With Friends Like These... (17 page)

“I baked cookies for you,” my mother said. I cringed, waiting for a horrible showdown and accusations, a replay of what Mackenzie had told me, but Hattie seemed too stunned or grief-stricken to connect yesterday’s baked goods with today’s. At least not openly. Yesterday, she had bragged to me about her ability to remember everything. Apparently, there had been some major changes overnight.

Hattie smiled, rather weakly, and when my mother opened the tin and offered the contents to her, she delicately extracted one, a swirl of chocolate and vanilla strips whose kin had brightened many of the lunch boxes of my childhood.

“Very pretty, Bea.” Hattie kept the cookie in her hand the entire time we were there. It never visited the neighborhood of her mouth. Maybe her memory wasn’t shot, after all.

A flabby woman with thin pinkish hair introduced herself. “I’m Alice,” she said with a peculiar animation that was first cousin to hysteria. “A neighbor and dear friend. Helping out in this time of grief, so let me make you comfortable.” She proceeded to bustle around making intrusive efforts at hospitality, offering us our cookies and repeatedly urging the housekeeper, Maria, who looked offended by her directives, to bring us coffee or tea, no matter that we both declined the offer.

“The most perfect boy who ever lived,” Hattie said. We seemed to have arrived in the middle of a discussion. “I cannot believe he’s gone.”

“Always was an angel,” Alice said. “And now he’s one for real.”

“Kind to everyone,” Hattie said. “Generous to a fault.”

Perhaps we hadn’t interrupted anything except a never-ending Lylesong in two-part harmony.

“A saint,” Alice said.

“Sometimes he was too good. People took advantage,” Hattie said. “Expected too much, too often.”

The leeches? I wondered. Alice tsked and shook her head. Maria the housekeeper sulked. I checked my watch.

“Bright as can be from day one,” Hattie said.

“And quite the athlete, too,” Alice added.

“And of course, so talented in his writing,” my mother said.

I couldn’t endure the round-robin, which felt programmed and potentially interminable. I stood up and walked to the large picture window.

“The shame was, Ace of Hearts made him famous, and he got so involved in producing, he never really wrote again,” Hattie said from behind me.

“Well, this way he was more of a Renaissance man,” my exceptionally gracious mother said. I wished Mackenzie were here—I wished the entire force were here to observe her and dispel any lingering questions about her innocence.

While the three women began a new cycle of competitive praise, I looked out over the river. Although the city of Camden on the other side is not often listed as a scenic wonder, it does have a skyline, and the Delaware flowed in front of it, reflecting its night lights. It wasn’t half bad. The most perfect boy who ever lived had done well by his auntie.

“He was the best. The best,” Hattie repeated. Her criteria were simple. If something involved Lyle, it was the best. Period. “I would have done anything for him, so how can I still be alive while he’s—he’s—”

My mother made comforting noises and Alice uttered grating homilies about the good dying young, and I felt useless and awkward and tried to concentrate on the wall that adjoined the picture window, a montage shrine to the late Lyle Zacharias.

My mother had a similar wall in Boca Raton, and I had spotted the beginnings of one at Beth’s house. Apparently, the real umbilical cord is strung between the delivery and dark rooms.

There were Kodak moments of Lyle on a bear rug and on a pony, dressed for baseball, tennis, swimming, and high school graduation; with a toothy prom date in taffeta, with a grin a mile wide under the marquee of the theatre that had premiered Ace of Hearts. There was a snap of a blurred trio of happy faces in matching jackets—Wiley-Riley and Lyle—and there was a picture of boyish Richard Quinn and Lyle grinning nervously from behind matching wooden desks. There were travel snaps: Lyle and Hattie in the surf, on a mountain with a small Asian guide, on board a raft in a dark jungly setting, at a Thanksgiving gathering.

There was a remarkable absence of females, except, of course, for Hattie. I searched for someone who might be my father’s foster sister, but couldn’t find a likely subject. Couldn’t find Sybil, either. Couldn’t find Tiffany.

It was Lyle she cared about and for. Period. Even Reed was barely present, and always a sidekick, never the real subject of the photo.

The housekeeper, urged on by Alice, offered me a cup of coffee for the third time in perhaps seven minutes. She looked desperate to end this impasse, so I accepted the flower-sprigged, nearly transparent cup. I grappled with its too-small handle, and as this seemed a particularly inappropriate time to destroy anything else Hattie cherished, I looked for a place to put it down.

I was standing next to a table with a display-case top. Not a suitable coffee-cup rest, but intriguing in its contents’ brilliant colors and convoluted shapes. I had expected to see bibelots, man-made treasures. Instead, the glass covered a purple butterfly, an orange and black shedded snakeskin, a fern frond, two small pressed flowers, a red-armored beetle, a large gray-green pod, a thickly veined leaf, a bird’s wing that varied from scarlet to buttercup to azure, a chambered nautilus shell. I leaned close and read a tiny brass plaque: treasures collected by Harriet zacharias.

I turned and was surprised to find Hattie watching me appraisingly. “Wonderful,” I murmured.

She nodded agreement. “When I was a girl, I dreamed of two things. First, I wanted to be a naturalist, but of course, girls didn’t get to do such things in my day. The closest I came was working at the Academy of Natural Sciences from the time I received my Secretarial Certificate until…” She paused and bit at her lips. “After Ace of Hearts, I was able to retire.” She sighed and pressed a handkerchief to her mouth.

So she had saved the little orphaned nephew, and then he had saved her.

“What was the second thing, Hattie?” Alice asked, much too brightly, as if she were the host of an afternoon talk show. “You said you’d always wanted two things,” she prompted.

“To travel.” Hattie answered so softly I had trouble hearing her. “But of course, once I had a little boy to raise, I couldn’t. When Lyle was five, he said, ‘Aunt Hattie, when I grow up, I’m going to send you all over the world. Every place you ever wanted to go.’ And he did. Even back then, when Lyle said he was going to do something, he really meant it. I’ve never doubted his word once.”

She suddenly sobbed, then wiped at her eyes while Alice annoyingly repeated, “There, there, mustn’t get riled.” Alice had a lot of undeserved self-confidence and was never at a loss for words, although the words she found were clichéd, meaningless, and irritating.

My mother made sympathetic clucks and held Hattie’s free hand. The housekeeper stood in the doorway to the kitchen, studying us impassively.

Hattie resumed her one song. “Such a good boy and such a good man,” she said.

“Lyle was too good to live, is what I say,” Alice added, just in case Hattie wasn’t feeling bad enough already.

Hattie sobbed into her handkerchief.

“Wasn’t Mr. Lyle just the kindest man who ever lived, Maria?” Alice persisted.

“Yesss,” Maria said sibilantly, her face sullen.

“Sound a little more like you mean it!” Alice laughed, then turned to us and rolled her eyes. “The man was a prince!”

“Mr. Lyle he was a prince,” Maria said with no conviction. Her expression remained as impassive as it had been since we entered.

“How could this have happened?” Hattie sobbed.

I awaited the next blow, Hattie’s theory of how, indeed, it had happened. But instead of pointing at my mother and yelling “
J
’accuse,” Hattie looked toward the ceiling. “It’s that girl!” Her voice cracked with emotion. “It’s all her fault!”

“What girl?” Alice asked.

Hattie waved her away. “You weren’t even there last night.” And then I knew which girl Hattie meant, and I wondered why she was again fixated on poor Lizzie.

And then I wondered why the police weren’t.

And then I was ashamed of myself all over again. The young chef was as ludicrous a killer as my mother was. The Boarding House was her business. She’d been flushed with creating a successful party and with what it could mean for her future.

Of course she had behaved bizarrely…

But again I argued myself down. Something might be neurologically or emotionally wrong, but that wasn’t the same as having either a motive or the temperament to murder and self-destruct.

Alice looked mortified, either about being excluded last night or about Hattie’s reminder of the same just now.

Facing me across the room, a crimson and gold mask, vaguely Indonesian, contorted in confusion and pain. It seemed to capture, in one ambiguous expression, the sadness, unfairness, and waste of Lyle Zacharias’s death.

Hattie saw me studying it. “We bought that in Bali. The artist called her the Queen of Hearts. Not like in our playing cards, but like in love and heartache.” She sighed, heavily.

“Take some comfort,” my mother said sympathetically, “that at the end he was surrounded by his friends, the people closest to him on earth.”

Alice snorted. “With friends like that, who needs enemies?” Her face flushed with excitement, as if she’d invented the expression that very moment. “I’ve known that boy from the time he was a toddler, and the one thing wrong with him was that he was too trusting. Thought everybody meant him well. It was his fatal flaw, I’d say. Right up to that last day.”

“Alice,” Hattie said. “Please.”

“Well, it’s no more than the truth, and I for one am
sorry
he was so eager to see them all again. Let sleeping dogs lie, I say.”

Was Alice truly Hattie’s friend, or merely a grief vulture who fed on misery? Maybe Hattie, ill with mourning, lacked the energy to throw her out of the apartment.

“Couldn’t pick friends, couldn’t pick wives,” Alice said. “Starting with that little hippie girl—”

I saw my mother’s spine straighten. So, apparently, did Hattie.

“Alice!” she said sharply. “Bea was related to Cynthia. Cynthia was a very nice girl. And pretty. Reminded me of Maureen O’Hara.”

“Did I even hint that she wasn’t nice or pretty?” Alice asked with a fake smile. “She was an angel. But surely you’ll agree that Lyle was unlucky to have his child—”

“That was not Lyle’s child.” Hattie turned to my mother, who had been watching the two women as if they were a sporting event. “I wonder what became of that girl,” she said. “A bad seed, if you ask me.”

“No, just a baby,” my mother murmured. “The accident must be a terrible burden to bear. I hope she turned out all right.”

“So you haven’t stayed in touch, then?” Hattie asked.

My mother shook her head. “I’m ashamed to say we wouldn’t know Betsy if we bumped into her on the street.”

Hattie raised her eyebrows and looked as if she had more to say, but Alice pushed back into the conversation. “All I mean is that Lyle’s own flesh and blood is a different breed of cat. Reed is certainly not the kind to pick up a pistol and—”

“Alice!” This time Hattie’s voice was nearly a growl.

“I didn’t mean—” Alice looked upset for a moment, but she had a quick recovery time. “Then how about his other wives? You’d agree that they were not lucky choices, wouldn’t you?”

Hattie glared wordlessly.

“All right! Not another word,” Alice said. “My lips are sealed.” And she made a motion—I could have predicted it—of zipping her mouth shut. Only the zipper broke immediately. “Wasn’t that coffee delicious?” she chirped. “Maria is the best coffee person in the city!”

Maria glowered. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with my cup.

“Mrs. Pepper and her daughter are ready for refills,” Alice said. “Do you think that might be possible, Maria?”

What I thought might be possible was hurling Alice out the window if all the rest of us cooperated in the effort. If we got our angle and swing right, she might even sail all the way into the river. Become part of the view. “None for me,” I said.

“Oh, my! The time,” my mother exclaimed.

“You can’t leave yet!” Hattie looked alarmed and somewhat put out.

Accusation time at last. I tried to avert it, tried to hurry my mother by talking right over her voice, offering my sympathy again and asking for my coat.

“Please, don’t,” Hattie said, teary-eyed. I thought her misery must at least partially be fear of being alone with Alice.

“I promised Mandy, you see,” my mother said.

Maybe this sort of thing went on all the time. Maybe my social life was always the mainstay of her conversation. But she was usually a thousand miles south of Philadelphia, so at least I normally couldn’t hear it.

“She has a…a prior commitment, you understand,” my mother insisted on saying as I scrambled into my coat.

Given their emotional states, I don’t know how my mother expected them to react to her coy euphemism, but I knew how I had, and, feeling like a great oafish toddler, I tugged at her sleeve.

Hattie stood up, the cashmere throw falling around her feet as she lurched forward and clutched my mother’s coat, and the slightly dazed, mostly benign expression she’d worn hardened so that her wrinkled old face was more crazed and crackled than ever. “You’re not really leaving, though, are you?” she asked.

“Well, as I explained, Mandy—”

“I mean back to Florida.” The hand clutching my mother’s coat had long nails painted an incongruous scarlet. It reminded me of a tropical bird’s foot.

I couldn’t decide if she was hostile, or angry, or if her cracked vocal cords were in need of oiling. But there was a note of urgency that seemed misplaced.

“You mean right away?” my mother spluttered. “We meant to, well, the tickets were for…but you know, Gilbert had a little accident, his foot, and we can’t.…” Her words accelerated, one falling on top of the other. She was afraid she wasn’t being kind enough, sensitive enough. “Besides, I wouldn’t leave now, not until after the… I’ll be here. I’ll come visit you again, too, if you like.”