Baltimore Noir (22 page)

“I know it’s a great house.” Jeannie looked at Ivan, who was pulling at the tablecloth as if he was having as bad a time as his mother. “Still, my gut says that it’s just a bit too … over-the-top. For me, anyway.”

“Just like you, my dear, are over-the-top,” Hodder said, taking an undisguised, lingering glance at Jeannie’s bosom before sliding his hand over hers. “But in the words of the Romantics song—that’s what I like about you.”

Was this how he did it? Jeannie wondered wretchedly, hours later, as she rinsed the dinner dishes while Charlie tucked Ivanhoe into bed in the nursery on the floor above. Was this why all those people moved out within a year or two of buying because Hodder preyed on the sexual insecurity of the wives and made them want to leave their husbands? Jeannie didn’t want to leave Charlie. Her husband was devoted o Ivanhoe, an excellent provider, a considerate lover—so what if he never read books? He knew lots of SAT words, a definite sign of intelligence. And though Hodder was certainly handsome, Jeannie believed from his manner and dress that he was gay, or at the very least bisexual, and what girl wanted to deal with that in this day and age?

What had really given Jeannie chills, she decided, hadn’t been Hodder’s fingers lightly stroking the back of her hand before she’d belatedly pulled it away. It was what he’d said a few minutes earlier about the bowling alley. She’d heard the rolling sound, usually late, when she’d come downstairs to put her cocoa cup in the dishwasher.

During those times, Jeannie had never opened the basement door. She’d always loathed the actresses in horror movies who heard the omens of their upcoming death, yet still went down to investigate. Jeannie wasn’t going into that basement no matter how many track lights were on.

On Saturday evening, Jeannie arranged for Fernanda, her neighbor’s housekeeper, to stay with Ivan, because Charlie had bought a table at a gala for the Maryland Historical Society, and he needed her there. Charlie had summoned a salesclerk from Octavia over to Goodwood Gardens with an armload of potential evening dresses, so Jeannie would have no excuse about not having the right kind of dress for an October function in Baltimore. The perfect dress proved to be a floor-length hunter-green silk charmeuse, cut on the bias and decorated with elaborate crystal beading. It had a high halter neckline and Jeannie hadn’t thought the gown was that provocative, but knew she was wrong when Hodder Reeves passed the two of them and ran his fingers down her bare back while he greeted the couple.

“What was he doing to your back?” Charlie demanded, sotto voce, after Hodder was gone.

“I didn’t ask for it,” Jeannie said under her breath, as they were mercifully interrupted by an elegant white-haired dowager already sitting at the table.

“What a pretty dress. I see everyone’s admiring it, including that crazy Hodder Reeves. I’m Hortense Underwood, by the way.”

“Charles and Jeannie Connelly,” Charlie said, reaching out a hand to her and slipping back into his happy, social personality. “We’re new in town, and this is our first time at the Historical Society gala. How about you?”

“Oh, I’ve been coming for about a million years. Can’t you tell?” Hortense said dryly.

“We just moved here,” Jeannie said. “Hodder is our real estate agent. That’s why he stopped to say hello.”

“Oh, so you moved here to buy a house! How exciting. Where is it?”

“Roland Park. On Goodwood Gardens,” Charlie added. “Not the German Embassy? I heard sometime back that a young family had bought it.”

“I can’t believe anyone really calls it the German Embassy, because my own private name for it is the Austrian Embassy.” Jeannie smiled at the woman, who was turning out to be a rescuer.

“The house was built for a furniture tycoon whose lineage was German. In those days, houses went to children, so there were two generations there, and I knew all the Erdmanns. During the war, you can imagine how hard it was for them. They spent all their time at home; nobody would receive them.”

Jeannie knew the name: Erdmann & Sons was a company famous for building reproduction furniture from 1900 through the 1960s that cost almost as much as eighteenth-century Maryland antiques. Charlie had seen a picture of an Erdmann sideboard in an auction catalog and been on the hunt for one ever since. Maybe it was fated that they were in the house. But still, Jeannie was unsettled. She said, “I heard they had a bowling alley in the basement.”

“Oh yes! I grew up on Edgevale Road and I played with the daughter while we were at Roland Park School—the public primary school,” she added. “I was invited to bowl at her home a few times during the ’30s. I heard the alley was taken out by some of the later owners. Heaven knows what’s there now.”

“An au pair suite. As if there aren’t enough bedrooms in the house already.”

“Yes, but that goes with the territory, my dear.” A wry smile cut new creases in Hortense’s worn, intelligent face. “So, how is the embassy changing under your command?”

Jeannie glanced at Charlie, who, from his spot across the table, was watching her. It was a loaded issue, because he’d asked her to hire a decorator and she hadn’t done so yet.

“Not much,” Jeannie admitted. “I’m doing a little bit of weeding, trying to keep up appearances—”

“You do your own gardening?” Hortense Underwood raised her almost nonexistent white eyebrows.

“Yes. I’m from California, originally. I like to be outside.”

“There are a lot of others in the neighborhood who garden, too. Once you meet them, you’ll feel at home.” Hortense smiled, as if Jeannie had been doing the right thing all along. “I’ll stop by one day next week. Now’s a good time of year to cut back your hydrangea. I want to show you a personal trick that I bet they don’t know about in California.”

Jeannie didn’t know why the visit of an eighty-year-old neighbor should throw her into such a tizzy, but it did. She declined Hodder when he called, inviting her for lunch again, and she practically bit Charlie’s head off when he wanted her to organize a dinner party for his friends the night after. Everything, Jeannie felt, had to be just so for Hortense. Their furniture—a motley mix of Pottery Barn, Maurice Villency, and Gaines McHale—was minimal, but at least it could be free of the litter of toys and newspapers and food. The parquet floors were to be swept, the marble ones mopped. Charlie was useless at cleaning—what millionaire would be otherwise?—so Jeannie finally broke down and begged Fernanda to come by in her off hours to give the place a quick dusting, which quickly turned into an all-out cleaning, a two-night marathon of vacuuming that drowned out the sound of bowling that Jeannie seemed to be hearing more often over the past few days.

The prospect of serving a cocktail was also an unending worry. Jeannie usually had a few bottles of wine stashed somewhere, but she sensed an eighty-year-old woman would probably take a mixed drink, or some kind of spirit straight up. She wished the walls would talk, in this case, tell her something like,
Sherry, neat!
Or,
Old-fashioned!
Jeannie could mix a margarita, but that was about all.

Charlie thought she should hire a bartender to come with his own stash, and thus be perfectly assured of making the drinks right, but Jeannie figured this would be pretentious. In the end, Jeannie ran into the liquor section at Eddie’s, where a nice young man helped her spend $200 in fifteen minutes, and had someone drive it back to the house and actually unpack it in the butler’s pantry. Too bad everything in Baltimore wasn’t that easy. She had to drive to Hecht’s in Towson to buy Waterford glasses of every shape and size, and was just unpacking them when the doorbell chimed.

Hortense was an hour early. Jeannie hadn’t time to change from her shopping clothes to her gardening ones, let alone get all the sticky labels off the bottom of the glasses. The doorbell awoke Ivanhoe from his nap so he was screaming from above, and Jeannie now felt the picture was complete; she was a totally decadent, uncaring trophy wife who knew nothing about caring for children or gardens.

“Oh dear,” said Hortense, immediately ascending the stairs. “May I?”

Ivanhoe was terrified when he saw Hortense peeping round the edge of the door, and had to be mollified with a sippy cup of warm soy milk. Then the three of them went outside and Hortense started snipping away, much lower than Jeannie would ever have cut.

“Are you sure I’ll get them all back next year?” she asked, looking at the stumps where outstretched boughs holding faded blue blooms had been.

“It’s good wood. It will survive. Just like this house.” She paused. “Just like you, my dear.”

“You can tell I’m out of my element, can’t you?” Jeannie said, starting to collect the flowers and branches in a trash bag. She knew that a more organized woman would save the hydrangeas to dry them and then spray-paint gold for the holidays. The holidays. She found herself flinching at the thought of putting on the kind of Christmas Charlie would expect in the house.

“I don’t think that’s the case.” Hortense looked levelly at Jeannie. “If there’s a problem, you’ll be the only one in this house to solve it. That’s all I meant.”

The problem. Over drinks—it turned out that Hortense drank whiskey, straight up—Jeannie tried to fish around and find out exactly which of her many discomforts was the problem Hortense had gleaned. But for a straight talker, she was surprisingly evasive—as curvy, in fact, as Edgevale Road.

That night, Jeannie awoke at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. The whiskey she’d had with Hortense and Charlie, who came home early, true to his word, had thrown her sleep-wake cycle out of whack. She’d be a mess when Ivanhoe woke up at 6—although he seemed to be awake now.

As the whimpering continued, Jeannie slipped out of bed and padded down the hallway to his room. Ivanhoe was sitting bolt upright in bed, and when he saw her, his whimpers turned to an outright scream. Jeannie pressed him against her breast, and gradually the cries lessened.

“Did Ivan have a bad dream? Everything’s okay now—”

“Bad boy,” said Ivanhoe. “Bad, bad boy in room!”

“Nobody’s here, Ivan. You just had a bad dream.”

“No, Mama, he real.” Ivan pointed toward the closet. “He shine like, like moon.” Ivan pushed the curtain over his window aside, pointing with emphasis at the full moon outside. “He have bib on. He roll a big ball.”

Jeannie felt herself shudder. She reached back and switched on the light. No bowling balls anywhere, and all the windows were latched shut.

“Come on, Ivan, let’s get you some milk.” She stood up, still holding him close, and started down the stairs and the hallway, snapping lights on as she went. The alarm panel downstairs still said
ARMED
the doors were all locked. Nobody had penetrated the embassy. She settled Ivan in his booster seat while she microwaved his cup of milk. But when the hum of the microwave finished sixty seconds later, she heard it. Rolling, then a crash. Rolling, rolling, another hit.

“What that, Mommy?” Ivan demanded. “What that sound?”

So her son had heard the rolling sound, too. It was time to get Charlie involved.

Charlie took a logical approach to the whole thing. After Jeannie had woken him, he pulled on a bathrobe and plodded downstairs, cordless telephone in hand. When they’d entered the kitchen, it was silent at first, so Jeannie was frustrated; but then the long rolling sound began again.

“Do you hear it?”

Charlie listened a minute, then said, “It sounds like something’s rolling around on the lower level.”

“Yes, yes! Exactly. And Hortense Underwood said it used to be a bowling alley.”

“Now a nanny suite.” Charlie looked thoughtful. “I can’t remember what the house inspector said about the foundation being level.”

“What does that matter?” The house inspector had been one Reeves had recommended; he’d said the house was perfect, of course.

“I do have my tennis things stored down there. Last time I was getting ready, I took Ivanhoe downstairs with me and gave him a ball to play with. It’s probably just rolling around.”

“The basement is carpeted. And the sound is too loud to be a tennis ball.”

“What else could it be?”

“Let’s go downstairs and look,” Jeannie said.

Charlie paused. “Well, if it makes you feel any better, I’ll call the police.”

That wasn’t what Jeannie had expected. She thought Charlie would have gone down with the unregistered Beretta he’d received from a client in L.A., years ago, who couldn’t come up with a cash payment; the gun that he kept fully loaded, but locked up in a safe in the bedroom. Jeannie thought Charlie would bear arms because so many of the superheroes in his games did; but then again, why should she expect heroics from her husband, eighteen years her senior and already with a slight predisposition for heart trouble?

Since the call for help had come from Goodwood Gardens, three squad cars arrived within two minutes. Six cops trooped downstairs. By then, of course, the sound had stopped. And they found nothing.

“You have reached Hodder Reeves’s answering service. Leave a message, and I will personally return your call as soon as possible. Have a super day.”

Jeannie had been calling Reeves every day for a week, but she kept getting the same recorded message; and he hadn’t called her back, not once, which seemed peculiar given all the special attention he’d lavished on her so recently. Maybe he was closing a deal with other clients. Or maybe he was worried that Jeannie had figured out he’d sold her a haunted house.