"No. The actual reunion starts tomorrow. Mel, I have to leave. What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to explain this to the owners and guests, give official warnings about not leaving, and set up a watch on the house."
"Mel—"
"Yes?"
"Well, it's just odd…. of all the women attending the meeting, the only one nasty enough to imagine casting as a murderer was the one who got killed. They're nice women, Mel."
"One of them'snot."
11
Jane ran her car pool on autopilot while her mind leaped around the facts and impressions jumbling in her mind. She'd have to organize her recollections before she passed them on to Mel. One thing seemed clear: Lila was a blackmailer. And if she'd tried it out on Kathy, she'd probably tried it out on others. All those nasty little digs she'd made the evening before were probably references to threats she'd already made or was paving the way to make later. The story she'd told suggesting that Avalon had experimented with drugs in high school was probably such an attempt. What else had she said? There had been a remark to Pooky about having a real understanding of the psychology of teenaged boys. What had that been about? Pooky had looked either stricken or confused by it, with the oddities of her facial expression, it was hard to tell which.
"Mom! You forgot to let off Jason," her son Todd said as they pulled into their own driveway.
"Oh, no I didn't," Jane said with a laugh. "I just like Jason so much I wanted to bring him home with us." She backed out and headed for Jason's house. Todd was looking mortally embarrassed by his mother's feeble joke.
When they got home the second time, there was a crisis. Mike had spilled a glass of orange juice all over a stack of his college applications and they had to dash back to school and beat the doors down to get in to acquire duplicates. Back home yet again, Jane had to cope with Katie, whose snit with her friend Jenny had escalated to nasty phone calls and hanging up on each other.
"I'm going to tell everybody everything I know about Jenny!" Katie exclaimed. "Like about how she had to go to the doctor because she wet the bed—"
Jane's patience, already at low ebb, disappeared entirely. "No, you're not!" she said. "You're going to behave like a lady. Those 'are friendship secrets and if the friendship dies, the secrets die with it."
Katie looked stunned at this outburst.
"Katie, I mean it. You'll regret it the rest of your life if you tell Jenny's secrets. Other people might like knowing the secrets, but they won't like you for telling them. And you'll never really, really like yourself again."
Katie fidgeted with her hair and looked out the window. "How do you know?"
"Because I'm a grown-up and I'm smarter than you," Jane said, uttering the one phrase she had sworn she would never use. She'd never succumbed to it before today, but she was rattled by the events at the bed and breakfast.
"Look Katie, I'm sorry I said that, but it is true. I've had experience in all kinds of things that you haven't yet. And I want to keep you from making big mistakes. It's my job as a mother to make sure you don't harm your opinion of yourself. Do you understand?"
To her astonishment, Katie hugged her hard and ran upstairs without a word.
Jane sat down at the kitchen table, shaking her head.
All those years she'd spent trying to explain, cajole, and gently urge Katie along, and this time a firm order had not only worked, but elicited a rare expression of affection. Why didn't they issue a handbook in the delivery room that explained which approach would work when? And why was it so hard for mothers and daughters to get along? Her boys were easy. They seemed genuinely to like her most of the time and if they disagreed with her rules, they criticized the rules, not her character. It must have to do with hormones, she concluded unhappily.
She threw together a quick dinner for the kids, gave last warnings about house rules while she was gone, and dashed back to the bed and breakfast to help Edgar. He was planning an elaborate dinner that night of glazed ham steaks with raisin/ginger sauce, julienned potatoes fried into tiny baskets with an artichoke heart filling, and a salad with a thousand finely diced ingredients. This was in addition to a raspberry souffle" for dessert and rolls that had to be watched carefully. He and Jane were so busy with the dinner itself that there was little time for chat about anything else. The only reference to murder was when Edgar said, "Would you prepare a tray for what's his name to eat in the library?"
"Which what's his name?"
"The officer they've left here to keep an eye on things." Edgar said this so bitterly that Jane didn't ask any other questions.
When everything was nearly ready to serve, Edgar said, "Gordon will help me take everything in. You run along to your meeting."
Jane glanced at her watch with horror. The Back-To-School night was starting in five minutes and she had to be there on time or she'd be assigned all kinds
of responsibilities she didn't want. It was highly dangerous to miss this night because the nonattendees, as a punishment, were given hideous jobs in their absence.
Jane got off lucky. No driving on field trips, no fund-raising carnival jobs, no baking for PTA meetings. Only assistant room mother for the Christmas — to be politically correct, Winter Break — party. It would be unspeakably horrible, of course, but it was still a couple of months away and the head room mother under whom she would work was a bossy woman who always ran the whole thing herself anyway. Jane even managed to protect Shelley from being voted PTA secretary, for which Shelley would owe her at least another permanent.
When she returned to the bed and breakfast very early the next morning, she discovered that Shelley's personality had come back up to full force the evening Jjefore and she had compelled the other women to tend to the business of having their fund-raising meeting. God only knew how she had done it. Jane suspected it would be generations before the meeting faded from the collective minds of Ewe Lamb history. She told Shelley so.,
Shelley was tidying up the last of her paperwork in the kitchen, packing it away into file folders. "I got a call a while ago about buying the rights to do a Movie of the Week about it. They've run out of diseases and are going into severe personality disorders," she said, collapsing into a chair. "I've never been so tired in my life, Jane."
"This might perk you up. That vicious Elaine person you fell out with over the carnival budget tried to nominate you for secretary of the PTA."
"The bitch!" Shelley said, horrified.
"Don't worry. I put a stick in her spokes. But I couldn't save you from directing the 'Brownies Around the World' program for the Spring Fling."
Shelley waved that away. "Piece of cake. They're all children. It's the adults I can't stand working with. Secretary. The nerve. She'll regret this." She levered herself out of the chair. "I'm through hostessing. I'm going home and take a bath in my own bathroom and a long nap. After beating up someone."
"Anyone in particular?"
"My sister-in-law Constanza."
"The unmarried one who's watching your kids?"
"The unmarried, snoopy one. I locked all our personal papers and my jewelry in that safe I had put in the linen closet last month. She's probably had in locksmiths by now. She loves pawing through our stuff and then making inventories for the rest of Paul's brothers and sisters. She's probably made a list of how many bras I — Oh! How could I forget? Go take a look at the living room."
"The Joker again?"
"And how!"
Jane opened the door cautiously and didn't know whether to be shocked or to laugh at the sight. The room was festooned with underwear. Bras draped over lampshades, panties suspended from television knobs and drawer handles, slips hanging over the coffee table, pantyhose spread-eagled on the sofa.