Grayson relaxed a bit when we got onto the freeway.
“I don’t think Con told Livy anything about how Alistair sabotaged me,” he said. “It’s part of the arrangement. She was crazy about that guy, you know. Con told her a disgruntled worker confessed to stealing the whiskey and that’s why he’d reinstated me.”
The arrangement. I wondered if every relationship was an arrangement of some sort. Alistair and I had certainly lived with an arrangement.
Like a nice display of flowers. A still life. Charming, but artificial and lifeless.
I wondered for a moment what would have happened if I’d broken that unspoken pact and said the words—
“Alistair, you’ve got a selfish, greedy, deluded mother. You’ll never please her by dressing like someone of her generation, or listening to her favorite music, or marrying an heiress to raise her social status. You’ll never please her at all. And Delia’s not her. Controlling Delia will not give you control over your mother. And Gaslighting won’t give you control over anybody.”
Na. He wouldn’t have heard me. Or he would have gone into a rage. Aunt Livy would probably be furious too, if anybody told her the truth about Uncle Con.
I suppose I had some sort of arrangement with myself, as well. Something that kept me from thinking about Count Santa Claus all those years. Or thinking about what I was going to do with my life now the scandal was over. And the fact my father had lost our home and I had no job and no place at Harvard in the fall.
But now the arrangement was falling apart and my brain went into panic mode. Where could I go? What kind of work could I do? Would anybody hire me if they found out I was “the killer nanny”? And worse—would Jack Poirier have heard about it in Viet Nam? If he was even alive. And didn’t hate me for barfing on his shoes, or dating Billy Bradford. If he thought about me at all, the scandal probably had ended any possibility we’d ever get together.
But panic gave way to fatigue and Grayson had to shake me awake when we got to Goose Hill.
Nobody but Marie was awake to let me in, but she gave me a warm welcome and showed me to the room that had once belonged to Wogs. I saw all of Wogs’ things were gone and the place had been redecorated in an upscale Colonial look. In one corner of the big room was a pile of boxes and suitcases—mine. Everything I had stored at Bryn Mawr. Some had even been unpacked. Sandburg was propped up on my pillow.
Aunt Livy had been at work. I thought of how Alistair’s mother worked for rich men and got things done “like magic.” Aunt Livy had that talent. I wondered if that’s why Uncle Con had married her.
When I went down stairs in the morning, Uncle Con was at the breakfast table, reading the Wall Street Journal. Aunt Livy was already on the tennis courts, he said.
He poured me a cup of coffee and gave me a surprising grin.
“I hope you’re ready to go to work. Nothing like a job to get your life back on an even keel. That’s what I did when I got back from the Pacific after the war. Hard work.”
I pushed sleep fog from my brain as I gulped Maxwell House. It was rather sweet of him to compare my Alistair ordeal to World War Two.
“That library job is long gone, Uncle Con. And I don’t have a place to live in Cambridge.”
“Neither does your father. That woman is taking him for everything he’s got. Luckily, he hasn’t got much. But you’ll be happy to know he’s back at the rehabilitation facility.”
I nodded, without much vigor. I wasn’t getting my hopes up this time.
“You can live here as long as you like. Olivia will be very happy for your company. The two of us are rattling around in here. And she thinks you need a comfortable place to recover from the, um, death of your fiancé. Do you play tennis?”
Death of my fiancé. So that’s how Aunt Livy was framing the scandal of the decade. Did I sense a hint of irony in Uncle Con’s tone? I couldn’t tell. It was too early in the morning for me to get much subtlety.
“A little. I played some tennis at Bryn Mawr.”
“Good. Be a good opponent, but never win.”
A bizarre bit of advice, but I nodded again, grateful when Marie showed up to ask how I’d like my eggs.
Uncle Con harrumphed. “I was talking with Grayson last week and…”
Here it was. We were going to talk about it. We didn’t have to have an “arrangement.”
“Grayson’s a lovely man.” I gave Uncle Con a big smile. “I’m so glad you two got back…”
He cut me off. “Grayson thinks we should go into manufacturing sports shoes. He thinks German tennis shoes are about to take the country by storm.”
Business. He was going to talk business. Another arrangement after all.
“Um, yes. Fancy tennis shoes are the big thing.” I showed him the now-grimy Adidas that had got me through my summer of nannying. “Engineered for comfort. You should get some. They’re amazing”
“We’re going to make something like them. Along with sporting gear for women. I’d like to put you in charge of that department.”
I managed to nod, awfully glad I didn’t have coffee in my mouth at the time. My uncle was asking me to be an executive at Conway Industries. Just as if I’d been a guy. I could have kissed him.
“We need a woman’s touch. I’d hoped Polly would join the company at some point, but she wants to be a farmer. If that makes her happy, I’m not going to stand in her way.”
Aunt Livy swept by in the hallway, elegant in a crisp tennis dress.
“Of course Polly is happy. She’s always happy when she’s breaking her mother’s heart. I’m going to change. Welcome to Goose Hill, Nicky. You’ll see I had your things sent up from Bryn Mawr. But you’ll need new clothes. Lots of them. We can start shopping tomorrow.”
Uncle Con winked as Aunt Livy rushed up the stairs.
“Remember. Never win.”
Later that night, as we dressed for dinner, Aunt Livy came into my room and gave me a little squeeze that was as close as she could get to a hug.
“You’ve suffered a terrible tragedy, Nicky. Alistair was a wonderful man. No matter what those awful scandal sheets say. I know he loved you. And I don’t believe it was suicide.”
“I don’t either.” It was nice to be able to answer her truthfully. “It was an accident. That’s what the coroner said.”
“Good. I’ve told Con that you’ll need time to grieve before you start your new job. I’ve signed us up for a tennis court at seven AM tomorrow. Nothing like exercise to keep up your spirits.”
Especially if you’ve made an arrangement to win, every time.
About a week after I got home, I phoned Jack’s house. His father answered and said he didn’t have any news of Jack. But he didn’t sound convincing. Or friendly. His loyalty to the Conway family did not seem to cover a scandalous scarlet woman like me. I tried to get him to put Jack’s mom on the phone, but he said she’d taken the grandkids to Old Orchard Beach.
I wondered if that merry-go-round was still there.
A couple of days later I went along with Aunt Livy to one of her fittings at Claudette’s house. While Claudette did her thing with pins and dressmaker’s chalk, I walked outside and peered over the hedge into the Poirier’s yard. I saw an old Galaxie in the driveway with a University of Maine sticker on it. Jack drove a Galaxie.
If he was home, but avoiding me, I wanted to know.
I walked into the back yard on the pretense of looking at Claudette’s flower garden and looked up at the window of what used to be Jack’s room.
I saw a face. A man with a dark beard. It could have been Jack. It disappeared a moment later. I could almost believe I hadn’t seen it.
But I knew it was him. And I knew he didn’t want to see me. If it was because of the scandal, or Billy Bradford, or just the barf, I had definitely lost my chance with Jack Poirier. Time to move on.
It took about three months before Aunt Livy started pushing Grayson and me together at company parties. Uncle Con had us go together to represent the company at local civic affairs. Of course Grayson was eager to play along. I was the ideal beard. I knew who he really was, but everybody in town would think we were “keeping company.”
He and Uncle Con often had “important out-of-town meetings” they needed to attend together. Aunt Livy never showed any interest in the business, so she didn’t catch on to how bogus the “meetings” were.
Or maybe she did.
She certainly did her own traveling. She took at least two trips to Mexico each year, to some spa near Acapulco. I guess for her that made up for her lack of a sex life.
Sometimes a sharpness in her tone or a harsh remark made me think she blamed me for Alistair’s death, in spite of her veneer of compassion. And sometimes I did the blaming all on my own.
After all, I was a murderer. Count Santa Claus’s murderer. Back at the scene of my crime.
Perhaps being Grayson’s beard was my penance for killing Uncle Con’s lover two decades before.
Not that my life was terrible. I started making a remarkable amount of money and seemed to be rather good at supervising people. Being an executive wasn’t much different from being a nanny. You just had to listen and keep people from doing stupid things.
It was just before Christmas—six months after Alistair died—that I got a telephone call from the Heavenly Rest Funeral Parlor in Taft, CA. It was Mrs. Aram Krikorian, asking who was going to make the arrangements for the burial of Alistair Milbourne.
“Arrangements?” I said. “You mean he hasn’t been buried?
That’s right. No funeral, no burial, no nothing. The body has never been claimed. The mother says she doesn’t believe in spending money on the dead. And none of those Hollywood people will return our phone calls. We need the freezer space. I’m sure you understand. Something has to be done.”
Alistair’s mother had never bothered to bury her son. The son she’d abandoned in a fancy boarding school when he was six years old. The son who spent a lifetime trying to please her.
If anybody had murdered Alistair, it was the Gorgon herself.
I asked Mrs. Krikorian how much money she needed to give Alistair a decent burial and a headstone. She named an exorbitant fee and I said I’d put a check in the mail in the morning.
“I’ll make the arrangements,” she said.