their stony silence Des shook her head and said, “We had a word for men like you when I was growing up- wusses.”
“God, am I loving this or what?” Bonita whooped.
“Shut your mouth!” Justy snarled at his young wife.
Des parked her big hat on her head and said, “If you folks will excuse me, I’ll be going.”
June Bond came shambling across the lawn toward them now in his swim trunks, all sun-browned and sweaty. June was lean and broad-shouldered. His jaw was strong, his smile genuine. “Good to see you, Des,” he said warmly.
“Back at you, June,” Des responded.
Bonita eyed him rather humidly from the edge of the pool, her blue eyes roaming over his tanned, muscular frame. June’s own eyes carefully avoided hers. Des would have sworn they had something going on if she hadn’t seen for herself how much June and Callie adored each other.
If Justy was aware of anything he wasn’t letting on. He was too busy showing who was in charge. “June, what in the hell are you still doing here? You should have been on the showroom floor a half hour ago.”
“Just have to jump in the shower, boss. I’ll be there in a flash.”
“See that you are. Or go find yourself another job. In this family we work for a living, hear me?”
June’s mouth tightened. “Yes, sir.” He started toward the house at a brisker pace.
“Why are you so rough on him?” Bonita asked.
“I treat him like any other employee. I expect him to move merchandise.”
Des tipped her hat and said, “Have a good day, folks.”
“Des, what if you were to pay Mr. Grantham a simple courtesy call?” Bob thumbed his receding chin thoughtfully. “You know, just to see if there’s any way you can be of service to him regarding the gawkers and so forth.”
“The man’s not stupid, Bob. He’ll see right through that.”
“What if he does? I should think he’d be flattered. I know I’d be. Would you do that for us, Des? Ask him if there’s any way you can help out? And while you’re at it, just, well, see if you can persuade him to accommodate his new neighbors a bit more?”
“The answer is still no, Bob.”
“It would be in your best interest, you know.”
“ My best interest? How so?”
“Because if there’s an incident of some kind, God forbid, it will reflect very poorly on your management skills. Your troop commander will take note of that when it comes time for your performance review. Especially because I’m quite certain he’ll be made aware of it.” Bob Paffin showed Des those yellow teeth of his again. At that moment he reminded her very much of a cornered Norway rat she’d had to shoot one night in the Frog Hollow projects. “Do we understand each other?”
CHAPTER 2
The traffic was backed up all the way to Old Shore Road. A state trooper was trying to move people along. Whatever. Mitch waited there patiently in his bulbous kidney-colored 1956 Studebaker pickup. He was delivering cartons of nonperishables from the Food Pantry to the Joshua sisters, who lived in the waterfront estate just this side of the Grantham place, and he was in no hurry. Quite honestly, Mitch saw very little point in ever being in a hurry. It was the single most important life lesson that Mitch Berger, a child of the streets of Manhattan, had learned since he’d taken up residence in his antique caretaker’s cottage out on Big Sister Island.
He reached for an Entennman’s powdered donut, munching on it contentedly. Until a few months ago, Mitch had been the lead film critic of the most prestigious newspaper in New York City-as well as the buffed, primped on-air reviewer for its parent empire’s cable news channel. But he’d said good-bye to all of that. These days, he was perfectly happy to write two essays a week for the e-zine that Lacy Nickerson, his former editor at the newspaper, had launched. Right now he was putting together his annual Halloween Scare-a-palooza, which was something that he, his readers and Netflix had all come to look forward to. Mitch always tried to avoid the obvious candidates like Psycho or The Shining. He’d choose fright films that were a bit more obscure, offbeat or just plain bizarre. And he’d come up with some good ones so far, like The Maze with Richard Carlson and Hillary Brooke, a 1953 William Cameron Menzies 3D non-classic that had a real jolter of an ending (spoiler alert: You won’t feel like eating frog legs for a really long time). And 1980’s Can’t Stop The Music, starring The Village People, Valerie Perrine and Olympic gold-medalist Bruce Jenner, which had to be the most outright terrifying Hollywood movie ever made.
Mitch helped himself to another donut, pleased by how relaxed he felt even though The Big Event was a mere day away. True, his forehead was breaking out for the first time in fourteen years. True, he’d just inhaled his fifth donut since he left the house. But, hey, it wasn’t every day that his parents flew up from their retirement village in Vero Beach to meet the new woman in his life. And her father.
I love Des. I love my parents. Why am I freaking out?
Chet and Ruth Berger were terrific people who had devoted thirty-four years of their lives to giving inner-city schoolkids a chance. His dad taught Algebra at Boys and Girls High in Brooklyn. His mom served as school librarian at the Eleanor Roosevelt Middle School in Washington Heights. They raised Mitch in a two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in Stuyvesant Town. Scrimped and saved so he could attend Columbia. Took their pensions when they were sixty-two, and were now enjoying the Florida retirement they so richly deserved. In fact, this would be the first time they’d been back to New York in over a year. They were staying in Mitch’s apartment on West 102 Street for a couple of days and coming out to Dorset tomorrow. He’d booked them a nice room at the Frederick House Inn.
I love my Des. I love my parents. Why am I freaking out?
It wasn’t as if they didn’t know she was a Connecticut state trooper who knew at least eighteen different ways to kill a man with her bare hands. Or that she wasn’t Jewish. Mitch’s beloved wife, Maisie, who’d died of ovarian cancer, hadn’t been Jewish either. But, well, she had been white. And there was no way tomorrow night’s real-life version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? wasn’t going to be tense.
Not that Chet and Ruth had flown north solely to meet Des. They also had a couple of “appointments” to take care of in the city. “Appointments” that they’d been stubbornly tight-lipped about when Mitch tried to press for details over the phone. As in, perhaps one of them was in town to see a specialist regarding a grapefruit-sized tumor. Then again, perhaps Mitch was just a bit spooked. After losing Maisie he had every reason to be. Not to mention what Des had just gone through with the Deacon. One day, he was fine. The next day he was on the operating table having quadruple-bypass surgery. That was how these things happened when they happened. Bam. You never saw them coming.
Slowly, the traffic crept its way near Stalag Grantham, with its eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire and festooned with KEEP OUT signs. All it needed was guard towers manned by helmeted storm troopers. Outside of Da Beast’s front gate the news crews and paparazzi were jabbering and jostling like a slavering mob at a freak show. Which, in fact, was what they were.
Finally, Mitch was able to inch close enough so that he could pull into the long gravel driveway that belonged to Da Beast’s neighbors, Luanne and Lila Joshua, a pair of wifty spinsters in their sixties. The Joshuas were one of Dorset’s most distinguished founding families. Old, old money. Not that you’d know it by the condition of their place. The tall weeds in the rutted driveway brushed the undercarriage of Mitch’s truck as he bumped his way toward their three-story center-chimney mansion, which dated back to the early 1700s and, you’d swear, hadn’t been cared for since. It was a moldering wreck with broken windowpanes, missing roof shingles, peeling paint, rotting door frames, rotting sills, rotting everything. It was sad to see what had happened to such a fine old colonial showplace. But the Joshua sisters happened to be penniless due to a toxic combination of poor investments, soaring property taxes and almost no income beyond the monthly Social Security check that their beloved seventy-two-year-old brother-in-law, Winston, received. The three of them would be starving if it weren’t for the Food Pantry deliveries Mitch made three times a week. And the rent money they were receiving from their boarder, Callie Kreutzer, an art student at the renowned Dorset Academy. Mitch had a hand in that, too. Callie’s
