Trail of the Spellmans (10 page)

“Order in.”

“You can come too, if you like.”

“I’ll think it over,” I replied.

“I have to decide between inviting David and Rae. Do you have a preference?”

“Why is it either/or?”

“David won’t come if Rae is here.”

“Seriously?”

“It’s worse than I thought,” my mother said.

“It’s worse than
I
thought,” I said.

“Do you know what happened?” Mom asked.

“No idea. You?”

“Well, obviously, it has nothing to do with the liquor cabinet. I’m not in the mood to play
Sophie’s Choice
yet again, so you tell me who to invite.”

“David,” I quickly replied. “Get him sloshed and maybe he’ll talk.”

“I like the way you think,” Mom said. “Well, I’d love to stay and explore the many angles of my children’s dysfunction, but I’m late for my class,”
Mom said as she slipped her arm through the straps of a canvas bag and made her way to the door.

“What’s in the bag, Mom?”

“I don’t believe that’s any of your concern,” she said, waving a cheery good-bye.

I promptly entered the office and got to the bottom of at least one matter. Well, not quite the bottom. Somewhere in the middle, I suppose.

“Dad, I’ll keep that cookie secret, even the next one, if you tell me what ‘class’
²
Mom is heading to right now.”

Dad pulled a calendar from his desk and said, “Let me check her schedule. What day is it?”

“Monday,” D answered.

“Monday is sculpting,” Dad said. “And book club once a month.”

“Give me that,” I said, approaching his desk.

Dad reluctantly handed me the calendar. I don’t believe he was under any directive not to provide this intelligence, but he was under a directive not to eat baked goods.

I was shocked to discover a traffic jam of “leisure” activities on the calendar, all in blue ink, blanketing the page like a tidal wave. There was virtually no time unaccounted for beyond work hours. I made a photocopy of the page and returned it to my father. I provide for you now my mother’s hobby schedule for the month of September.

Monday, 6–9
P.M.
, Beginning Pottery; 8:00
P.M.
, book club (second Monday of month)

Tuesday, 5–6
P.M.
, yoga; 7–10
P.M.
, Russian 101

Wednesday, 6:30–8
P.M.
, crochet
³

Thursday, 7:30–10:30
P.M.
, Tarting It Up [fret not; it was a cooking class]

Friday, 7:30–9
P.M.
, Music Appreciation

Saturday, 9–10
A.M.
, yoga; 11
A.M.
–1
P.M.
, decoupage

Sunday, 9
A.M.
–12
P.M.
, volunteer work; 2–3
P.M.
, tennis; 5–6
P.M.
, prep for family dinner

I had so many questions that it was impossible to unite them in any semblance of logic or order. I simply chose them at random like scraps of paper tossed in a hat.

“What the fuck is decoupage?” was the first to surface.

“Some kind of craft thing,” Dad replied.

“It’s the technique of decorating with cutouts from a newspaper or magazine on a flat surface and coating with a layer of finish,” D explained.

“I’m confused. Why would somebody do that?”

“I did it in prison once or twice in art class. It was kind of relaxing.”

“In prison, the point is to kill time. I wouldn’t be surprised if you took a knitting class as well.”

“Knitting would have been very popular,” D replied. “And dangerous.”

“Since when does Mom volunteer?” was the next question that fought through the competing interrogatives.

“She’s worked at the food bank on a few occasions.”

“Dad, what’s going on?” I asked. “It isn’t like Mom to have outside interests.”

“She’s been taking yoga with me for the last few years,” Dad replied.

“That’s to make
you
go to yoga.”

“What’s the harm in your mother having a hobby or two?”

“She’s booked solid.”

“She promised me she’d drop a few after the first couple of weeks.”

“You don’t think she’s up to something?” I said.

“She’s taking some classes to broaden her horizons.”

“Russian!”

“Spanish was at a bad time,” my father nonchalantly replied.

“You know more than you’re saying.”

“Maybe you should get a few extracurricular activities of your own. Then maybe you won’t be so preoccupied with your mother’s.”

“I have extracurricular activities,” I smugly replied.

“I’m sorry,” Dad said. “I forgot you play the Game of Kings. How’s that working out for you?”

KING, QUEEN, CASTLE, HORSE

Three months earlier

“What did you do?” Henry asked as he returned from the kitchen.

“I took your castle with my horse.”

Henry sat his cup of chamomile next to my whiskey beside the chess-board. “Please call the pieces by their appropriate names.”

Sigh.

“What is the horsey called?” he asked in a condescending tone.

“Um . . . knight.”

“And the castle?”

“I’m drawing a blank.”

“Rook.”

“Oh yeah.”

“What did you do?”

“I took your rook with my knight.”

Henry studied the chessboard.

“First of all, if you’re going to take thirty minutes to decide on your next move, the least you can do is wait for me to return to the table before you steal my rook.”

“Steal? Is that the proper language for the game?”

“It is when you’re cheating.”

“I didn’t cheat.”

“This isn’t poker, Isabel. You need to show some good sportsman-ship.”

“We’ve met before, right?”

“I’m going to let the rook-stealing slide just this once.”

“Thanks.”

“Check,” Henry said, and the game was over.

The three previous times we played chess together, Henry had made me study the endgame. To ensure that this would not happen again, I slid my arm across the board and knocked the pieces back into the box.

“Once again, I’d like to remind you that the only reason we’re playing chess is because your dentist overbooked one day.”

This is, in fact, truer than you can imagine. An emergency root canal was to blame for my current state of forced chess study and weekly losses. Henry was trapped in the waiting room of one Daniel Castillo, DDS’s office without any of his own reading material. Dr. Castillo (Ex #11) had left the magazine subscription duties to his full-time office manager, who has an unnatural fondness for trashy rags. The options were Hollywood tabloids or women’s magazines. Henry read, cover to cover, an issue of a magazine geared toward women in their thirties on a nose-diving mission for marriage, called
Me.
²
(So, if you’re talking to your friend about the magazine, you’d say, “Hey, have you read the latest
Me Squared
?”) One of the many articles he read (which included an astrological fashion assessment)
¹
was a piece on relationship compatibility that strongly encouraged the sharing of each other’s activities. Turns out Henry and I, up to that point, had not shared any activities besides watching
Doctor Who
and debating the many issues on which we do not concur. I debated that the debating alone offered us plenty of shared experience, but Henry stood his ground and demanded that we each choose an activity that we could do together.

I didn’t choose, thinking this phase would blow over. But when Henry bought me a book called
Chess for Imbeciles,
I realized how serious this had become. My only response was retaliation. I chose beer tasting as my hobby. This, as far as I was concerned, meant going to a dive bar and drinking beer.

Henry, however, had a more lofty approach and would often arrange tours at local microbreweries. If you ask me, listening to someone lecture you about why beer tastes the way it does kind of takes the fun out of drinking it. Plus, when they say “tasting” they’re dead serious about that. You’re lucky if you can get a pint in you after a three-hour tour.

But I digress. Much to my dismay, when I returned home that night, I found Gertrude and Henry in the midst of what appeared to be an intense and evenly matched game of chess.

“What’s going on here?” I asked, feeling a bit betrayed by Gerty.

“Just a friendly game,” Henry said.

“Why do people always have to add the word ‘friendly’?” I asked.

“To remind people like you not to cheat,” Henry replied, sliding his bishop across the board and taking his mother’s knight.

“You can always forfeit, Gerty, and then we can go get a drink.”

“This won’t take long,” Gerty replied, taking Henry’s rook.

“He hates losing his rook,” I said, taking a spectator seat.

“I especially hate it when it’s taken by a pawn three rows down when I’m not looking.”

“I wouldn’t have pegged you for a chess player,” I said to Gerty without bothering to hide my disappointment.

“I’m not.”

“And yet you seem to be decent at it,” I replied, judging purely by the mass of Henry’s material
³
by the side of the board.

“Henry’s father taught me ages ago. I got tired of losing so I began taking lessons with a grand master. I decided that one day I was going to win, no matter what it took.”

“How long did that take?” I asked.

“Seven long years,” Gertrude replied. “Check.”

While Henry stared at the board, attempting to retrace the series of moves that derailed him, Gerty got up from the table, grabbed her coat, and said, “Izzy and I are going to grab a drink. Care to join us?”

“Again?” Henry asked. “You went out last night. I think you could use a night in, Isabel.”

I couldn’t risk the exposure of a night alone with Henry; he had that look he gets when he wants to have an adult conversation. I was going to stick with my usual—the Avoidance Method™.
⁴

“I think I could go out again,” I said.

“Dad phoned earlier. Did you call him back?” Henry said.

“I’ll do it tomorrow,” Gerty replied. “He’s probably asleep by now.”

“Don’t stay out too late,” Henry said.

“Don’t wait up,” Gerty replied.

THE FOURTH WALL

O
ne of the many benefits of Rae’s reduced workload is a reduction in the time that I must spend in her company. She surfaces only on Fridays for the summit and the occasional Sunday-night dinner, which have been less religiously enforced since the arrival of Sydney.
¹
The next time Rae showed up at the office, she was once again wearing the doctored $$
JUSTICE 4 MERRI-WEATHER
$$ T-shirt. D tried to ignore her by avoiding eye contact, which I’ve noticed is effective with some animals but not so many people, and definitely not Rae.

“Have you had time to read the material I sent you?” Rae asked D.

D, not looking up from his computer, replied, “Been busy.”

“You should look it over, D. You’re running out of time. The statute of limitations on a malicious prosecution case is two years. You’ve got six months left. But the waiting doesn’t look good. You lose credibility.”

“Thank you, Rae,” D firmly replied. “If I wish to discuss this matter further, I will contact Maggie. Do we understand each other?”

“Is there a subtext I’m missing?” Rae asked.

D finally looked her straight in the eye. “I don’t want to have this conversation with you again. If I choose to pursue this matter, which is
unlikely, I will discuss it with my attorney, not a college girl who checks her stock portfolio every hour. Now, do we understand each other?”

“What have you got against money?”

“That will be all, Rae,” my mother said with a note of finality in her voice. On occasion Mom adds a certain edge to her tone and you just instinctually know not to cross it.

Rae quietly returned to her desk and got back to work.

The Sparrow got a new nickname after a week of being tailed by the Weasel.

“The Sparrow’s a snore. I thought this case had some juice,” Rae said, sounding like an old cop from a bad TV show. An hour after the Demetrius incident, Rae submitted her first surveillance report on Vivien Blake and was clearly nonplussed by the coed’s bland freshman behavior. Apparently, Vivien went to class, the library, an occasional movie, sometimes a coffee shop, and
one
party, at which she imbibed exactly two beers.

“The least she could do is take some hallucinogens like everybody else at Berkeley,” Rae said.

My father shot my mother a concerned glance, which my mother nodded away.

“Relax. She’s just messing with you, Al.”

My father then perused the file and furrowed his brow. Of all our current cases, one might have expected Vivien Blake’s to offer at least a shred of indecency.

“How do you know she had two beers?” I asked.

“Because I was also at the party.”

“You crashed a party to follow a suspect?” I asked.

“What were my options?” Rae said.

“Did you make any new friends?” Dad asked.

“I was on the job,” Rae replied.

“How many drinks did you have?” I asked.

“Only two.”

“Young lady, you’re still underage,” said one member of the unit. I can’t recall which.

“I had to blend in.”

“Club soda and cranberry juice looks just like a sea breeze,” Mom suggested, sounding ridiculously prim.

“If you keep following her into parties, she’s going to make you,” I said.