Two

If I am not for myself, who is for me?

— Hillel “The Elder”

Supertramp’s vintage “Good-bye Stranger” blew out through the eight speakers of the low-slung red convertible sports car: “I was up before the dawn...”

“Yadda-yadda-yadda... I must be moving on,” Annie Kendall sang out with enthusiasm, the wind catching the words as the car whizzed past the uninspiring scenery bordering Route 22. Rounded, pink-tipped nails pounded out the beat on the steering wheel. Slim shoulders moved to the melody. Annie’s head, wrapped in a bright pink scarf, bumped and jived to the point that the trucker who’d been pacing her in the passing lane, just to watch her, grinned in delight and blew his horn.

Annie laughed, and waved, then floored it, leaving the truck to follow after her as she whipped into the left lane in front of him, the speedometer edging toward eighty.

The huge pink plush bunny strapped into the passenger seat was thrown back, its long ears trailing in the wind. Annie loved to drive. She loved to drive fast. She loved the sun on her face, her car radio cranked to the max. And why shouldn’t she? She was young, heart-free. She still found the world to be a delicious place.

And she was Granddaddy Peevers’s little ace in the hole, and that wasn’t so bad, either!

Peering through her round-lensed, massive, black-tinted sunglasses, she spied the exit for Route 512 approaching and eased up on the gas in order to get back into the right lane. Ten more minutes, and she’d be there. Annie, her brand-new car, her small mountain of luggage in the trunk and backseat, the bunny, along with her written invitation from Archie Peevers to “come visit and plan to stay for at least a month.”

Oh, yeah. She had it all. And she’d probably need it all, if her first short “appointment” at Peevers Mansion could be used to measure what this “visit” would be like. Filthy old man. First he’d tried to scare her, then he’d tried to pinch her bottom. She’d been just about to deck him when he announced to that zombie butler of his that she was “perfect, just perfect.” If he only knew, the rat bastard. Annie slowed the car around yet another turn in the narrow macadam road she’d been driving on for the past few minutes, and then watched as Peevers Mansion appeared to her right. “Dracula’s summer home,” she told the rabbit, wincing a little, then took a deep breath, reminding herself that nobody was going to lock her in the joint—she could leave at any time.

One pinch, as a matter of fact, and she was outta there. No matter what Poppy said.

She pulled the sports car into the circular driveway in front of the massive grey-stone building and cut the motor in front of the main doors. Twisting the rearview mirror for a better look, she removed her scarf, fluffed up her mop of ebony curls, and shoved her sunglasses up on her head.

The better for you to see me, my dears, she thought as she reached for her knapsack-sized purse and rummaged in it for her lipstick even as she stashed away the concealing sunglasses. Her eyes were the clincher, Archie had said and, after looking at his eyes, she’d agreed.

She took another deep breath, shook off the lingering Supertramp tune that kept running in her head, “Take the Long Way Home,” and opened the door, stepping out onto the drive in her three-inch taupe pumps. She brushed down her taupe-cotton skirt, flicked a bit of lint from her pink, sleeveless sweater, and reached into the backseat for her suit jacket.

She was “designer,” from head to toe. Never look like you need the money, Poppy had said. Poppy had said a lot of things, but it wasn’t Poppy who was going to be staring down a wild-eyed bunch of Peeverses for the next month.

So she’d bought the bunny. An impulse purchase, certainly, and the thing wouldn’t make much of a bodyguard. Still, as she reached inside the passenger side and undid the seat belt, at least she had something to talk to now. Okay, so the bunny didn’t talk back. Annie had considered that to be just one more selling point. “Come on, bunny, it’s you and me against the world,” she said, tucking the huge stuffed animal under her arm.

Dickens answered the door personally when she banged on the knocker, and quickly, as if he’d been standing on the other side, watching out the peephole for her arrival.

“Miss Kendall,” he said in that deep rumble Annie remembered from her first visit. He was like a stereo with the bass cranked up full. “And friend,” he added, eyeing the bunny as if it might bite.

“Dickens,” she answered as breezily as she could manage, then lifted her chin, trying to look as imperious as her slim five-foot-four frame could manage. “My luggage is in the car. See to it, please.”

Dickens bowed from the waist. “Certainly, Miss Kendall. Will there be anything else? Spit shine your shoes? Wipe the gravy off your chin at dinner? Burp you, you insolent little twit?”

“Now, now, Dickens, play nice,” Annie said, smiling her first genuine smile inside the Peevers Mansion. “Or else I’ll just have to have Granddaddy Peevers toss you out on your pointy posterior. Now, do I head upstairs to my rooms to wait for the dinner gong, or is there anyone here for me to shock?”

In answer, Dickens took her by the elbow and all but pushed her into a small room to the right of the foyer, a room designed to accommodate meetings with those not exalted enough to enter the drawing room. “There’s been a development.”

Annie raised one expressive eyebrow, felt a tightening in her stomach. “Archie kicked the bucket? Man, that would put a crimp in things, wouldn’t it?”

“Mr. Peevers enjoys his usual nauseatingly good health,” Dickens shot back. “But he has, very much against my wishes, enjoined the services of a bodyguard, a Mr. Grady Sullivan, of D&S Securities, out of Philadelphia.”

“A bodyguard?” Annie shook her head, then looked down at the rabbit. Had Archie been reading her mind? Not that she wanted anyone to think she was bright enough even to dream anyone at Peevers Mansion could cause trouble that would necessitate bringing in paid muscle. “Nope, I don’t get it,” she said, blinking her eyes, hoping she looked less than brilliant. “Why a bodyguard?”

“Who can explain Mr. Peevers? Perhaps he feels he is in danger. Perhaps he feels you will be in danger.”

“Me? Danger? Not Archie, but me? Damn, I hadn’t thought of that one...” Annie said, her words trailing off as she bit on her knuckle, a habit she’d been trying to break for ten years. Now she’d better react, right? “Yeah, well, Dickens old sport, can’t say it’s been grand knowing you,” she added, turning toward the door.

Dickens clamped a hand around her elbow, drawing Annie “and friend” back into the room. “Or perhaps,” he said slowly, “Mr. Peevers has hired Mr. Sullivan to investigate your background, to prove to his family that he hasn’t entirely lost his mind, that he isn’t just accepting you as his granddaughter.”

“Investigate me? Sure, like that’s really going to happen. Still, it is a pretty good idea, I suppose.” Annie rolled her eyes, even as she shook off Dickens’s grip. “In other words, this Sullivan guy is a dupe, a fool, and probably—hopefully—a lousy detective who’ll say anything Archie scripts for him. Okay, that works. But why didn’t you just say so? Never mind, I can answer my own question. You get your jollies playing the big, bad butler.”

Dickens shot his cuffs, rolled his head on his shoulders. “One takes one’s pleasures where one finds them. I was also following orders, as Mr. Peevers wished for you to know that there’d been an addition to our small gathering. Speaking of which, Mr. A.W. and his wife are in the drawing room. Would you like me to announce you?”

“A.W? Oh, okay, that’s Archie’s oldest son, right? Arthur William, known to Archie most affectionately as Asswipe, if memory serves? Charming. And his wife would be—Mildred? No, Mitzi. Mildred was too lower class, so she changed it. She’s the social climber who tells everyone Archie made his money in personal-care products rather than admitting that he’s the toilet-paper king. How am I doing so far?”

“You recite well enough,” Dickens said, sniffing. “Now let’s see if you’re worth everything Mr. Peevers is paying you.”

“Gee, thanks for the pep talk.” Annie tried to hide the flinch she felt at Dickens’s words, but failed. This was the part she hated; coming off as a moneygrubbing con artist. She was, in some ways, but she didn’t like to feel like one, damn it. “Lead on, Macduff, it’s show time,” she said, waving a hand so that the butler could precede her out of the room.

As they passed through the foyer, Annie fought down the sudden urge to open the door, run down the marble steps, fling herself into her convertible, and roar off for parts unknown, parts unknown being where she had come from in the first place.

Instead, she took a moment to look around the foyer, which would be pretty impressive if this were 1900 instead of the new millennium. As it was, the walls were dark, the furniture darker, and a chandelier that must have weighed a half ton could barely bring light into the massive, high-ceilinged vault of a place.

“Bet there’s a great echo in here,” Annie quipped, following after Dickens. “What do you say I give it a try?”

“Of course,” Dickens agreed loftily. “Cement your low background to everyone right from the get-go. That should help matters enormously. May I suggest a yodel?”

Chastened, Annie shut her mouth with a snap and eased her tension by doing her imitation of Dickens’s poker-backed walk, muttering under her breath in best Igor-fashion as she hunched up one shoulder, “Valk this vay, valk this vay...”

They valked... er, walked this way until Dickens stopped in front of a double set of closed doors, then flung them open before stepping inside the drawing room to announce: “Miss Annie Kendall to see her aunt and uncle Peevers.”

“Well, that should get their attention. I’ll bet you’ve been practicing the line for a week,” Annie complimented under her breath as she stepped from behind the tall butler and peeked into the room. “Here, put this with my luggage, will you?” she asked, then thrust the bunny into Dickens’s chest so that he had no option but to take hold of it.

“Disabuse yourself of any notion that you and I are coconspirators, Miss Kendall. Mr. Peevers is expecting you upstairs when you’re done here,” Dickens replied stiffly, and just as stiffly wheeled about on his heels, the bunny tucked under his arm, and left the room.

A small, terrified part of her would miss him. Not as much as she’d miss the bunny, but she’d miss him.

The drawing room was enormous, dwarfing the huge foyer, and quadrupling it for pure ugly. During her first visit, and coming in through the servants’ entrance, she hadn’t been privileged to see more of the mansion than Archie’s apartment, which had been pretty bad; but this was worse. Ugly quadrupled had to be worse.

Archie must have made a killing fifty years on a sellout of red velvet, because this room was as full of it as his apartments. Dark, clotted-blood red velvet. It hung from the floor-to-ceiling windows. It wrapped around Victorian chairs and hard-as-a-board Victorian sofas. It covered tables, draped over the grand piano, banded with foot-long fringe.

There were deep red carpets spread all over the dark parquet floors. Red shades on the lamps. Bloodred over white-flocked wallpaper on the walls.

Walking into this room was rather like being reduced to an infinitesimal dot, then inserted inside a vein while a voice announced: Hello, I am Joe’s corpuscle; would you like a tour?

She wasn’t alone in this gargantuan Blood Bank Bordello. There were two people deeper in the room, just now rising from a pair of velvet couches and staring at her as if she were some virulent virus just injected into their midst.

A.W. looked a lot like Archie, only younger and heavier and a lot less jolly. He wore gold-rimmed glasses had the bulbous nose of the dedicated drinker, and as the sun lit him from the back, Annie could see that his ears had gone hairy. His belly preceded him as he took his wife’s hand and walked toward her, and his wing-tip shoes squeaked with each step.

Mitzi Peevers had been caught in a time warp. She wore her hair in a blond bubble that probably wouldn’t lose its shape in a Force 5 hurricane, and she seemed to have a deep commitment to blue eye shadow and Barbara Bush pearls. Tall, she looked nearly anorexic, obviously a proponent of the “nobody can be too rich or too thin” school. What had Archie said about Mitzi? Oh, yeah, Annie remembered now: “Mitzi’s all right. She’s got balls. I think she ripped them right off the asswipe on their wedding night.”

Trying to dislodge Archie’s words from her mind so that she could concentrate on the moment, Annie held out her hand, smiled, and said, “Hi. I’m Annie Kendall. I guess maybe you weren’t expecting me?” She could have said, “Hello, I’m Annie Kendall, your worst nightmare.” She congratulated herself for fighting down the impulse. Much better to play dumb than flip. After all, they were going to hate her anyway. Why give them encouragement?

A.W. said nothing, just looked to his wife, which seemed to be a reaction born of long habit.

“Dickens said we’re your aunt and uncle?” Mitzi said, her voice very much at odds with her tall, thin body, as it was deep, and seemed to come from her toes. “I doubt that highly.”

“Well, okay. So you’re my great-aunt and -uncle? Or maybe something like aunt and uncle once removed? I never could figure out this stuff, could you? Especially as Mom was a bastard. Do you think Miss Manners covers bastard children anywhere?”

Annie was playing for time, speaking just to fill the silence as A.W. and Mitzi glared at her, looked down their noses at her.

When in doubt, Annie had decided, babble.

“So, I guess you’re wondering why I’m here, and I’m being about as clear as mud, right?” she said quickly. “Truth is, I’m kind of confused myself, as Mom never spoke of it, but it looks like I’m one of you. Archie boinked my grandmother when she worked here a zillion years ago, and Mom was the result. They’re both dead now, Mom and Grandma, and I really thought I was alone in the world. But I’m not, I’m a Peevers, and you’re my family. Isn’t that the coolest thing? Archie’s over the moon about it.”

“A.W.,” Mitzi rasped, listing slightly to one side, “lead me to a chair. I feel faint.”

When A.W. didn’t move, Annie stepped forward, ready to take the woman’s arm. Mitzi’s reaction was swift. She threw up her hands, screeched, “Don’t you dare touch me!” then grabbed A.W. by the shoulder and whipped him around, shoving him toward the facing sofas.

A.W. looked back over his shoulder as he was dragged along, and Annie took that as meaning she should follow them, join them on the sofas. After all, if she waited for an invitation, she could grow roots through the carpet.

By the time Mitzi had extracted a short, gold cigarette holder from one pocket and a cigarette from the other, lit the cigarette with a solid silver lighter on the coffee table, she seemed to have regained her poise.

“So, you’ve come here claiming to be my father-in-law’s illegitimate granddaughter. Is that right?”

“Yes, ma’am, except I’m not really a bastard; just my mom, and I’d rather we didn’t mention that again, okay,” Annie said, smoothing her hem that fell two inches above her knees when she was sitting down. Shocking the Peevers was fun, but now she had to step back, measure every word she said. “When my mom died I went through her things, and found her birth certificate. Oh, the father was listed as unknown, in case you’re wondering, so I guess you could say I have no real proof. But, with the birth certificate was a letter, addressed to me. Mom wrote that if I was ever in trouble I was to contact my grandfather, Archie Peevers, for assistance. Otherwise, Mom said, I was to stay as far as I could from the man, because he wasn’t very nice. She sure had that one right, as I found out when I contacted Archie a few weeks ago. Although I’ve decided he’s just cranky because he’s old and ill, poor man.”

“I don’t believe a word of this. First that private investigator, and now this... this... person,” A.W. said, hopping up from his seat and heading for a sideboard littered with cut-glass decanters and an ice bucket. It was only three in the afternoon, but Annie imagined A.W. was in need of a little liquid refreshment.

Mitzi was still staring at Annie, her eyelids narrowed to slits. “Your grandmother. What was her name?”

“Sally,” Annie answered easily, for she was well rehearsed. “Sally Beckman. I believed she worked here at Peevers Mansion as a maid of some sort. Archie seduced her when she was only sixteen, and she ran away rather than stay and face her shame. Archie didn’t even know she’d been pregnant until I showed up. Man, I have to tell you,” she said, leaning forward in her seat, “I thought he was going to croak when he saw my eyes for the first time! You’ve got them too, don’t you, Uncle—that is, Mr. Peevers? No, that’s too formal. I guess I’ll just call you A.W. and Mitzi, and you can call me Annie.”

Mr. Peevers couldn’t speak at the moment. He was otherwise occupied, downing three fingers of neat scotch, so Mitzi answered for him. She usually did anyway.

“You can’t really sit here and tell us that Archie believes this ridiculous claim?”

Annie wriggled in her chair once more, the sweet, not too bright young thing confiding in those older and wiser than herself. “Now, here’s the thing,” she said, spreading her hands. “I don’t know what to believe, and I don’t think Archie does, either. That’s why he invited me here, asked me to come for a whole month, which is really nice, because I’m... well, let’s just say I’m between jobs at the moment.”

Mitzi ground out her cigarette in a crystal ashtray and lit another. “Did you hear this, A.W.?” she asked, as her husband sat down beside her once more. “Archie’s known about this girl, even invited her here. To wag her under our noses. God, but I hate that miserable man!”

It was time for Annie’s exit, she was sure of it, so she stood up, smoothed down her skirt once more. “I know what you’re saying, you know,” she said, making her bottom lip tremble. “And I know you’re thinking that I’m only here because I want Archie’s money.”

“And we’re wrong?” Mitzi asked, one overplucked eyebrow climbing her brow.

Annie grinned, clearly letting her small audience know she was about to pull their legs. “Yes, ma’am, you are. I’m here because I have no family, and now I’ve found out that isn’t true, that I do have a family. I’ve already told Archie that I don’t want a single penny of his fortune. I only want to be a comfort to him in his old age and infirmity.”

“Oh, God,” A.W. groaned, sinking back on the cushions. “She’s a con artist. Isn’t she, Mitzi?”

“Say that to the old man, and you’ll be cut out of the will. You know how he likes to think he’s the smart one around here,” Mitzi warned tightly, then glared up at Annie. “You seem like an intelligent girl, Miss Kendall. How much? How much to get you out of our lives?”

“Why, thank you, Mitzi, for the offer, but I think I’ll decline. Although, if you play your cards right, I might be inclined to give you and A.W. here an allowance.”

And with that, Annie turned and left the room, collapsing against the wall outside the door to catch her breath, talk her knees into holding her up until she could get to Archie’s apartments.

And these were only the first two! She still had so many Peeverses to meet, all of them forewarned, she was sure, by A.W. and Mitzi as to who and what she was.

This sure had been a lot easier when she had listened to Poppy tell her how it was going to go.