“Really?” Anthony countered. “How so?”
“Isn’t it obvious? Virginia Estherbrook is one of us!” Her fingers tightened on Anthony Fleming’s arm once more, but this time there was nothing reassuring in the gesture. “And don’t think you can simply change the subject on me.” She guided him toward one of the baseball diamonds, where a group of shouting children were gathered around a man wearing the striped shirt of an umpire. “Let’s watch for a while,” she said as the group broke up into two teams. While one of the teams fanned out into the field and the other huddled together to establish a batting order, Anthony Fleming watched in amusement as Irene surveyed the benches behind the backstop, silently trying to anticipate which one she would choose. Men, a lot of whom seemed to know each other, occupied most of the benches and Anthony assumed that for the most part they were divorced, spending the weekend with the children they never saw during the week. Irene, just as he suspected she would, ignored the benches occupied by men, and headed instead toward one that was occupied by a woman who appeared to be a few years younger than he, and a girl who looked as if she was just shy of her teens.
“Is this end of the bench taken?” Irene asked.
The woman glanced up, shook her head, then returned her attention to the game that was just beginning on the baseball diamond. Irene settled herself onto the bench and patted the empty space next to her. When Anthony made no move to occupy it, she fixed him with a look. “Just for a few minutes,” she said. “It’s not going to kill you.”
Anthony Fleming lowered himself reluctantly onto the bench, and waited to see what Irene Delamond’s opening gambit would be. It didn’t take long.
“Is your son playing?” Irene asked, smiling at the woman.
The woman nodded. “He’s in left field.”
“He must be very good. They always put the bad players in right field.”
The woman glanced at Irene. “I think he’d play every day, if he could. But since his father—” Suddenly her face colored, and she seemed to withdraw slightly. “He just doesn’t play as much as he’d like.”
“What a shame,” Irene sighed, scanning the field.
Anthony Fleming watched as her eyes came to rest on the boy in left field — who darted out to snag a fly ball faster than Fleming would have thought possible — and he was almost certain he saw a tiny nod of Irene Delamond’s head, as if the boy had just passed some sort of test to which the woman had silently subjected him.
The boy suddenly looked directly at them, as if he was somehow aware of Irene’s scrutiny, but her attention was back on the woman at the other end of the bench.
“There’s just not enough time anymore, is there?” she asked. “The children all seem to have so much to do nowadays.” She leaned forward slightly and spoke to the girl sitting on the other side of the woman. “What about you, young lady? Do you like baseball?”
The girl shook her head, but said nothing, and finally the woman answered for her. “I promised her I’d take her to the Bronx Zoo this afternoon, but now I have to work. I—”
“Mo-om!” The girl rolled her eyes in exasperated embarrassment. “Do you have to tell everyone everything?”
“Oh, dear,” Irene fretted. “I’m afraid I’ve stuck my nose in where it doesn’t belong, haven’t I?”
“No, of course not,” the woman assured her quickly. “It just hasn’t been the best morning for us, that’s all.” She turned to the girl. “And I don’t think I told her anything that’s a big secret, Laurie. I did promise to take you to the zoo.”
The girl’s face burned with humiliation. “Will you stop treating me like a child?”
“Actually, no she won’t,” Irene said before the girl’s mother could reply. “My mother treated me like a child until the day she died, and I was nearly sixty when that happened. If you think it’s bad now, just wait a few years. She’ll drive you stark raving mad.” Laurie, taken utterly by surprise by the elderly woman’s words, was now gaping at Irene, who winked at her. “It’s what mothers do,” Irene finished in an exaggerated whisper. “I think they don’t feel like they’re doing their job right if their children aren’t regularly made to feel like idiots.” Now the woman was staring at her too. “I’m Irene Delamond,” she said.
“Caroline Evans,” the woman replied. “This is my daughter, Laurie.”
“And this is my neighbor, Anthony Fleming,” Irene said.
“Who must be getting along,” Anthony said promptly, rising to his feet.
Irene glared at him. “Don’t be silly, Anthony. We just got here. Surely you can sit a few minutes?”
“I’m afraid I can’t,” Fleming replied. He offered Caroline Evans a neutral smile. “Nice to have met you. And be careful of Irene — she’ll run your life for you if you give her half a chance. The best thing to do is get up and walk away, before she really gets started. Just like I’m doing right now,” he added pointedly as Irene started to say something. “Behave yourself, Irene.”
Irene watched him go, then shifted her attention back to Caroline Evans, and sighed in frustration. “I swear, I don’t know what I’m going to do with that man.”
“He seems very nice,” Caroline said.
“He is,” Irene agreed. “But ever since his wife died…” Her voice trailed off, and then she appeared to shift an internal gear. “Well, you don’t need to hear about that, do you? Do tell me all about yourself, Caroline.”
As she left the park an hour later, Irene Delamond’s mind was starting to work, and by the time she was back home, an idea was already taking shape. She made a few phone calls, but none of them were to Anthony Fleming. For the moment, at least, there was no reason for him to know what she was up to.
No reason at all.
CHAPTER 3
Irene Delamond rang Virginia Estherbrook’s bell, rapped sharply on the door, then called out. “Virgie? Virgie, are you there?” She waited impatiently, stabbed at the doorbell once more, and was considering calling Rodney to bring up the master key when she finally heard the deadbolt open, and the chain drop. The door opened a crack, and a rheumy eye peered through the narrow gap.
“Of course I’m here.” The voice was thin and raspy.
“Don’t simply stand there, Virgie,” Irene said. “Let me in. And why on earth are you putting on the chain and using the deadbolt?”
The door swung open far enough for Irene to slip through, then swung closed, and Irene could hear the deadbolt being thrown into place.
“Look at me,” Virginia Estherbrook said so bitterly that Irene reached out and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. “Wouldn’t you bolt the door if you looked like this?”
Taking Virginia’s arm, Irene gently guided the frail woman through the dimly lit foyer of her apartment and into a living room that was even larger than Irene’s own, but so dimly lit that its darkly papered walls felt as if they were closing in on her. As Virginia lowered herself gingerly onto a straight-backed chair Irene went to the windows and pulled back the heavy drapes, letting the early afternoon light penetrate the room. Then she moved from lamp to lamp, turning them all on. All of them, at any rate, that worked. Three of the table lamps had burned out, and the three-way bulbs in the floor lamps had been replaced with regular sixty-watt bulbs.
There was no way of telling precisely how old Virginia Estherbrook was — Virgie had never divulged it, and Irene would certainly never ask — but the ravages of time were starting to show badly, despite Virgie’s best efforts with makeup. Her skin, even under a thick layer of powder, looked paper-thin and was deeply wrinkled, and her eyes seemed to be sinking into her skull. She was wearing a cloche, which told Irene that her hair had gone even thinner, and that alone would have been enough to make Virgie keep the lights down, the draperies closed, and the door locked, since her hair — once a thick and wavy mane of auburn that had flowed nearly to her waist when it wasn’t piled up in a regal French twist that had accentuated not only Virgie’s beauty, but her height as well — had always been her pride and joy. In her prime, Virginia Estherbrook had only to enter a room to capture the attention of
