‘I don’t care. We can’t let him get away with it. I know he murdered Alex just as sure as I’m standing here brushing your hair.’
‘But you aren’t brushing,’ I reminded her gently.
‘Right.’ She began again, slowly, rhythmically. ‘I wasn’t in love with Alex,’ she reflected, ‘but he was in love with me. I told him how I felt, and he was OK with it, really. I think he thought I’d come around eventually, and he may have been right. But it was just too soon after Drew to get into another serious relationship, you know?’
‘I know. If something happened to Paul… Gosh, breaking in one husband is hard enough. I don’t understand how women like Elizabeth Taylor and Zsa-Zsa Gabor managed it. After they talk me off the railing of the high span of the Chesapeake Bay Bridge, I’d probably just sell up and move to a cottage in the south of France.’
‘No you wouldn’t, Hannah.’
‘No?’
‘Your daughter? The grandchildren? How about them?’
‘You have a point.’ I laughed. ‘Look, I have an idea. What we need is to snatch off his cloak of invisibility, draw Drew out. What would make him show himself?’
‘Jealousy. If Drew killed Alex, it was because he was jealous.’
‘We have to assume that Drew is still watching us,’ I said.
‘That gives me the heebie jeebies, Hannah.’
‘I’m not comfortable with it either. So, under that assumption, let’s make him jealous. Get somebody to come on to you.’
‘But that could be dangerous, especially for the object of my so-called affection.’
‘That’s where the people Paul knows might come in handy.’ I thought for a moment while Amy brushed. ‘If Drew is watching you, I’ll bet he’ll turn up at the State House ball. It’s the next time that we’ll all be outside Patriot House and it’ll be a mob scene. He could easily sneak in, just like he did at the burning of the Peggy Stewart, if we assume, like I do, that the so-called reporter Alex was talking to was actually Drew.’
‘We’ll need help, Hannah. I’m certainly not going to flirt with you!’ She laughed, genuinely amused. ‘That would push Drew over the edge for sure! SEAL’s wife throws him over for another woman.’
‘It probably wouldn’t be the first time,’ I observed ruefully. ‘OK, it’s decided. In the meantime, then, it’s business as usual. Let me get a note out to Paul. I’ll try to talk to him. See what he can do.’
‘A note to Paul? How will you arrange that?’
I put a finger to my lips. ‘Need to know, Amy. Need to know.’
TWENTY-TWO
‘I had to help the cook pluck a chicken today. When this is all over, I think I’m going to become a vegetarian.’
French Fry, housemaid
‘Melody,’ I said as we strolled through the rose garden one morning after breakfast, cutting flowers we planned to arrange in the vase on the entrance hall table. ‘I need you to run an errand for me.’
Melody snipped off a white damask rose and laid it gently in her basket. ‘As long as it doesn’t involve Gabe, I’ll consider it.’
‘I’m sending you to the market with Karen today. You’ll be purchasing a roast for Sunday dinner, and anything else that Karen thinks we might need.’
Melody’s face lit up. ‘I’d adore that. But, how come you aren’t going?’
‘Founding Father sent me an invitation to tea at Hammond-Harwood House this afternoon. No way I can get out of it.’ I reached into my pocket and pulled out the note I had written to Paul using a leaf I’d torn out of the little blue notebook he’d given me. I pressed the note into her hand. ‘This is for my husband. Please leave it with Kyle or with Corey at the Maryland Table concession. They may have a packet for you, too.’
‘But isn’t that, like, cheating?’ Melody asked. With a furtive glance over her shoulder at the hulk of Paca House looming behind us, she accepted the note and tucked it quickly into her own pocket, a willing accomplice.
‘Technically, it is. But I’m hoping that this will be our little secret.’ I touched her arm. ‘Thank you, Melody. And whatever is in the packet they give you? It’s yours to keep.’
Her eyes widened, she beamed. ‘Awesome.’
I cleaned up for the tea party as best I could, scrubbing my face and neck with soap and warm water, and paying particular attention to my underarms. My Savannah-born grandmother had often said, ‘Hannah, honey, horses sweat, men perspire, but women glow.’ After the fever, the exertion and the tension of the previous weeks, I had done more than glow; I sweated buckets. One of my gowns was so ripe, in fact, that I was certain it could walk out of the room and down to the laundry tub quite of its own accord.
For the occasion, I chose one of the few remaining everyday gowns in my wardrobe, a yellow silk with green lace trim that had probably looked smashing on Katherine Donovan but only made my skin look sallow, more tired and drained than I already was. I was a winter; yellow didn’t appear anywhere on my color palate.
Through my fund-raising work for breast cancer research, I was already acquainted with the hostess, Mrs Sandra Bordley-Bowen, a local realtor who could trace her ancestry directly back to Stephen Bordley, the eighteenth-century Maryland attorney general, and rarely missed an opportunity to interject that historical fact into any conversation.
When I arrived at the Hammond-Harwood House, an Anglo-Palladian villa built in 1774 by renowned architect William Buckland, Chad the Cameraman took some time to capture the impeccable front door, then ducked in ahead of me the better to record my grand entrance for posterity. A liveried servant took my cloak, and I was shown to the upstairs ballroom where two pianists, a man and a woman, sat at the pianoforte, and were just beginning to play the second movement of a Mozart sonata for four hands.
Mrs Bordley-Bowen’s lips drew away from her laser-white, predatory teeth in what passed for a smile in the over-botoxed set and gushed, ‘Mrs Ives. Delighted you could join us today. May I introduce you to the others?’
‘Of course.’ I scanned the audience and realized that I already knew most of the others, a half-dozen women from Mrs Bordley-Brown’s book club, dressed, like her, in colonial costumes, mob caps perched precariously (and ridiculously) atop their freeze-dried hairdos. Shallow women, these, whose conversations ran the gamut from A to B, as Dorothy Parker famously said, and read Oprah books almost exclusively, depressing novels where life sucks, things get worse, and everybody dies. I didn’t like these women any better now than I would have nearly two and a half centuries ago. Nevertheless I gathered my skirts around me, sat, folded my hands demurely in my lap and prepared to enjoy the music.
The event turned out to be more of a soiree than a tea. There were sandwiches and sweets, of course, and the inevitable ceremonial pouring of the tea. At the end of the Rondo, one of the pianists retired to a Chippendale armchair, and a soprano took her place, treating us to some delightful solos from the ballad operas of Thomas Arne and William Boyce. Following the musicale, when the pianists were finally allowed some refreshment, Mrs B Hyphen B divided us up into two groups with a cheery, ‘It’s time for whist!’
After the card games began, I could no longer avoid their questions about the terrible accident at Patriot House, and how I felt about it.
We had no access to modern-day newspapers at Patriot House, of course, but I quickly learned from the ladies that Alex’s death had been in all the papers. Fortunately, neither The Capital nor The Baltimore Sun had mentioned exactly who had found Alex Mueller’s body, so I could smile wanly, claim shock, and suggest that with time, I might possibly get over it, which was the honest truth.
The sun was low in the sky before I could politely excuse myself, send for my cloak, and hurry home to Patriot House, just two blocks away, with Chad hot on my heels. If Melody had done her part, I would have an appointment with Paul at the back wall, and I didn’t want to miss it. But first, I’d have to ditch Chad.