A Rather Curious Engagement (28 page)

“Ooh, what is it?” one of the wives cried.

I shot a look at Jeremy, who appeared genuinely shocked, and shook his head. We’d both agreed that we would not mention the Lion to anyone we knew, not yet. I glanced over at Rupert, Jeremy’s junior associate, who seemed embarrassed. Had Lydia wheedled something out of him? But Rupert always looked mortified whenever he sensed trouble, whether or not he’d caused it.

“Jeremy’s working on an ‘investigation’ of some sort,” Bertie said, as if he thought it were all great fun. “But he won’t tell me what. Top secret, and all.”

“Is it a murder? A robbery? Do tell!” one of the women cried out.

“What’s that?” asked the green-eyed woman, turning to Jeremy. “Darling, you haven’t become some sort of policeman, have you?” They all laughed uproariously.

“Jeremy a copper!”

“Maybe he’s an international spy!”

Maybe he’s joined MI6!”

I tried to tell myself that this was just good-natured ribbing, prompted by curiosity and a bit of pique that they had somehow been excluded. Jeremy must have sensed this, too, because I could see him searching for a way not to snub his friends while at the same time telling them to mind their own business.

Jeremy cleared his throat. “It’s really just another inheritance dispute. Trying to help someone recover a lost item from an estate.”

“Well, your girl here must know all about
that
sort of thing!” one of the men said.

“If you can suspend your summer vacation to work on that, then perhaps you can look into that little matter in Frankfurt I was telling you about,” Harold said, looking peevish.

“From what Rupert tells me, it’s coming along fine,” Jeremy replied.

“But you’re back in London to stay now, right?” someone asked, confused.

“No, no,” Bertie said, “he’s taking a gap summer. Like in school. We only hope that it doesn’t turn into a gap year and a gap life, and we never see him again.”

One of the women glanced slyly at Lydia and then said, “Jeremy, I heard you’re going off on a yacht to explore your soul and come up with a Five-Year Plan.”

“Good God! Like Stalin?” somebody asked, and they all roared.

“Huh!” said the older man next to me, who looked up from studying his plate. “Well, it’s all very well to enjoy one’s leisure, but, Jeremy, a serious fellow like you wouldn’t want to make a lifestyle of it. People who go off to ‘find themselves’ usually find themselves bloody bored!”

The others nodded in agreement. I had a sudden flash of insight, as I looked at their stricken faces. They were terrified. Something was happening, some little thread was being tugged out of their crowd and they were afraid the whole thing might come undone. As long as everybody was doing pretty much the same thing, then nobody was getting ahead, and nobody was falling behind. I glanced at Jeremy, who looked embarrassed. I couldn’t imagine what Lydia thought she’d gain by instigating this.

Until afterwards—when we took coffee and dessert in the living room. Most of the men wandered off to a billiard table in the back of the duplex. Harold and Rupert had pinned Jeremy in a corner and were talking urgently to him, and Jeremy’s face took on a slightly perturbed expression that lingered even after the game ended, and the men deigned to rejoin the ladies.

I had been listening with dutiful attentiveness to one of the women who was very, very pregnant, and who advised me that if I was contemplating having children, then the thing to do was to have them all at once, one right after the other, no matter what people said about spacing them apart.

“It makes no difference to the kids if you space them out,” she said positively. “So you may as well get it all done, just like a dog with a litter.”

Jeremy came over to me and said, “Penny, I think we’d better be going. We have an early start tomorrow.” Good, I thought wearily. By tomorrow we’ll be back at the Riviera, back on the case.

“It’s raining,” Jeremy noted. “I’ll go get the car.” We’d had to put it in a car park down the street. “You wait here,” he said, “and I’ll phone you when I’m right in front of the house.”

I went upstairs again in search of the “ladies’ loo” which was a powder room with a big mirror and purple chairs, and a lockable door that led to a private water-closet with a toilet and its own sink. Both rooms were empty. But just after I’d washed my hands and was drying them on a purple towel, I heard Lydia and a couple of other women come into the adjacent powder room.

“So?” Lydia said cunningly. “What do you think?”

“She’s cute!” one of them said, as if to deliberately stick it to Lydia.

“Jeremy always liked redheads, didn’t he?” said another. Somebody giggled.

“I think she’s just charming,” Lydia said firmly, “but I have to say, I do worry about the influence she’s had on him. Do you know he simply walked out of the office one day and never came back?
She’s
the one who’s making him take a gap year!”

“Why?” someone asked.

“Can’t say, really. But people think it’s a bad move. Jeremy’s a company man at heart; so, without a sound business plan, well . . .”

“He’ll come out of it,” another woman said. “He’s always been so sensible.”

Lydia said in a low, conspiratorial tone, “Well, the fact is, he’s losing clients. Some will wait for him to see the light, but some are gone for good!”

“Doesn’t
she
care about his career?” someone asked, as if she’d been cued by Lydia.

“She took the lion’s share of the estate right out from under his nose,” Lydia said in a confidential tone. There was a general murmur of disapproval.

“Well, American girls certainly know what they want and they know how to get it!” one woman declared, as if she half-admired that sort of bitchiness.

“Oh, I like her!” somebody replied, and I felt a little better. Until I realized that was Lydia again. “It’s just that she’s all wrong for Jeremy, and I
worry
, that’s all.”

At this particular inopportune moment, my cell phone rang. Loud. They all stopped talking. Then there was furtive whispering and rustling, as some of them quickly slipped out the door so I wouldn’t see that they’d been part of it. Having been “outed” in this way, I walked into the powder room, and took the call.

“Penny?” Jeremy said. “I’m out in front.”

“Hi, Jeremy,” I said. I smiled brightly. “What charming friends you have,” I continued, while beaming at them all. “Won’t we miss them when we’re out there on our yacht? Yes, of course, darling, I’m on my way.”

You could have heard a pin drop. I certainly heard a few gasps. They all froze.

I hung up and slipped the phone in my purse even as Jeremy was still saying, “What on earth—?”

“Cheers!” I said to the gals, and waltzed out.

Jeremy had the rental car waiting as if he were the driver in a bank robbery requiring a hasty getaway. I raced through the rain-drops and ducked into the car.

“Well?” he asked after I’d closed the door and we roared off.

“Oh, nothing much,” I said. “Just Lydia trying to organize the I-Hate-Jeremy’s-New-Girl Club.”

Jeremy sighed heavily. “It won’t last,” he said gloomily. “They do that with everybody’s new girlfriend.”

“Do they always make fun of people who want to do something different with their lives?” I asked. Jeremy grinned.

“Can’t you tell garden-variety envy when you hear it?” he asked. Then he said, very seriously, “Look, I wish we hadn’t had to come back to London, but we did, and it looks as if there really is trouble going on with a client in Frankfurt. I have to go there for a couple of days and straighten it out.”

“So, who invited the guys from your office?” I said. “Don’t tell me, let me guess.”

“I’ve been getting frantic e-mails and phone messages from that client in Frankfurt all along,” Jeremy said. “This would have come to a crisis, with or without the party.”

“You never told me that,” I said.

“Well, I didn’t want to spoil our fun, did I? Been trying to hold them off without bothering you about it. I just can’t ‘phone it in’ anymore. Harold and Rupert have been doing us a great many favors all along, you know, fielding all those calls and acting as a filter for us,” Jeremy was saying defensively. “I can’t very well tell them that I’m too busy working for strangers, or gazing into my navel trying to contemplate the true meaning of life.” I sat there quietly, trying to comprehend what had been going on tonight.

“Jeremy, are you losing clients because of me?” I asked.

“No, of course not,” he said. “Oh, some will go off in a huff, but frankly those are the ones I’d just as soon see the back of. No, what concerns me is more basic. I mean, exactly who am I supposed to be, anyway? Some bloke on permanent vacation? Are we going to spend the rest of our lives chasing after yacht-jackers or antiques thieves, at the behest of some senile old Count? What kind of a life is that for a man? Have you ever seen what Private Investigators look like after years of doing that sort of slogging? What’s next, tailing some guy’s wife who’s having an affair?”

So, I thought. Lydia’s arrows had met their mark, after all. “We’re not a PI firm,” I reminded him. “We are dealing specifically with a missing antique. With your international legal expertise and my art research experience—those were your words, remember? This is a test case. If we decide to continue doing this line of work afterwards, we can build a good client list of people dealing with the settling of estates, auction houses, museums, etc. It’s an experiment, Jeremy. Nothing is set in stone. But you have to try different things before you know what you want.”

“You’re used to this nomadic, seat-of-your-pants way of doing things,” Jeremy said. “I admire you for it. I just don’t know if I could make a good partner for you, Pen.” He looked really, truly concerned.

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Are you the real Jeremy, or the clone? You sound like the clone. Because the real Jeremy would never let envious chatter get him down. Come to that, who told Lydia about our Plan?”

“I certainly didn’t,” he said, a bit testily.

“Maybe she picked up the extension that time we talked on the phone and she was in your apartment,” I said. At the look on his face, I knew that he realized this could be a distinct possibility. But he wouldn’t admit it.

“Oh, God, Penny,” Jeremy said, sounding irritated. “You see Lydia behind every tree and under every rock. Well, suppose she did. What’s the difference?”

I turned and faced him squarely, feeling ornery. “The difference, as I’ve been telling you all along, is that she knows how to ring your bells and push your buttons,” I said. “So how long are you going to let her keep doing this to you, and, therefore, to us?”

“It’s really got nothing to do with you—” he mumbled, as if this would reassure me.

“That’s just the problem!” I exclaimed. “She yanks you right back into the past, where she knows I can’t follow. Meanwhile, I’m trying to create a future for us. But you can’t keep going back and forth, you know. At some point you have to pick which fork in the road you want, and go with it. It’s called commitment, Bub.”

Jeremy had that stunned, stricken look a guy gets when a woman reads him the riot act. For a moment he didn’t speak or even make a sound. Then, he regrouped.

“There’s no point in arguing,” he said. “I have to go sort out Frankfurt.”

“We’re supposed to check on the townhouse tomorrow,” I reminded him. “It won’t be ready, but we should make sure it’s progressing as it should.”

“Well,” Jeremy said, “I guess you’ll have to do without me.”

It had sounded pretty ominous when he said it, and it felt even worse the next day when Jeremy flew out to Frankfurt and I had to "do without” him.

When the taxi arrived to take him to the airport, and he waved goodbye, I had the feeling that, although he’d return, I would never again see my buddy, my partner, the one who wanted to explore what the world had to offer before buckling back down in a law firm again.

I didn’t like the way he’d ridiculed his own soul-searching. It was one thing if a couple of fuddy-duddy friends made jokes; quite another if he let it deter and dishearten him. But perhaps the men had said even more negative things to him over their cigars and brandy, to make him come away feeling foolish about it. At any rate, I felt I ought to face the fact that when Jeremy came back from Frankfurt, he might already have gone right back to his old life again. And it might very well be where he wanted to be.

I told myself, fine, I’ll do it alone. I’ll keep researching the Beethoven Lion all by myself, without that man. After all, I’d spent my entire working life doing research without the help of some guy, right? And I’d whip that townhouse into shape, too, because Jeremy wasn’t the sort of fellow who functioned well with bits of plaster falling on his head. And, fine, if I had to, I’d go into business all by myself. And fend off all those crazies all by myself. And go back to cooking dinner all by myself . . .

But, damn it. I missed that pain-in-the-ass man, and his dumb jokes, and the fun we’d had doing the research together. And what good was
Penelope’s Dream
if it turned out that it was no longer Jeremy’s Dream?

At any rate, Jeremy was stuck in meetings for days, and just when he was scheduled to return, he sent me a cryptic e-mail:
This is going to take longer than I thought. Going to have to miss dinner with your folks. Sorry, please give them my apologies. Jeremy.

Well, I couldn’t just slog around London feeling sad. So, I went over to the townhouse to check in with the workmen, and we figured out all kinds of complicated stuff about flooring and windows and security systems. Then Claude sent an e-mail saying that the yacht was all repaired and refueled and spruced up and ready to go. Did I think we’d be using it this week? I told him I’d have to get back to him.

At suppertime I locked up and went out to meet my parents for dinner on their last night in London. They weren’t the least bit offended that Jeremy had to rush off to Frankfurt. They had been enjoying their vacation, but were ready to go home.