Naked Once More (27 page)

“We would appreciate a confirmation as soon as possible, Mrs. Kirby.” The other woman’s voice had the slow inexorability of a mudslide. “Our members like to know about these things well in advance. They are all busy people.”

One corner of Jacqueline’s mouth turned up. Not even Mrs. Parker could have mistaken the expression for a smile. “I’m a very busy person too, Mrs. Parker. I’m afraid I just don’t have time right now to speak to your group.”

“Oh?”

Jacqueline knew the technique, she had used it herself. That single word with its rising inflection, accompanied by a fixed stare and ensuing silence, could drive a victim into incoherent and untrue explanations, which were easily demolished by a ruthless interrogator. “You don’t drive at night? We’ll pick you up. You can’t eat red meat? We weren’t planning to feed you, you fool. You always go to bed at nine o’ clock? But surely, for a cause as worthy as this one…”

So Jacqueline said nothing at all. She returned Mrs. Parker’s glare with one just as formidable. Mrs. Parker opened her neat little handbag. “Next month, then. I have the date here in my notebook.”

The appearance of Mollie, overflowing with apologies, saved Jacqueline from replying and Mrs. Parker from annihilation. She lingered as the others followed Mollie, to try one last ploy. “We’d be pleased to have you join us, Mrs. Kirby. You seem to be alone—”

Jacqueline did not take kindly to being condescended to or bullied. She felt her temper cracking, and could think of no reason why she shouldn’t enjoy the process. “I like being alone, Mrs. Parker. I am going to my room now, Mrs. Parker, to work. The word is
work.
Writing is
work.
If I don’t
work,
I don’t get paid. That’s how I earn my living, Mrs. Parker—not from speaking to organizations that don’t offer honoraria. Good night, Mrs. Parker. Hi ho, hi ho, it’s off to
work
I go.…”

Since Mrs. Parker was too ladylike to run and Jacqueline was not, she made it to the door with yards to spare.

She started off down the street with no particular goal in mind. It would have been unwise to return to the cottage; Mrs. Parker was perfectly capable of following her and continuing her assault. People like that gave all loyal readers a bad name, and it wasn’t fair; most of them were considerate, courteous, and intelligent. Especially my readers, Jacqueline thought smugly. At least the library group had been honest and humble. Their budget, as she had good cause to know, didn’t run to anything more fulfilling than tea and cookies. She would write the Friends of the Library tomorrow and accept, as penance for her bad manners. (That would show Mrs. Parker.)

The walk cooled her temper, and by the time she reached the Elite Bar and Grill she was laughing aloud over her disastrous encounter with Mrs. Swenson. Served me right, she thought, amused. I hate being condescended to, but that’s exactly what I was doing to Mrs. Swenson.

The patrons of the Elite didn’t condescend; they greeted her like an old friend. Jacqueline took a booth in a secluded corner and ordered a meal absolutely devoid of nutritional value. Anticipating the need for something to read while she ate, she had brought along a handful of the more interesting letters, including that of her son. She was reading it again, with a maternal fondness she would have been embarrassed to have the writer observe, when the waiter brought her Bacon Cheeseburger Deluxe platter.

“You sure do get a lot of mail,” he remarked.

“You don’t know the half of it,” Jacqueline said, moving the pile out of his way.

“Yeah? I like to get ’em but I hate to write ’em. Guess you don’t mind writing letters, you being a writer and all.”

“Mph,” said Jacqueline ambiguously, through a mouthful of french fries.

“Yep,” said the waiter. “You sure are one popular lady. Everybody keeps asking when you’re gonna be here.”

Jacqueline swallowed. “Who is everybody?”

“Oh—you know. The ones that wasn’t here the other night heard all about it and they wanna meet you.”

“And see me perform?” Jacqueline grinned. “I don’t schedule my fights in advance, Jim. Mr. Carter hasn’t been back, has he?”

“Not him. Couple of tourists asked about you this morning, though.”

“Tourists?”

“They talked funny,” Jim explained.

“What did they look like?”

The question strained Jim’s powers of description. The only distinctive feature he could remember was “The ears on the one guy. Boy, did they stick out.”

Meager as it was, the description struck an unpleasantly familiar note. His ears were the most distinctive feature of a certain reporter Jacqueline had encountered in the course of her recent publicity spree. At least she could be fairly certain that Brunnhilde had not been one of the tourists. Jim would have remembered her.

“You could do me a big favor, Jim,” she said. “You and the others who work here. If people ask about me, try to find out who they are and where they’re from.”

“Sure. Want anything else?”

“Not at the moment, thanks.”

Jim ambled off and Jacqueline applied herself to her food. After she had finished, down to the last delicious, greasy french fry, she took a seat at the bar.

Her conversation with Bernie, owner and bartender, proved less enlightening than she had hoped. A number of people had asked questions about her. One or two had openly identified themselves as reporters.

“I didn’t tell ’em nothing,” said Bernie. “But I couldn’t swear nobody did. Some guys would spill their guts for a free drink.”

He looked pointedly at one of the attendants of the Exxon station, who had been openly eavesdropping. “I didn’t say nothing neither,” this individual protested unconvincingly.

The regulars began to drift in and conversation became more generalized. Gossip was one of the favorite sports of the Elite’s clientele; there really wasn’t much else to do in Pine Grove. It was only necessary for Jacqueline to nudge the conversation gently to turn it in the direction in which she wanted it to go. In the process she had to listen to a lot of extraneous information, but she was not bored by it. She found people endlessly interesting, and now that she had become a novelist she had an excuse for listening to gossip. Was it not the stuff of which great novels were made? Look, she often remarked, at Jane Austen.

It was reasonable that she should ask about Tom, since she was staying at the inn and enjoying his remarkable cooking. Efforts to elicit information concerning his whereabouts during the missing years failed, however. “He was just another wild kid,” Bill Hoggenboom said tolerantly. “The usual stuff—crazy driving, some drugs, girls. Me, I figured he’d straighten out in time, most of ’em do, but his old man couldn’t take it; kicked him out of the house when he hit eighteen. His mom had died a couple of years before; the old man kept telling him he’d broken her heart with his behavior.”

“What a sweetie,” Jacqueline said.

“He was no worse and no better than most guys,” Bill insisted. “But Tom was stubborn as a mule; the day after he graduated from high school he just took off, not a word of warning, nor a farewell note. We tried to track him down when the old man died, but nobody knew where he’d gone. He must’ve heard about it, though, because he turned up after the funeral to find out about the estate. Kind of cold-blooded, some folks thought.…”

“Maybe he didn’t find out until after his father was dead.”

“Yeah, maybe. The old man hadn’t made a will, so Tom got the lot. Wasn’t much, just the property. It was a house then; got to give Tom credit, he put a lot of work and cash into making it what it is today.”

“Where’d he get the money to remodel and finance the inn?” Jacqueline asked.

“From her, I reckon,” Bill said disinterestedly. “He sure didn’t marry her for her looks.”

“It is inconceivable, of course,” said Jacqueline icily, “that he married her because she is loving, generous, goodhearted, and kind.”

“Those weren’t the qualities I was looking for in a woman when I was his age,” said Bill, grinning. “Her dad’s got money, at any rate; owns a big real-estate firm in Philadelphia. He co-signed the note when Tom borrowed the money to start the inn.”

“So Tom was in Philadelphia during those years?”

“Part of the time, anyhow. Turns out he was working for her dad, that’s how he came to meet her. Love at first sight,” Bill added, with a cynical leer that made Jacqueline itch to slap him down with a well-chosen comment.

She controlled herself, however, and turned the discussion to Tom’s relations with Kathleen Darcy. Interest in Tom was flagging by then—they were ready to turn to juicier topics, like Mrs. Worley’s unusual method of murdering her no-good husband—and nobody seemed to know or care much about Tom and Kathleen. “She was just one of a lot of women,” Bill said with a shrug. “He could have had his pick. Did, too, from what I hear. I guess it was a pretty hot affair for a while; folks say she put him in her book as the top stud.”

That was one way of describing Hawkscliffe, Jacqueline supposed.

The rest of the evening passed pleasantly. Jacqueline enlisted her buddies as assistant spies, to keep a watch for reporters, an assignment they accepted with enthusiasm; skunked the ex-sheriff and the manager of the Bon Ton at billiards; and regretfully refused the drink the losers offered to buy.

“I’ve got work to do,” she explained. “Be good, boys.”

Such are the seductions of billiards and good company that she had stayed later than she had intended. The streets were deserted and the wind had grown cold. Dry leaves rustled across the sidewalk like grotesque insects. After she had passed the lighted windows of the Bon Ton (featuring our fall collection of ladies’ and gents’ fine designer clothes) the dark closed in. The entrance to Jan’s bookshop, shadowed by the tall buildings on either side, gaped like the mouth of a tunnel.

Jacqueline passed it at an undignified trot. Nothing happened. Feeling a little foolish, she slowed her steps. What was the matter with her tonight?

There were only half a dozen cars in the parking lot of the inn. Two had out-of-state plates and undoubtedly belonged to harmless tourists. Only one thing was unusual and, in the present state of her nerves, unsettling. Normally the parking area was brightly lit, by a standing dusk-to-dawn pillar light and by another fixture outside the kitchen door. The dusk-to-dawn light shone brightly, but the other was dark. No doubt the bulb had burned out. But Jacqueline stopped long enough to find the flashlight buried at the bottom of her purse. She examined the padlock carefully before she inserted the key. No sign of tampering. She unlocked it and opened the gate.

The only thing that saved her from, at the least, a severe headache, was the fact that the falling object had not far to fall. It had barely gathered momentum when it skimmed the side of her head and bounced off her shoulder before hitting the asphalt with a crash that sprayed hard, sharp objects in all directions.

Jacqueline’s scream was compounded equally of pain, surprise, and deliberation. She had never been a great believer in keeping a stiff upper lip, and at that moment a loud noise was her best defense. She did not drop the flash-light, for she had put it down on the ground before opening the padlock, which required both hands. She snatched it up and turned, back against the fence, her head spinning.

There was no sign of movement, inside or outside the gate. Jacqueline screamed again, and shone the light down.

There was enough of the broken object yet undamaged to show what it had been. The polite term was “slop jar”—one of the more delicately named “receptacles” for wash water that had formed part of the sets found in bedrooms before indoor plumbing became common. Jacqueline had seen them in antique shops. They were big enough and heavy enough to constitute a formidable weapon in themselves, and the weight of this one had been augmented by filling it with fist-sized stones. Dangling pieces of string fastened to the handles explained how it had been held balanced on the top of the gate until its movement snapped them.

Jacqueline rubbed her shoulder. She was contemplating another scream when the sound of running footsteps reached her ears, and she was not too stunned to note that they came, not from the inn, but from the grove of trees north of it. She turned and let out a sigh of relief when she recognized Tom.

“Mrs. Kirby! What happened? I thought I heard—” He looked at the fragments of broken pottery. “Did you drop something?”

“I always load my antiques with stones before I try to carry them home,” Jacqueline snapped. “And I always scream my head off when I drop things. That was balanced on top of the gate. It just missed my head.”

Tom’s jaw dropped. He was in jeans and shirt sleeves, despite the chill of the night. A few dead leaves crowning the tumbled masses of his hair gave him the look of a sylvan godling. Jacqueline’s eyelids fluttered. She put her hand to her head, moaned, and swayed.

Tom was quick to support her, his hard young arms holding her close, his hands firm on her waist and back. His grasp was supportive only; but Jacqueline felt a strong shiver of response. The man gave off sex appeal the way a skunk gave off…

She freed herself, with a murmur of apology. “Is that blood on your face?” Tom asked anxiously. “Let me look.”

“It’s just a scrape.” Jacqueline backed away. “I’m fine.”

He insisted on walking her to her door, apologizing and speculating all the way. He hadn’t noticed that bulb was burned out. From now on he would be more careful. He couldn’t imagine who could have done such a thing. Some of the high school kids were kind of wild, though. He did not explain why he had been outside, and Jacqueline did not ask. She felt sure he would have a logical explanation.

After he had left her she searched the house, but only as a precaution; as she had anticipated, there was no sign that anyone had entered. She had been lucky. The injury on the side of her face was trivial, only a patch of scraped skin and a small cut. The shoulder would take longer to heal; it was bruised and swollen, but she didn’t think anything had been broken.

Slipping into a warm robe, she went back downstairs and settled down at the kitchen table, coffee and ashtray at hand, and began scribbling on the pad of paper she had brought with her. There was no possibility of sleeping for a while yet; she had to unwind first. Might as well make use of the time to get a few of her ideas down on paper. No one could have made sense of her scribbles; her mind was working faster than her hand.