Bella Tillis was busy whipping up an apple cake in the big open kitchen when Des got there. A round, fierce little Brooklyn-born widow in her mid-seventies, Bella Tillis was bunking with Des while she looked for a place of her own. Bella had been her next-door neighbor in the New Haven suburb of Woodbridge back when Brandon had ditched Des for Tamika, a U.S. congressman’s daughter with whom he’d started sleeping back when he and Tamika were classmates at Yale Law School. In fact, Brandon had never stopped sleeping with Tamika, not even after he’d married Des. Which had taught Des one very valuable lesson in life: Dont ever trust lawyers. And caused her to make one very solemn vow to herself: I will never get married again for as long as I live. Because no man on this planet was ever going to get the chance to hurt her that bad again. Never. Utterly shattered by Brandon’s betrayal, Des had stopped going to work, stopped leaving the house and stopped eating. Until, that is, Bella came barging in one morning, Tupperware tub of stuffed cabbage in hand, and recruited Des for her feral stray rescue program. They were best friends now. When Des relocated to Dorset, Bella unloaded her own big house and followed her. As far as Des was concerned, she could stay as long as she wanted. Bella was good company and a dynamite housekeeper and it was nice to have her there when Des felt like staying over with Mitch.
“Oy-yoy, Desiree, what is that awful smell?” she demanded when Des came charging through the back door into the laundry room, shivering from the wind.
“It’s raccoon urine,” Des replied as she stood there on the mud rug, unlacing her spare boots. Not an easy proposition when she had five house cats studying her socks with keen, busy-nosed interest.
Bella appeared in the laundry-room doorway, scrunching up her face. “Forgive me, it sounded like you just said-”
“You asked, I answered.”
“Take those socks off at once, tall person. I will not have you tracking that-that smell all over my clean floor.”
“Um, okay, I like to think of it as our clean floor.”
“Off!” she roared, hurling herself in Des’s path. Des towered over her, but Bella was as wide as a nose tackle.
“All right, all right.” She yanked them off and tossed them out the door into the snow. “Feel free to burn them.”
“Oh, I shall. Believe me.”
Barefoot, Des hurried across the kitchen toward her bedroom. When she’d bought the place she’d torn out walls so that her kitchen, dining room and living room all flowed together. Her studio was in the living room, which had floor-to-ceiling windows overlooking the lake. “Bella, I am feeling so not glamorous right now. And I am late, late, late. Tell me what to put on.”
“Well, for starters, forget glamorous.” Bella went back to work on a Granny Smith with a paring knife, slicing it rapid-fire into a mixing bowl. “You’re not about glamour.”
Des stopped in her tracks, hands on hips. “Was that supposed to be a compliment?”
“No, that was honesty,” she replied, hurling cinnamon, brown sugar and nutmeg into the bowl with the apple slices. She made cakes just like Des’s granny did. Never measured, never used a recipe. Hell, there was no recipe. “Glamour is a facade, Desiree. Strictly for tsotskes who are trying to hide something. You don’t have to hide a thing. You’re the real goods.”
“Does that mean I should or shouldn’t wear a dress?”
Bella puffed out her cheeks in disgust. “Covering your tuchos with a dress is like putting a veil over the Mona Lisa. I forbid it.”
“Girl, I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
“I don’t either, quite frankly.”
Des whipped off her uniform en route to her bedroom and jumped into the shower, toweling off while she searched frantically through her closet. She was not what anyone would call delicate. Des knew this. She was broad-shouldered, high-rumped and cut with muscle. Nor was she a girlie-girl. She kept her hair short and nubby, and wore no war paint or nail polish. But she did have alluring almond-shaped pale green eyes, and a dimply wraparound smile that could melt titanium from a thousand feet away. And Des knew this, too. She settled on her black cashmere turtleneck, gray flannel slacks and black boots with chunky two-inch heels.
By now it was a quarter to seven. She’d already reloaded her weapon at the barracks. She tossed it and her shield into her shoulder bag. Her cell phone and pager she wore on her belt. On her way out she shoved her gloves into a pocket of the hooded, buttery-soft shearling coat that she’d bought in Florence on her honeymoon. She loved that damned coat so much she’d worn it around their hotel room naked. Brandon hadn’t exactly minded. God, that was ages ago.
“Yum, what am I smelling?” she wondered, pausing in the kitchen to say good-bye.
“I already had the oven going, so I figured I may as well do my brisket, too. When I thawed it this morning I didn’t know you had plans.”
“Sure, we can have it tomorrow. Mitch loves your brisket.”
“Of course he does. This is a man of discerning tastes.”
“If that’s the case, then how do you explain his American chop suey?”
“This is also a man,” Bella replied, glancing at her. “What’s with you tonight? You nervous about meeting Ada?”
“Should I be? I don’t know her films.”
“She was one of my heroes when I was a girl,” Bella recalled, her face creasing into a smile. “So smart and gutsy and beautiful. Her husband, Luther, was a very fine playwright. The two of them were hounded out of the country by those thugs during the McCarthy era. That was a terrible time, Desiree. A girlfriend of mine whose father wrote for the radio, he ended up committing suicide.” She peered at Des shrewdly. “What is it then?”
“What is what?”
“You’re acting meshuga tonight.”
“Am not. I’m just in a rush.”
“Whatever you say,” Bella said doubtfully. “Have fun.”
“I’ll do my best.” Des was halfway to the door, car keys in hand, before she came back and said, “It’s Mitch. I think he has a problem with our relationship.”
“Tie that bull outside, as we used to say on Nostrand Avenue.”
“Bella, I have never understood what that expression means.”
“Well, what’s the problem-is it the lovemaking?”
“God, no. He’s still the Wonder from Down Under. But the man has something serious on his mind, Bella. He keeps getting all quiet and far away. Which I’m, like, he is never.”
“Maybe it’s that book he’s been trying to write. How is that going?”
“It’s not, near as I can tell.”
“Then that’s probably it. Men can get very strange when their work isn’t going well.”
“Men can get very strange come rain or come shine. But it’s not the book, Bella. His words say otherwise.”
“Why, what did he say?”
Des took a deep breath before she replied, “He said, and I quote, ‘I wonder if we’re getting in too deep.’”
Bella’s face dropped. “Oh, I see… And what did you say?”
“I said, ‘Why, do you think we are?’ To which he replied, and I quote, ‘It could certainly appear that way.’ To which I said, ‘Appear that way to whom?’”
“Hold on, you actually said to whom?”
“I did. This girl’s got herself a proper education.”
“And what did Mitch say to that?”
“Jack. Not one damned word.”
Bella considered this carefully. “Desiree, I’m not necessarily hearing qualms here. Mitch could simply be trying to engage you in a dialogue about your feelings.”
“No sale. If he’s not getting cold feet, then why raise it at all?”
“You do have a point,” Bella admitted, sticking out her lower lip.
“Besides, when we first got together we swore we’d never do this.”