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Authors: Ellen Pall

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“Then you're in favor of more glee in men?”
Yes, evidently she did believe they should. “Why not?” she said weakly.
“Why not indeed?”
Snow
“It is the starved imagination,” E. M. Forster wrote, “not the well-
nourished, that is afraid.”
Whether Juliet had been nourished by what she had soaked up in the yeasty creative vat of the poetry slam the night before, or simply because her characters were at long last starting to behave, she found herself sitting down at her desk on Thursday morning with no apprehensiveness and worked easily through the day. Sir James Clendinning had traveled up to town to refurbish his sober wardrobe, an errand he undertook annually in a spirit of godly respect for the temple of his soul. He happened to overhear, in the smoking room of his club (Sir James's god said nothing against smoking), an interchange suggesting to him that a penniless young puppy named Charles Vizor, an army captain, was head over ears in love with Selena Walkingshaw. Sir James had not meant to eavesdrop, and he naturally removed himself from his chance listening post as soon as discretion would allow, but the incident set him thinking as he strolled out into—Strolled out into—
It was July in “A Christian Gentleman,” and Juliet stopped dead. What would a gentleman up in London stroll out into in July of 1813? She put her pen down, swiveled her chair around, and gazed absently out the window. The difficulty of imagining one kind of weather while enduring another never failed to surprise her. Outside
her office, the sky over Riverside Park, so blue only yesterday, was leaden. A storm system over the Great Lakes was moving toward the city; on WNYC that morning, the forecast had been for snow—light snow starting tonight and falling heavily by tomorrow.
Juliet sighed and turned back to her desk. Whatever the temperature, Sir James would certainly have strolled out into a miasma of ghastly odors, the warmth of the season evoking the maximum possible stench from the open sewers flowing everywhere through the metropolis. Wondering how to put this delicately, she picked up her pen.
 
 
Some hours later, as she crossed the street to fetch Ada and take
her to
The Phantom of the Opera,
Juliet doubtfully checked the sky. Listening to the news while she had been dressing, she had heard the word “blizzard” being excitedly tossed about. Yet the snow had stopped, and a crescent moon shone dully behind a thin veil of cloud.
Still, she would make a point of mentioning the forecast to her elderly date, who planned, Juliet knew, to attend another poetry slam tomorrow.
“Blizzard! Pff!” said the lady airily, when Juliet had delivered her warning. She flung one end of a gold lamé stole around her shoulders, picked up a matching gold clutch, and shoved it under her arm. “I could tell them about blizzards!”
And off they went on another long and somewhat exhausting expedition. By the time they got home (having taken in the show, supper at Sardi's, and a slightly queasy-making nightcap in the revolving cocktail lounge at the top of the Marriott), the sky was thickly overcast and snow was falling fast. Juliet was still worried about “A Christian Gentleman”—very worried—and yet she once again went to bed in a pretty contented frame of mind.
Phantom
had not been
to her taste, but Ada Caffrey rather was. The woman was indefatigable. She seemed to have no idea she was eighty-four. Which was, in some respects, distressing—there had been a painful interlude this evening when she attempted to pick up a fiftyish theater usher—but in most ways delightful. From her poems and the stories she told, Juliet had concluded that Ada Caffrey, like Ulysses, had drunk life to the lees. The fact that she had done most of her drinking in and around Espyville, New York, and not—as would have seemed more proportionate to her interests and appetites—Manhattan, Paris, or Hollywood, hardly seemed to matter. She had been married three times to three very different men and had “carried on” (her term) with dozens of others.
At first, Juliet had taken “carrying on” to mean some sort of gentle flirtation; but the poems, coupled with some remarks the old lady made apropos of a nude male torso in the Metropolitan Museum's Greek Gallery, had changed her interpretation. From a few references she made to funerals, Juliet gathered that Ada's circle of friends had contracted very much of late. But she did not seem to allow that circumstance to sap her joie de vivre. In fact, the thought seemed never to have crossed her mind.
If old age could be like this, Juliet thought, she would relish it. She listened again to the radio as she undressed. The current snowfall, according to the forecast, would thicken by the hour; it was indeed a blizzard. School closings were already being announced, and Juliet went to bed contemplating not only the cheerful prospect of a rollicking senescence but the much more immediate one of a lovely day or two with the city crystallized and quiet. Tomorrow, cross-country skiers would glide through Riverside Park, traffic lights would change meaninglessly on empty, snow-bedded side streets, and snuggling in with a good book would become not just socially permissible but practically de rigueur. Ada Caffrey, she knew, had an appointment at Rara Avis to talk with Dennis about
the value of the manuscript. But that could be postponed. Even Ada would have to stop running around for a bit (surely!), take a nap, and give her new friends some rest.
 
 
When Juliet stumbled downstairs to make tea on Friday morning,
thick, lush whorls of small, cold snowflakes were falling swiftly past her windows. In the kitchen, both radio and television fairly rang with delighted, dire warnings. The storm upon the city now was the worst since the Blizzard of '96, since the “Storm of the Century” in '93, since snow was invented. Listeners must stay tuned to (fill in your choice of call letters) Radio (or TV), which would struggle to stay on the air and advise them no matter the obstacles. Juliet experienced a weird sensation of relief. After the World Trade Center disaster, it was a pleasure, almost a luxury, to have a merely natural emergency to cope with.
She had hoped Ames would have the sense to stay at home; but when she called to tell her not to come, there was no answer. She switched off the radio, went upstairs, and sat herself down at her desk, as was (she reminded herself) her bounden duty. Having invented the puppy Vizor, she had decided during breakfast to give Selena Walkingshaw a wealthy uncle, Lord Spafford, who would invite Selena and her younger sister, Catherine, to his country estate. She had a vague idea it might turn out later that Lord Spafford was not wealthy at all but secretly in grave financial difficulties; and she was pretty sure Sir James Clendinning would turn up eventually, large banknotes in hand. But for the morning she considered it enough to describe Spafford, relate the unexpected advent of his invitation, and detail the journey of the girls to his place in Hampshire. She was writing Spafford's letter when Ames showed up; Juliet sent her straight back to Queens again, lest she get stranded in Manhattan. At lunchtime, just as his lordship's nieces were sitting down to
their supper at Spafford House, Angelica Kestrel-Haven had a bite of tuna fish.
She returned to her desk around two o'clock, by which time more than a foot of snow had fallen. The day having warmed a little, the flakes were larger, and more was tumbling down all the time. The pile of Christmas trees across the street from Juliet's office window was cloaked in white, as were the branches of the living trees around them. Sitting down again to her manuscript, Juliet was pleasantly surprised to find Selena and Catherine Walkingshaw falling easily into a long bedtime conversation about what constituted a happy life. The phone rang now and then, but she ignored it. It was a pleasure to have something before her worth ignoring the phone about. As for the demanding Ada Caffrey, if Juliet gave her a thought, it was only to feel grateful for her temporary silence. She did think of calling to offer help to Suzy, a captive audience if ever there was one and no doubt condemned to spend today listening to racy stories from Ada Caffrey's past. But, cravenly, even callously, Juliet decided to let her friend endure this penance on her own. If Suzy wanted to run a bed-and-breakfast, she must put up with her guests; surely that was part of the price of doing business.
As for Juliet, she would bask in the silence. This was a sort of day she adored. All over the city, people were forced to abandon their plans. Meetings were canceled, dates postponed (among them, Juliet's own dinner with her father and the Great Gal—they left it that they would get together in a week or two when Ted got back from a business trip to Dallas). Parents, forced to play hooky from work, took their children sledding. Householders slogged to the grocery store and, loaded with food, went home to their apartments as if to rural cabins that might be cut off for weeks. Small dogs peered from lobbies and refused to go outside. Large dogs, freed of their leashes, bounded deliriously through snowdrifts in the parks, chased snowballs, wriggled luxuriously into the huge, cold, white carpet.
Alternate-side-of-the-street parkers, that hardy band who scoff at New York City garage prices and house their cars on the streets, rejoiced in the knowledge that street-sweeping operations would be suspended and their cars, therefore, allowed to remain wherever they were despite the posted no-parking hours, perhaps for days and days. Restaurant deliverymen cried on their bikes, the teardrops freezing in their lashes. Supers counted their staff and cranked up the heat.
Juliet worked easily late into the evening, pausing only to eat some soup in the kitchen and, now and then, to glance out and enjoy the spectacle of the hushed and darkened city under its purifying cloak of white. Back at her desk, while the Walkingshaw girls lay in their beds debating what made for happiness, Lord Spafford's steward, Tom Giddy was taking shape on the page. He was a bluff, burly, practical man famous in the village for his feats of strength as well as his unusual generosity. (On their way home last night, apropos of the sight of circling snowplows, Ada had mentioned with satisfaction that her neighbor, the real Tom Giddy, always plowed her driveway for free. This Tom, she also noted, had once been captain of his high school wrestling team.) Today, he was sternly confronting his employer with a respectful but forthright accounting of his lordship's failing finances. Lord Spafford's finances were of the greater concern to the conscientious steward because his own life's helpmeet, stout, cheerful, comfortable Mrs. Giddy, was his lordship's cook. Juliet went to bed feeling pure and virtuous, a weary but satisfied spinner of fifteen pages of first-rate froth.
The next morning Suzy called to report that Ada had gone out the day before and had never come home.
Mrs. Caffrey Gone
Juliet's first thought was of Pierre. If Ada were missing, mightn't
his bed be one place to look?
Suzy agreed. “I wouldn't put it past her.”
Juliet rubbed her eyes. After her late work last night, she had allowed herself to sleep in. The phone had rung just as she was sitting down at the kitchen table with her first cup of tea. She wasn't at her most alert. Still, there was something—
“Oh, but the storm,” she blurted out. “How can Ada be lost in the middle of a blizzard?”
Suzy ignored the apparent idiocy of the question. “I know, but she went out anyway.”
“Yesterday?”
Juliet stood and looked out at the white, glaring world to the west. A good eighteen inches of snow must have fallen on Manhattan since the storm began. The cars parked along Riverside Drive were mere swells, soft billows under a sea of white. Even now, a plow hooked up to a garbage truck was shoving more snow against them, marooning them further behind a tall, compacted bank. The pile of Christmas trees had grown to a sugar mountain. On the playground at Eighty-third Street, snowmen and snowdogs made yesterday peered out from under new veils. A few cars moved sedately along
the West Side Highway. From the titanium sky, a flurry of flakes still tumbled past the window.
“Where did she go?”
Suzy's voice rose to a worried wail. “I don't know. She was planning to go to some kind of rondeau slam in the East Village last night. She didn't want me to tell you because apparently she had her eye on someone she expected to see there, and she thought you would ‘cramp her style.' That's a quote,” Suzy noted. “I tried to talk her into staying home, but it was a waste of breath. The only thing I know for sure is that in the afternoon she had an appointment with your friend Dennis. I made her lunch, she took a nap, I walked her up to Rara Avis, and that's the last I saw of her.”
“They kept that appointment?” Juliet asked. “Why didn't Dennis come down to her? It was already snowing so hard.”
“I don't know. She just said she was going. She was due there at three-thirty.”
“Did she come home after that at all?”
“I have no idea. I had to go out myself.”
“Yesterday?”
“Well, magazines have to get published on time whether the weather is good or not,” Suzy pointed out. “An editor at
Menu
suddenly decided to kill a piece on polenta. They called me up around three, desperate for artwork on silverware. I took Ada up to Dennis's, saw her go into the building, took a bus down Broadway, and spent from four-something till almost eight drawing forks in the art editor's office.”
Juliet resisted the temptation to inquire into the nature of the fork article in
Menu,
an upscale book for New York foodies, and focused instead on the matter at hand.
“So the last time you saw her—?”
“Was just before three-thirty.”
“And when you got home, you couldn't tell if she had come in and gone out again?”
“No. She has her own keys, of course, and she always wears
that same bear coat, seal, whatever it is, so—I really didn't think about it. Wait a minute.”
Juliet heard Suzy walking, heard the old-fashioned click of her aged refrigerator door. A moment later, “No, I bet she never came in,” she reported. “I left her some homemade soup for dinner, and she never touched it at all. Although, of course, she could have decided to eat out.”
“At her own expense?”
“Yeah, maybe not,” Suzy agreed. “Well, whatever, by the time I got home myself, I realized that wherever she was, she'd have a hard time returning. It took me an age to get up Sixth Avenue. The buses were barely running. Anyway, I had no way to find her, so I just figured eventually she'd turn up. And then I got totally distracted. The phone rang, and it was Parker—”
“Parker, huh?”
Parker Scutt was an artist who created detailed suburban dollhouses in which small waxen figures did strange and scary things to each other. Suzy had met him several months before. They had been seeing each other once a week or so.
“Yeah. He said he had his snowshoes on, and he wanted to come by and visit me. So he did.”
“And?”
“We went for a walk in the park, which was pretty gorgeous, and then we went back to my place and then—he stayed over.”
“Suzy, you slept with Parker Scutt?” Juliet yelped. Parker Scutt was married, although he claimed to be separated.
“Don't yell at me! It was fabulous, and he swears he's not living with Diana anymore—”
“Then why doesn't he ever let you come to his place?”
“Juliet, the point is, I was in bed with him; I didn't come out of the room till I woke up this morning; and when I finally did, Parker was gone and Mrs. Caffrey still hadn't come home. I mean, I didn't realize that first thing. When we got in from the park and I
didn't see her coat anywhere, I guessed she was still out. This morning—well, she'd left her room door shut; and when I saw it that way, I figured she'd finally worn herself out and was sleeping. It wasn't until five minutes ago that I thought to look in the closet. Her coat's not there. So then I opened her door, of course, and Juliet, she never came in. Her bed is untouched.”
“You don't think she could have come home, slept, got up, made the bed, and gone out again this morning?”
There was a momentary pause. Then, “It's pretty clear you never had Ada Caffrey for a houseguest,” Suzy said. “I'm worried about her, of course, but what a pig. Believe me, if she'd been here, I'd know it.” There was a pause. “You don't think she could really have gotten lucky at the slam?”
Juliet thought of the youthful faces of the other poets at the Ashtray slam, of the embarrassment of the usher Ada had hit on at
Phantom.
Who could she have expected to flirt with at the slam? She hadn't even talked to anyone, except—
Oh. The image of Ada bussing Doug Renny at the Ashtray returned to her. But wasn't he just the very “husky wrestler type” Ada had deprecated as not “wearing” well? On the other hand, she was eighty-four. Even she must realize she probably wouldn't be around to see him dwindle. Could she really have imagined—?
No doubt she could. Juliet recalled Renny's surprised, rather dismayed look after she'd kissed him.
“No,” she said aloud. “But I think I know who she had in mind.”
“Do you think I should have offered to pick her up at Dennis's after her appointment?” Suzy asked.
“No, of course not. It's only three blocks, for Pete's sake. And if it seemed so treacherous outside, he could have walked her back himself.”
“Maybe he did.”
There was silence on the line. It lasted a long moment. Both women were weighing the likelihood of Ada's having the consideration to call if she had stayed out overnight with a man (highly unlikely, they thought). Both were trying to figure out how long a very grown-up woman could be missing from a bed-and-breakfast before the police, for example, would consider her missing. Both wondered if Ada could somehow, suddenly, for some reason, have gone home to Espyville unannounced.
“Her suitcase—?” Juliet asked finally.
“It's here. I mean, I only glanced in her room, but all her things seem to be here. Except—you know, her coat and stuff.”
“Do we know how to reach Pierre?”
“Call the Plaza?”
“I'll try Dennis; you try them.”
Five minutes later, Juliet's phone rang again.
“Neither snow nor rain nor whatever it is stops the Plaza,” Suzy reported. “Pierre's at work. I spoke to him myself. He hasn't seen her.”
“Dennis said she left his place about four.”
“He didn't go with her?”
“No. He tried to phone you guys to offer to come down to your place, by the way, spare her the walk. But you must have already left. He didn't realize till he looked outside just before the appointment how heavily it was snowing. He also offered to bring her home, but she didn't want him to. He says when she left, she was majorly pissed at him. She took the Wilson pages back. Apparently, their meeting didn't go well. She didn't leave alone, though. Someone else happened to be there, too—a collector Dennis had contacted about the manuscript—and Ada went into the elevator with him, talking a mile a minute.”
Like most artists Juliet knew, Suzy was extremely practical. “I'm going to call her number in Espyville,” she said briskly. “You
see if Dennis will give you the name of the collector she left with; he might know something. Or—there isn't a doorman at his building, is there?” she added hopefully.
“No.”
“No, that would be too easy. Okay, let's see … It's ten after ten. Let's figure if we learn nothing, and if we don't hear from her by noon, I'll look in her room, see if she was here, see if I can find the manuscript. She definitely had it with her when she left?”
“Yes, Dennis gave it to her.”
There was a fractional pause.
Then, “Could she have taken it somewhere else?” Suzy asked. “One of the auction houses?”
“Maybe. But let's try to figure out if she ever came home at all. Check her clothes. Do you remember what she was wearing when you left her?”
“Of course. Who could forget Ada's clothes? A dark purple dress with flounces at the hem and one of those high-necked, drapy collars. Circa 1940, I would say. She had a matching purple purse—a cloth one, fairly large, bunched at the clasp, with a thin silver chain—lavender leather gloves, and a purple felt hat with a little veil.”
“So see if those are in her closet. I don't think she's the kind of person who would go out for the evening in her day clothes, do you? Especially if she was angling for a date.”
“Good point.”
They hung up. Ten minutes later, they were on the phone, comparing notes again.
“Dennis can't reach the collector guy,” Juliet reported. “He's not at home, not at the office.”
“No one answers her number in Espyville. I don't see the purple dress or the hat and purse.”
This, more than anything else, struck fear into both their hearts.
“And the manuscript?”
“I'm still looking.”
They hung up. At twelve-fifteen, Suzy called again. She had searched Mrs. Caffrey's things. Of course, the manuscript could be hidden somewhere Suzy hadn't thought of. But she knew that room pretty well; she used to sleep in it when things were really bad with Jack, her ex-husband. The manuscript was missing. So was Mrs. Caffrey.
Juliet hung up and called Murray.
 
 
Murray Landis and Juliet Bodine first met when they were nineteen
years old. Murray, studying art at Harvard, had then been dating Juliet's Radcliffe roommate, Mona. Their affair, like all of Mona's, had been torrid; but not so torrid that Murray hadn't noticed Juliet, and vice versa.
Nothing had ever been said or done between them. On the contrary, diligent restraint was practiced on both sides, and after Mona and Murray broke up, Juliet lost track of him. Then one morning last summer, he'd turned up at her door, a police detective investigating a death among a group of dancers at the Jansch troupe, where Juliet had been helping a friend restructure the narrative of a ballet based on
Great Expectations
. Murray was still an artist in his off hours, a serious artist. But rather than starve as a sculptor, he had decided to go into the family business: after growing up in Brooklyn, the son of a cop of a son of a cop, he'd joined the NYPD. He had been assigned to Juliet's precinct for some years before the Jansch death brought them together.
Juliet was lucky; he answered his own phone at the station house.
“Jule! I'm sitting here catching up on paperwork, bored out of my skull. How the hell ya doin'?” he shouted, in the broad Brooklynese he could turn on and off at will.
She explained.
“So it's really Suzy who should be calling,” he suggested, when the bare bones had been outlined.
“Well, we just weren't sure anyone would care if we called out of the blue. Don't you have to wait twenty-four hours or something?”
“Nah, that's one of those urban folklore things,” Murray said, “like alligators in the sewers. Especially after the weather we've had, we'll get on it right away. But it's really not a detective matter. I'll send you a couple of uniforms.”
“You don't think you”—Juliet broke off, then finished rather wistfully—“you couldn't come yourself?”

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