Final Exam (5 page)

“Okay, as long as it’s before ten. I have six A.M. mass tomorrow morning.”

I didn’t know if I could accommodate Kevin’s schedule but told him I would respect his bedtime. “If I don’t talk to you tonight, let’s get together tomorrow.”

He sighed. “Tomorrow might be tough. The kids are coming back from spring break.”

I heard the occupant of the ladies’ room unlock the door. “Why would that make it tough?”

“Oh, you know. There’s a lot of sinning that goes on during spring break so I often have a lot of counseling to do.” He paused. “You’re the RD now. You should probably be around to help out, if necessary.”

With sinners? Not exactly my bailiwick. I live vicariously through sinners, being a repressed, guilt-ridden lapsed Catholic. But I promised him I would be available and asked him to let me know when we could get together.

The door to the bathroom opened and I came face-to-face with my boss, Sister Mary, who was surrounded by her usual cloud of Jean Naté and hairspray scent.

“Dear!” she said, surprised to see me. Her angular Irish face was its usual ruddy hue. She was close enough for me to kiss her cheek but I didn’t want to do that, for obvious reasons.

“Sister?”

“What are you doing here?” Her eyes narrowed behind her round glasses. “And were those police cars I saw in front of Siena Hall?”

I let out a strangled laugh. Busted. “Yes, they were.”

“Visitors? Or trouble?”

Visitors? Would six cops be visiting me in my new home twenty minutes after I moved in? It seemed a little unorthodox but Mary was at a point, I was sure, where nothing I did would surprise her. Visitors or trouble? A little of both, I thought, but I went with the truth. I had worked for Mary for the last nine years, and she had been my professor when I was a student, but she still scared the bejesus out of me. “I found something in my room and—” I started, but stopped when I felt Crawford’s strong arms around my shoulders, crushing me against his torso and indicating that I should shut up right this very second.

“Sister, hi!” he said brightly. We were jammed together in the narrow corridor leading to the restrooms, two laypeople and a suspicious nun. “Are you ready, hon?” he said. He never calls me “hon,” so I knew this was a rescue mission. He was behind me and had me in what Mary would think was a romantic embrace but which I knew was one that was subliminally telling me to “be quiet.”

“Yes, sweetheart.”

Mary grabbed my arm. “Your room? What did you find? Was it something to do with Wayne?” I noticed that her Irish brogue got stronger the more excited she became; right now, I could barely understand her.

Crawford dragged me away from her and toward the front door. Our table was on the way, and I picked up my Blazing Dragon and drank the last of it as we exited the restaurant. I dropped it on the table where another couple was eating just before Crawford pulled me onto the sidewalk. I turned back toward the restaurant and saw Mary picking her white cardigan sweater from the back of her chair and grabbing her purse, purposeful in her actions. The other nun seated at the table seemed perplexed. “She’s coming this way,” I said.

Crawford perp-walked me to his Passat, his arm still around me. He beeped the car key and the doors unlocked. “Get in.”

We were in the car and out of the spot in seconds. I turned around and saw Mary staring after the car, her face a mask of consternation. I turned back around and put on my seat belt. “That was a close one.”

Crawford maneuvered through the traffic and onto the highway going north.

“To Scarsdale, James.”

“Who’s James?” he asked.

Literal as always. “Never mind. Just drive.”

Six

“So what do you do when
you
have to pee during a stakeout?” I asked, squirming around in my seat, trying to get comfortable.

“I told you to go the bathroom before we left the restaurant,” Crawford said.

That wasn’t an answer.

Under normal circumstances, this would have been a very romantic scenario: a dusky sunset on a cool spring night, a handsome guy sitting next to me, a tree-lined street, no one else in sight. But my engorged bladder, protesting after two huge Blazing Dragons, and the fact that we were looking for a wayward resident director broke the mood. I shifted again, crossing one leg over the other. We had been sitting there for about an hour and hadn’t observed anyone coming in or out of the Brookwell house.

“What do you usually do? Go in a bottle? An empty coffee cup?” I asked, knowing that neither of those options were available to me. I’m pretty limber, but not that much.

“You could go outside,” he suggested. He reached into the glove compartment and handed me a stack of yellow napkins from Wendy’s, the top one stained with burger grease.

“Gee, thanks.” I looked around. We were on a pretty suburban street, big, old Tudor mansions on either side, some surrounded by stone walls. I didn’t see a tree that afforded enough privacy to allow me to relieve myself and I couldn’t envision myself hopping over one of the stone walls. Who knew what was on the other side? Might be rabid guard dogs, for all I knew. And with my luck, that was the best-case scenario.

The Brookwell house was one of the smaller houses on the street, and newer by about fifty years. It was a tidy, classic Colonial, white with black shutters, columns flanking the front door, and a long driveway running along the side to a detached garage. Very southern Westchester County, very old money. “I’ll be right back,” I said, hopping out of the car before Crawford could ask where I was going. The situation had become dire and I never would have considered this normally, but desperate times and all. I crossed the quiet street and walked up to the Brookwells’ door, lifting the heavy knocker, a brass Claddagh ring. So, someone in there was Irish, apparently. I knocked a few times before I heard footsteps on the other side of the door.

An older gentleman, probably in his late sixties, answered the door. He was wearing khakis with a neat crease down the front, a blue oxford with some kind of insignia on the breast pocket, and penny loafers without socks. He was the epitome of Scarsdale preppy, right down to his round, tortoiseshell glasses, which perched on the end of his nose. “Can I help you?” he asked, more pleasantly than I would have if a strange woman appeared on my doorstep. But this being Scarsdale and all, good manners were de rigueur and who was I to complain?

“Oh, hi,” I said, not realizing until that very moment that I had no idea what to say. I turned and looked at Crawford, who was slumped down in the front seat of the Passat, trying to become invisible. He was no help. I decided to put him in the role of directionally challenged spouse. “My husband and I are looking at houses in the area and we were driving around looking for the Coldwell Banker office and got turned around. Could you point me in the right direction?” I took a chance that there was a Coldwell Banker realty office in the area; my experience was that every Westchester town had one and I hoped that Scarsdale was typical in that regard.

He smiled. “Are you sure it’s Coldwell?”

I laughed. “I thought it was . . .”

“Was it Houlihan-Lawrence, maybe?”

I hit my forehead with my palm. “Of course! Coldwell is the realtor selling
our
house,” I said. “Can you tell me where Houlihan is?”

“Of course. It can get a little confusing around here,” he said. He was so charming that I felt bad lying to him. Where’s your kid? I wanted to ask him, but I refrained, watching while he stretched out his arm and made some gestures trying to describe exactly where I was supposed to go. I made some mouth noises that conveyed my understanding of where he was talking about, even though I was just as clueless as when I had begun this charade. “So, that’s it,” he said. “You’re really close. No more than three minutes away.”

“Great!” I said. “Now here’s the really embarrassing part,” I started, taking in his kind expression. I shifted from one foot to the other to demonstrate my discomfort.

He stepped aside, sweeping an arm into the foyer. “No need to explain. Powder room is just beyond the staircase there, right before you get to the kitchen. On the right-hand side.”

I turned and looked at Crawford, my eyebrows raised to convey my surprise at my quick entry. He slumped farther down in the seat, shielding the side of his face with his hand. I went into the house and ran down the hall to the well-appointed powder room, but took a minute to look at a few pictures that hung on the wall across from it. There were a few little Brookwells, it appeared: Wayne, an older sister, and two older boys. At one time, they had had a West Highland terrier, who posed with them in a few formal holiday pictures where the little Brookwell boys wore short pants and vests while the sister wore an explosion of organza that made it appear that she had no legs. I pulled my eyes away and went into the powder room where I took care of business, and helped myself to a little of the Jo Malone grapefruit hand lotion that was perched on the glass shelf over the sink. I smelled my hands and decided that I would definitely put this on my Christmas list. I heard voices outside of the bathroom, one of them female with an Irish brogue, the other belonging to Mr. Brookwell. Aha, I thought. The purveyor of all things Claddagh. She was probably wondering what the heck had led her husband to allow a stranger into their home. I dillydallied a few more seconds hoping that I wouldn’t have to run the Mrs. Brookwell gauntlet just yet; I was enjoying Mr. Brookwell so much that I figured I could chat with him for a few more seconds, ostensibly about Scarsdale but mainly about his kids. Or, more specifically, one kid. Wayne. The butthole.

I pumped a little more lotion onto my hand and rubbed it in before opening the powder room door. I went back out into the hallway and saw Mr. Brookwell still standing by the open front door, waiting for me to return.

“I can’t thank you enough,” I said. “Nothing worse than being lost and not having access to . . . facilities,” I said, choosing my words carefully in front of this lovely, well-mannered man.

He chuckled. “Not a problem, dear.” He held out his hand and I took it in my well-moisturized one. “My name is Eben Brookwell.”

I stopped for a moment, not realizing that I would need an alias. I quickly decided to go with the old “your first pet/your first street” rule of thumb. I forgot that that’s what you were supposed to use for your stripper name—at least that’s what Max had told me when we had played this ridiculous renaming game—but it worked in a pinch. The only problem was that I had grown up on a street named “New Broadway.” Obviously, that wouldn’t work. And my current street name was “Palisades,” after a line of cliffs that ran along the Hudson River. I thought quickly, staring into Mr. Brookwell’s handsome, older-gentleman face. “Coco. Coco,” I repeated, flashing on my first dog, a teacup Yorkshire terrier. I searched my brain for an appropriate surname. “Coco Varick,” I finally said, using Max’s former street address in lower Manhattan.

“Well, Coco Varick, happy house hunting,” he said. “And tell Mr. Varick that we’ll get together for a drink when you do move to town. Look us up, will you?” He gave Crawford a little wave, which Crawford returned sheepishly.

“I definitely will, Mr. Brookwell.”

“Eben.”

“Eben,” I said, my discomfort at the number of lies I had told growing by the second.

“What do you do, dear?”

“Do?” I asked.

“Yes. What’s your profession?” He blushed a bit when he realized I might not have a job that required me to leave the house, like raising a small brood. “Or are you home with the little ones?”

“No. No little ones,” I said, deciding to go for broke. What was one more lie to Coco Varick? “I’m a flight attendant.”

“Ahhh,” he said, some kind of look passing across his face. Lust for flight attendants of yore? Who knew. But he seemed impressed so I went with it.

“I fly for Air France.”

“Très bien!”
he said enthusiastically, the flush in his cheeks getting deeper. Yep, he likes the flight attendants. Especially the French ones.

“Do you have children, Mr. Brookwell?”

“Four,” he said proudly, regaining his composure after his momentary flight of fancy, pun intended. “Twin boys, then a girl, and then a boy.”

“How lovely.”

“I’m a very proud dad,” he said. “One of the twins is a lawyer in Boston, the other a doctor at NYU. My daughter is also a doctor in Miami. And my youngest is a resident director at St. Thomas University. Have you heard of it? It’s local. Right over the border in the Bronx.”

“Oh, yes,” I said, exuding enthusiasm. “I have heard that it is quite an institution.”

“It is,” he said, and his face fell a little bit. “Our youngest—his name is Wayne—is at a bit of a crossroads. We’re hoping that he doesn’t spend his life living in a dorm.”

“Not exactly the path you had mapped out for him?” I asked.

He shook his head but before he had a chance to elaborate, a woman emerged from the kitchen and came up behind him. She was tall and thin, her crisp white blouse open just enough so that I could see her Miraculous Medal of the Blessed Virgin glinting in the light coming from the overhead fixture in the foyer. Eben turned around.

“Dear,” he said, gesturing toward his wife and putting an arm around her waist when she got close enough. “This is my new friend, Coco Varick. Coco, my wife, Geraldine.”

I held out my hand and hoped that she would hold me up when I crumbled to the floor on my shaking legs.

Because I was looking into the face of Sister Mary.

Well, obviously it wasn’t Sister Mary, but someone who looked exactly like her. The reason I knew it wasn’t Mary is because she was
nice
.

She held out her hand. “Nice to meet you, Ms. Varick.”

“Oh, please call me Coco.” I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was Mary down to the sensible shoes and short haircut but definitely had more élan and flair than my stodgy boss. I pulled my eyes away from her when Eben started talking, my eyes coming to rest on a St. Thomas sweatshirt thrown casually over the banister of the staircase. It was hard to miss: St. Thomas’s school colors are a bizarre combination of purple and yellow, which I’m sure had some deep religious meaning lost on me, the pagan. The sweatshirt material was the purple, and I could see some yellow lettering peeking out from under the wrinkled fabric. I was itching to ask them if their son was a drug dealer and if he had just quit his day job, but being as we had just met, I thought it might be a tad impolite.

“Coco and her husband . . . ,” Eben started, looking at me questioningly.

“Chad,” I said.

“Chad are looking for a house in the area. They got a little turned around and stopped to ask for directions.”

“I’m glad you did!” she exclaimed. “Who’s your agent?”

“My agent?”

“Yes, dear,” she said, fingering her necklace. “Your real estate agent?”

Crawford tapped gently on the horn and we all looked over at him. “Chad seems to be in a hurry,” I said apologetically, and started down the walk.

Eben followed me. “Please do look us up when you move in, Coco. We’d love to have you and Chad over for cocktails sometime.”

I hurried down the walk and called over my shoulder, “We’d love to, too!” I put my thumb and pinkie to my ear. “We’ll call you!”

“We’re in the book!” he said. “And don’t forget! A left at the Catholic church!”

“Got it!” I called back and gave him a thumbs-up. Of course it was a left at the Catholic church; I wondered if we could stop in for a little on-the-go confession. I jumped in the car and returned Eben’s wave as we drove off.

Crawford looked at me when we got to a stop sign. “What the hell is wrong with you? I thought we were going to spend the night there, you were with him for so long.”

“Before I forget, your name is Chad and mine is Coco and I’m a flight attendant for Air France.”

“Of course it is. Of course you are.” He let out a little exasperated sigh. “What do
I
do?”

I put on my seat belt and adjusted my pocketbook between my feet. “I didn’t get that far. Do you want to be a firefighter?”

“Do
you
want me to be a firefighter?”

New York City cops and firefighters have a not-always-amicable relationship with each other and are somewhat competitive when it comes to whose job is more important and who is braver. It’s stupid civil servant man stuff, but I knew I had to choose my words carefully regardless of how ridiculous I thought the whole thing was. Crawford was already irked that I had gone into the Brookwells’ so telling him I wished he was a firefighter would not help. “No. Of course not. Do you want to be a graphic designer?”

He started thinking and then realized that we were off topic. “Whatever. What did you find out?” he said, pulling into a parking spot in the middle of town.

I looked out the window and took in the row of quaint shops and restaurants. “Maybe we should look for a house here,” I mused. Crawford cleared his throat and I realized I had to tell him about the Brookwells. “Very Junior League, country club, blue-bloody types.” I held my hands out to Crawford. “Smell my hands.”

He did it instinctively before realizing he didn’t actually have to.

“Smells good, right?” I asked, putting my hands back in my lap. “The hand lotion in the bathroom goes for around sixty bucks a pop.”

“That’s fascinating,” he said. “What did you talk about?”

“Chad and Coco’s house hunt, mainly,” I said. “Wayne’s a loser compared to the rest of the brood, but we could have guessed that.”

“He’s not a loser,” Crawford protested. “He
is
gainfully employed.”

I snorted. “Did you get a look at Mrs. Brookwell? Geraldine?”

Crawford shrugged. “Not really.”