The Ladies Farm (27 page)

She struggled to remember Richard during the time when he was buying these diamonds. The look in his eye, the excitement of his secret … had it been a thrill to give Barbara these gifts, or a sense of dread?

“Dad?” It was the young man who had answered the door. “Sam Marx. You want it?”

“Mrs. Brewer,” said Mr. Jacoby. “This is my son, Elliott.”

“Hello,” said Della, not offering a hand.

Elliott nodded. “Hello.” Still holding the door, he turned to his father. “So should we put the call through?”

Mr. Jacoby shook his head. “He’s just asking about lunch. Tell him I’ll be about an hour, but I’ll call him.”

Elliott nodded and backed out of the room. Mr. Jacoby smiled at Della. “We’re almost finished. I appreciate your patience.”

“I appreciate your help. Is there any more tea?”

“Oh, I think we’re out,” Alana said. She looked at her uncle.

“Oh, just tell me where and I’ll make it,” Della offered.

Mr. Jacoby nodded. “I’ll go with you,” Alana said. “We just have to plug in the kettle.”

This is when they make the switch, Della thought. When I come back, he informs me that none of the diamonds is real, that the total value of all that glass is a buck twenty-five.

Della and Alana were the only people in the kitchen, which was equipped with all the standard appliances plus a large, round table. “So is everyone at Jacoby Brothers a Jacoby?” Della asked.

“Pretty much,” Alana replied. She took fresh cups and saucers from the cabinet and pulled a lemon from a basket on the counter. “My grandfather and his brother started it, and they took in two sons-in-law as well as my father and Uncle David. So some of my cousins—the Spicers and the Rudnicks—aren’t Jacobys, but we’re all related.” She looked thoughtful. “You must think it’s medieval, working with family like this.”

“No,” Della protested. The girl’s earnest demeanor masked a quick eye. “No, in a way, that’s what I’ve done. Sort of made a family—my friends and I—to run our bed and breakfast. The Ladies Farm.”

“The Ladies Farm!” Alana repeated. “Where is that?”

Suddenly, Della found herself brimming over with descriptions of the Nolan River and the rolling hills around it. She talked about the shops on the square in Sydonia and the classes in the barn.

“It sounds more like a spa,” Alana said. “And there are no men?”

“Well, sometimes,” Della said. “But it’s mostly women, mostly my age.”

Alana loaded the tea things onto the tray, and Della held the door for her as they left. The girl’s dark hair shimmered beneath the beret. “But if a whole group of women booked the Ladies Farm, then there wouldn’t be any men,” Alana said.

“Well, no,” Della said, not sure where this was leading. She guessed at Alana’s age, you had to consciously exclude men if you wanted an all-female environment. Della wondered if she should warn the girl that that would happen eventually anyway.

“My friends and I … actually it’s a study group … we’ve been talking about a retreat. But there would have to be a lot of arrangements about food and so forth.” Della opened the door to the showroom and Alana followed her in, setting the tray on the counter. “Perhaps, though, if we simply agreed to a vegetarian menu, it might work.”

Della fished a business card out of her pocket and handed it to Alana. “Call me in a few days. We can probably accommodate you. My friend Barbara is a whiz at menu planning. We’ll figure something out.”

Mr. Jacoby looked up for a moment, then returned to his work. “We’re almost finished, he promised Della, picking up one of the diamonds with some sort of tweezers and setting it down on a scale.

She had returned to her chair and ottoman, but even though she held her book in her hand, she didn’t read. She just held the book in front of her face, lifted and lowered her teacup, and stared at the page. Don’t think about this too much, she advised herself.

The tea was gone by the time Mr. Jacoby pushed himself back from the table and stood up. “Aaach!” he exclaimed, clasping his hands and stretching his arms over his head. “A man can freeze in a sitting position if he’s not careful.”

“You will excuse me for a few moments? Then we will sit down and talk business.”

Della nodded. The large expanse of white shirt revealed when his jacket fell away from his belly left her speechless. This man had
sensed Richard’s integrity and, she suspected, his passion. But she could not imagine such mass in motion over passion of his own.

Well, someone loves him, Della thought. Different people look for different things.

When Mr. Jacoby returned, he bore with him ledgers and files. After the teacups had been refilled, Della faced him across the ornate table, and he began by outlining Richard’s arrangement. “Our price is locked in, of course, but you are welcome to refuse. It is based on our last three invoices from Tel Aviv, Amsterdam, and Johannesburg. Averaging the last three from each, we are obligated to offer you the highest of them, which this week is Amsterdam.”

He laid a sheaf of papers before her. “These are the invoices. They have been certified by our accountant, but you are welcome to show them to an independent accountant to verify their accuracy.”

“Oh, no!” Della said without hesitation. “Barbara—Mrs. Morrison—was very clear, to accept your word.”

“She is very generous,” Mr. Jacoby told her. “So was her husband. Did you know him?”

Della nodded, but didn’t trust herself to speak.

Alana, who had remained silent, smiled from her seat next to her uncle, who continued by placing a long ledger sheet before her. “The inventory matches exactly. You see,” he pointed with his pencil to the various columns, “the weight, the clarity. No change. So, the value comes from last week’s market, you see here, per carat, each stone valued separately.”

He continued on, but Della’s focus jumped to the last column, then down to the bottom of the page. She read it again, trying not to move her lips. Then she looked at Mr. Jacoby, who had fallen silent.

“It’s …”

“Yes,” he said.

She had expected a lot of money, certainly over a hundred thousand dollars, perhaps two or three hundred thousand. But the figure
written at the bottom of the ledger page was eight hundred eighty-three thousand, two hundred sixteen dollars.

“I thought …” she looked at him “It’s far greater … Barbara …”

“Her husband insisted on investment quality,” Mr. Jacoby said. “He was very particular, very careful. He bought a great many diamonds. He brought them to us. We would select out one, maybe two for him, sell off the rest.”

“I didn’t …”

“He became quite an expert. They knew him in Europe, in Israel, in South Africa. Even in Hong Kong.”

“He had a business,” Della mumbled. “He traveled to find suppliers, then he was in licensing software.”

“So I understand.”

Della wanted to ask how many stones he had selected out, if they knew whether there were more, somewhere, given to someone else. And she wanted to explain to these people, to this man who would not take the hand of an adult woman, that she did not merit their respect, that her relationship with Richard’s widow was based on fraud, that her relationship with Richard had been adulterous.

“You understand, of course,” Mr. Jacoby said, “it is mostly the large one.” He shook his head. “That’s the only one he bought from me personally.”

“From you?”

“My brother, may he rest in peace, had died by then. It took him—Mr. Morrison—weeks to decide: first to pick the stone, then back and forth, back and forth from Texas, as if he didn’t know, couldn’t make up his mind.”

“That was the last one, then?” Della asked, startled.

“From us, certainly.” He smiled gently. “It was worth more than all the others put together.”

She shook her head to clear it. That doesn’t mean anything, she told herself. Only that he was that much sorrier. And that it’s that much more money for the Ladies Farm.

“I … it’s the Ladies Farm, our bed and breakfast,” she stumbled, explaining what she could. “This means I can … my friends and I will be able to continue there. Barbara” she stopped for a second, “Barbara, Richard’s … Richard’s widow is very sick. We need … oh! this means so much!”

Mr. Jacoby and Alana gazed at her with the same set of brown eyes.

“It is much more than I expected,” Della said again, but this time she was considering the quantity of cash. She looked at the small duffel and the shoulder bag that sat next to the chair.

“Perhaps we can help you there,” said Mr. Jacoby.

Which was how she came to be met at the Amtrak platform in Penn Station by Alana, pulling a red, wheeled cooler behind her. “Cousin Della!” she called. “Cousin Della!” Like a child pulling a wagon, Alana made her way through the crowd pressing forward to board the express to Chicago. “Mama and I couldn’t let you go back to Texas without fixing something.”

By this time, she had reached Della and they stood facing each other as passengers continued to board. “Who would have guessed?” continued Alana. “A Jacoby from Texas!” Della saw a few smiles, then glanced down at the cooler. The bottom, she knew, was filled with stationery boxes packed with hundred-dollar bills.

“Now, don’t open this until you’re home, otherwise it will spoil, and the lox will stink up your whole berth!” Alana took Della’s hand and placed it on the cooler handle. “And next time, you won’t wait twenty years to visit!” With that, the girl leaned forward and touched her cheek to Della’s. “They’re shrink-wrapped, under the dry ice. Don’t unpack till you’re home,” she whispered. “And there really is lox and cream cheese on top. And frozen strudel.”

“Strudel!” Della exclaimed. “Your mother is too good to me.”

“Apple and cherry,” Alana giggled.

Della kissed the girl once more. “Thank you so much.”

“You must call us,” Alana said. “The moment you get home, so we know you’re safe. And then write us a nice, long letter about Texas.”

Della turned to board. The conductor stood on the steps, ready to help her get the cooler onto the train. From the corner of her eye, she saw David Jacoby, an attaché case propped against a tiled column, the newspaper held up in front of his face.

“They packed this one nice and full,” the conductor said, lifting it up to the passenger car. “Ain’t nothing like family for feeding you right.”

“You’re not kidding,” said Della.

               Chapter 17

T
he conductor teased her about her cooler full of home cooking, but Della laughed him off, refusing to share anything but the small sack of raspberry–almond tarts Alana had given her before she left Jacoby Brothers. Her fellow passengers accepted the sweets and shared her amusement that her orthodox cousins had insisted on sending her back to Texas with real—that is, New York—lox and cream cheese, not to mention the strudel.

When she changed trains in Chicago, she found herself ignored, which suited her fine. It might have been better to rent a car, but that, too, had its perils. You avoided the airport X-rays, she reassured herself; it would have been stupid to drive alone for three days with a cooler full of cash. You might never have reached Texas.

When they rolled into Fort Worth the next afternoon, it was Tony, not Kat, who met her train.

“Kat had to take something to the lawyer for Barbara,” Tony explained. “What’s this?”

“Take what?” Della asked, but Tony just shrugged and looked curiously at the cooler. “Oh, I just picked up this little red wagon in New York. We need to stop and get fresh bagels. It’s filled with lox—that’s smoked salmon—and cream cheese.”

“I know what lox is.” He took the handle and, setting the duffel atop the cooler, walked her through the station and out to the car.
He caught her up on Barbara’s condition (the collarbone felt okay, but the cancer had entered a new stage), on the parade of inspectors (the zoning people had no problems, but OSHA was concerned about chemical storage in the barn and the salon so he and Dave would have to put up a storage shed), the gravel mining (Kat had prevented them from taking samples and Hugh Jr. had filed a motion to compel them to allow it), and the Ladies Farm itself, which was full of guests.

Nancy’s sister, Hannah, had been drafted to help with the cleaning, and Barbara had called a friend, Dottie, to take over the jewelry classes. Even Rita had been forced to bring in another beautician to help with the facials and manicures. “But she won’t let anyone else do hair,” Tony explained as they headed out of town. “She says she’s the only one who can fix that Texas big hair.”

Della smiled. “She’s right about that. Though I don’t know how she’s doing anyone’s hair if she’s getting married tomorrow.” They picked up ten dozen bagels—that would feed the guests, plus leave some for freezing—then drove straight to see the Huttos. They hooked up with Dave and Rita where the gravel drive met the county road and, after transferring the cooler to the back of Dave’s truck, Della thanked Tony with a peck on the cheek and dispatched him back to Fort Worth.

“I hope someday you share the details of your mystery trip,” he said before he got back into the car.

Della wondered for a second what it would be like to come clean with Tony, imagining that he would simply accept it all and go on doing her bidding; then, she squared her shoulders and touched a hand to the side of his face. “Someday,” she promised.