The burly guard didn’t even ask to see my invitation. He merely put his hand on Rob’s arm and mumbled a few words.
“What did he say?” I shouted as we stepped through the gates.
Rob did a good job of pretending not to hear me, so I repeated the question several times as we climbed the white marble steps up to the portico. He finally answered, just as we stepped over the threshold and into the throng of well-connected somebodies.
“He said he gets off at midnight, and to meet him at the back gate.”
“You won’t, will you?”
“No—not that it’s really your business.”
“But you and Bob are both among my closest friends. What am I talking about? You are my closest friends.”
“Then you should respect our privacy.”
“You’re right.”
My face stung with shame, and it was probably scarlet as well. No doubt Rob, being the dear friend that he was, could read me like a book: a very small diary, to be sure.
“Hey,” he shouted, “enough seriousness for tonight. Have you ever seen a reception hall this large?”
Looking around me didn’t do much good, but I allowed my gaze to travel upward to admire a pair of six-foot alabaster vases mounted on black marble pedestals. Above these exquisite white containers rode a crest of red Oriental poppies; this added another six feet of height. It was a simple arrangement, but all the more breathtaking for its simplicity.
Another ten feet above the flowers soared a stamped tin ceiling that was said to be original to the house, which was built in 1817. The great hall was rectangular and three stories high, the rooms all arranged around the reception area. Some of the earliest guests had already given themselves over to gay abandonment (those were Rob’s words, by the way, not mine).
Leaning over the mahogany balustrades, champagne glasses in hand, they called merry greetings down to us.
The invitation read that there was a receiving line in Parlor One. Although Charlestonians are a genteel lot, nonetheless, I could detect a decidedly strong current heading toward the far left corner of the reception hall. All I had to do was lift up my feet and let it carry me along. Suddenly, the river of well-heeled humanity came to an abrupt halt as women (who had no business doing so) tried their hand curtsying, while their husbands whispered business proposals in a bored duke’s ear (as if they foolishly expected something would actually come of this).
Suddenly Kitty Bohring’s meaty hands grabbed mine and she swung me high up into in the air, bringing me in for an uncertain landing directly in front of the duchess. “Your Graces,” she intoned, “this is my very dear friend, Her Royal Highness, Princess Abigail Strugendorf of Weisbladderbadden.”
At some point during the day I must have eaten fish, a.k.a. the brain food, because it took me just two seconds to figure out what she was up to. I flashed her a look, telling Kitty that it would cost her, but of course I was more than willing to play along.
The first move was not to move. As a royal princess, I was a couple of notches above a nonroyal duke and duchess, so I most certainly would not curtsy. Of course I would shake hands—if one was offered. But only then.
“Ah, one of the Continental royals,” the Duchess of Malberry said. She made the C word sound as distasteful as cod liver oil.
Thank heavens I’d been raised on Hogan’s Heroes. A bad German accent is exactly what we speak in Weisbladderbadden.
“Ya, my family tree, she goes back to Charlemagne. Und yours? No? I didn’t tink so; I tink mebbe you are recent marriage into zee nobililty.”
“Whatever makes you think that?”
“Because a longtime duchess, ya, she vould know dat eet eez alvays coostamary to make curtsy to zee direct descendents of Charlemagne.”
The duchess glanced at her husband, who was still being hypnotized by a hopeful businessman. Then, much to my continued amazement, she dropped a quick curtsy.
“I have much to learn from you, Princess Strugendorf.” Then she spotted Rob, and was halfway through her next curtsy when the meaty hand of Kitty yanked her back to parade position.
“This man is of no account,” Kitty said. “He’s only the princess’s bodyguard.”
The duchess frowned, but managed to wrest her husband away from the overzealous entrepreneur. She whispered something in his ear, whereupon he snatched up my hand, kissed it with lips as dry as packaged figs, all the while bowing deeply from the waist.
“I am honored, Your Royal Highness,” he rasped in a smoker’s voice.
“Und eet eez a playzure to meet you, sir,” I said.
“Don’t bother about the man with her,” the duchess said. “He’s just her bodyguard.”
“But a very good one, ya?” I said. “Last veek der vas an attempt on my life—surely you read about eet in dee interpalace circular. Anyvay, Freddy here literally caught zee grenade weez his ties.” I pointed to my thighs for clarity. “Fortunately eet vas a dud.”
“Or I would be singing soprano,” Freddy said. “If at all.”
Their graces chuckled agreeably, but I silenced them by shooting Freddy a stern look. “Really, Freddy, how many times must I tell you to shpeak only vhen shpoken to?”
“Thirty-six times.”
“Dat vas a rhetorical question,” I snapped. I flashed their royal highnesses my trademark smile, which has graced the front page of newspapers as well as gossip rags around the world. “Vell, I shall move along now, but I hope dat next time you are anyvhere near Weisbladderbadden, you vill shtop in at zee castle. Hans is eager to go shnicklehobblezeeben mitt you again. He says there is room for one more shnicklehobble over zee fireplace in zee north tower. Men!”
We all laughed.
I winked at the duchess. “Und vile zee men point der big bad guns at zee vilde gammenhuben, vee vill strumenabben our dingleberries in zee pies mitt glee. Ya?”
“It sounds absolutely lovely, dear.” She gave me a peck on both cheeks before curtsying again.
“What the hell was that all about?” Rob demanded.
“Please, dear, watch your language. You’re speaking to a royal princess.”
“Princess, my ass—”
“Phalt.” I managed to pull Rob into a nook behind a statue of a Greek with very small genitals. “Kitty smells a rat.”
“Excuse me?”
“She suspects that their graces are not who they say they are, and she’s asked me to perform background checks on them.”
“Oh, come on, Abby, don’t give me that crap. I was standing right behind you, remember? Kitty didn’t even speak to you. Instead, she handed you over to the duchess like you were the pawn in some private game. I was amazed that you actually played along.”
My sigh was so hard and prolonged that it must have ruffled the sails of boats in the harbor. “Think about it, Rob. There were other people listening to Kitty’s introduction—which, by the way, she made with a straight face. For a social climber, that’s serious stuff.”
“Yes, but nobody believed her.”
“Her guests of honor did. Did you see the duchess’s face when I told her that I outranked her?”
“Okay, so the duchess did look like she’d eaten some bad shrimp. But if Kitty Bohring suspected she had some bogus nobility mooching off her, it would have been pretty easy to check that out before now. With the Internet being at everyone’s disposal, private investigators are a dime a dozen these days. And heck, all Kitty had to do was google them.”
“For all we know, Kitty has been watched for every second of the day for the past couple of weeks. This party could be one big scam, like, say, a jewelry heist. Or not. Maybe on some level Kitty suspected there was something fishy going on with those two, but something happened in the receiving line tonight that made her so sure that she risked public humiliation to act on her hunch. What you saw as a game, I saw as a desperate plea for help. And just so you don’t get all bent out of shape, the only reason she picked me, and not you, is because I’m married to a real-life detective. She probably thinks some of it rubbed off on me.”
“You sure have an active imagination, Abby, I’ll give you that. You ever think of writing mysteries?”
“I never even read fiction, Rob, you know that. I mean, what’s the point? It’s all made up.”
“Ha ha, not funny. So now what do you plan to do?”
“Find someplace to google, just like you said.”
“I suppose it wouldn’t hurt.”
“Famous last words.”
Holding hands, so as not to lose each other, Rob and I snaked through the thickening crowd until we found a room on the third floor that appeared to be an office. It was, however, quite occupied. The fainting couch, in particular, appeared to be taken.
“Get out!” It was the woman occupant who saw us first, and pushed her unsuspecting lover to the floor.
“Dang it, Mrs. Knopfsky,” the boy said. “You don’t have to be so rude.”
Rob cleared his throat. “Never mind us. We just want to use the computer.”
“You young people and your computer games,” the woman railed, shaking a liver-spotted fist at us.
The boy turned his head. “Dang it again! I had no idea that Mrs. Knopfsky was so old.”
“Just like I’m sure she had no idea that you’re so young. By the way, just how young are you?” Rob said.
“Twenty-three.”
“And I’m forty-six,” Mrs. Knopfsky said.
Rob snorted. “Is that so, Mrs. Robinson?”
“I age poorly—it’s the Charleston sun. That and the fact that I’m a heavy smoker. Besides, we wouldn’t even be having this conversation if I was a forty-six-year-old man and he was a twenty-three-year-old woman.”
“Except that if you were the forty-six-year-old man,” I said, “you’d really be a sixty-six-year-old man, given that you belong to my mother’s parlor game club. ‘Clueless,’ I believe it’s called.”
The boy’s clothes were across the room, but he’d been trying—somewhat unsuccessfully—to cover himself with his hands. Suddenly that became unnecessary because he had less to hide, comparatively speaking, than even the Greek statute.
“Dude—I mean, Mrs. Knopfsky—you used to be a man?”
“He’s not the brightest of lads, is he?” Rob said.
“Look, not-so-lady and not-so-gentleman,” I said, “were it not for the fact that you, Mrs. K, are a widow with certain healthy needs, and you, young man, yada yada yada—well, it’s like this: we’ll be back in two minutes. By then you’ll have your clothes back on, capisce?”
The boy waved his arm furiously. “Is that like spinach pie?”
“Yes, and you’ll eat it with a smile on your face.”
“But I don’t like spinach.”
“Tough cookies,” I said.
“Now where was I? Oh yes, then we come inside, and you wait out there and stand guard. If anyone tries to come in, stop them. Don’t even let them come close.”
“So you two are gonna do it, huh?”
Rob answered him with a neat clip to the left jaw.