The Class Menagerie jj-4 Read online

  "We have what we laughingly call a 'suite' on the third floor right now," Edgar answered. "Nasty place. Meant for stunted midget maids. Gordon's head is perpetually black-and-blue from crashing into the ceiling where it takes weird dives. We suspect bats, but the lighting is so poor we're not sure. We're probably going to live in the carriage house eventually, but

  right now it's just for storage. And for mice, which Gordon claims Hector is afraid of."

  "Then nobody will have a room there. Good," Shelley said. At Jane and Edgar's questioning looks, she added cryptically, "Bad vibes. Especially for this group."

  Edgar showed them around the ground floor rooms: a vast-formal dining room, a living room with game tables, sofa groupings, and a sound and video system that would have made Jane's son Mike weep with envy. There was even a Nintendo game hooked up. "That's for guests with children," Edgar explained a little too hastily.

  "I thought you didn't take children?" Jane said.

  "Well, no — we don't plan to, but — I"..

  Jane grinned broadly. "You're an addict. I know the signs. What's your favorite? Mine's Chrysalis."

  Edgar actually blushed to the roots of his fine hair. "Actually, I like the maze kinds best. Lolo, that sort."

  Shelley stared at the two of them, aghast. "You play those games?"

  "Someday I'll get you hooked," Jane threatened. "Is this the library?" She glanced into a darkened room next to the living room. > i

  Edgar went in and turned on the lights. It was the perfect library — three walls of dark oak bookshelves, a long library table with green-shaded lamps, chairs and sofas of soft, comfortable leather, and an |oak library ladder that slid along one wall. There was even a fax machine and a copy machine ready, for businessmen and women who couldn't, or wouldn't, leave their work behind.

  Jane went to a shelf of paperbacks with matching orange spines. "P. G. Wodehouse! Are these yours? Edgar, I think I'll adopt you instead of Gordon. 'There

  is only one real cure for gray hair. It was invented by a Frenchman. He called it the guillotine,'" Jane quoted.

  " 'The magistrate looked like an owl with a dash of weasel blood in him,' " Edgar came back.

  They were laughing happily and tossing quotes back and forth when they became aware of Shelley tapping her foot and clearing her throat ominously at ' intervals.

  "Yes, all right," Jane said. "Edgar, you better tell me what to do and show me where the skivvy stuff is."

  They toured the broom and vacuum cleaner closet and the linen closets, then Edgar said, "Now come out to the carriage house. The rags are there."

  "A whole house, just for rags?" Jane asked as they hurried through the drizzle across the driveway and into the carriage house through the ground floor garage doors. Hector sensibly remained behind in the warm, dry house. There was, his expression suggested, a limit to what one would do for guests.

  There was a jumbled heap of fabric in the middle of the floor. "These, ladies, were all the old rotten curtains and drapes in the house. I took out the hardware, washed them, and threw them in here to turn into rags as I need them. All the yard stuff's here, too, and extra cleaning supplies. I got a by-the-crate bargain on bathroom cleaner and dishwasher soap and over there is a mountain of toilet paper." He pointed into the gloom at the back of the triple garage.

  "Is there more stuff upstairs here?" Jane asked.

  "No, we haven't done anything to that yet. It's a relic of a boy's room. Sort of poignant, really — that the people left it. Posters, football trophies, a battered desk with school homework papers still in the drawers.

  Sort of chokes you up to think of pitching it all."

  "That's Ted's room," Shelley said.

  "Dead Ted?" Jane asked.

  "Dead Ted! That sounds like a rock group," Edgar said, laughing uneasily.

  "Ted Francisco," Shelley said. "I guess I better explain to both of you — just in case anything awkward happens."

  "Are you anticipating 'something awkward'?" Jane asked.

  Edgar looked distinctly unhappy at this turn in the conversation.

  Shelley didn't answer directly. "This house belonged to Judge Francisco. He and his wife had a son Ted, who was in our class in high school. He was handsome, smart, athletic, everything. We were all madly injlove with him. He had everything going for him." She paused for a moment before finishing. "The night of our senior prom, he committed suicide." ',

  "Where?" Edgar asked quietly.

  Shelley pointed above them. "In that room."

  "Another cream puff?" Edgar asked Jane solicitously. They were back in the bright, cheerful kitchen. Hector was lashing himself against Jane's legs,

  "My thighs will have to have their own zip code if I eat another," Jane said. She turned to Shelley. "How did he do it? Dead Ted, I mean."

  "Carbon monoxide. Besides the stairway upstairs, there's a sort of hatch at the back of the garage. It opened next to Ted's bed. It used to be a joke with us. Ted could be out of there as fast as a fireman, flinging up the hatch, sliding down a rope almost into the front seat of his car. Anyway, that night he left the car running and the hatch open. His parents

  were out of town overnight and when they came back, they found him fully dressed in bed. Dead. It was horrible for them. He was literally the light of their lives. An only child, born to them when they were in their late forties, I believe. Judge Francisco had a complete breakdown. By the time he recovered, his wife had closed the house and they moved away. I didn't realize they'd left Ted's room just like it was. I guess they couldn't stand to get rid of his things and just walked away and left it."

  "Do you think this is why the house was vacant for so long?" Edgar asked. "We bought it from their estate."

  "My guess is that they couldn't make themselves come back to the house, but couldn't bear to sell it either," Shelley said. "So they're both dead. Not surprising. They were a much older couple than the rest of our parents. They had Ted very late in life."

  "It's a shame the house was left to stand vacant so long. It's a lovely place," Jane said.

  "It wasn't so lovely when we got it," Edgar said. "In fact, I wouldn't have gone along with buying it if Gordon hadn't been so confident that something could be made of it. There had been transients living here off and on and the police told us — after we bought it, of course — that a drug ring had been operating out of here. Why, some of the riffraff have even turned up since we moved in. One night, we heard scrabbling noises and came down to find a young couple in what you might call 'a delicate situation' right in the middle of the living room. Thrashing around in a pile of sawdust. That's why we're awfully fussy about keeping the doors locked at night. We're going to ask guests to be in by ten-thirty or they'll have to wake us to get in."

  "There must be a lot of details to work out when

  you're opening a place like this," Jane said.

  "Probably a lot more that we haven't even thought of yet. But your group will be a nice trial run, Shelley. I'm sure it's going to go wonderfully well," Edgar said with determined brightness.

  Jane was surprised that Shelley didn't answer, but continued to stare out the window at the rain. She was frowning. It was always a bad sign when Shelley frowned. "I hope I haven't made a big mistake," she said, more to herself than to them.

  Wednesday morning was wildly hectic. Jane's car pool schedule — as elaborate as a schedule of Mafia debts, her Uncle Jim claimed — fell to pieces. The mother who was supposed to drive Jane's high school son Mike's car pool called sounding like she was in the final stages of pneumonia and tried to get Jane to take her place.

  "I'm sorry, but I've got the grade school this week and the whole junior high group has come down with something and I've got to drive my daughter, too. I'm really sorry, but you'll just have to press your husband into service," Jane said firmly. She probably would have caved in and helped if it had been humanly possible. It would have put the other driver under a terrific obligation. Being owed a car pool favor wa
sn't to be taken lightly.

  "Oh, Jane, you know what an idiot Stan is about car pools."

  "Stan runs a whole bank! He's just convinced you he's too stupid to figure out how to drive the kids so you won't ask him to help," Jane said. "It's selective idiocy. Steve used to do the same thing."

  There was some more sniffling and whining at the other end. Jane sympathized. Her own late husband Steve, who had died in a car accident a year and a half earlier, had been just as discriminately parental.

  Jane hung up on the other mother and screamed up the stairs, "Katie! Hurry up!"

  "I'm doing my hair!" came back the indignant reply.

  "You better get a move on. I've got to take you early so I can get Todd's gang picked up."

  As Jane rounded up kids, helped hunt for lost math homework, and emptied her purse for lunch money, she reflected on how shortsighted she'd been to allow her children to be spaced out in such a way that they attended three different schools. Why couldn't she have just had triplets and been done with it? Everybody would have done everything at the same time— started school, lost baby teeth, gotten hormones. There would have been brief periods of absolute hell] but they'd have never been repeated with the next kid.

  It was a bright sunny day out when she headed toward school with Katie, and the early morning light was catching the tops of trees just starting to show hints of vivid fall coloration. "Oh, look at that one!" Jane said, pointing toward an especially gorgeous scarlet ivy climbing a chimney. ' ''

  "Don't turn this way!" Katie shrieked.

  "Why not? It's the way to school," Jane asked.

  "Mom, Jenny lives on this street!"

  "Of course she does." Jenny was Katie's best friend.

  Katie was scrunching down in the seat, squealing protests. "She'll see me! Why couldn't you go some other way?"

  "Katie, Jenny's whole family has the flu; I doubt very much that Jenny's been up since dawn peering out the window to see if we go by and what difference would it make if she had? Have you and Jenny had a tiff?"

  "Mom, don't use words like that. They're so lame."

  "Tiff is a perfectly good word. So have you had a spat, quarrel, rumble, confrontation, take your choice." The silence that met this inquiry answered it. "What was it about, honey?"

  "You wouldn't understand," Katie grumbled. She'd crawled back up to a vertical position and was craned around, looking back at Jenny's house.

  "Try me," Jane said.

  Katie just sniffed pitifully, begging to be begged.

  Jane dutifully begged.

  Finally, just as they turned the last corner and the school loomed up in front of them, Katie relented. "Mom, she told Jason I liked him."

  Jane tried to cast her mind back and appreciate the gravity of this treason. "Why would she do that?"

  "She's mad at me. There's this new girl at school she likes better than me and I said she was fat. Well, Mom, she is!"

  Jane sorted through the pronouns, assigning them, and came to the conclusion that the new girl was the fat one. Jenny herself was a bit plump, but Jane didn't think Katie even noticed that anymore. There were a thousand true, sensible and "motherly" things to say to her daughter, but Jane knew Katie didn't want to hear them and it would slam the door on further confidences. "I think the best thing is to act like you don't care," she ventured. "Jenny will remember pretty soon that you're her best friend and she'll be sorry she told Jason."

  All her careful selection of words went for nothing. Katie wasn't paying any attention. As Jane stopped the car in the circle drive in front of the school, Katie put the back of her hand to her forehead. "I think I'm getting sick. You better take me back home."

  "No way, kiddo." But just the same, she felt Katie's

  forehead. "They'd all think you were afraid to come to school if you stayed out today. Besides, I'm going to be gone all day."

  It was the wrong thing to say… again. "Mom! Why do you have to treat me like such a baby. I could stay home by myself."

  Jane remembered Staying Home By Myself from her own school days. "No deal. Hop out."

  The phone was ringing when Jane came back in the door to her kitchen after delivering the grade schoolers. It was Detective Mel VanDyne, the man she was dating in an extremely sporadic fashion. "Jane? I'm glad I caught you. Listen, about Saturday night…"

  "You're canceling."

  "Sorry, but I've got to. It's a follow-up to that drugs in the schools seminar I taught last week. It seems that…"

  "It's all right," Jane said, even though it wasn't. She'd bought a new outfit.

  "How about Sunday night instead?"

  "Sorry. I'm busy."

  There was a silence Jane hoped wasn't patently disbelieving. Well, she was busy on Sunday night. All Sunday nights, in fact. There was always at least one child who had to have help on a report that had been assigned a week earlier, another who couldn't find a precious article of clothing he/she had to wear the next day, and one who decided to practice some musical instrument next to the phone that a sibling was speaking on. It was that way every school night, but for some mysterious reason Sundays were always the worst. Not that she had any intention of letting a sophisticated bachelor know what sort of things she was busy with. She'd been dating Mel off and on

  (more off than on, to her regret) for two months and he was still wary of her extraordinarily maternal life-style. He always seemed half-afraid she was going to lose her head and pack him a lunch or drive him to a piano lesson.

  "If it weren't my own class—" Mel finally said.

  "No, don't explain. I didn't mean to sound snappish. I'm just a little rushed. I'm on my way to the airport in a few minutes and I always have to sort of 'commune with my soul' before I tackle the drive."

  "You're having visitors?"

  "No, Shelley is. A class reunion. I've been drafted to help with the convoy."

  "How about tonight for the dinner and movie then? You'll deserve it."

  "I do hate to keep turning you down, but I really can't tonight." (Oops, did that "really" give away the earlier lie, she wondered.) "Shelley's got me booked— or hooked. Any night next week, though. How about Tuesday?"

  Mel agreed that Tuesday fit his schedule, too. This settled, they rang off and Jane poured herself a thermal mug of coffee to take along. With any luck she'd be at the airport a good half hour before anybody arrived. This would allow her to make the drive without worrying about the clock and give her time to get her bearings. The three women she was supposed to pick up were coming in on three different flights and she would have to know where she was going next to keep from missing them.

  She put on a black-and-white plaid skirt and her good black sweater, freshly out of summer storage. It was a good thing it was unusually cool for September. Jane was sick to death of her summer clothes. She hastily applied some makeup, glanced once more at

  the city map to refresh her memory, and went out to the car.

  During the interval while Jane had been inside the house, Shelley had put something on the front seat of her station wagon. Three modest-sized posterboards with a name on each: Lila Switzer, Susan Morgan, and Avalon Smith. And on the back of each, as a reminder, the airline, flight number, and arrival time of each.

  Trust Shelley to be so organized.

  It was a good thing Jane had allowed herself extra time. She missed bullying her way into the correct exit lane and had to go to the next exit and backtrack. Fortunately she had better luck parking and made it into the airport well ahead of the first flight she was due to meet.

  If only she had some idea whom to look for. She was going to feel a bit silly holding up a placard. She'd asked Shelley for descriptions of the women she was meeting, but Shelley had refused to help. "Jane, it's been twenty years since I've seen them. God only knows what they all look like by now. I'll fix it so they find you."

  The first flight was actually a bit early and Jane dutifully held up her "Susan Morgan" placard as the passengers flowed from the
door to the walkway.

  "Why, hello. Who are you?" an attractively coiffed and tanned woman said to her.

  "I'm Jane Jeffry, Shelley's neighbor. Are you Ms. Morgan?"

  The woman put a hand with expensively sculpted nails and a number of exceedingly expensive rings on Jane's arm. "This year I am. Next year, who knows? And please, none of that 'Ms.' stuff. Just call me Crispy. Everybody else at the reunion will."

  "They will?" Jane asked, smiling. "Why on earth would they do a thing like that?"

  The woman laughed warmly. "Because my maiden name, back in the dark days of my maidenhood, was Susan Crisp. I like you, Jane. I might make you my assistant."

  "Assistant what?"

  "Tormentor. Oh, this is going to be such fun." She rubbed her lovely hands together like a stage villain. "I can't wait to see everybody. I've got about a dozen bags and my hairdresser is crammed into one of them. Where shall I meet you?"

  "My next gate is around the turn down there, first on the left, and the next is at the far end of the same concourse. Can you manage the bags?"

  "My dear, I can manage anything." And she sounded as if she could. She went off chuckling to herself. Jane watched her go with a mixture of amusement and alarm. Assistant tormentor? Good God, what had Shelley let herself in for?

  More important, what has she let me in for?

  As if feeling Jane's eyes on her, Crispy — halfway down the concourse and drawing a number of admiring looks — turned gracefully on a spiked, lizard-skinned heel, waggled her fingers, and winked conspiratorially.

  The last time Jane had seen an expression like that was when her sister Martha had decided to purchase a high school term paper and blackmailed Jane into being her go-between. Jane's father had caught her slinking out of the house with the cash wadded in her fist. If she recalled correctly, as she was certain she did, Jane herself had gotten the entire blame for the episode.