Amanda leaned across me and spoke through the rip in my side curtain. ‘I’m Amanda Phelps. I’ve brought a guest.’
I found myself holding my breath. Her body weight, so easily pressed against me, felt like the best of our old times.
The private cop’s list of invited guests had small photos alongside the names. He peered in at her. ‘I’m sorry, Ms Phelps, we don’t have your guest listed.’
‘I’m Mr Phelps’s daughter. That’s sufficient.’
The private cop looked a little too long at the gray primed section behind the driver’s side door before asking for my driver’s license. Amanda had to straighten up so I could reach for my wallet. I handed out my license, and the guard stepped back to speak into his two-way radio.
‘Obviously I didn’t tell my father you’d be coming along,’ she said to me.
I gestured toward the guard reporting my arrival. ‘There goes my shock and awe.’
‘Maybe not. My father hasn’t yet seen your purple bow tie.’
Behind us, expensive automobile engines revved loud and impatient. Finally, the radio crackled and the guard motioned for one of the valets to come over. ‘Thank you,’ the private cop said, handing back my license.
‘Don’t let anybody paint over that primer,’ I told the valet as I got out, pointing at the gray patch behind the driver’s door. He nodded gravely, probably thinking it was a sign of great wealth to have the confidence to drive up in such a heap, particularly wearing a purple bow tie.
A big man was waiting for us by the front walk, his suit coat bulging from a gun. He motioned for Amanda and me to follow him along the flagstone path around the south side of the house. Wendell had sent him out fast when he learned Amanda had brought a most unwanted guest.
A huge red-and-white striped tent had been set up on the lawn. A four-piece combo was playing gentle jazz on the stone terrace as a hundred people, holding champagne flutes, swayed to the music and made appropriate rich people noises. The unseasonably warm weather had held, and the men wore pastel jackets, the women, pastel dresses. All the guests seemed to be tanned, from Palm Beach or Palm Springs or wherever the palms were where they wintered when Chicago got slushy. I supposed I stood out, because I don’t get tanned until summer, and even then it comes mottled with spots of white wherever bits of caulk and paint had blocked the sun from my skin.
I looked around for Wendell. Three more men in ill-fitting, too-square suits stood fairly close together at one end of the terrace. Wendell stood in the approximate middle of them, talking with a small group of people. I started to head over but the big man blocked my way. ‘Mr Phelps is busy.’
‘Not for his daughter,’ Amanda said.
‘Mr Phelps suggested later,’ the big man said.
Wendell had allowed me in, only to box me in.
Amanda was about to head for her father when a bell sounded from a few hundred feet away. The jazz group stopped playing in mid-riff.
‘Delores’s new baby,’ a woman with impossibly white teeth said to Amanda. Delores was the name of Wendell’s second wife.
The crowd began to move as a herd toward the far side of the lawn. I looked toward the tent. Wendell had gone.
I grabbed two flutes of champagne from a passing waiter. ‘Delores’s new baby?’ I whispered to Amanda, handing her one. ‘You’ve become a half-sister?’
I’d expected a glare. Instead, Amanda gave me a faint smile and we followed the crowd.
TWENTY-THREE
Only the waves crashing onto the beach below sounded as we moved, hushed like congregants summoned to a secret sunset ceremony, through a tall grass prairie preserve and into a dense tunnel of arched trees that shrouded the path in almost complete darkness. We emerged fifty yards later into a clearing where the last of the day’s sun shone again. Some of those ahead of us had apparently participated in such gatherings before, and were forming a broad semicircle facing a lit-up, miniature stone cottage.
A large woman stood in front of the tiny rock house. Her closely cropped dark hair was streaked with gray, and she wore a loose-flowing, multi-hued robe that, in the backlighting from the little windows behind her, made her look like a pagan priestess afire with the setting sun. She held a champagne flute in her right hand, and the end of a leash in the other. I stepped around the people in front to see more clearly. The other end of the leash was attached to a pig.
It was not the sort of small pink pig seen on farms, destined to become bacon. This pig was larger, with brown and white spots, and looked to weigh two hundred pounds.
The woman in the robe raised her champagne. ‘Welcome Jasmine, everybody,’ she shouted to the sky.
Everyone raised their glasses.
As I raised my champagne, I snuck a glance at Amanda. She was looking directly back at me, her own flute raised, but not toward the pig. She was toasting my ignorance. ‘My new half-sister,’ she mouthed above the muffled applause, the best the crowd could do while holding champagne.
After a few last claps, and several more shouts of ‘Welcome, Jasmine,’ the group began to disperse in the direction of the path back to the food and stronger booze. The homage had ended. I turned to follow, when Amanda stepped up and seized my hand.
‘No, Vlodek,’ she said. It was the first time she’d ever used my given name. ‘You must meet Delores, the woman at the center of my father’s not-quite-rational universe.’
Her fingernails dug into my palm as she half tugged me to the small group of people clustered around the woman in robes. As we got closer to the cottage, I noticed that the thick Plexiglas windows were deeply scratched and smeared milky, no doubt from snouts.
Just then, the rubber door swung outward and, to the faint strains of classical music playing inside, another pig lumbered out, this one pure black and half the size of the leashed Jasmine. I glimpsed straw on the floor of the rock cottage before the rubber door slapped shut.
Delores spotted Amanda standing at the edge of the little group. The way the two women stiffened simultaneously said it all. Amanda put her arm under my elbow and marched me forward.
‘Amanda,’ Delores Phelps said.
‘Delores.’
People to the left of us stepped back, to make room for the pig that had come from the cottage.
‘Peter!’ Delores Phelps cried, holding out her champagne flute low enough for the new arrival, the black pig, to insert his tongue. ‘Peter just loves Dom Perignon,’ Delores said.
Several in the small cluster murmured approvingly, and Peter the pig grunted, a low, long snorting sound, likely in agreement.
Delores turned to me. ‘And you are Mr Rudolph, Amanda’s most successful young man?’
‘Not young, nor successful, nor Mr Rudolph. I’m Dek Elstrom.’
‘We’re divorced,’ Amanda said, of me.
‘I believe I did hear something about that,’ Delores said. ‘Lovely tie, Mr Elstrom.’
Peter nudged Delores for more Dom Perignon.
‘Peter is so attached to his mommy, aren’t you, Peter?’ Delores cooed, lowering her flute to give him another taste. ‘Peter is a Vietnamese potbellied pig,’ she said. ‘He used to sleep in his own bedroom, just down the hall from ours, but after he outgrew his bassinet, he started coming into our bedroom.’ She stopped, noticing the look on my face. ‘He was mostly potty trained, of course, but still, he did have his accidents.’ She bent down again to nuzzle the pig’s hairy ear. ‘So we built him his own little cottage, and got him some brothers and sisters.’ She straightened up and nodded to the pig at the other end of the leash. ‘Jasmine’s our newest, a Kunekune from New Zealand.’
I looked at my empty champagne flute, simply because I couldn’t think of what to say.
Delores noticed, and held out her own flute, swishing the little in the bottom that Peter had not licked out.
I shook my head. ‘Thank you, no.’ I took a quick look around for Amanda, but she’d disappeared. Only the bodyguard remained.