BOOTSIE WAS IN my driveway honking impatiently at four twenty-five the next afternoon, thirty minutes earlier than she was supposed to pick me up for Sophie’s symphony benefit, but I was dressed and ready to go. I’d had a productive day cleaning up my yard and had stopped into the store to polish the silver acorns and serving pieces I’d bought in Lancaster County. I’d even gone to the 11 a.m. church service, then splurged on a five-dollar mocha at Starbucks. This was my perfect version of a Sunday.
“This party is going to be huge!” Bootsie crowed as I climbed into her giant SUV, wearing a fantastic yellow sundress that Holly had given to me after wearing it once to the post office and deciding she was “tired of it.”
“Bootsie, the event doesn’t start till five,” I said. “And Sophie’s house is less than a mile away.”
“Who cares?” shouted Bootsie, gunning her engine and throwing the gearshift into reverse. “Everyone in Philadelphia is early for parties. Eula Morris knows that. This shindig will kick off at four-thirty, mark my words.”
Bootsie roared out of the driveway on two wheels, and Mario-Andrettied the short distance to the Shields mansion.
“Sophie told me yesterday that she’s worried Barclay’s going to crash the party tonight,” I told Bootsie, while my eyes adjusted to the mind-boggling lime-green pattern of her Lilly Pulitzer dress. “If he gets out of the hospital, he’d love to make things uncomfortable for her in front of the symphony crowd.”
“Sophie doesn’t need to worry about Barclay coming tonight,” Bootsie replied, two-wheeling it around a corner of Dark Hollow Road. “He’s still in the hospital, and won’t get sprung until Friday at the earliest. He wanted to leave this afternoon, but as soon as they wheeled him out of the hospital, Barclay collapsed in the parking lot. They did an EKG in the emergency room, and immediately had to perform an angioplasty.”
At this, Bootsie sniffed disapprovingly. Bootsie doesn’t believe in angioplasties, or in being fat. She comes from the kind of family that thinks that no matter what the problem, a brisk jog, an aspirin, and a bracing five-mile swim around an icy lake will cure you. Whenever Bootsie’s mother, Kitty Delaney, gains a pound, she eats nothing but avocadoes and grapefruit for a week, and Bootsie subscribes to the same spartan regimen.
“Jeannie, our old sitter, was just arriving for her nursing shift and saw the whole thing,” Bootsie continued happily. “Now Barclay’s on clear liquids, and they’ve given him a bunch of pamphlets about lap-band surgery,” she continued, delivering this news with some relish. “He’s stuck there for at least five more days. And he’s scared that someone’s going to try to kill him again, so he hired a security guard and stationed the guy outside his room.”
“Did Jeannie the nurse fill you in about Barclay’s visitors on Friday?”
“Of course,” Bootsie replied. “Two guys with Jersey accents, in black jeans and leather blazers. They were pissed off about not getting in to see Barclay, and said they were relatives.”
“Make that Beppe,” I told her. “That’s Barclay’s real name: Beppe Santino. His nickname was the Forklift, before he had to leave North Jersey when his parents were killed in a suspicious catering-hall incident.”
“Are you kidding me!” shrieked Bootsie. “That’s fantastic. I had a feeling there was more to Barclay’s past!”
“Let’s just hope the cousins don’t show up at Sophie’s,” I said. “I don’t think Eula Morris was counting on anything other than tomatoes arriving from Jersey tonight.”
Bootsie took a left and squealed into a long driveway flanked by arbor vitae, where she almost crashed into Holly and Joe, who’d pulled into the valet parking line before us in Joe’s Range Rover. Bootsie was right—we didn’t need to worry about being early. There were already a dozen cars queued up to be parked. No one could wait to inspect Sophie, or more importantly, her house. Since I’m as inquisitive as anyone else, I craned my neck out the window to try to see around the line of expensive SUVs into Sophie’s property.
I’d never gotten a glimpse of the inner recesses of the Shields estate before, since it was hidden from the road by those enormous hedges. Now, though, a palatial, monstrous structure loomed ahead, evoking Cinderella’s castle at Disney World in size and scope. Overhead, the letters BS were woven into the arched gate of a wrought-iron fence that soared above the driveway.
“BS!” shrieked Bootsie. “I love it. This is going to be great!”