Pulling out of Leigh’s driveway, Abby said to Elizabeth, “I’m so glad I didn’t have to sit through that alone. Thanks for coming with me.”
“It was worth it to see Leigh’s home,” responded Elizabeth. “I love Olivia Blackwell’s style. The home would photograph nicely, and the kids’ playhouse could be a spread in the front of the magazine. It’s too special to lump in with the other playrooms we’re planning to feature. It’s totally excessive, which is exactly what the magazine’s readership wants.
“So how exactly did you meet Leigh?” Elizabeth asked when Abby pulled over in the Kings Lord Manor’s cul-de-sac so she could dig in her purse for her phone.
“We were dating brothers,” Abby recalled. “Remember Bill Stein?”
“Vaguely,” said Elizabeth.
“She was going out with his brother Jonathon. She hired me to help find her first apartment,” said Abby, scrolling through her email messages.
“She hasn’t changed,” she continued, looking up from her phone to Leigh’s house. “She just has more money now. But despite her bad behavior, I’ve always had a soft spot for her. She had a really rough upbringing.”
Abby went on to explain what she had learned about Leigh’s childhood from her former boyfriend. Leigh’s father left the family when she was a toddler and never contacted her or her mother again. Leigh’s mother was sweet but emotionally unstable. Leigh spent her high school years living like a vagabond in a Winnebago while her mother tried to get her act together in town after town. Leigh attended over ten schools between kindergarten and high school graduation.
“So she feels like she has a lot to catch up on and needs to win in every situation,” said Abby.
“Too bad she isn’t going for the happiness award,” commented Elizabeth.
“Yes, it is sad,” Abby agreed, “for everyone around her.”
“That’s the neighbor whose home we’re featuring in next month’s issue,” Elizabeth said as she pointed to Brianna’s home, Leigh’s neighbor. “I’ve heard they’re best friends.”
“Is the interior of that house nice?” Abby asked incredulously. “The outside is so chaotic.” As Abby looked at the house, she tried to make sense of it and the varied, pitched rooflines, its tacky overwrought gingerbread millwork, and its pink-and-mauve color scheme combined with classic Colonial massing, clapboard, and shutter windows.
“Today that style is what suburban developers call Victorian-inspired Colonial,” said Elizabeth, watching as Abby plugged her phone into its car charger. “Pretty bad, isn’t it? The interior was a standard box McMansion before the designer Meredith Fox got her hands on it. Now it’s beautiful inside. It’s decorated in an eclectic international style. You know Robert Couturier’s work? It’s not quite as polished as his spaces, but it’s close. It’s filled with a gorgeous collection of eclectic antiques and is paired with a novel color scheme and antique and modern accessories. It’s really well done.”
“What I still don’t understand since moving here is why there hasn’t been a universal backlash to what most developers build,” stated Abby. “Their homes are huge and generic. You have to spend a fortune after you buy one to fill and personalize it.”
“The developer homes look and feel so wrong because, in the interest of cutting costs, architects have been largely cut out of the suburban residential building process,” responded Elizabeth. “Some developers buy architectural plans, but since they aren’t formally trained, the homes look off when they adapt them. Once they’re built, most people can’t justify knocking down an entire home that’s structurally sound, so if buyers are looking for an already built, newer home, they buy them and try to improve them.”
“It’s a totally backward system,” Abby said.
“That’s Brianna now,” Elizabeth said, spying an attractive, middle-age women in heels and a blazer walk out of the front door. “Pull into her driveway. I’ll introduce you.”
“Hi, Elizabeth, how are you?” Brianna asked as Elizabeth waved and rolled down her window. “Visiting Leigh and her nursery?”
“Yes,” said Elizabeth, laughing.
“Be careful with her,” said Brianna. “Since she moved to town, she’s become my closest friend—and I like to say my biggest rival. When she heard my house was going to be featured in the magazine you edit, her eyes flared. She’s determined to get her home in it, too. If you do feature it, you better photograph the property soon. She has plans to do more landscaping. It’s going to look like a jungle soon.” She laughed. “I’m tempted to go over there in the night with a machete and hack some of it back.”
“Leigh just showed us her surveillance system so, no matter how tempting, I wouldn’t do that,” said Elizabeth, teasingly. “Brianna, this is my sister, Abby. She’s new to town.”
“Nice to meet you,” said Brianna. “And, Elizabeth, thank you for responding to my Easter party invitation. I’m so glad you can come. Abby, if you’re free on April eleventh, I hope you’ll join us. We hide eggs all over the yard for the kids, and I serve my famous colored deviled egg sandwiches.”
“That sounds like fun,” responded Abby.
“I’ll get your address from Elizabeth and send you an invitation,” said Brianna.
“Thank you,” said Abby. “I hope I can make it.”
“Where are you off to?” Elizabeth asked Brianna.
“I have to pick up an auction item for Jack Turner’s benefit,” said Brianna. “Words Bookstore is donating several art books.”
“I heard you’re helping with that?” said Elizabeth.
“Yes, Adair roped me in,” said Brianna, “but I don’t mind helping. Jack and I go way back. I better get going. I was supposed to be there a half hour ago. It was nice to meet you, Abby, and good-bye, Elizabeth. Hope to see you both soon.”
“She seems nice,” Abby commented as they pulled out of the complex.
“She means well and she is very generous,” Elizabeth said. “Brianna is still trying to recover from a few embarrassing incidents that appeared in the police blotter a few years ago. I didn’t live here yet, but from what I was told, she and her husband were regulars in the paper for about a month. After Brianna’s second incident, she was court ordered to go through anger management treatment and is now an active anger management counselor in a Norwalk clinic.”
“That woman?” asked Abby. “She seems so normal.”
“I heard she’s strongly medicated now and less prone to outbursts,” said Elizabeth.
“My God, what happened?” Abby asked.
Elizabeth explained Brianna and her husband Edward’s notorious past. While Edward was a known yeller, Brianna was violent. She was arrested twice in 2006. The first time was for attacking her mother-in-law in the couple’s first home in Cannondale. The police blotter said that the mother-in-law had been admitted to the hospital for a gash on her arm that required fifteen stitches and a blow to the head that caused a slight concussion. No charges were filed. The fight was supposedly over Edward’s mother’s disapproval of Brianna’s lavish spending habits.
After that episode, Edward was arrested. Someone dialed 9-1-1 from the couple’s home but hung up, so that person was never identified. When the police arrived, there was a verbal argument in progress. Edward was drunk and in an absolute rage. He was belligerent with the police and arrested. Although Edward’s mother was also in the home, given that the 9-1-1 call was a hang-up, everyone assumed Brianna set him up. He was the one who called 9-1-1 on her during the fight with his mother.
Brianna’s second arrest was for spanking her son in Cannondale Nature Center’s Rainbow Room minutes before his fourth birthday party started. Again, Brianna’s attack was vicious enough to warrant a call to the police, but this time it came from the woman who ran the nature center’s birthday parties. As the guests arrived—happy little boys and girls carrying brightly colored, wrapped boxes with dreams of catching butterflies and frogs—they watched Ward’s mommy be escorted to a police car. The little boys were particularly interested and excited about the arrest, which only helped spread the embarrassing incident further around town.
In September, many of the boys remembered it as a summer highlight and detailed it in their “Back to Preschool” journals. “I went to Ward’s party and his mommy got a ride in a police car,” they told their teachers. The pictures they drew were of a woman with big tears on her cheeks looking out from a police car with Ward standing next to it and crying, too. Some added balloons and a cake. It was rumored that Edward was so disgusted with Brianna that he went ahead with the party and refused to bail her out for forty-eight hours.
The following week, the blotter reported that Edward’s vintage Mercedes 230 SL convertible was vandalized in their locked garage. Paint stripper had been poured all over it. “I was told Edward loved that car,” Elizabeth said. “Although they never found out who did it, everyone assumed it was Brianna.”
“Wow,” Abby responded. “Thank goodness for modern medicine.”