The McCloud Home for Wayward Girls

“Jesus! Jasper. Are you trying to scare me to death?” Jill said, steadying herself against the creaky door of the antique armoire. Jasper Cloris, the local undertaker, loomed in front of her. His pallid demeanor had always given her the creeps, as if he took his work home with him.

“Hope not. Business is fine. No need to recruit.”

It didn’t help that he took his job, and death in general, lightly.

“I wanted to discuss some arrangements with you in person,” he continued, tucking a strand of his long side-swept hair behind his right ear.

Jill shuddered at the indigo black contrasted with the pale orb of his lobe and wondered, as always, why a funeral director would choose to dye his hair such a ghastly color. She lifted a stack of linens from a shelf and clutched them to her chest. She didn’t have the luxury of letting him distract her. “Can you talk while I set up?” She snapped a tablecloth open and sailed it over a four-top.

“I bear bad news and good news,” he said.

“Oh. Okay.”

He stood as if somehow waiting on her.

“Well?” she asked.

“Hester Fraser is dead.”

“What’s the bad news?” Jill asked, regretting the words instantly. Hester had been the kind of mean that only old money and generations of entitlement could afford, but trashing the still-stiffening had to be the sort of bad karma that crossed all cultural barriers. A run-of-the-jungle cannibal probably knew better. Jill felt a tingle down her spine. Damn, Jasper gave her the willies.

He sent her one of his canned smiles as if her gaffe made them pals. “I’ve been retained by her nephew, Keith, an old acquaintance of yours—I believe—to handle the arrangements.” He spoke slowly, obviously enjoying himself. “We’re expecting a rather large crowd for the wake. I was wondering if your dining room and lounge were available.”

Jill chewed at the inside of her cheek. So this was why Jasper had come in person. He wanted to see her reaction. Not just to the news of Hester’s death, but of Keith’s involvement. It wasn’t enough to be the town ghoul; he wanted to be the town gossip as well.

She looked straight into Jasper’s gray eyes, hoping to quell, somehow, the twitch that was snaking across her brow. “We were more than just acquaintances, surely you know that.”

“As they say in my business, careful what stones you turn over.” He cleared his throat. “I thought it best not to pry.” Looking about the room, Jasper ran his fingers up and down the lemon-yellow and powder-blue striped tie that matched his pale blue linen suit. It was a point of honor with Jasper that he never wore black. He would affably proclaim it his job to brighten, in any small way, that which was inevitably bleak. Jill had never been fooled. His big loopy grin and Willy Wonka suits didn’t change the fact that a sworl of black matter lingered about his person.

Jill sailed another cloth over a two-top.

“Keith arrives this evening from Boston,” Jasper said, so intent on reading Jill’s reaction that he leaned forward. “He may, in fact, be in need of a room.”

Jill pulled her face into a smile, forced but inscrutable. “What night were you considering for the wake?”

“Thursday.”

Jasper knew better than to ask for Friday. She hosted a weekly wine tasting with parlor games for her guests on that night. “And how many were you thinking?”

“A hundred or more,” he replied.

Jill’s inn often accepted local catering jobs. Since the dining room was only open for breakfast, it was available for small parties. In fact, in light of her current financial situation, she was in need of the revenue. She didn’t normally like to include the lounge. She liked to leave it open for her guests to settle into the old leather club chairs; mingle informally; and enjoy the views to the garden, pond, and woodlands beyond. A party of a hundred would require the additional space, however. She’d have to set something up for her guests on the patio and hope for dry weather.

“I think I can handle the group. Are you sure, though, the choice of venue is appropriate? Does the family approve?” Jill was fully aware old Hester Fraser didn’t have any remaining “family,” besides Keith, whose name refused to dislodge itself from her brain’s self-preserving censor.

“Probably not in its past incarnation.” Jasper flopped the point of his tie up and down. “Though I, myself, never knew it as a home for unwed mothers, I can scarcely imagine it was the sort of place one would have opened up to functions.” He smoothed the tie over his starched white shirt. “But in its current capacity, there could be no objections.”

Though Jill ached to defend the home’s past lives, plural—Jasper presumably unaware of its first—she resisted. He wasn’t worth the energy it would take to string together nouns and verbs. “I wasn’t referring to the house itself, rather the strained relations between Hester and my parents.”

“Ah. Yes. That. Hester jilted.”

Jill exhaled. “Yes. That.”

“Surely an involvement long forgotten.”

“Surely.” An involvement long forgotten. Jill looked at her watch. The conversation had set her back. Just as she felt a small burn of panic begin in her tummy, the door to the kitchen swung open and Borka and Magda bustled in. Borka with a steaming pot of coffee in one hand and a pitcher of orange juice in the other, and Magda with a tray of mugs and glasses. Jill wondered if it was bad form to be thankful for the crushing Soviet domination that had sent the Kovacs sisters into exile. “I really do need to get ready. How about we talk by phone later today?”

With Jasper dispensed of—if only temporarily—Jill stepped into the kitchen, pulling in a deep calming breath and savoring the morning smells: bittersweet coffee, smoky bacon, and freshly squeezed orange juice. A large platter of sliced fruit sat atop the old marble countertop. Jill didn’t know what she’d do without the two sisters, both solid fiftysomething women who had been working at her side for almost fifteen years. Magda was as unruffled as an Amish collar, and Borka a contrary being who began at least one sentence a day with something along the lines of “In Budapest, we don’t do like this.” They could whip up a breakfast for twenty and have the kitchen scoured, linens changed, bathrooms sanitized, and corners swept for three o’clock check-in.

Borka, who’d filed into the kitchen on Jill’s heels, dipped her head toward the harvest table that ran down the center of the kitchen. “Ruby made a mess.”

Jill snatched up the canvas and a paint jar. “She must have had a bad night. You know she paints when she’s agitated.” Ruby, Jill’s mother, had been painting a lot lately. Yet another thing that Jill, like any good storm tracker, put on the watch list.

“Your mother,” Borka said, “she like the story of the lady who paints so many pictures she can’t find the window. Myself and my sister, we’re too busy—our whole lives—for pictures.”

Jill didn’t know how to reply. Granted, Ruby idled away a great deal of time on her watercolors. Nonetheless, Borka was hardly anyone’s definition of an art critic; nor did she understand the complex situation that had converted their home for pregnant teens into an inn and saw Jill take over the helm, after burying her father and tending to her grief-stricken mother. Besides, Ruby put in her hours. When recovered from the breakdown following the death of her beloved husband, Daniel, Ruby had declared herself the “face of the inn.” She wore dresses, stockings, and pearls daily and greeted the guests with such a disarming mixture of poise and spunk that more than one walked away in a state of bemusement. Ruby’s freetime hobby was fine by Jill; not only was it therapeutic, but it also—ideally—kept her out of trouble. Jill chalked Borka’s annoyance up to apples begrudging oranges their bright peel. Though the discord nettled Jill, it didn’t faze her regard for Borka, who—for all her gruff—was a friend. Jill would never forget the compliment Borka once, and only once, paid her. That Jill could remember it verbatim was testament to how dearly she’d treasured it. Years ago, and quite randomly, Borka had said, “You good person, good worker, a keeper.” With those few no-verb-required words, as efficient as Borka herself, Jill had felt even her hair lift.

Jill managed to get through breakfast without the distraction of Hester’s death and Keith’s imminent arrival causing any damage to herself, her staff, or her guests. Her daughter, Fee, however, seemed to sense her disquiet. Jill was bunching linens into a sack to be picked up by the laundry service, when she found Fee staring at her with her hands on her hips.

“What’s wrong with you this morning, Mom?”

“I learned of someone’s death just before breakfast.”

“Who?”

“You wouldn’t know her. She was very old. She’d lived in a nursing home for almost ten years.” Coming up with that figure was as simple as making change for a twenty. Fee was fourteen now. It was the Labor Day weekend, just two weeks before Fee’s fifth birthday, when Hester suffered that massive stroke and was moved into a facility.

Jill and Fee had, in fact, visited Hester in the home once. It had been unintentional, of course, and Fee wouldn’t remember. Her third-grade class had made valentines for the home’s residents and Jill had volunteered to chaperone. The kids had shuffled through the corridors shell-shocked and horrified, handing their artistic labors of hearts and flowers and rainbows into the bony clutches and sunken eyes of the half dead. In the lounge, a darkened room with sagging chairs enlivened only by the fuzzy blur of an old TV, Fee and her classmates had dutifully handed over the last of their cards. They were about to leave when something about a woman who sat away from the others drew Jill’s attention. She was in a wheelchair and balled into such a messy array of gray hair and bones that she looked like something a snake would cough up after crossing paths with a mouse. Even in that weakened state, Hester’s presence had filled Jill with dread. She had ushered Fee out of the room, spooked into a jittery haste by the haunting green eyes, tracking her retreat.

“What was her name?” Fee asked.

“Hester Fraser.”

“I’ve heard of her. Wasn’t the Climbing Ivy once her house?”

“Yes. It used to be. It was sold after she got sick.”

Hester’s stately Victorian mansion had become the Climbing Ivy Restaurant years ago. It was a popular eatery that offered a bar and casual dining on the first floor and formal dining upstairs. The removal of walls, tin ceilings, and period wallpaper had been controversial at the time. Keith’s already tarnished image had suffered further damage by his decision to act as power of attorney during the sale of the home that had been in the Fraser family for four generations.

In hindsight, Hester’s years in assisted care couldn’t have been cheap. Jill had a brief encounter, the only one in almost fifteen years, with Keith just days after Hester’s stroke. She ran into him walking down Main Street and might not have even noticed him except for his companion, a strikingly attractive woman whose stylish red leather coat and long black hair stood out amid the everyday garb—faded denims, drab wools, and muted flannels—of small-town Scotch Derry, Iowa.

It had been awkward. The woman was introduced as simply Meredith, a prefix of girlfriend or wife was not offered, but Jill could sense Meredith’s displeasure and intuited that Keith had omitted a title, most likely the former. She’d have heard had he married. They talked mostly about Hester, her condition, where he’d placed her, and about the “For Sale” sign on Hester’s front lawn. And as much as Jill had labored to appear calm and collected, internally she’d fought a balefire, the heat of which had tinged her cheeks scarlet and choked her voice ragged. Meredith had glared so openly that Jill had invented an appointment to disentangle herself.

“I don’t get it. Why does it bother you if she was old and sick?” Fee asked.

“She wasn’t a nice lady, but she was very well known in this town once upon a time. I guess it just signifies the end of an era.” Jill swung the sack of linens over her shoulder with the ease and practice of a merchant marine. “I’ve agreed to have the wake here on Thursday night, so don’t make plans. I’ll need your help.” She headed into the kitchen. Fee followed.

“Do I have to?”

“Yes. And we’ve already talked about this. I’m expecting a lot of help from you this summer.”

Fee groaned.

“I mean it. You’ll get paid, but I need to know I can depend on you. I’m short-staffed since Marcie quit. Can I trust you? This event is important to me.”

“Yes, Mother.”

“And do me a favor,” Jill said. “Don’t tell Booboo about Hester.”

Ruby had refused to be called Grandma, and toddling Fee couldn’t pronounce the R in Ruby. Booboo was the result.

“Why?” Fee asked.

“They didn’t get along.”

“And?”

“I’m not sure how she’ll react.” Ruby was, almost daily, growing into what would politely be termed “feisty”—less politely, “ornery.” She’d always had moxie complemented by an enviable ability to disarm gossip with a breezy indifference. There were recent outbursts and barbs, however, that were uncharacteristic—and a complete contradiction to her mind-your-own-bees-please policy. And Ruby’s sudden interest in men, grizzled old geezers, had Jill completely baffled.

“Well, lately, the littlest nothing and she acts all crazy.” Fee opened the back door for her mother. “Maybe something big and she’ll act normal.”

“One can always hope,” Jill said.