Femmes Fatal (19 page)

“Think the cops’ll see it that way?”

“You’ll explain—”

“Before or after you tell how you found me strapped to the bed naked as a jaybird? And what do you think this will do to Normie’s Tinseltown image?”

The word tarnished sprang to mind.

Night gathered up its black cape with a swirl of purple lining and stole across the housetops as if aware that dawn was hard on its heels, a ray gun in its hot little hand. Driving through streets more tortuous than my thoughts, I reflected wryly that a few days ago I had worried about lying about my weight on a yogurt survey. Was it possible my conscience was too finely tuned? Was I engaging in hyperbole when sensing the hand of the law ready to descend on my shoulder, the way Miss Clopper’s had in algebra class?

“Ellie Haskell, née Simons, it is alleged that with duplicity aforethought, you did conspire with one Jacqueline Diamond to conceal facts pertinent to the death of her spouse, the beloved television personality Norman the Doorman.”

“Your Lordship!”

“Be brief, Mrs. Haskell.”

“Learned Counsel is attempting to mislead the jury with conclusions which, while in the main true, do not reflect the motives of myself or the grieving widow. Yes, I left the premises before the police or a medical examiner arrived at the scene because I wanted to help spare Jacqueline Diamond embarrassment. What was the harm in her giving an abbreviated version of the facts—that her husband fell and hit his head while practicing one of his stunts? It’s not as though there’s any question of foul play.”

“That depends on your idea of play, Mrs. Haskell. I suggest, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that on the night in question, Mr. Diamond was not practicing Boy Scout knots. It is my contention that Mrs. Diamond enticed her husband—a man of guileless naivete—into engaging with her in a game of bondage which I submit ended in his untimely death. Your Lordship, I offer into evidence Exhibit Forty-three, the Fully Female manual.”

“No need, my wife has one.”

“I do not question Your Lordship’s impartiality—”

“Pray proceed, Mr. Rimple.”

“Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I sorrowfully suggest that Mr. Diamond rebuffed his wife’s animal advances—culled from this paean to erotica—and thus doing, so outraged her that she provoked the fall that killed him.”

“Objection! Your Lordship, Learned Counsel is accusing my Fellow Female of murder!”

“Mrs. Haskell, I will hold you in contempt.”

“I don’t care. I refuse to sit still in the dock for this nonsense. Mrs. Diamond
loved
her husband.”

“Hearsay!”

“Are you suggesting, Mr. Rimple, that she tied herself to the bed after giving her husband a fatal shove?”

“Mrs. Haskell, all things are possible in love and law.”

Emerging from my courtroom nightmare, I discovered that I had been driving on mental cruise control. I began praying for guidance, not out of my moral dilemma, but out of the one-way street, down which I was driving the wrong way, intent on going goodness knows where.

When at last I parked under the archway at Merlin’s Court and switched off the ignition, it dawned on me that Ben might reasonably expect some semirational explanation of my exploits following my precipitous flight from home. A friend needed me, I would say. Whereupon he would naturally inquire the name of said friend. Harmless, husbandly chit-chat with potentially awkward repercussions. Tomorrow, when Norman’s demise was plastered on the front page of
The Daily Chronicle
, it would be difficult to convince Ben that Jacqueline and I had spent the midnight hours exchanging cross-stitch patterns. He would press me for all sorts of tiresome details which would infringe on my loyalty to a woman
I barely knew. I would threaten to leave him if he didn’t shut up. He would say, Suit yourself, but you get the cat, I get the kids … and I would be tempted to take a flying leap off an armoire.

Stepping from the car, I stood in the courtyard beneath a gauzy grey sky, drained by night of its colour as was my face by the sound of footsteps. Ben emerged through the portcullis to stand like Heathcliff, his shirt ruffling in the wind and his eyes blazing black in a face parched as death. Thank God, my name wasn’t Catherine. Ellie is no name for a doomed heroine, and as such, I had never feared to hear it hurled against the twilight sky.

“Ellie!” The wind echoed the mournful sound.

“Yes, dear?” I moved toward him, wishing I were a ghost who would evaporate at his touch. But there was no escape, he reached out his arms and crushed me to his manly chest. He bent his dark head, blocking out the moon—or it could have been the sun coming up; at such moments one loses track of time and place. His mouth seized possession of mine in a kiss of such searing passion that it sucked the soul right out of my body. I would like to say that I fell in love with my husband all over again at that moment, but the shameful truth is that I did not use the moment to step outside myself and analyze my emotions. I did not look into my husband’s eyes and think, Damn, you’re a good provider, and I adore the way you handle our tax returns. I wanted us to take possession of each other out there in the courtyard; I wanted to be his lover, not his wife …

Ben wrenched his lips away from mine, but held on to me with his eyes. “Thank God, you came back to me, my love. I thought I would go mad, pacing the house, knowing I had driven you away by my stupid insensitivity. I was planning on putting an advert in
The Daily Chronicle
this morning: ‘Ellie, please come home.
Things will be different. Please contact and say all is forgiven.’ ”

My breathing slowed. I was remembering my anguish upon finding the twins gone from their playpen.

“Ben, aren’t you angry that I walked out?”

“Sweetheart, the thought of you driving around in circles for hours …” He had that part right at least. “I was filled with such shame!”

That made two of us.

He touched my face with fingers more gentle than the breeze that ruffled my green lace negligee. “I kept thinking I didn’t have one portrait-sized photo of you with the twins.”

“Ben …” I couldn’t go on. There was so much to lose by telling him the truth.

He drew my hands to him, and through the fabric of his shirt I could feel his warmth and the pounding of his heart when he said, “Never in my life have I felt such dread.”

“Don’t think about it,” I said hastily.

“How can I not? The thought of having to ask my mother to come down and take over was so demoralizing. Not that there’s any doubt she would have done a superb job.”

“Sublime!”

“But, Ellie, I wanted my children’s mother, not
my
mother.”

Laying my head against his shoulder, I asked him how he could seriously have believed that I would stay away forever. Abandon him, abandon my children, just because things had become a little sticky for a while?

“At such times, Ellie, one doesn’t think rationally. I’ve forgotten how to be alone.”

The wind chose that moment to step between us like a third presence. Too many powerful emotions too late at night turned the world topsy-turvy. Or that’s
what I thought had happened until it occurred to me that Ben had swept me up in his arms with my gauzes trailing and, like Heathcliff with his benighted Cathy, was striding across the courtyard into the house through the garden door, which he had left open and now kicked shut behind us, and up the stairs to our bedroom, where the pheasants on the wallpaper awaited us in a flutter of excitement.

I can’t say I experienced any qualms upon returning to the scene of my fantasy fiasco. But when Ben settled me upon the bed in a swirl of skirts that would have done justice to a fabric softener advert, I did look with some aversion toward the fireplace area. No need for fear and trembling! Some genie had been at work here. The intimate table for two had been denuded of its oil-soaked cloth and returned to its everyday state. A collage of books and candlesticks was now arranged on its mahogany surface. The ruined rug, the fondue pot, and all other vestiges of our aborted midnight feast had been scraped from the landscape as if they never were.

Joining me on the bed, Ben enveloped me with his arms and spoke into my hair. “We were ready for a new hearth rug.”

“Oh, yes! I hated that little family heirloom.”

His laughter vibrated down my spine, and if the tingling wasn’t one of exquisite passion for my dark and stormy knight, it didn’t matter. At that point I was ready to trade up to friendship, with its lifetime guarantee. Shifting around to face him, I cupped his face in my hands.

“Thank you.”

“For what?”

“For cleaning up and …”

“Yes?”

“For being imperfect.”

His blue-green eyes were flecked with the gold of
tomorrow’s sunlight, and I wanted him to hold me so tight that neither death nor thoughts of six
A.M
. feedings could part us.

“What’s that?” He lifted his head.

“Sounds like Abbey.”

“And there goes Tam.”

“Perhaps if we lie here and don’t breathe …” But even as I spoke, I was on my feet, already mentally back in uniform.

“Ellie, you’re not leaving this room.” He took hold of my arms and walked me backwards to the bed. “I’ll see to the twins while you get some shut-eye.”

“But you have to go to work in a few hours.”

“So do you.”

I wove my fingers through his rumpled black hair and whispered, “Why don’t we both go? We could make a date of it.”

He didn’t answer. Instead, he removed my chenille dressing gown from the hook behind the wardrobe door and wrapped it around my shoulders as if it were a sable stole and we were Lord and Lady Fitzuppity stepping out for a night on the town.

Lucky me, I am blessed with one of those constitutions that bounces back from lack of sleep with no ill effects—other than feeling as though I’ve just donated eight pints of blood and every drop that is left has migrated to my eyeballs. When Ben left for the restaurant at the inhuman hour of ten
A.M
. the next morning, I presented as sweet a picture of domesticity as you could imagine. There I sat at the kitchen table demurely sipping coffee while my offspring, identically attired in peppermint green, gurgled and gooed in the playpen. Ah, but what falsehood lurks in the heart of woman! As soon as the
garden door closed behind Ben signalling the all-clear, I grabbed up the newspaper and rifled frantically through the pages, desperately searching for a late-breaking bulletin on the late great Norman the Doorman. Not a word.

The death-of-the-week honours went to the recently departed Mrs. Huffnagle. Her husband, a distinguished gentleman of the old school wearing an ascot and a lugubrious expression, was pictured under the caption
Grieving widower learns faulty electrical outlet a factor in bathroom death of spouse
. Did I need this callous reminder that joining Fully Female could prove a fatal mistake?

The last of my energy drained away and I slumped forward, rocking my coffee cup in its saucer, and was out like a light for all of thirty seconds. Grimace! Something was calling me back to life—an insistent knocking that brought me snarling to my feet.

“Coming!”

Under the watchful eyes of my daughter, who was gnawing on her rattle in a most unladylike way, I staggered to the garden door and opened up.

“What is this, the Royal Mint?” Mrs. Malloy stood on the doorstep, supply bag looped over her arm and the spotted veiling of her hat drawn down over her eyebrows.

Immediately on the defensive, I stammered that the door wasn’t locked, only stuck. Before she could open her mouth, my brain had thumped out the anticipated response in a series of jolts that threatened to cave in the sides of my head. But to my perplexity, Mrs. Malloy never said a word about not doing windows or hinges. Her introductory crack seemed to have left her spent. She entered the kitchen as if borne upon a current of air, her four-inch heels seeming to skim the quarry tile. Belatedly, I realized she looked as though she’d had even less sleep than I. Her eyes stared out of a face as white as the roots of her hair into a vast nothingness. They
reminded me uneasily of Norman the Doorman’s last night.

She paused in the middle of the room, staring down at the red-gold heads in the playpen. “They new?”

“What?”

“The kiddies.”

“No, I’ve had them for some time.” Shock turns me giddy. “I got them at a two-for-the-price-of-one sale.”

“That’s right. I remember now.” Mrs. Malloy deposited herself, supply bag and all, in the rocking chair beside the fireplace and began pumping her foot as if working a treadle sewing machine, back and forth, back and forth. I would have gone mad if I hadn’t been so desperately afraid she had already crossed the invisible line. Could she have fallen off the bus and suffered a concussion? Should I phone Dr. Melrose or, light dawned, was her state of mind a repercussion of her romantic tryst with Walter Fisher? Had he performed some kind of experimental taxidermy on her? Or were we dealing with a standard case of post-orgasmic trance?

“Tell me,” I asked with a brave smile, “how was your evening?”

“None of your bloody business, Mrs. H,” she answered in a monotone.

“Sorry.” Properly put in my place, I attempted to hide my discomfiture by plopping the kettle down on the cooker and hunting about for the copper caddy. Sure enough, it was where it always was—next to the teapot, right under my nose.

From behind me came a raucous sob and, scattering teabags, I hastened back to the rocking chair to find Mrs. M with her face buried in a black-edged hanky. A gift no doubt from her beloved. And suddenly it occurred to me that what I had read in her face might not have been ecstasy revisited, but the blank look of despair. All too possibly her homework assignment had
been the same dismal failure as mine and Jacqueline Diamond’s.

“Roxie, dear!” I stayed the arm of the chair to fend off a wave of motion sickness. “So what if your romantic rendezvous didn’t measure up to your hopes and dreams!”