A Farewell to Yarns jj-2 Read online

  “No, it's those embroidered Santa pillows the Parslow sisters made."

  “Oh dear—" Jane had seen the prototype pillow last summer and had been appalled. The rosy-cheeked Santa had looked like a lecherous old alcoholic. The stitching that was meant to give him a rosy nose looked like broken veins, and to make it worse, he was leering horribly.

  As they reached the front door, it opened, and Fiona Howard came out to meet them. "Shelley, Jane," Fiona said warmly in a lovely upper-class English accent that made Jane feel she'd stepped into the middle of a Masterpiece Theater production. "I didn't hear you drive up. Here, let me help with those. I can call Albert to help us if you have anything heavy."

  “No, we can manage. Just point me in the right direction," Jane said over the top of the Santa pillow carton.

  “Just down the hall, then. I'll have the maid help me unpack them later."

  “We'll come back and do that," Shelley said, staggering under the weight of a box of iced gingerbread men. "You're not supposed to go to any trouble, since you're letting us use your house for the sale."

  “I don't mind in the least. But can't you stay?”

  Jane had set her carton down and come back. "Not this morning. I have an old neighbor coming to town to stay a few days." Even saying it made her shudder. "I left her at home un‑ packing. If it's okay, we'll come back tomorrow and help you sort things out."

  “Can't you even have a cup of tea?" Fiona asked.

  “That nice jasmine kind?" Jane asked. "If you like.”

  Jane shot a questioning look at Shelley, who glanced at her watch and said, "Only for five minutes. I have to be at school pretty soon and to help the nurse weigh the third graders. Some sort of health unit.”

  Fiona led them through the house, and Jane dawdled as much as she could, looking around. She knew Fiona only slightly from church, and she'd never been within the hedged walls, much less inside the house before. She'd expected it to be palatial. Actually, it was quite ordinary, but in a very expensive, tasteful way. The only Englishness about it was the formal living room, which was done with a busy patterned carpet that was probably eighty dollars a yard minimum, imported. The room was furnished in elegant, dark furniture that was certainly antique. The rest of the rooms they passed were just what any well-to-do American family might have. Jane was sorry there wasn't linen-foldpaneling and ancestral portraits hung from picture molding.

  Fiona led them to a small, sunny breakfast room that overlooked the backyard and spacious garden, dormant now but obviously well tended. Fiona and Shelley fell into a discussion of the proper packaging and pricing of some hard candies that would be for sale at the church bazaar, and Jane studied Fiona. She, unlike her home, was satisfyingly English. Her hair was a burnished copper and the tiniest bit curly. It might even fuzz on a humid day. Her skin was as fair as milk and her eyes almost neon blue. She must have been a striking girl and was still attractive, but she had a bit of middle-age hippiness starting, and there were a few gray hairs in with the red. The large white teeth that must have made a ravishing smile in youth were the tiniest bit horsy at thirty-five. She looked like Fergie, the Duchess of York, would probably look like in a few years.

  “You don't know anyone looking for a house, do you?" Fiona asked, as she poured three cups of fragrant tea.

  “You're not selling, are you?" Shelley asked.

  “Heavens, no! We wouldn't dream of leaving. It's the house next door to the north. The lady who lived there has gone into a nursing home, and her son is trying to sell the house. He explained to Albert about some tax thing or another that makes it imperative to sell it before the end of the year. I think he might price it quite reasonably. It's only two bedrooms, I believe, but for a single person or young couple it would be ideal."

  “Single? Do we know anybody single, Jane?" Shelley asked with a smile. "I hardly remember the state."

  “The only single people I know are divorced with mobs of kids. Like myself."

  “I didn't know you were divorced, Jane," Fiona said, passing her an elegant china sugar bowl.

  “I put that badly. I'm not. I meant I'm a single parent with mobs of kids. I'm a widow."

  “Oh, I'm so sorry. I had no idea. How tactless of me," Fiona said, a genuine blush of embarrassment brightening her cheeks.

  Jane almost smiled. How odd that Fiona, a rather famous widow herself, should apologize to Jane. "Please, don't be sorry. It's been nearly a year now, and I'm quite accustomed to it—" Jane stopped. "Listen to me! I'm already picking up your accent. That's a terrible habit. I don't mean to do it."

  “Jane grew up all over the world, and she tends to talk like whoever she's talking to," Shelley explained. "Even if it's just a speech impediment, she mimics it."

  “I never!"

  “You certainly do. Remember that woman in the grocery store last week who couldn't say her 'r's? She asked you where the sausages were, and you said, 'Wight down the thiwd isle.' "

  “I didn't.”

  Fiona smiled and said, "Still, if you hear of anyone needing a small house, give me a call. We're uneasy about it standing empty. One hates to have an invitation to vandalism so close, you know.”

  Shelley asked. "Doesn't that Finch man live on the other side of it?”

  Fiona looked as if she'd been caught in something. "Yes, he does. But I really believe he's harmless!"

  “Harmless! I wouldn't call anybody who poisons dogs harmless," Shelley said.

  “There's no proof it was Mr. Finch," Fiona said. Her voice lacked conviction. "We've never had any trouble with him.”

  Jane had been so interested in listening to Fiona's accent that she'd hardly started on her tea when Shelley started bustling her along. "Fiona, we'll be back tomorrow to help with setting up. Please don't go to any trouble on your own."

  “Please feel free to bring your houseguest along if she's interested in helping out," Fiona said to Jane. There was something vaguely poignant in her voice. Loneliness? No, that couldn't be, Jane thought. You can't be rich and famous and lonely.

  As they reached the front entry, a man stepped into the area from another door. "Oh, Fiona, I didn't know you had guests."

  “Albert, this is Shelley Nowack and Jane Jeffry. They're on the placement committee for the church bazaar."

  “How nice to meet you, ladies," Albert Howard said. He was American—a plumpish man with thinning dull brown hair and oversized tortoiseshell bifocals that made his receding chin appear almost nonexistent. Fiona had taken his arm in an oddly protective gesture and was gazing at him as if he'd just spoken words of enormous import.

  “We've met before, I think," Jane said. "I substituted for Mary Ebert in the church choir one morning. You were there.”

  Albert stared at her for a minute, recognition dawning, then started to laugh. 'Oh, yes! The director ended up asking you if you'd just hum."

  “I didn't expect you to remember the occasion in detail!" Jane said. "My enthusiasm for music slightly exceeds my talents."

  “Jane—?" Shelley said with a meaningful glance at her watch.

  "Odd, aren't they?" Shelley said as they pulled out of the driveway moment alter.

  “You're a mind reader," Jane said, smiling. "I had no idea he was Albert Howard. I see him in the church choir, but I never connected him with Fiona. How could she have married him?"

  “He's a very nice man, I hear from people who know him. Very soft-spoken and witty."

  “Yes, but married to Richie Divine's widow? I mean—Richie Divine was so—"

  “Sexy?" Shelley asked.

  “Slim, young, blond, talented, gorgeous, famous, rich. I was going to say. But I guess sexy sums it up. Was he really, Shelley, or were our hormones just at fever pitch when we were young and he was alive?"

  “There's evidence against it," Shelley said, craning her neck around to peer at traffic behind her. She changed lanes in such a way as to nearly cause a beer truck to run onto the shoulder.

  “What evidence?""Well,
there's the fact that my mother and her friends thought he was wonderful, and none of them were much given to admiring young men. Mostly their impulse was to bat them around the ears for impertinence. Then, too, there's that old movie he was in—I saw it on the late show a month or so ago and found my tongue hanging out."

  “Can you imagine slobbering over Albert Howard after having been married to Richie Divine?"

  “No, but apparently Fiona can. You're sounding like the press. Remember the flap when it was revealed that Richie'd been married—?"

  “Of course! Who could forget? Every girl in America thought she'd been personally jilted.”

  “And then the reporters just about crucified Fiona when she remarried. As if it was really anybody's business."

  “I'd forgotten that, but I can see why. It's sort of like an ex-president running for county dogcatcher.”

  They were silent for a few moments, then Jane spoke again. "It makes me sad. If I'd been married to Richie Divine, I'd have never considered remarriage."

  “Stay a widow, forever worshipping at the shrine? Is that how you feel about your husband?"

  “Lord, no! But Steve was hardly Richie Divine."

  “Maybe Richie Divine wasn't either.”

  “What in the world does that mean?"

  “I'm not sure," Shelley said. "It's just that he might not have been so 'divine' to live with. To be young and idolized might have made him an egotistical bastard at home. It would have been odd if it didn't. And it can't be fun living in the glare of public scrutiny—bodyguards everywhere, not being able to just run to the mall and shop or do anything like a normal person. You remember last year when Paul had that convention of his franchisers?"

  “Yes?"

  “Well, I got a little taste of very minor celebrity at the convention. Everybody was either toadying to me or resenting me because I was the boss's wife. It was creepy. I can see how Fiona's glad to be out of it."

  “I guess so, but why pick somebody like Albert Howard, the ultimate nerd?"

  “Maybe he's terrific in bed," Shelley speculated.

  “Hmmmm—" Jane was sorry the subject had come up. Her imagination in such matters, after nearly a year of widowhood and celibacy, was beginning to revive like a desert plant suddenly watered.

  “Forget hormones," Shelley advised. "Let's figure out how to get rid of your houseguests.”

  SIX

  It was too short a ride to come up with any clear plan. They discussed and discarded murder, arson, bribery, rumors of epidemic, and outright rudeness. Shelley dropped Jane at the sidewalk and tore off to fulfill her school obligation.

  Jane had just gotten in the house when the Jaguar was delivered. Jane was amazed at the way things worked for Phyllis. Perhaps there was something in her credit card number that tipped merchants off that they'd hooked a big one. The man who delivered her car all but swept off a cape and offered to let her walk on it.

  Within minutes of the car's delivery, Bobby was gone, without apology, explanation, or indication of his anticipated return schedule. Phyllis gave him a handful of money and watched him screech away. A sickeningly fond look remained on her face long after he disappeared. Jane thought the odds were pretty good that he'd wreck the Jag by evening.

  Phyllis went to her room to finish unpacking. Jane noticed that it was only one o'clock. This had already seemed a very long day, and it wasn't half done yet. She sat down at the kitchen table and smoked another cigarette. How many was that today? Far too many. What was she going to do with these people?

  “Are you hungry?" she asked Phyllis when she came down from her room. She'd changed into jeans and a plaid shirt with a red sweater over it. Common enough outfit, but the jeans were so perfectly fitted and faded that Jane was certain they'd cost a fortune, and the sweater was probably hand knit from certifiably virgin Scottish sheep.

  “Starving," Phyllis answered.

  Jane grabbed a package of lunch meat, a head of lettuce, and some mayonnaise from the refrigerator and pulled out a loaf of whole wheat bread that didn't have any green fuzzy spots on it yet. Phyllis, who was probably accustomed to meals that cost as much as Jane's car was worth, fell to making a lunch meat sandwich as if it were gourmet stuff. Jane reflected that while Phyllis could be irritating, there was still a streak of enduring innocence in her that had drawn Jane to her so many years ago. She suspected that Phyllis really didn't recognize a difference between pâté de foie gras and plastic packaged lunch meat.

  Jane smiled. How must Chet have felt all these years about handing the world on a silver platter to a woman who would have been happy with Melmac?

  “Well, I guess you're dying to know all about Bobby?" Phyllis asked a they sat down to eat. Jane wanted to say she'd rather have a Papsmear than know anything more about Bobby, but courtesy won out. "Yes, tell me everything.”

  "Everything," about Bobby turned out to be mercifully concise. According to Phyllis, she and a high school classmate had run off to get married when she was only fifteen and he a year and a half older. Both sets of parents went after them and three days later dragged them back to Philadelphia. The annulment mechanism was put into action, and in no time, the marriage was as if it had never been.

  Except that Phyllis was pregnant.

  Her parents arranged for her to go to Chicago and live with her aunt until the baby was born and could be put up for adoption. That duly accomplished, Phyllis had stayed on in Chicagoto take a secretarial course, partly because she got along far better with her aunt than she ever had with her parents. She was working as a secretary when she met Chet Wagner, married him, and lived happily ever after.

  “What about the boy? The one you married? Did he know about the baby?"

  “Heavens, no!" Phyllis aid. "I wanted to tell him at first. I was really happy about it. Then I thought it over. My parents made me think it over. I may not be brilliant, but I was smart enough to see how relieved he'd been when the marriage was annulled. And I couldn't blame him. It wasn't as if we were madly in love or anything. In fact, we'd only had two or three dates when we ran off together. We only did it, I think, because we were both unhappy at home, and that seemed a way out.”

  Jane felt this didn't ring quite true. The part about the boy being relieved might be so,. but Phyllis sounded like she'd probably been crushed by the knowledge that he'd been glad to be free of her. Had this version—not really in love, just wanting out—come to her then, or was it the product of long years of thought and reflection? Jane was astonished to learn that Phyllis had actually undergone such emotional upheaval. "Didn't you regret that it didn't work out?" she asked.

  “No, if I'd stayed married to him, I'd have never met Chet. I liked him—the boy I ran off with—maybe even loved him, but we were too different. He was real smart, you see. Ambitious and all that, too. He'd have gotten tired of me. Chet's smart and ambitious, too, but in a different kind of way. I don't know quite how to explain it.”

  In spite of herself, Jane was fascinated. She wished Phyllis were more articulate. "Did you ever see the boy you married again?”

  Phyllis paused, as if trying to remember. After a moment she said, "We never met again. I didn't go back home except once or twice, and he moved away as soon as he finished high school.”

  Jane suddenly had a devastating sense of exactly what they were talking about. The Phyllis who ran away and got married was about the same age as Jane's daughter, Katie, and the boy had been the age of her son Mike. Katie and Mike were babies! Yes, Jane would probably have done just what Phyllis's parents haddone—break it up, put the baby up for adoption, and let the kids have another chance at life. To cover an involuntary shudder, Jane got up and fetched a bag of potato chips and a plastic carton of dip. "So what about Bobby?" she asked when she sat back down. "How did you find him—and why?"

  “Well, I'd never told a soul about having a baby. Not even Chet. It was the only secret I had from him, and it always bothered me. Then, about a year ago, Chet was out on the ocean in
his boat, and there was a terrible storm. While I was waiting for word, I realized that if Chet died, I'd have that secret on my conscience forever. So when he got back safe and sound, I told him about having Bobby. I mean, about the baby, I didn't know his name was Bobby."

  “How'd Chet take it?"

  “Oh, Jane, I was so afraid he'd be disgusted with me, but he was wonderful. He knew how sorry I was that we'd never had children. He said that he had his sons and I should at least get to know mine. He got some person who worked for him to find Bobby—”

  Some person who worked for him, Jane reflected. That's how the rich did things. Wonderful, thoughtful Chet buying Phyllis yet another new stuffed toy. Only this one could bite and make messes in their lives.

  “Bobby's adoptive mother had died, and his father remarried someone who just couldn't get along with poor Bobby, so they were happy to let him come visit us on the island. And we all got along so well that he stayed with me.”

  I'll bet he did, Jane thought. Having driven some poor stepmother crazy, he was suddenly thrown into incredible wealth and a brand new mother who worshiped him. What young man wouldn't have stayed? Bobby might be pond scum, but even scum knew when it was onto a good thing.

  “Jane, I can't tell you what a comfort it's been to have Bobby these last few months. Without him to lean on, I'd have probably just gone to pieces. You see, Chet has been acting very strange. It isn't anything Bobby says or does, exactly, that's so comforting. It's just knowing I have him. Somebody who is my own. Chet's boys are very nice, but they were half-grown before I got to know them, and they're so—so businesslike. Not like Bobby at all.”

  Oh, Bobby's businesslike enough, Jane thought bitterly. He's gotten into a lovely investment, and he knows it. Too bad he doesn't know enough to treat it with the respect it deserves. "What does Chet think of Bobby?" she asked.

  “He loves him!" Phyllis said with almost shrill confidence. "He doesn't really understand him, but he loves him."

  “Doesn't understand him how?" Jane felt she shouldn't be picking at this, but she wanted some confirmation that Chet wasn't as foolish as Phyllis.