With Friends Like These... (3 page)

“You wouldn’t want to leave Dad alone all night, would you?” That was a better argument than the real one, which was that I wanted to be home. There was always the chance that Mackenzie and his pals would find either the killer or the dead man’s fingers and call it a night.

“I promised to bring him whatever’s delicious. Remind me, okay?” My mother babbled, girlishly excited by the evening, or by being on the town without her husband. “I hope he still likes tarts.”

“Daddy? He loves your—”

“Lyle. Years ago, he said they were his idea of heaven, and the only snake in Paradise was sharing them. So I wrote ‘No Sharing This Time’ on the tag. You think he’ll get it? Still remember?”

I hoped so. I also hoped he was so ecstatic about Bea Pepper’s tarts that he failed to notice that her daughter had arrived uninvited and empty-handed.

“Otherwise,” my mother continued, “what could a person like me give a man like him? Dad thought of it, actually. He said my tarts were one thing Lyle couldn’t buy with all his success. I made lemon and cherry-almond and hazelnut-cream and peach-pistachio. Fifty. One for each year. But now I’m wondering: what if he’s developed a cholesterol problem, or a weight problem?”

My mother was debating herself and did not require input. The good news was that the hotel was a matter of minutes away, so her festering could not go on indefinitely.

“I’m afraid I packed them too tightly. They’re probably all crumbled. If that messenger drove as wildly as some I’ve seen…I put cardboard between the layers, but…”

The radio announcer spluttered something about a traffic jam due to a three-alarm fire. It didn’t seem possible that anything could burn in this downpour, but weather was my mother’s specialty, not mine. I listened carefully, wanting to detour around it, if necessary.

“And what about the tin?” my mother asked her invisible auditor. “Did it seem sick? I thought it was funny in the store, but now…”

The tin the messenger had delivered was enormous and black, with silver lettering on its side that said over the hill. Its main failing was its clichéd predictability, but I didn’t tell her that. I was too busy listening. It seemed the fire was just outside the city, in Cheltenham. No problem. And then the location registered.

“The Cavanaugh Hotel had a second life and became something of a local landmark during Prohibition, and will be remembered for…”

“Oh, no!” I said. “The hotel!”

“Here? We’re there?” my mother asked.

I shook my head. The Cavanaugh Hotel was where Philly Prep was holding its Senior Prom at the very end of May. Had been going to hold. Could you rebuild a massive Victorian in ten weeks?

I knew the answer without asking. I also knew the amount of trouble we were going to have finding an alternate site. Poor kids. Between weddings, graduation parties, and proms, nothing suitable would be left to rent.

“You’re right! We are here!” my mother said with audible delight. And we were, to my surprise. There was even a parking spot not too far from the entry to The Boarding House.

I imagined the building without green awnings and planter boxes filled with forced azalea bushes. I pictured men in handlebar mustaches and muddy boots, and stenographers wearing shields to protect the cuffs of their shirtwaists. Lyle’s parents, perhaps, along with his aunt Hattie, who, my mother had explained, had raised him after her brother and his wife both died.

There had been an awful lot of loss in Lyle Zacharias’s life, and I could understand my parents’ decision to accept his invitation despite their sad associations with the man.

* * *

The economics of both The Boarding House’s guests and its decor had been upped several social stratifications since its original days. As soon as we opened the door, the sounds of people celebrating their enormous good fortune in having been born themselves flooded us. They were not immediately visible. Instead, we faced a bald and jovial man who sat at a minuscule mahogany desk which constituted the reception area. My mother launched into a lengthy overexplanation of why she wasn’t going to sleep in her room. The man at the desk didn’t care, but he let her anxious apologies run their course, and then he handed her an enormous brass tag and said to feel free. Whatever. He smiled ever more broadly.

In the parlor to our right, the cheery group burst into laughter, then someone made a toast to Lyle and to birthdays in general. “What, after all, is the alternative?” I heard. The decor, although of a long-ago style, was polished and glowing: dark woods, inlaid or waxed tabletops, garnet velvet upholstery, and richly patterned carpets.

The guests, however, were exceptionally now, giving off so much self-assured heat that I knew without looking that all their teeth had been fixed to perfection, their hair lovingly arranged, their bodies toned, their wardrobes brilliantly conceived. I was also sure without checking that these were the TV outlanders from the Big Apple, and I immediately became a proper hick and felt inferior and defensive.

“Look!” my mother whispered. “That one, there, by the fireplace. That’s Dr. Sazarac.”

“Your doctor’s here?”

Her laugh was incredulous. “Not my doctor! He’s the doctor on Second Generation.”

He was fiftyish and pink-skinned, properly topped with silver hair. Give me a break.

My mother plunged a lamb-covered elbow into my side. “His real name is McCoy. Shepard, but they call him The Real.”

“Who was the Real McCoy?” I asked.

She waved away my question. “He’s single again,” she hissed. “I read about his divorce in Parade magazine.”

“He’d make a better date for you than for me!” Except, of course, she was married and I was not, and that was the sum of it to her.

A woman with a full-length mink coat and none of my mother’s fur qualms swept into the vestibule along with a blast of cold air.

Like peasants, my mother and I automatically stepped back, allowing the grande dame free passage. My mother mouthed the woman’s name in my direction. I didn’t catch it, and I didn’t care. Another character from Second Generation. “Why don’t we get rid of our coats and join the other guests?” I quietly suggested. “Let’s at least use our room as a closet.”

She looked troubled. “Mother,” I whispered. The fur lady, whose perfumed aura was nearly as dense as her mink, registered. “Stop gaping. You’re Lyle’s guest as much as she is.”

“I know I am. What are you talking about?”

“You look so worried, I thought…if it’s not that, then what’s bothering you?”

“My tarts. Where do you think they are?”

I looked to the concierge, but he had bustled off with the mink lady. There did not seem to be a table, as for a wedding, with gifts on it. The out-of-towners making merry in the living room had probably left their offerings upstairs, and in-towners were arriving slowly.

“What if they never got here?” she whispered. “What if they’re in a warm place? There’s whipped cream on some of them. If they sit out for too long in a heated… How could I have let your father talk me into such a troublesome gift?”

My mother’s competence had dissolved in the presence of semicelebrities. I half expected her to get the vapors, or to curtsy for the TV contingent. I shook my head and guided her around and behind the staircase. Somewhere there had to be a kitchen, and I was willing to bet Mrs. Pepper’s tarts were in that same somewhere.

We went through open double doors that led into a bright and modern, mildly chaotic kitchen. A young and harried-looking man scooped frilly lettuce—a small mountain of it—into enormous plastic containers. “Oh, God!” he kept saying. Then, with a wave to us, he left the room.

There was evidence of prior chopping, peeling, and slicing all over the counters, but only one other worker visible; a pudgy figure in white bent over the sink.

The Boarding House had opened for business only a short while ago, and despite rave reviews for the rooms and the restaurant, Lyle’s party was probably the biggest crowd and challenge of the hotel’s short career. The fragrance of tension was almost as strong as the more delicate aromas filling the room.

My mother knocked on the door frame. The figure at the sink didn’t budge.

My mother moved closer. “Excuse me,” she trilled like dowagers in Thirties movies. “Hate to bother you, but—”

The dishwasher remained with back to us, but turned off the water. I heard humming and a shh-bump beat, which I traced to small earphones attached to a yellow Walkman sitting on the windowsill.

“—I had a large tin messengered here today—” my mother continued.

“Can’t hear you,” I said.

My mother opened a few throttles in her throat. “I wonder,” she bellowed, “whether they arrived and whether they’re being refrigerated and—”

“Mom, don’t shout! There are earplugs in—”

Of course my mother didn’t hear me. She was shouting too loudly. “Some of them have cream,” she bellowed. “They could go bad!”

Smack in the middle of this last nonexchange, the person at the sink chose to remove the plugs and turn around. She—because it was now clear the round figure was female and not a man with glandular problems—opened her eyes and mouth extra wide, and screamed.

I couldn’t blame her, really. There was a strange woman shouting at her, after all.

She put a hand to her chest. Below the turquoise bandanna tied around her hair, her skin looked blanched with fear, and a spray of freckles on her cheeks stood out like gold sequins.

“Why are you screaming?” My mother sounded truly baffled by the girl’s excesses.

The young woman closed her mouth and swallowed whatever noisemaking might have been left. “Sorry,” she said, which seemed pretty inappropriate to me since she had done nothing but be frightened. Further proof of my mother’s powers.

“I was saying that I messengered a tin today. For Mr. Zacharias. But—”

The kitchen door swung again and a voice demanded information even before its owner was fully in the room. “Whatever is going on here? We have guests! What kind of place is this? Who screamed? Who are all of you? Why aren’t you wearing aprons?” This was barked out in the surprisingly strong voice of a woman who looked as if her face had been cross-hatched before it was put in to rise. Small eyes under baggy, crepey overhangs inspected the three of us. “Well?” she demanded. “Answer me.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” the dishwasher said. “I screamed because I was startled.”

The old woman hmmphed, as if that were a suspect alibi. “Who are you?” she asked.

“Lizzie, ma’am.”

We were in a time warp, back to The Boarding House’s roots by way of Dickens. The steamy kitchen, the imperious old woman, and Lizzie, the cowering kitchenmaid. Surely, a little lame boy in a cap would soon hobble in.

“You work here?” the old woman asked.

“Yes’m. Catering. Food preparation.” Her turquoise bandanna slipped forward, down onto her forehead, and she pulled it off. Frizzy carrot-colored hair sprang free.

“What about you?” The old woman now faced me, hooded eyes like a bird of prey’s. “Where’s your apron? What’s your name?”

“My—I—” I sounded just like Lizzie. “Pepper. Mandy. I don’t work here, I’m one of the…” But I wasn’t really one of the guests. I spluttered a few more words but my mouth couldn’t work properly while my mind was stuck on the really relevant issue: was I so inappropriately dressed that I looked like a waitress or the kitchen staff instead of a partygoer?

“Sorry for the noise,” my mother told the old woman. “Hope it didn’t upset anybody out there, but it was all my fault. I scared her. Not on purpose, of course.”

“I know you,” the old woman told my mother. She cranked her head in my direction, like a wrinkled hawk, then swiveled it back to my mother. “You a Pepper, too? I once knew a family of Peppers. Way back.”

“Aunt Hattie,” my mother said. “I should have recognized you. Mandy, this is Lyle’s aunt, Hattie Zacharias.” I smiled and shook her hand. It was dry and brittle, all bird bones.

Aunt Hattie redirected her glare at Lizzie. “You another of them? Another Pepper? You look familiar, too.” She squinted and turned her head to view Lizzie sideways.

Lizzie shook her head. “My name’s Chapman,” she said. “My dad and I own this place. I’m the one who talked with you on the phone, Miss Zacharias. About the reservations and menu and all.” She grinned, showing broad teeth with a wide gap between the front two.

“I was trying to find out about the tarts I sent over. I baked fifty of them for Lyle,” my mother told Aunt Hattie, who nodded, as if that degree of homage were only to be expected. “Couldn’t think of what else he could possibly want or need.” She laughed nervously, still worried about her gift. “They probably need to be refrig—” At what seemed the same moment, we all saw the enormous tin with its funereal silver on black Over the Hill motto and we gravitated toward it.

On top, a taped-on oversized tag said: FOR LYLE’S OLD TASTEBUDS ONLY. NO SHARING THIS TIME.

My mother carefully lifted the lid to inspect the contents. “Oh, dear,” she said.

“Something’s gone bad?”

“That messenger must have jostled it. Some of the edges are cracked.” She tsked and shook her head and pursed her mouth, waiting.

“They’re beautiful, Mom.”

“Better than anybody in my class at culinary school could have done,” Lizzie said. “They look ready for a photo spread.” My mother was visibly heartened by praise from a professional.

“Do you think they should go into the—”

“There’s really no room just now,” Lizzie said. “Later, for sure, after dinner. Meanwhile, if you’d like, I can put them outside. There’s a small overhang and I think the tin would stay dry, although the rain’s awfully strong.”

“Flash floods in Paoli,” my mother said. “We’d better keep it inside.”

“You here, Aunt Hat?” Once again the voice preceded the actual entry. Maybe it was a genetic trait in that family.

The tall man who entered was nothing at all like what I’d expected. I’d anticipated a similarity with his friends in the front parlor, an effortless slickness. Styled hair, silk suit.

But what I saw was a man who looked as if he’d been working hard to smooth down his rough edges. Lyle Zacharias was completely bald, which made his black, piercing eyes beneath heavy brows even more compelling. His smile was charming, complicated, and half hidden in a thick beard. He looked as if his dark hair had fallen down inside his skull and was exiting via his chin.