Perfect Little Ladies Part 3

"Because you're not one of them? Because you're Latino, so naturally you'd know about criminals? Like it's a birthright that comes with your skin? Why can't you just be like other women and meet a nice man and be a nice wife? How many times do I have to ask you to have dinner with Junior Diaz? He won't wait forever, you know." His voice had grown louder, and he'd shoved back his chair and was standing now. Belita's dark eyes followed his movement. Suddenly, they filled with tears.

Waaaaah. Waaaaah.

"Now look what you've done," Yolanda said. "You've scared my poor baby..."

She picked her up and hushed her, while Manny said, "Oh, man, I'm sorry, Yo. Honest, I'm sorry. Do you want me to hold her?"

"No," Yolanda said, smoothing Belita's black hair. "I want you to forget about trying to fix me up and let me be myself. I want you to tell me what to do for my friend."

He poured more coffee. "Start at the hotel. Find out where your friend left her...her things...before they wound up in the Dumpster." Tough cop though he was, Manny got fl.u.s.tered when the talk was of a womanly nature. "Then you'll have to figure out who had access to them."

"So you'll help me help her?"

"Only if you don't tell anyone. Or I could get fired, Yo."

Seven.

CJ rose at dawn on Sunday morning, hitched her yellow Lab, Luna, onto a leash, then went for their predictable walk around the lake. Summer was nearly over; a few leaves on the birch trees had already turned yellow, though the thermometer was nearly sixty degrees and would no doubt reach eighty by noon.

Last night, she'd barely slept.

This business with Elinor was crazy, insane. Putting aside her feelings for Malcolm, it was hard to believe that Elinor was having an affair. If there had been an award in high school for "Least Likely to Screw Around on Your Husband," Elinor would have won, without question. In fact, rumor once had it that Elinor kept her legs and her spine so tight most of the time that it was surprising she'd landed a man at all, let alone Malcolm.

"Morning, CJ."

She hadn't heard the Williams boy-Ray's son-ride up on his bicycle, which was. .h.i.tched to a cart that held stacks of Sunday New York Times for the lake neighbors.

"Good morning, Kevin."

Luna loped over in search of a scratch on her ears. Like his dad, whom CJ on-again-off-again dated, Kevin thought Luna was the second-best dog on the planet, rated only slightly behind his chocolate Lab named Jerome.

"Want your paper now?"

"Sure. We're almost home." She took the paper; Kevin waved and drove off, pumping down the dirt road that was not much more than a path. Luna lumbered after him for a bit, then charged into cattails that hugged the water's edge, stirring up the cicadas, the noisy, heat-lazy insects that had three legs, "like a wheelbarrow," her father had always said.

Though there were times CJ wistfully thought about living in Paris again, she'd never regretted making her home where she and Elinor had grown up during summers and school vacations when they hadn't been on the campus of McCready School. Their mother had been more relaxed, less formal here, their father less stern. He'd sat by the lake, smoked his pipe, and read Victorian cla.s.sics to his girls: d.i.c.kens, Trollope, and CJ's favorite, George Eliot, a woman doing a man's job.

She supposed she'd become a George Eliot of her generation, needing to earn a man's wages to support herself. And Luna, of course.

If she'd had a husband like Malcolm, she wouldn't have needed to sell hand-painted dresses and jackets and elegant shawls. But the only husband she'd had had been Cooper (his first name was Lionel, so even CJ called him by his last), who had gotten too close to the truth.

They'd been married five years and had lived in a SoHo loft. He wrote screenplays (a few actually sold!), she painted textiles, and it seemed like a good long-term fit. For a while CJ forgot about Malcolm, but then she got pregnant. She and Cooper were ecstatic for a few weeks...until she miscarried.

"It's just one of those things," the doctor at the downtown clinic had explained to Cooper. "She's had one healthy pregnancy, so chances are, she'll have another."

One healthy pregnancy?

CJ, of course, had not told Cooper about Elinor and Malcolm and Jonas and the rest.

She'd deemed it safer to divorce him than to tell him the truth and reveal the big family secret. Not many people understood the magic bond of the twin-psyche, the monozygotic connection.

So she'd broken Cooper's heart, and broken her own, and since then, she'd been alone, which, she told herself, wasn't so bad. When she missed the warmth of a man, she had Ray Williams to turn to. Ray was a neighbor, a friend, someone who'd fix her screen door and share a bottle of wine, which often led to a romantic occurrence. She'd been quite clear about not wanting to get involved. Besides, Ray had sole custody of Kevin and would not spend the night. Other than her ex-husband, CJ had never slept until dawn with a man, not even Malcolm, whose love had been limited to clandestine moments in surrept.i.tious places until one day the guilt had been too much.

And now the ache swelled again in her chest, the one reborn yesterday at Elinor's, the "Malcolm ache" she'd once called it before she'd buried it-or thought that she'd buried it-so long ago. But there it was, rising up from the ashes, Malcolm the Phoenix.

Unless it was just loneliness, looking for a victim.

She shuddered, then quickly shook her head.

"Luna!" she called. "Come on, girl!" It was time to stop dawdling, as her mother would have called it, time to stop thinking waste-of-time thoughts, to get home and get ready for the guests who'd arrive soon to talk about blackmail.

She clutched the newspaper to her chest, waited for Luna to catch up, then marched briskly back toward the cottage.

At five minutes to eight on Sunday morning, Alice located the mailbox marked Twenty-three Lakeside Lane. She stopped the car, surveyed a tall stand of pine trees, soft bundles of ferns, and thick cl.u.s.ters of sun-colored daylilies. It was quiet and serene, like a watercolor, accented by the old gardener's shed off to one side and the former carriage house, which, Elinor once told her, now held CJ's studio. In the center of the frame was the familiar stone cottage. It seemed smaller now that CJ lived there alone.

"It's changed," Poppy said quietly from the seat beside her. "It no longer looks scary." Her words were rea.s.suring, but her tone was rather lifeless.

"It's older," Alice replied. "So are we."

"Older and wiser."

"Well, older, anyway." Alice put the car into drive and slowly directed it down the gravel driveway. "You're okay, then?" she asked. "To be here?"

Poppy nodded. "I'm not going to faint, if that's what you mean."

"Well," Alice said, "that's good then." She wondered if Poppy had been in therapy and hadn't mentioned it, the way Elinor hadn't mentioned her affair. Life was more fun, she supposed, when they'd been young and naive and had discussed life's minutiae at great, tedious length.

"Poppy," Elinor said as she greeted them at the back door. "I am so sorry. I completely forgot. I wouldn't have had us meet here-"

Poppy held up her hand. "It's all right, Elinor. I'm a grown woman now." She supposed none of them really believed that, but it seemed like the right thing to say. For once, she would try to be there for her friends-for Elinor this time-the way they'd always been there for her.

"Still, it was selfish of me..."

"Well, don't be silly." Poppy's head twittered a little, so she spun around. "Catherine Janelle!" she called out to CJ. "You have, indeed, done wonders with this place!"

Her eyes cruised the living room, with its plump, comfy furniture in natural, neutral shades that accented the copper-like veins of the nutmeg stone fireplace.

Poppy had no idea how she remembered the fireplace was of nutmeg stone. Memories of this place were usually so confusing.

She held one side of her cerulean skirt up by its hem and wondered if her heartbeat would ever slow down. She feared that if she let her mouth relax from its smile, her lips would start quivering as they had that day, and that this time they'd never stop.

With a light fingertip, she touched a bouquet of gerbera daisies that stood in a thin crystal vase. Then she pirouetted to a painting in vivid acrylics.

"Yours?" she asked CJ, and CJ said, "Yes."

"Fabulous!" Poppy twittered again, aware that everyone was watching her, as if they'd been suspended in her precarious air.

"Simply fabulous!" she repeated, her timbre a bit higher than she would have liked. She twirled back to CJ. "Now where is the kitchen? Do we have b.l.o.o.d.y Marys? I believe I could use one or two."

Eight.

Yolanda was the only one who opted for coffee instead of a b.l.o.o.d.y Mary. Then again, Yolanda hadn't been there when the gardener was murdered.

Alice meandered around the room, not wanting to witness Poppy's behavior, but not wanting to look out the window to the garden, where she surely would picture the yellow Police-Do Not Cross tape ribboned through the innocent pink and white blossoms.

She sat on the sofa and stared at the fireplace until a furnace flared up from her feet.

Finally, everyone had a beverage, everyone was seated, and everyone waited for Elinor to hold court.

"So," Elinor began, "do we have any ideas how we're going to find out who my blackmailer is?"

Alice cleared her throat. "What about the note? Did it come in the mail?"

"No. It was overnighted. A standard courier service. The sender was a phony name and address somewhere in Manhattan. I've already checked that out." A long fingernail traced the crease on her ivory cotton pants.

"What about the hotel?" Yolanda asked. "Were you at the Lord Winslow with your lover? Is that why your panties were there?"

Alice blanched.

Poppy blinked.

CJ seemed to take a deep breath.

Sometimes Yolanda was a little too outspoken for the ladies of Mount Kasteel.

"Yes," Elinor finally replied. "I met my lover there Thursday night," she continued. "We've often been careful to meet out of town."

Out of town? Alice gulped, even though this was not about her.

"We need to start there," Yolanda said. "Whoever it was might have been spying on you, maybe waiting to find evidence to hold up for ransom. Your panties were their mother lode."

They thought, they drank, they bit their lips and played with their hair. Actually, it was Poppy who played with her hair.

"Alice and Poppy," Yolanda continued, "the two of you should go to the hotel. You can tell the manager that you're Elinor's friends. Show them her picture. Say she left something behind and you've come to get it."

"Me?" Poppy asked. "Me?"

"Well, not me," the hairdresser-slash-nail-tech replied. "No one would believe I'm Elinor's friend."

They blanched and blinked and deep-breathed again.

"Why doesn't Elinor go herself?" Alice continued. "Or have CC go in her place?" She'd meant to say CJ, really she had, but "CC" had slipped out. It had been a tongue-in-cheek way she and Poppy had referred to CJ when they were kids, CC meaning "carbon copy," the besmirched, lesser twin who'd not been quite as grand or as snooty as Elinor. When they were fourteen, snooty had been good.

Yolanda stood up and walked to the fireplace. "If Elinor is being followed, the blackmailer might mistake CJ for her. If he thinks either one of them is snooping, who knows what he'll do." She looked at Elinor. "Did he say what his next step will be?"

"The note said to stay where I am, which I suppose means at the country house. I don't know if I'll hear more in a day or a week."

"In the meantime, maybe we can learn something."

"Oh," Poppy said, "I don't know if I can do this."

"Yes, you can," Alice said. "You're stronger than you used to be."

"I am? That's right. I am."

Yolanda ignored them. "You should bring a picture. Preferably one of the three of you: Elinor, Alice, and Poppy. That way, whoever you show the picture to will know that you're friends."

"What if the hotel people say, 'I remember her. But she left nothing behind'?" Alice asked.

"Ask if they're sure. Ask if someone else might have already picked something up."

"And if they say yes?"

"Ask what he looks like. Act as if it's fun, as if he must be another of Elinor's friends."

"What if it's not a he but a she?" That came from Poppy.

"I can't imagine a woman being this scary," CJ said.

No one mentioned Poppy's mother.

Then Elinor asked, "Do you think you can do this? Pretend you're my friend?"

Alice smiled. If nothing else, this game might be safer than the one she'd been playing. "We are your friends, Elinor. You'd do it for us." Wouldn't she?

"But what if the person we ask turns out to be the blackmailer?" Poppy asked.

Yolanda shrugged. "Look, I have no idea if this will work. But we can try."

"Please," Elinor said. "For the sake of my marriage."

More sighing and drinking and hair curling followed.