Thursday morning
WHEN RANNIE AWOKE AT NINE AND STUMBLED INTO THE LIVING ROOM, Alice was sprawled on the couch reading a fat textbook, a laptop and several books spread out on the coffee table, a yellow highlighter clenched between her teeth. The sight was so cheering, so welcome, that Rannie couldn’t resist covering her daughter’s face with kisses.
“Ew, dragon breath,” Alice said around the highlighter that she then removed. “They think they caught the S.W.A.K. killer!”
“No kidding!” Rannie scurried to the kitchen, turned on the radio and, over two cups of coffee and a bagel, listened raptly.
At midnight, an undercover cop, young and attractive and one of many acting as “bait” in the neighborhood, had been stopped by a middle-aged man on crutches, asking for directions to Saint Luke’s Hospital. As soon as the cop drew close enough, the man lunged at her and attempted to push her into a parked car.
“The minute he spoke to me, I had a feeling,” the officer said. “Don’t ask me how, but I did.” She sounded young to Rannie, an almost teenaged breathlessness in her voice.
The police commissioner was more circumspect, saying only that someone was in custody and being questioned. The suspect’s name was Howard Something and he’d worked at a Staples on Broadway. It occurred to Rannie that she might have bought stationery, boxes of blue pencils from the guy. Creepy with a capital C. Still, the news was reassuring, and as she showered, dressed, and went to Zabar’s, Rannie felt more lighthearted than she had in days. Both her children would be home for dinner. And no need for Mace anymore.
“Oh, you’re supposed to call the headmaster, what’s-his-name,” Alice shouted into the kitchen after Rannie returned and was unpacking groceries. Alice sauntered in. She was in the same tee shirt but had added Rannie’s bathrobe and sheepskin slippers from L.L. Bean. “And there’s a message about some job. Ooh! What’s in the dessert box?”
“Lemon tarts. Stay away! They’re for tonight!”
The call-back was from Croyden and Woolf, the publishing house. Could Rannie come for an interview next week? Yes! Yes! Yes! She would impress everyone with her skills, her experience, her commitment to children’s books. After all, she had read the complete works of Judy Blume, every single title in The Babysitters Club series, and could still recite all of Ludwig Bemelmans’s Madeline. Not to mention being on quite intimate terms with Nancy Drew.
Jem Marshall, it turned out, had merely called to let her know that he’d seen her son earlier and Nate seemed fine. “Rannie, I understand you were in Palo Alto for a family emergency.”
He’d never addressed her by her first name before and so, in the spirit of camaderie, she replied, “Yes, Jem, Nate’s father had a mild heart attack.” Jem…. His name sounded so foreign on her tongue. She mentioned taking the Stanford tour and stopping by the Admissions Office.
“I told them you were an alum.” She confessed to giving out his school number. “I hope that wasn’t presumptuous.”
“Not at all. But they absolutely have all my information already—I’m on a reunion committee. Had to be some computer foul-up. Anyway, I got a call yesterday and it’s all straightened out.”
After their good-byes, Rannie brought coffee over to the computer and went online checking out the title list of Croyden and Woolf Publishers. Lots of award-winners. Several children’s classics. “I’d be head of a four-person department. Copyediting and production,” she told Alice.
Alice nodded in a distracted way. She was reading from an overweight tome titled Left-handedness and Learning Disorders. Another textbook, The Sinister Hand: A History of Myths and Fables, lay on the coffee table.
“This for the paper you’ve been working on?” Rannie asked.
Alice nodded and withdrew the highlighter from her mouth. “Abnormal Psych. We’re studying brain anomalies. Being left-handed counts. That’s what I’m writing my paper on…. Remind me to check Nate’s head. I wanna see if his hair swirls counterclockwise. I never thought about it before, what it’s like to be left-handed. But it’s a right-handed world.”
“At least it pays off in tennis,” Rannie remarked. Most of Nate’s opponents were righties, and his shots naturally went to their backhand.
“It comes from an Anglo-Saxon word. ‘Lyft,’” Alice read later from her book, “which means broken or deformed. Listen to this. This is so crazy…In the 1600s you could get burned at the stake for being left-handed.”
Rannie fetched the Mengele manuscript from her totebag; she hadn’t looked at a page the whole time she was in California. For the next couple of hours, she and Alice worked companionably in the living room, Norah Jones providing background music, Alice pausing every now and then to share other tidbits she came across, the most arcane being that typewriter keyboards were intentionally designed with the most-used letters—a,s,e,d,t,r—on the left-hand side. This slowed down typists, the vast majority right-handed, and thus prevented the fragile mechanisms on the first typewriters from breaking down as frequently.
At some point Rannie remembered there was still unopened mail on the hall table.
She opened the latest cheery missive from her mother, sent from Copenhagen. Was her mother the only person left in the world who still sent letters on thin, pale blue air mail stationery? She tore up junk mail and set aside bills until the only remaining envelope was one with the Chapel School crest. Her name and address were written in purple blocky capital letters instead of the usual preprinted label. And the envelope was hand-stamped, not metered.
Rannie was expecting exactly what she saw; yet that didn’t stop a sickening shiver from escaping. The message, spelled out in the same ransom-note letters as before, said: “Watch out! Your days are numbered!” It had been mailed Monday. Ms. Hollins had probably sent it after encountering Rannie at the patisserie.
“Ma! You okay?”
“Yes. Just a bill from Chaps, one I wasn’t expecting.” She put the note back in its envelope and considered calling Lieutenant Peratta; instead she called Tim, explaining the reason for her California trip. “Could I stop by the bar after dinner? Maybe you’ll treat me to a Diet Coke?” That was fine, he said. Then she checked in with Mary.
“Rannie darling, you’re home! I just spoke to Peter. He’s out of Intensive Care and in a private room,” Mary informed her, then paused before going on. “Darling, Daisy’s here.”
Suddenly Rannie discerned the false cheeriness in Mary’s tone.
“It turns out she knew the teacher at Chaps, the one who killed herself.”
“She didn’t kill herself, Mims!” Rannie could hear Daisy saying indignantly.
“Daisy’s quite upset,” Mary went on.
So in Wasp-ese that translated to something akin to uncontrollable hysteria.
“Is there any chance you could stop by; you’re welcome to stay for an early dinner.”
“I don’t know about dinner, Mary—”
Alice heard and immediately started shaking her head violently, mouthing, “Don’t say I’m here! I’m not eating there!”
“—but I’ll be right over.”