With Friends Like These... (24 page)

The truth is, nobody is really sure if that was the woman’s actual house. Furthermore, nobody is certain that she truly made the original American flag. So what you visit is the house of somebody unknown passing as the house of somebody who probably didn’t do what she’s famous for. The only justification for trucking in class after class of students who are too young to appreciate the nuances of a Colonial woman’s life is that the stairwell is so low, only wee ones can get through it without risking concussions.

My mother had subbed for Beth as one of the parents who worked on mob control. But my mother hadn’t returned to the Main Line on the school bus. Instead, she and Karen had stayed in town and I had been designated as their homebound chauffeur. I was to meet them at One Liberty Place.

It’s shallow of me, but I find this new building a much more satisfying bit of architecture than old Betsy’s theoretical digs. It lacks two hundred years of history, but it makes up for it in the sleek brightness of marble and color and brass, almost to the point of overkill. I felt underdressed and out of style in my pudgy down coat over the unglamorous brown slacks and rust sweater I’d worn all day.

I sat on a bench in the balconied rotunda admiring the colorful march of people moving in and out of two stories’ worth of glass-fronted shops. Across from me a black grand piano sat under a brass-railed staircase. It was unoccupied and unopened—although classical music was being piped in from somewhere—but the piano stood majestically as the new litmus test for upscale retail. People shopping on the cheap had Muzak to ignore. High-enders were given genuine concert pianists as musical wallpaper.

I abruptly realized I was no longer alone on my bench.

Although I like to think of myself as having a wide tolerance for adolescent and postadolescent diversity, the fellow next to me set off all my mental alarms. I was surprised he hadn’t activated sensors on his way in here.

He was very tall and deliberately fierce. He had four earrings in the ear I could see, a heavily studded black leather jacket, black leather boots that should have been declared weapons, and jeans that were terminally ripped at the knees and crotch. Red long johns showed through the tattered denim.

He was out of place in this glitter dome, and even more so next to me.

I wondered if his arrival and placement were pure accident. He felt too much for happenstance, particularly today. He was too extreme and too close.

I wondered how well he punctuated. Assigning the note and the tombstone drawing to him didn’t seem a stretch of the imagination.

This was the sort of situation my self-defense instructor had said was best handled by avoidance. In fact, “Git!” is what she had said. I looked around. The other benches were occupied. Surely, he wouldn’t harm me here, in the rotunda, with all those witnesses. Nonetheless, I clutched my bag and stood up, but as I scooped up my books, he bent over and reached into a filthy satchel. A gun? A knife? A burning cross? I stepped back, out of range.

He pulled a book out of the bag, sighed with audible contentment, and settled back to read, a hot pink highlighter in one hand.

I sidled closer and checked the cover. Cognitive Theories of Personality Differences and Treatments.

I was really losing it. Seeing devils instead of students. I didn’t want him to witness my mortified blush, so I turned away—and saw real peril barreling across the rotunda.

“Wouldn’t this be a beautiful place to have a wedding?” she said from halfway across the expanse.

Back to reality. The scary guy seemed preferable. “Mom, it’s a mall,” I said, teeth gritted.

She pivoted, a shopping bag in each hand, checking how many tables would fit in this rotunda. Actually, it wouldn’t be a bad place for the prom if, say, Richard Quinn couldn’t open The Scene because he couldn’t get that final backing or, say, because he turned out to be a murderer. And of course, here, if dancing became too boring, the kids would be able to buy a little chocolate, or jewelry, or new party clothes between sets, to liven things up.

“How was Betsy Ross’s house?” I asked Karen, who was occupied with a pretzel with mustard I hoped she’d want to share.

“Elizabeth Ross’s house.” The child had a little mustard mustache. “That’s her real name, like Miss Penelope says.”

I had no idea who Miss Penelope was or why my niece suddenly hunched her small shoulders and tried to click the fingers of her left hand. But then she started chanting, a tiny white bepretzeled Main Line girl-child, rapping Mother Goose. Don’t try to tell me the U.S. isn’t a melting pot.

“Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess,

They all went together to seek a bird’s nest.

They found a bird’s nest with five eggs in,

They all took one, and left four in.”

“Grandma explained,” she said. “They’re all the same girl. It’s just nicknames, so she’s Elizabeth Ross, isn’t she?”

“Absolutely right.” My mother flashed a beam at her granddaughter, then aimed a when-are-you-going-to-create-a-genius-like-this? look in my direction. We had progressed, without speaking a single word, from having my wedding in a shopping center to proudly enjoying the fruit of the union.

“We went upstairs for a snack first,” my mother said.

“Time to go, then.” I offered to hoist the shopping bags. They were pretty solidly packed. My mother looked embarrassed. “We found a wonderful sale. Besides, Beth doesn’t have time to shop for Karen right now.”

My mother is extremely frugal, but money spent on grandchildren doesn’t count, the same way calories ingested while standing up don’t count. Some things are off-the-record, free points.

Karen chanted Mother Goose as molested by Miss Penelope all the way home.

“Great A, little a,

Bouncing B!

The cat’s in the cupboard,

And can’t see me!”

A Mustang is too intimate a car for such torture. I toyed with the idea of hailing Karen a cab, but that seemed cruel, as did putting her on the Paoli Local and hoping for the best. Instead, we drove on, making conversation and trying to ignore the backseat.

“Your father and I have decided to stay up here until after Lyle’s funeral,” my mother said. “Whenever that is. It’s the right thing to do. I feel so sorry for Hattie. Besides, it’ll give Daddy a few more days to heal. I just hope we’re not too much of a burden for Beth.”

I didn’t know whether to tell her to get out of town while the getting was good, or what.

“If I’d as much money as I could spend,

I never would cry old chairs to men—”

“Why give men chairs?” I asked my niece. Maybe the kid knew something new about the opposite sex. There was all that talk about wisdom from the mouths of babes, wasn’t there?

“Aunt Mandy!” Karen sounded amused and incredulous. “Not men. Mend.

“Old chairs to mend, old chairs to mend,

I never would cry old chairs to mend.”

Damn. For a moment Mother Goose had seemed code for a new furniture-oriented courtship ploy. Instead it turns out I had a hearing problem.

* * *

Beth’s living room would have looked like a What’s Wrong With This Picture? game except that I knew what was wrong with it. Mackenzie.

Last night he’d said he’d see me today, but I certainly didn’t think he meant here, now, or for this reason.

Worried as I was about his presence, I still felt a momentary reflexive flutter. He’s a looker, after all. Also, I had the threatening note in my briefcase. I couldn’t wait to turn it over to him, to have him take care of it and make it all right.

A trick of the light, or of my mind. I was confusing him with a knight, even if one in slightly tarnished armor. But he was a cop, not Sir Galahad. Maybe he’d find out who was threatening me, but only on the side. Mostly, he’d still be a cop on a case. And in this case, one involving my parents.

I shouldn’t have told him about my father and Cindy. If I was sure he was going to find out about it anyway, why hadn’t I let him do so on his own? Charm and ease and sweet southern mush-mouthing notwithstanding, he’d just been grilling my old, wounded dad. He’d cast Dad as villain, Mom as dupe, both as killers. A more ridiculous duo had never been suspected. The third degree ceased at our arrival.

“I saw Elizabeth Ross’s house and got new shoes and a coat!” Karen skidded across the living room floor, raced across the carpet, and hurled herself at my father.

“Careful!” my mother called out. Then she quickly added: “Everything was on sale.” It wasn’t her husband who was upset about her buying spree; it was her daughter, Beth.

“You mean Betsy Ross’s house,” my father said before we could warn him. Karen, delighted at the continued ignorance of adults, smugly, loudly began an encore of her routine.

“Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy, and Bess,

They all went together to seek a bird’s nest.

They found a bird’s nest with five eggs in,

They all took one, and left four in.”

“Get it?” she demanded. “They’re all the same person. Just nicknames! Like I’m Kari and Pumpkin-face!”

My father did the grandparent admiration bit, then recovered enough to speak again. “There’s even more nicknames for Elizabeth,” he said. “There could have been ten names at that bird’s nest and only one egg would be gone, I’ll bet. There’s Betty and Libby and Elsie and Elissa.”

“And Lissa and Lisa and Lizzie and Lisbeth,” my mother added.

Karen had long since lost interest, but my parents were really into it. As for me, I suddenly heard them from a distance. My ears clogged, as if the atmosphere had abruptly changed, as if I were making a too-rapid descent. A crash landing.

“Not just Lisbeth, but Beth herself as well,” Mackenzie said from far away, and through a haze I saw him bow, gallantly, at my sister.

My heart palpitated. I didn’t want to pursue the path opening in my mind, but words nonetheless had been dropped like a little crumb path to follow. Name words. Elizabeth, Elspeth, Betsy and Bess… Betsy. Cindy’s toddler, Cindy’s murderer.

Around me real conversation had gone on hold and all was chitchat and pleasantries set to the drumming, finger-snapping—or at least finger-rubbing—enormously annoying sounds of my niece, the rapper.

“The Queen of Hearts,

She made some tarts,

All on a summer’s day…”

Nobody asked her to stop. My family is pathologically tolerant.

I thought back to Sunday. It seemed ancient times, years, not days, ago; but I nonetheless tried to replay a mental tape in slow motion and listen carefully to every word that had been said in this room. I knew that my mother and father had squabbled trying to date the length of time since they’d seen Lyle, a span that began with Cindy’s death. I tried to remember. Nearly two decades ago, isn’t that what my father had said, rather testily? Twenty years, give or take one. And Betsy had been three, so she’d be twenty-three or twenty-two now.

“The Knave of Hearts,

He stole those tarts,

And took them clean away.”

The kid and her jingles were making me crazy. If I was in this mood when my biological clock sounded alarms, I’d unplug it.

“The King of Hearts,

Called for the tarts,

And beat the Knave full sore—”

How did anybody with small children ever think? I couldn’t keep my head on course. My thoughts skidded sideways, sticking on the repetitive rhyme, until, with difficulty, I pulled them free and tuned out Karen’s jingles and the conversation of the other adults and concentrated.

I had to think about Elizabeth/Betsy of the changeable name.

I had to remember everything I knew before I went off on a wild Mother Goose chase.

A cute redheaded baby, Wiley had said. Janine had wanted to adopt her.

A cute redheaded girl-child whose natural father was in Vietnam. Whose natural father eventually raised her.

Whose mother, of course, was dead.

A cute little redheaded Betsy, Bess, Elizabeth, Lizzie.

I felt sick. When my sister offered cookies all around, I took three, maximum nervous munching in action. As I chewed, not tasting much, more random fragments surfaced in my memory pool, joining to create a picture I didn’t want to see.

Hattie’s strange reaction when she learned Lizzie’s father’s name—Lizzie’s original name, of course. Hattie saying it was Lizzie’s fault the night of Lyle’s death and then again when my mother and I visited. I’d thought she’d meant that Lizzie had been guilty of inadvertent food poisoning, but now her real meaning was clear.

Mackenzie was watching me quizzically.

He wasn’t going to be surprised. He was forever pulling me out of my webs of speculation, lecturing me on the fact that the odds always favored the most logical suspect. Unexciting, but true. Lizzie, with complete access to the tarts all day and evening, Lizzie, who knew who was coming to dinner, made depressingly obvious sense, particularly when her history was factored in.

But why now? Why this Sunday?

Just because, perhaps. Because, as Dorian Gray said, life wasn’t governed by will or invention. Instead, the cells held old passions, and then, when something happened by chance to reactivate the memories—the sound of music, a scent, whatever—everything came back. And as he said, “It is on things like this that our lives depend.”

Because, by chance, Lizzie and her father had converted a dilapidated boardinghouse into a chic bed and breakfast, and by chance, it was located across the street from where Lyle Z. grew up. And because by chance, Lyle Zacharias was turning fifty and having an acute attack of nostalgia and needed to believe you could go home again, that was the birthday party site.

And because Hattie Zacharias made the arrangements while Lizzie’s father was out of the country and spoke to a woman named Chapman, a name with no associations.

So just because. Because something had been waiting to happen for a long, long time. Who knew what poems and passions had simmered and brewed in Lizzie for twenty long years since her nightmarish accident? Who knew how stable or skewed Lizzie had been then—or since, having caused her mother’s death. Who could say what the weight of carrying that around every day of her life had done to her spirit and even her sanity?