Wicked Stepmother Page 5

5

  Next morning, Louise walked into the dining room just as Cassandra was finishing her breakfast. She took Cassandra to task for having gone off on the very night of her father’s funeral. “I was going to fix dinner for the three of you. I went to a great deal of trouble, because I thought it was important that the family should be together at a time like this.”

  “The family was together,” Cassandra pointed out. “I’m sorry you were left all alone here, Louise, but we had already made other plans.”

  “You might have told me about them!” Louise protested.

  “You didn’t ask us,” Cassandra returned placidly. “You simply announced what your plans were without asking what we intended to do.”

  Louise closed her mouth very tightly. “Where’s Verity?” she demanded.

  “Right here,” said Verity, from the doorway. Her dark glasses rested on the top of her head, but after one glance at Louise, she pulled them down onto the bridge of her nose.

  Louise looked Verity up and down. “Those are the same clothes you had on yesterday. You spent the night out, didn’t you?”

  “Oh, Louise,” sighed Verity. “Really.” She crossed to the buffet and poured a cup of coffee for herself, generously spooning in cream and sugar.

  “You did, didn’t you?” persisted Louise angrily.

  Verity sat down at the table. “I’m a physical wreck,” she remarked to Cassandra. “But I feel great.”

  “Where were you?” cried Louise.

  Verity turned slowly. “Do you really want me to answer that?”

  “Yes, of course I do.”

  “All right. I went home to Porter Square with a complete stranger. I think his name was Jack. He was very nice. I had taxi fare, but he drove me home anyway.”

  Louise drew in her breath sharply. “Are you actually admitting to me that you were unfaithful to Eric?”

  “You asked. I’m too hung over to lie.”

  “And on the night your father was buried?!”

  “Christ, Louise, give me the confession and I’ll sign it. Just lower your voice. You’re rattling my contacts.”

  “I can’t believe this,” cried Louise. “I can’t believe the way you two girls are acting.”

  “I’m twenty-five,” said Cassandra. “Verity’s twenty-eight. We’re not girls anymore.” Her glance at her stepmother was hard. “Louise, what are you doing over here at this hour, anyway?”

  “I came to see if I could do anything for you. This is a house of mourning. I came to see if I couldn’t be of some help. After the death of a husband and father, a family has to draw together.”

  In one parallel motion, the two women looked at Louise sharply, glanced at one another, and then turned away.

  “We’re fine,” said Cassandra grimly.

  “We’re fine,” echoed Verity. She rose to pour out another cup of coffee. “Louise, aren’t you going to be late opening the

  office?”

  Louise marched out of the room without another word. Verity returned to the table.

  “How long has she been here?” Verity asked.

  “She’s been skulking around the house all morning. In and out of rooms. Up and down the stairs. She’s been driving Cara and Serena crazy.”

  “Giving them orders?”

  “Trying to,” said Cassandra. “I put a stop to that. I told them to ignore everything Louise said.”

  “Louise covets this house,” mused Verity. “You can see it in the way she walks through the rooms.”

  “I have no intention of turning it over to her,” said Cassandra flatly. “Nor of asking her to move in, either. Although I think that’s what she’s after.”

  “No, of course you mustn’t,” said Verity absently. “Last night, I was thinking. . . .”

  “Thinking what?”

  “That one of us ought to go down to Atlantic City,” said Verity, almost shyly.

  Cassandra nodded her understanding. “To see what really happened?”

  “Yes,” said Verity. “Talk to people.”

  “Jonathan and I spoke about this last night after you had gone off,” said Cassandra.

  “And?”

  “And it wouldn’t do any good. A resort hotel hushes these things up. They don’t stay in business by advertising how many customers fall dead in their casinos, or how many people get shot up in their dining rooms.”

  “We could talk to the police,” said Verity. “Or hire a detective.”

  “Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe?” Cassandra’s laugh was melancholy. “I’m not making fun or anything. Jonathan and I thought about the same thing. It’s just that all that’s so melodramatic. Finding out exactly which blackjack table Father died at, hiring a private eye. This isn’t a melodramatic family. We’ve never done things like that. We’d never do it right if we tried.”

  “Maybe,” said Verity. “So what do we do?”

  “Nothing, for the time being. I mean, we don’t really believe that Louise killed Father, do we?”

  Verity didn’t reply. She merely got up and closed the dining room doors. Then she went to the swinging door and peered into the kitchen. Only Ida, the cook, was there.

  “What are you doing?” Cassandra asked.

  “Louise may be lacking in tact, but she’s not deaf,” shrugged Verity. “I just wanted to make sure she wasn’t hanging around.”

  “And,” Cassandra went on, “if Louise did do something stupid in Atlantic City, she’ll probably do something stupid again. We’ll just have to watch her closely, that’s all.”

  Verity considered this as she poured out a third cup of coffee. At last she nodded her acquiescence.

  After another few moments, Cassandra asked, “Did you at least have a good time last night?”

  “I think so,” said Verity after a moment of hesitation.

  “You don’t know?”

  “Well, we did a lot of coke, and then we drank something that—Cassandra, honest to God it was bright green, and I know it wasn’t crème de menthe.” With two fingers she rubbed the skin just beneath her nostrils. “And I’ve got nose-burn from the amyl nitrate.”

  Cassandra raised her eyebrows and shook her head.

  “Are you shocked?” asked Verity, peering at her sister over the top of her dark glasses.

  “No,” sighed Cassandra. “Just surprised that in the midst of all that, you still had time to think about Father, and Louise, and Atlantic City.”

  Verity shook her head slowly. “I couldn’t think about anything else.” She took the last coffee roll from the plate on the table and spread it with butter. There was a lull as the two sisters gazed out the open French doors at the morning-lit garden. Right outside was a plot of King Alfreds. The flowers were thick now, and on a slight breeze their bright fragrance was blown into the dining room. For a moment it even covered the smell of the freshly brewed coffee.

  “Should we apologize to Louise?” Cassandra asked.

  “I think it might be a good idea,” said Verity. “For appearances. I have no scruples about that sort of thing, do you?”

  “I suppose we ought to apologize. She’s going to be enough trouble around here without our starting fights about nothing.”

  “Why,” Verity wondered aloud, “would Father actually marry her? He was obviously sleeping with her—probably he had been sleeping with her since Mother died. Why didn’t he just leave it at that?”

  “I don’t know. She talked him into it, I guess. At the funeral I kept thinking, well, at least Louise won’t be underfoot anymore. Ironic, isn’t it?”

  Verity wrinkled her nose. “This room reeks of that awful perfume she wears. Where does she buy it—J. C. Penney’s? I can’t believe she was here at breakfast. It’s just what I need to start the day—my mother-in-law accusing me of infidelity to her rotten son.”

  “Your stepmother,” Cassandra corrected.

  The offices of the Menelaus Press occupied the second floor of an eighteenth-century building on Brattle Street in Cambridge, jus
t on the edge of Harvard Square. Cassandra’s office, as managing editor of the quarterly journal of the arts and letters, Iphigenia, had two large unshaded multipaned windows that overlooked Brattle Street. Three walls of the room were covered floor to ceiling with bookshelves. A long oaken table behind Cassandra’s desk was laden with magazines, bound galleys, loose galleys, manuscript boxes, and stacks of manila envelopes containing unsolicited submissions.

  Cassandra returned to work a few days after her father’s death and found her already cluttered desk piled high with mail, all of it, doubtless, requiring replies. She worked all morning on correspondence, lunched with the artist who had brought preliminary sketches for the artwork of the September issue, and spent the afternoon at her desk, feet up and coffee in hand, grimly perusing an ample and badly typed manuscript. Every minute or two she’d look up—at the clock, at the budding trees that appeared through one window, at the wooden shingle reading MENELAUS PRESS EST. 1942 that appeared through the other. Whenever she finished one page of typed poetry, she’d place it carefully atop a pile on the far side of her desk, and riffle through what remained to be read.

  A crisp spring breeze creaked the shingle, and automobile traffic and students’ voices around Harvard Square were a pleasant murmur. As had been the tradition for many years, in celebrating the end of the long Boston winter, large numbers of students had stuck their stereo speakers in the dorm windows and were playing the Beatles’ “Here Comes the Sun” at full blast. When she finished the last page, she sighed, sat wearily back, and called out, “Sarah!” She waited, but did not bother to call again.

  After a minute or so, a short, squat woman of about twenty-seven appeared in the doorway of Cassandra’s office. She had waist-length dull brown hair, and wore wire-rimmed glasses, an ill-fitting cowl-neck sweater, and a pleated plaid skirt.

  Cassandra waved a hand toward the manuscript.

  “You wrote the report on this?”

  “That’s Mary Scott-Trout?” asked Sarah, and when Cassandra nodded grimly, Sarah said, “Yes, I did.”

  “Did you actually read it?”

  “Of course! I thought it was a darkly fragmented statement of the condition of the artist as societal mentor, fragmented yet—”

  “I read your report,” interrupted Cassandra. “I also read the poetry. They’re both total nonsense.”

  “Oh,” said Sarah weakly, “do you really think so?”

  “I do.”

  Sarah clucked her tongue. “You know, that could be a real problem. Her new book just got that wonderful review in the New York Review and there was this big article on her home life in the Globe Magazine last Sunday.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “Because in the Globe article, she told the interviewer that Iphigenia was going to publish her entire new cycle of poems as a special issue.”

  Cassandra smiled. “She actually said that?”

  “Yes.” Sarah shifted uncomfortably, and leaned against the doorjamb.

  “Where on earth would she have gotten an idea like that?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t say anything to her about it. Really, I didn’t.”

  “I believe you,” said Cassandra. Sarah looked very relieved. “Ms. Scott-Trout and her fans at the Globe are just going to have to be disappointed.”

  “Should I write her or call her?” Sarah’s tone of voice betrayed with what little pleasure she anticipated the task.

  “I’ll take care of it,” said Cassandra, and reached into the drawer of her desk for a sheet of the journal’s notepaper, embossed in the upper-left-hand corner with the figure of a young woman standing despondently on the seashore.

  “You don’t mind?” asked Sarah incredulously. “I hate writing rejection letters.”

  “So do I,” said Cassandra. “I hate doing things like this. And I’m terrible at it, but if someone is going to waste our time by presenting a patently unpublishable manuscript, I don’t mind telling her I feel that my time has been wasted.”

  “You won’t say that!”

  “No, I’ll be very polite, and I certainly won’t mention what she said in the Globe interview.”

  “She’s going to be very very upset,” warned Sarah, edging out of the room. “You know how obnoxious she can be.”

  Cassandra had already begun to type.

  “It’s not our problem,” said Cassandra. “Iphigenia wasn’t founded so that we could devote entire issues to the fourth-rate poetry of minor celebrities of the local literary scene.”

  Sarah paused at the door. “I just wonder where she got the idea that we were going to publish her.”

  Cassandra paused in her typing. “It’s not important, Sarah. Forget it. Some people just have a talent for making trouble.”

  At five-thirty, Cassandra dropped the letter to Ms. Scott-Trout into a mailbox, then walked over to the Harvard Faculty Club and took part in a small dinner symposium on the state of Boston literary arts.

  It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when Cassandra parted from a noisy group at the door of the Faculty Club. She got wearily into her car and was about to cross the river on her way home to Brookline when she quite suddenly changed her mind and turned left onto Storrow Drive. Ten minutes later, she pulled into a free spot in front of Betsy’s Pit.

  Inside, Boys Say Go was in the midst of the same set it had played the last time she’d been to the place. Cassandra slipped off her quilted leather jacket and draped it over the back of an empty chair at the bar. She slid up onto the stool and ordered a glass of white wine. For a long while she sat, lost in thought, neglecting not only the band behind her but the glass of wine in front of her.

  She didn’t even turn around until twenty minutes later, when the drummer smashed his cymbals with such force that his drumsticks snapped apart. She politely joined the audience in applause. She watched as the band packed up their instruments and drifted off the stage, and looked expectantly for Rocco DiRico and People Buying Things to come drifting on.

  Instead, six women appeared, wearing puce body stockings and knee-high lace-up high-heeled boots. All of them had teased green hair, white pancake makeup, black eyeshadow, and crimson lipstick.

  Puzzled, Cassandra called the bartender over.

  He was young, burly, and sandy-haired. When Cassandra smiled at him, he returned her smile with suggestive warmth.

  “What’s the name of that group setting up now?” she asked.

  “Vera and the Swamp Pussies. That’s Vera with the green hair.”

  “They all have green hair.”

  “Vera’s the tall one. Ever seen ’em before?”

  “No, I haven’t. I thought People Buying Things would be playing here tonight. That’s why I came. Will they be on later?”

  “No, but why don’t you hang around anyway—I get off at two.”

  “Do you know if they’re playing anywhere tonight?”

  “Who?”

  “People Buying Things.”

  “The Rat.”

  “The what?”

  “The Rat. The Rathskeller,” he explained. “Kenmore Square.”

  “Oh,” said Cassandra uncertainly. “Yes . . .”

  “You come to a place like this, and you don’t know the Rat?” He shrugged and was called away to fill an order. When he returned he asked, “Are you going to wait for me tonight?”

  Cassandra shook her head with a smile. “I can’t,” she said in a soft voice. “Sorry.”

  The bartender shrugged. “You know Rocco?” he asked.

  “Yes,” replied Cassandra. “But not well,” she added after a moment.

  The bartender swept his eyes from Cassandra’s face down to her breasts and then back up again. “Rocco and I have the same taste.” He paused, evidently waiting for a response. But when none came he took up his towel, which had lain on the bar beneath his fist, and said, “Go over to the Rat. If you can believe it, the place is even scruffier than here. Don’t go in the front; you’ll never get a table, you won’t get ne
ar the stage, and Rocco won’t even know you’re there. Go around the back, tell ’em Andy sent you. That’ll get you in. He may be in the dressing room, but if he’s not, wait for him there.”

  Cassandra smiled sincerely. “Thank you,” she said.

  “You don’t look like a groupie.”

  “I am not a groupie,” said Cassandra pointedly.

  Andy shrugged. “If it doesn’t pan out, come on back over here. I get off at two.”

  Cassandra pulled the coat over her shoulders, smiled a farewell, and left the bar without answering him.

  “Andy? Who’s Andy?”

  The broad woman dressed in the none-too-clean waitress’s uniform blocked Cassandra’s way in the rear entrance to the Rat. She had already gotten by two sixteen-year-old girls sharing a joint with a young man relieving himself loudly against the lid of a garbage can.

  “Andy works at Betsy’s Pit,” Cassandra explained. “He told me to give his name as a password.”

  The waitress regarded Cassandra skeptically. She was in her mid-twenties, with a greasy yellow beehive and vivid blue Cleopatra eye shadow. A wad of gum ballooned her right cheek. Her hands were on her hips and her feet spread wide, one heel tapping rhythmically to the muffled beat of the band playing behind the wall of concrete just to their right.

  “Andy,” the waitress repeated.

  “You know him?” Cassandra asked uneasily. She wasn’t in the habit of going to bars at all, much less sneaking in the back

  way.

  “Used to work here,” the woman said sourly, shifting the wad of gum to her other cheek. “Punched me out one night.”

  “Oh,” said Cassandra quietly, “that’s terrible.”

  “I dislocated his jaw. I broke his toes,” the woman said. She waited for Cassandra to speak again.

  “Look, I’m not trying to avoid paying the cover, I’m just trying to find Rocco. That’s who I came to see. And Andy is not a friend of mine—he just told me to use his name—if that makes any difference.”

  “It does.” The waitress stepped aside. “Dressing room’s down front. That door to the right of the front stairs.”

  As Cassandra slipped past her, the waitress grabbed her arm, pulled her up short, and hissed in her face, “You tell Andy for me: he comes around here I’ll break his face into little pieces and stuff ’em in his shoes!”