A Catered Halloween (15 page)

B
ernie still couldn’t believe that Amethyst had lived in Stanton as she pulled up in front of Amethyst’s flat.

“Are you sure she lived there?” she’d asked Bree Nottingham, real estate agent extraordinaire, social arbiter of Longely, and general pain in the butt, when she’d tracked her down yesterday morning. After several false starts, Bernie had finally located her at Kim’s Nifty Nails.

Bree had fixed her with a gimlet eye. “Of course, I’m sure,” she’d snapped.

She’d been, as was usual these days, dressed in pink from head to toe, up to and including her Prada bag. It was, she’d told Bernie, her signature color. Bernie didn’t believe in signature colors—people weren’t pens—but she’d never say that to Bree, who threw a fair amount of business their way. Actually, she wouldn’t have said it to her face, anyway. However, she did say it to her sister in private on several occasions.

Bree had taken her right hand out of the bowl she
was soaking it in and had held it out for the Korean girl to dry before speaking. “I tried to persuade Amethyst to live in town, but she wasn’t having any of it,” she’d told Bernie.

“But why did she choose Stanton of all places?” Bernie had wondered out loud. “That’s so strange. I would imagine her somewhere a lot more upscale.”

Bree had frowned. “Think about it.”

“Nothing comes to mind,” Bernie had said.

“Well, she said”—Bree bracketed the
she said
with her voice—“that she liked the people there.” Here Bree had paused meaningfully. “She said they were more authentic.”

“Authentic? Please.”

Bree had nodded encouragingly, pleased that her point had been made.

Bernie had frowned. “Amethyst didn’t care about authentic unless the word applied to diamonds and gold. I mean Stanton is made up of Mexicans and Portuguese. I never saw Amethyst look at anyone who wasn’t driving at least a Lexus.”

“Exactly.” Bree had nodded at the Korean girl, who had begun filing her nails. “And this time I want them straight across,” she’d told her. “Straight. You understand?” The girl had bobbed her head and had kept filing. Bree had watched her for a moment to make sure she was doing what she’d asked and then had turned her attention back to Bernie. “My guess is that Amethyst was living there because she could come and go as she pleased, without anyone knowing her business, which would most definitely not be true if she lived in Longely or another community she socialized in.”

“Makes sense,” Bernie had told Bree.

Bree had nodded. “Of course, it makes sense. The expression ‘Don’t poop where you eat’ comes to mind,
which would be especially important to someone of Amethyst’s…” Bree had paused while she hunted for the right word and had finally said, “To someone of Amethyst’s bent. Plus, she kept her overhead low and put her money into what counted—herself. From a business point of view, it was a good decision.”

“Not that it helped her,” Bernie had pointed out.

“No, it didn’t,” Bree had acknowledged before changing the subject. “I want you or your sister to call me tomorrow. I’m having a dinner party for fifteen in two weeks, and I want to discuss the menu. I was thinking we could do something retro, something Julia. You do know Julia, don’t you?”

“Of course, I know Julia Child,” Bernie had said, incensed. How could someone who loved food not know her? She was an icon.

“Good. Because I was thinking we could build the menu around beef Wellington, the real one, with a Bavarian cream for dessert. Or maybe some sort of crêpes flambé. Yes. Let’s do that. Maybe crêpes suzette.”

“Sounds great,” Bernie had said.

And she’d meant it. She loved traditional French food. She just didn’t get a chance to make it anymore, because people were so concerned with their diets and the amount of fat they ingested, but in her mind, there were two kinds of food: regular food and party food. And you should be allowed to eat what you wanted at a party. If you couldn’t, what was the point? In fact, when Bernie thought about it, cooking wasn’t as much fun as it used to be. Ever since people had started saying things like, “I need protein” instead of “I’d like a nice, fat, juicy steak,” things had definitely gone downhill.

On her way to Stanton, Bernie found herself thinking about what kind of first course and appetizers she
could serve at Bree’s dinner party. She would keep the appetizers on the light side because the meal was going to be heavy. She’d start the ball rolling with Kirs and a good prosecco. They were always good aperitifs. They had just enough alcohol to loosen people up, but not so much that it dulled their taste buds.

Along with the drinks, she could serve two types of spiced nuts, one with pepper and rosemary, and the other with salt and a dash of anise. People seemed to like those. Then she could serve a selection of olives and tiny toast points with heated goat cheese. That should really be enough. Unless she added cubes of feta cheese marinated in olive oil and garlic.

For the first course, she’d serve a clear beef broth with one or two small circles of baked custard and a dusting of chopped chives floating in it, or she could do a celery rémoulade, which was also very nice, and celeriac was in the market these days. Naturally, they’d have to make the mayo for the rémoulade sauce, but she liked doing that. There was something very meditative about whisking the oil into the egg yolks and watching the emulsion form a light yellow cream. Hellmann’s just didn’t cut it.

Then, after the beef Wellington, she could serve a salad made up of endive and watercress and arugula in a vinaigrette dressing. The sharpness of the greens would be a nice foil to the richness of the main course. She’d do the crêpes suzette that Bree had requested for dessert, or maybe something like crêpes filled with an apple compote and flambéed with a good apple brandy, which would be a little more seasonal.

Or maybe not. The problem with calvados was that you needed a really good one; otherwise, it tasted like diesel fuel. And, thanks to the dollar’s weakness, good bottles of calvados were extremely expensive these
days, and since they didn’t have any on hand in the shop, Bernie would have to purchase a bottle. So she would forget the apple crêpes and stick with Bree’s original suggestion. Unless, of course, Bree was willing to buy a bottle of the stuff, which Bernie was pretty sure she wouldn’t be.

Bernie was almost at Stanton by the time she’d worked through the pricing of Bree’s menu. Between the labor and the ingredients, this was not going to be a cheap meal, but then a good cut of beef, let alone pâté, never was. She was wondering whether or not Bree would want to pay that much when she caught sight of one of the street names on her map. It was, she realized, time to focus on the task at hand.

A
methyst’s home was four blocks away from the commercial district, in an unprepossessing neighborhood of small houses, smaller yards, and older, dented cars. No BMWs here. According to the numbers painted on the wall, Amethyst lived in the bottom part of a two-family house. The sagging fence posts, the paint peeling on the porch stairs, the empty planter boxes, and the absence of holiday decorations of any kind gave the place a forlorn appearance. It looked as if no one had lived in it or taken care of it for a long time.

The question, thought Bernie, was how to get in. Now that she was actually here, she wasn’t so sure. It was one thing to joke around with Brandon about it and another thing to actually do it, breaking and entering not having been a course in her high school curriculum.

She parked her car and contemplated her options. She could go the legal or the illegal route. Both had good things going for them. The legal route involved something like knocking on the upstairs neighbor’s door, seeing if they had the key to Amethyst’s place,
then making up a plausible story so she could get it. However, there was a big problem with that approach. The upstairs apartment was for rent. So that took care of that.

Which left the illegal route. For a moment, she debated the wisdom of what she was about to do, and then she thought,
The hell with it
. What was the worst that could happen? The neighbors could call the cops, and she’d get arrested, her father would kill her, and she’d never hear the end of it from Brandon or her sister. Which, in the scheme of things, wasn’t so terrible. It wasn’t as if she was going to get shot or anything.

Here goes nothing
, she said to herself as she zipped up her jacket and got out of the car. She strode toward Amethyst’s door like she had business being there. As she did, another thought popped into her mind. Inez had cleaned for Amethyst, which meant either Inez had a key and had let herself in, Amethyst had let her in, or Amethyst had left the key for Inez somewhere inconspicuous, like under a potted plant or the welcome mat. Bernie decided to go with the third option because it was the easiest, while the other two left her with nothing to do but break a window or open the door with a credit card—something she wasn’t good with. Besides, these days everyone had dead bolts, which required a little more finesse. And if option one didn’t work, she could always go to option two or three.

Bernie casually strolled around to the back of the house, figuring that if Amethyst had left the key anywhere, it would be there, because there was no place in front to hide a key. There was a slot in the door for the mail and no welcome mat on the porch. If anyone asked what she was doing, she would say she was thinking of renting the upstairs apartment and just wanted to see what things looked like.

Like not much, in her opinion. Maple saplings were pushing up through the cracks in the driveway. Their leaves littered the tarmac. Over by the hurricane fence, black-eyed Susans drooped disconsolately. A sand box sat uncovered. In it, three small, chartreuse, plastic starfish molds sat next to a kiddie-sized pail and shovel. She looked in all of them. No key. Then she addressed the doll whose legs were sticking out of the sand.

Bernie reached over and pulled her out. It was a Barbie. She dusted the sand out of her hair and sat her down next to the pail. Then she picked her back up. Poor Barbie. She deserved better than being left out for cats to pee on. Growing up, Libby had never liked Barbie dolls, but Bernie had been a Barbie fanatic, bugging her mom to buy her every new outfit that came on the market. She’d never liked Ken, though. She’d always thought he was a dork.

Bernie slipped the Barbie into her bag. She’d donate it to Goodwill, because it was obvious that the little girl that had lived upstairs with her parents wasn’t coming back. As Bernie continued on, she wondered who they were and if they would know anything about Amethyst. Somehow she doubted it. She also doubted that she’d be able to locate them, but maybe Bree would know who the realtor was who handled this house. Then she or her sister could call up and see if the family had left a forwarding address. It was a long shot, but the way things were going, any long shot was a shot worth pursuing.

Bernie walked up to the back steps and picked up the welcome mat. Nothing. Too obvious. She went back down the steps, and taking care to keep her suede boots out of the dirt, she squatted down in front of what had once been a flower bed but was now a tangle
of dead and dying weeds that banked the side of the house.

It seemed like an unlikely place for Amethyst to hide anything, but she ran her hand through the soil, anyway, because you never knew. As her father always said, “Do it right the first time so you don’t have to go back and do it again.”

After a minute of that, her hands were cold from the dirt. Well, that had definitely been a waste of time, she decided as she stood and brushed the soil off her hands. Not only had she not found anything, she’d ruined her manicure as well. Now she’d have to go back to the salon for a touch-up, something that she didn’t have time to do.

This definitely wasn’t turning out well. But the key had to be somewhere. Unless, of course, it didn’t exist at all, which was a possibility she wasn’t prepared to consider yet. Bernie tapped what was left of her nails against the boards of the house, thinking that maybe the key was behind a loose board. She tried prying a couple of boards out. No go.

“Okay, Bernie,” she said aloud to herself. “If this key is here, it’s in some easy, accessible place. Just look around.”

First, she looked at the yard again, but aside from starfish molds and the pail and shovel in the sand box, there was nothing in the yard that could be used to hide a key. No trash cans, no cute little garden gnomes, no faux plastic bunnies. The yard was completely bare. So far she was batting zero for zero, or whatever that expression was. She didn’t follow baseball, so she didn’t know. Bernie turned and studied the back of the house. She got up on her tiptoes and ran her fingers over the top of the door frame. Then she tried the windows. And that was when she got lucky.

The key was sitting in a magnetic box on the underside of the window to the right. She hit her forehead with the heel of her hand. “You are such an idiot,” she said aloud.

Why do I always have to make things so much harder than they really are?
Bernie thought as she slid the key in the lock and turned it. The door opened with a creak. Then Bernie replaced the key under the window frame, went inside, and locked the door from the inside. Better safe than sorry, as her dad would say. Well, that wasn’t what he’d say in this situation, but she didn’t want to think about that.

“Might as well start here,” she muttered to herself, stepping into a small, oblong-shaped kitchen. Since she didn’t know what she was looking for, she couldn’t afford to skip anything.

The first thing that struck her was that the kitchen probably hadn’t been touched since the sixties. The walls were painted a greenish yellow, the counters were green Formica, and the floors were some sort of speckled linoleum. The second thing that struck her was that the counters were applianceless. There wasn’t even a microwave on them. Who, except for her family, didn’t have a microwave these days?

Bernie started opening cabinets. Most were empty. There was a set of pots that looked as if it had never been used, a paring knife, seven steak knives, five dishes, a couple of mugs, and a box containing a set of glass tumblers. Bernie had had more stuff in her college dorm than Amethyst had had in her kitchen. Bernie continued on. There were a few cleaning supplies under the kitchen sink, and two boxes of cereal, a box of mac and cheese, a box of Bisquick, and a couple of packets of honey roasted peanuts in the kitchen cabinet across from the stove, as well as a bottle of Wild
Turkey, a bottle of good French brandy, and a couple of bottles of not-bad Chilean wine.

The refrigerator didn’t yield much more. There were two bottles of water and a carton of Diet Coke on the top shelf, a lemon with green fuzz on it on the second shelf, and nothing in the vegetable bins. The freezer revealed a bottle of vodka and a bottle of Aquavit. Obviously, Amethyst hadn’t done any entertaining here. Or eaten here.

Bernie turned and opened up the lid of the garbage can. There was nothing in it but a bottle of Diet Coke, a bridal magazine, and a copy of the Longely newspaper. Bernie reached in and fished out the two publications. The paper was dated three weeks ago.

Did that mean that that was the last time Amethyst was here, or did she simply read and dispose of more recent papers elsewhere? Bernie took a quick look at the paper but didn’t see anything that linked it to Amethyst in any way. Then she looked at
Modern Bride
. There was no mailing label, so Amethyst had bought it off the newsstand. Unless someone else had purchased it and left it here, which, knowing Amethyst, was a more likely scenario. Nevertheless, Bernie tucked both pieces of printed matter under her arm. Maybe her dad would see something in them that she couldn’t.

As she walked into the living room, she was wishing that there was some way of finding out what Inez had found out.
If
she was telling the truth. If this didn’t pan out, Bernie decided that she’d appear at Inez’s house with a large bottle of booze and some money. Despite what Brandon had said, she could probably spare fifty bucks, and it wasn’t as if Inez didn’t need the money. Her mother would have disapproved, but Bernie always felt that there were times that justified the expedient approach.

Looking around, Bernie decided the living room wasn’t much better than the kitchen. There was a brown leather sofa, two chintz-covered armchairs, a coffee table that looked as if it was made out of particleboard, and a cheapo television set. The furniture looked as if it had come from one of those rental stores, and the television looked as if it was at least ten years old.

What Bernie was really struck by was what wasn’t there. No cable box. No provisions for music. No books. No magazines. No pictures on the wall. There didn’t seem to be anything personal at all. This apartment looked like it was a place for Amethyst to crash and nothing more. Bernie took another quick glance around and headed for the dining room. She found a bridge table and four chairs set up in the middle of the room, along with a floor lamp with a torn lamp shade.

Bernie wondered what she’d find in the bedrooms as she walked down the hall. The walls were covered with the kind of cabbage-rose wallpaper that had been popular in the thirties and forties. She opened the first door she came to. The room was empty. The only thing in it were the shades on the windows. She walked in and opened the closet door. A strong odor of mothballs came out and slapped her in the face. She peered inside. Nothing but some metal hangers, an orange metal container appropriately marked
CAMPHOR
, and an old navy blue woman’s cardigan.

Bernie closed the closet door, left the room, and opened the next door. A made-up bed sat in the middle of the room. The coverlet was dark green and matched the curtains on the windows and the skirt on the bed.
Amethyst’s room,
Bernie thought. Had to be. The nightstands were a light ash, as was the dresser standing in the far corner. An old-fashioned doll, the kind with a
china head, leaned against the mirror hung over the dresser.

But what really attracted Bernie’s attention was the two photographs hanging on the wall. They were both of preteen girls. Both of them were sitting on beds in what looked like dorm rooms, smiling and waving at the camera. Bernie didn’t know how she knew who they were, she just did.

The titles written on the mats confirmed her guess. The girl with the big smile on her face and the slight buckteeth was Bessie Osgood. The second picture was of Zinnia McGuire. Bernie stared at them for a long time. She decided that Bessie looked a little bit like Libby had at that age. Kind of schlumpy. The sort of kid who always got As and did everything her mother told her to.

On the other hand, Zinnia looked as if she was going to get in her fair share of trouble. But, of course, she hadn’t had the chance. She and Bessie had both been killed, their deaths officially declared accidents. Why did Amethyst have their pictures hanging on her wall? Were they trophies? Expressions of guilt? Reminders of the good old days? Bernie shook her head. She didn’t know, and now, since she couldn’t ask Amethyst, she never would.

She turned away and went through the dresser and the closet. The dresser had some underwear—the kind you got at JCPenney on sale—a fake pearl necklace, several T-shirts in different colors, and a couple of stretched-out black turtlenecks. The closet turned out to be a little fuller, but the clothes and shoes in it were old and worn, things that Bernie judged Amethyst wore around the house. In any case, Bernie had never seen her in anything remotely resembling the stuff in
her closet. Now more than ever, it looked as if Amethyst had been living somewhere else.

If she needed any more convincing, the bathroom did it. There were towels hanging on the racks, a shower curtain surrounding the bathtub, and a hamper for dirty clothes. Bernie opened the shower curtain. A nubbin of soap sat in the soap dish, while a bottle of shampoo stood on the side of the tub. Bernie lifted up the shampoo bottle. There was practically nothing left in it.
Interesting
, Bernie thought as she put it down. She opened the medicine cabinet over the sink. There was a bottle of aspirin, an unopened tube of toothpaste, mascara, and a couple of lipsticks. Bernie opened the mascara. It was practically empty. She put it back and opened the lipsticks. One was a horrendous orange—obviously a fashion error—while the other was a cheapo discount brand Bernie had never heard of. If Bernie remembered correctly, the only brand she had ever seen Amethyst use was Chanel.

Bernie put everything back the way it had been. She knew Amethyst. Amethyst had not been a back-to-nature kind of gal. She had used lots of product. Lots of styling gel on her hair, three coats of mascara, eyeliner, eye shadow, blush, not to mention concealer, lip liner, gloss, and lipstick. Basically, she’d applied lipstick like Spackle.