurt little boy. His pride was obviously wounded. I wondered if it made me a bad person if his jealousy
secretly thrilled me, even if I wasn’t sure I wanted to be involved with him any longer.

“There’s no other man.”

“No? Impossible. There must be someone.”

“There’s no one.” The lie fell so easily from my lips.

“Then what has happened?”

What had happened? I still thought he was incredibly sexy and charming, when he wanted to be. And then it hit me. My feelings
for Henri had started to change the moment I’d started to feel like his wife instead of his lover. And the fact that he hadn’t
paid me for my work had only contributed to my sense of being taken for granted. I felt like I was still married to Jim, only
with a French accent and without the foundation of a shared history.

I gulped my wine in three substantial swallows, and then coughed when everything from my eyes to my throat burned like fire.

“It’s…well, it’s…complicated.” I mangled the words, but the sentiment was clear. Henri’s eyes widened.

“There is someone else.”

“No, there’s not. There used to be someone else—”

“Used to be?”