I think Moira and I both thought, as we discovered Maud lying there, that the neighborhood would not be the same again, ever.
Much to our surprise, Maud and Frank had had rather more money than we would have guessed. A very tidy sum, actually, just over a million dollars, not including the sale of the building and contents. The bulk of the money went to a couple of charities, the old building and its contents to a nephew in Australia we never knew they had, and there was a nice little fund set up with the stipulation that our coffee group— we were all individually named—should get together once a year for dinner in the restaurant of our choice for as long as we were able.
Conversation for the next little while focused almost exclusively on Frank and Maud.
“Where do you think all the money came from?” I wondered out loud, Moira having dropped in for a coffee before our respective enterprises opened for the day.
“Investments,” Moira, owner of the local beauty salon, ventured. “Once when I went over,” she went on, tapping the table lightly with her perfectly manicured nails, “Maud was working at her desk upstairs. Looked like bonds to me.”
“But you have to have money to invest!” I replied. “If personal experience is anything to go by, these places don’t make anyone rich.”
“Maybe they were just better at it than we are,” Moira said, including herself in this rather generously, since she is a very successful businesswoman.
I remember that day very clearly for some reason, looking around my shop, which was looking particularly nice, in my estimation, and thinking how content I was with my life for the first time in a while, how my universe was unfolding entirely satisfactorily. Business, if not brisk exactly, was steady. Sarah and I worked well together. She left the buying decisions up to me and so I got to take four extended buying trips a year to parts of the world I loved, while she, the born accountant, managed the shop very efficiently. We’d built up a nice roster of repeat customers who kept us going through the lean times.
On the personal side I had, I thought, a pleasant life. Partnerless for a year or so, I found that, despite thinking about the former love of my life—a Mexican archaeologist by the name of Lucas May—more than I would like to, and still occasionally having to resist the temptation to call him and beg him to come back to me, I enjoyed being single.
I got together with friends like Moira as often as I could, and one evening a week I took a course at the University of Toronto, usually about some aspect of ancient history or languages, partly because it was related to my business, but mainly because I was interested in it. I’d long since realized I’d never be a scholar, but I enjoyed knowing a little about a lot of things, and in particular learning about the history of the places where I went to do my buying.
I had some not very onerous surrogate parenting responsibilities for a young Maltese couple who were living in Canada while the young man, Anthony Farrugia, studied architecture. These duties I shared with a friend of mine, Rob Luczka, a sergeant in the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, whom I’d met in Malta a year or two earlier and with whom I’d stayed in touch. The young Farrugias lived in a basement apartment in the house Rob shared with his daughter Jennifer and his partner Barbara. I looked in on the Farrugias from time to time, called Anthony’s mother about once a month to report, and, when I was in town, had Sunday dinner at the house with Anthony, his wife Sophia, and Rob and his clan. Life, if not overly exciting, was extremely comfortable.
“So what’s going to happen to Maud’s junk, do you think?” Moira said, interrupting my thoughts.
“The nephew in Australia has no interest in any of it,” Alex interjected. “The house is to be sold, and the contents auctioned off. Molesworth Cox,” he added, naming a swank auction house.
“Well, if you say so, Alex, then it must be true.” Moira laughed. “I don’t know how you do it, but you seem to know everything.”
Not quite everything, as it turned out. A “for sale” sign went up on the property soon enough, and the building was snapped up almost immediately by a man who was one of the larger property owners and landlords in the area. Shortly after that it was being renovated for a new tenant. For whom, exactly, the landlord wasn’t saying. He would only allow as how this tenant was upscale, exclusive and exciting, which didn’t tell us much. We all liked to think we were all of those things. Large hoardings hid the renovations from our view, try as much as we might to peer in. Even Alex Stewart couldn’t find out who the new tenant would be.
Then, with great fanfare, the hoardings came down and the shop was shown in all its glory, clive swain, designer, antiquarian, the sign said. My ex-husband, the rat, right across the street in competition with me!
From that moment on, my comfortable little world began to unravel.
“My goodness, some men are hard to get rid of! Hang around like dirty shirts!” Moira exclaimed.
“This is so awful,” I moaned. “I started the business in the first place,” I said, quite unnecessarily, since Moira knew this only too well. But I had to say it anyway. “The only reason he got into this business is because I was dumb enough to give him half when I married him. And he was such a jerk, insisting I sell the store to give him the money when we split. It was sheer luck I was able to buy back in again with Sarah. Now what does he up and do? Right across the street!”
Moira made sympathetic noises. “He certainly seems to be able to get women to take care of him, doesn’t he? First you, who figured him out and booted him out the door. So he takes up with this new woman—what’s her name, Celeste—who, let’s face it, buys him a store.
“I don’t think he’ll be much of a threat to you, darling,” she went on. Moira called everybody darling. “After all, he never did an honest day’s work in his life, now did he?”‘
That much, I thought, was true. Clive was a brilliant designer, and we’d been a good combination for a while. However, it didn’t take a genius to notice that soon after we were married and I’d given him a half interest in the shop as a wedding present, he’d taken to lying about hotel pools ogling young women in bikinis while I pressed a rented Jeep up steep mountain roads to get to the perfect wood carvers, or argued with customs agents in some hot, sweaty warehouse.
Technically Moira was right. Clive didn’t like to work. But he’d remarried, a wealthy woman by the name of Celeste, and she had more than enough money to hire people to do the work for him. I tried to make light of it, assuring Sarah, who must have wondered what she’d done in a previous life to deserve finding herself involved in this battle, that Clive would not be a problem.
The truth was, however, he could work hard when he chose to, and he’d been a ferocious adversary in our divorce proceedings. I considered him very much a threat, but more than that. I’d loved him once, we’d been married for twelve years, and seeing his name in elegant gold letters on the sign across the street was a constant reminder of something I considered a personal shortcoming, as if the failure of the marriage, and Clive’s behavior, was somehow due entirely to inadequacy on my part. I dreaded the inevitable first meeting, and my anxiety made me furious, both at Clive and at myself.
I tried to put as good a face on as I could, and made a point of carrying on much as usual, concentrating on the details and the routine of my life. There were the plans for my next trip to Indonesia and Thailand, and the handling of the latest shipment from Mexico. On the more social side, there was dinner at Rob’s house on Sundays, where as usual this time of year, Sophia, Jennifer, and I would sit on the back deck and watch Rob and Anthony barbecue, while Barbara, a perky blonde with a ponytail and gorgeous physique, and a shoo-in for the Martha Stewart award for perfect housekeeping should there ever be such a thing, passed exquisite little hors d’oeuvres and tossed salads of leaves and other ingredients I couldn’t even identify.