Occasion of Revenge

17

On the last day of 1999, the day that was to have been Daddy’s wedding day, we conspired to keep him busy. After a fortifying lunch of split pea soup and hunks of sourdough bread, I contrived to look so pitifully inept that he volunteered to clean the ashes out of both fireplaces. Then I walked him from our house all the way to Mother Earth with him complaining the whole way, “What? You afraid I can’t take care of myself, Hannah?”

We were on Maryland Avenue at the time, just passing the entrance to Galway Bay. I thought about the cheerful bar inside and about all the other friendly Annapolis watering holes Daddy used to frequent and said simply, “Yes.”

Ruth welcomed her shift as caretaker. She gave Daddy a quick lesson in cash register management-reassuring him that its computerized brain wouldn’t go into Y2K-induced seizure at the stroke of midnight-then put him to work behind the counter while she busied herself restocking the shelves. I hung around for a while, chatting, until Daddy rang up a sale for Cornelia Gibbs, a widow we knew from St. Anne’s Church. I eased out of the store, smiling. Daddy was attractive, charming, and sober. It wouldn’t be long before he’d begin dating again, his affair with Darlene merely a chapter in a closed book. I hoped the book would end with the revelation of her killer.

Back home, Emily and Dante were preparing to leave for First Night Annapolis’s gala citywide, multi-event New Year’s Eve celebrations. Chloe lay placidly on the sofa and was allowing herself to be dressed in one of the outfits I’d given her for Christmas: a pink turtleneck shirt tucked into a pair of Calvin Klein minijeans that cost almost as much as the ones I buy for myself. Miniature Nike tennis shoes and pink, lace-trimmed socks completed the ensemble. As I said, the saleswoman saw me coming.

Dante picked up a Santa cap from the sofa and slipped it on his head, settling it carefully over his neatly combed ponytail. He fiddled with the snowball dangling from the end of the cap until, to my amazement, the ball began blinking. Emily giggled and kissed her husband on the nose. “A man of culture, refinement, and taste.” She swatted the ball with the back of her hand, setting it swinging. “And way cool.”

While Emily slipped into a coat, I pulled my granddaughter’s arms through the sleeves of her pink Polartec jacket then helped Dante wrestle her into the Gerry pack. I watched with affection as the three of them hustled out the front door and down the steps.

I was waving good-bye from the porch when Emily turned. “Oh, by the way, Mom, there’s a wacko message from LouElla Van Schuyler on the machine.”

Dante adjusted Chloe’s legs more comfortably around his waist and added, “That woman gets stranger and stranger. She needs to be locked up.”

“She’s a little kooky, but I don’t think she’s dangerous,” I said. I was actually relieved to hear that she had turned up safely.

“I don’t agree, Mrs. Ives. Since your father got away from her, she’s lost focus. I think she’s going off the deep end.”

“Yeah, Mom. Listen to the message. She was threatening Virginia Prentice.” Emily pulled her gloves off and tucked them into her pocket. She took a step closer. “I don’t know how you can be nice to LouElla after all the anguish she put us through with Gramps. I’ll never forgive her for that.”

I was struggling to deal with that, too, but the fact remained that Daddy was stone cold sober and hadn’t had a drink in almost two weeks. But it was more than that. His attitude toward drinking had changed. And he’d joined Alcoholics Anonymous. I had to give LouElla full credit for that.

With long fingers circling his daughter’s ankles, Dante pranced Chloe around in a tight circle. “I agree with Em, Mrs. Ives. This time LouElla’s really lost it. Seems that Virginia’s been putting viruses into people’s mailboxes in order to take over the world for Communism.”

“Or something,” Emily added. “She’s so wigged out that I called Mrs. Prentice to warn her. I asked her to keep an eye on Mrs. Van Schuyler. They’re supposed to be friends, aren’t they?”

I nodded. “I certainly thought so.”

Dante sniffed. “Some friend! Keeping track of everything you do in some stupid notebook and threatening to reveal your deepest, darkest secrets to the tabloids.”

I had to smile at the picture of Virginia tiptoeing around town, anointing the mailboxes in Chestertown with some exotic virus. “So, what did Virginia say to that?”

“Not much.”

“She wasn’t upset?”

“Hardly. She just laughed hysterically and said not to worry. Who’d believe that crazy old broad?” Emily tugged on the zipper of her jacket. “Then she wanted to know what we were doing for New Year’s, so I bored her with that for a while.” Emily shrugged. “That’s about it.”

Dante added, “LouElla said she’d try to get you on your cell phone.”

Emily’s face grew serious. “Why did you give your cell phone number to that nutcase, Mother?”

“When I was looking for your grandfather, I gave my telephone numbers to everyone in the world.”

Emily adjusted the straps on Chloe’s backpack. “Well, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

I promised to listen to LouElla’s message and waved my little family off in the direction of their first stop, St. John’s College, where they were going to see Kohl and Company, a comedy magic act that the First Night program in the newspaper guaranteed would split your sides. I stepped back into the house and closed the door firmly behind me, then leaned against it. The curious part of my brain wanted to listen to LouElla’s message right away; the practical part yearned to hit the three button and send her ramblings into oblivion, then go get my sides split along with Emily and Dante. But I was expecting Paul home any minute.

Although it was only three-thirty, I opened the refrigerator, poured myself a glass of cold Chablis, pulled a chair up to the phone, and reached for the receiver. I held it to my ear for a few seconds, listening to the dial tone. Then I took a sip of wine, dialed the phone company’s answering service, and punched in our code.

For someone so experienced in espionage, LouElla seemed to have very little expertise with recording devices.

“Hello? Hello?”

I heard a metal object hitting the floor.

“This is LouElla. LouElla Van Schuyler. Uh… uh. Hannah?”

Another clang. Maybe a pot lid.

“Virginia Prentice tells me your father came home. I’m so relieved! I spent days and days looking for him.”

So that’s where she’s been. Serves her right! I hope she got blisters!

“Virginia says that you were very, very upset with me. That troubles me, it really does. But, please! Let me explain.”

This had better be good!

“Your father entrusted himself to the Phoenix program and into my care, and I couldn’t betray that trust. Doctor-patient confidentiality, as you know, extends to nurse practitioners as well…”

I was equally sure that it didn’t.

“… so you see my dilemma.”

There was a long pause, filled with the sound of music playing softly in the background, something bouncy out of the fifties, a tune that sounded vaguely familiar.

“I must caution you, though, Hannah dear, to be more judicious in your choice of people in whom to confide. I’ve had my eye on Virginia for a long, long time. I find her completely unreliable. The other day I caught her on David White’s porch, pawing through the items in his mailbox. Pawing! When challenged, she showed me a package from L.L. Bean and claimed it had been misdelivered. Said she was just putting it in the proper mailbox. Hah!”

Just then I recognized the tune. Rosemary Clooney was singing “Mambo Italiano.” I strained to pick up the words.

“I observed her at Ellen Swain’s and Marty O’Malley’s a while ago, too. There can’t be that many misdelivered packages. Our postman isn’t a moron! Hah! I warned Virginia over and over about this, and I’ve told the postmaster, too, but do they listen to me? They do not. Doesn’t everyone know that interfering with the U.S. mail is a federal offense? You can never be too careful. You never know what wicked people are going to put in your mailbox.”

I thought about all the junk mail I’d been receiving lately and had to agree that something wicked was indeed going on. Then I wondered about the nasty cards Darlene had been receiving. If LouElla was correct in her observations, could Virginia have been responsible for them? If so, what was her grudge against Darlene? Or had other people been receiving Nasty-Grams, too? I sipped my wine. The last time I’d heard “Mambo Italiano” it was on Your Hit Parade, that TV show sponsored by tap-dancing packs of Old Gold cigarettes. I was tapping my own foot and singing silently along with Miss Clooney when LouElla veered hard right and the “Oh, ho, Joe, you mixed-up Siciliano” flew right out of my head.

“I’ll bet you thought that smallpox had been eradicated, didn’t you?”

I was fairly certain of that. By the time Emily was born, pediatricians were no longer recommending that children be vaccinated.

“Well, it hasn’t, dear! Ronald Reagan warned us not to trust the Evil Empire, didn’t he? And he was right, the man was right! With callous disregard for human life, those Russians saved some of that virus.”

I remembered that the United States had saved some, too, in deep, secure vaults at Fort Dietrich in western Maryland. But LouElla was way ahead of me.

“Of course, we needed to save the virus, too, in case those scoundrels decided to use it as a biological weapon and we needed to make vaccine.”

She took a deep breath, then launched in with renewed vigor, her voice spiraling upward in her excitement.

“Now one of those Russians has defected to Libya and he’s taken the virus with him! Do you realize what this means? Do you, Hannah?”

If what she said were true, one could only imagine the havoc that a virus like that would wreak in the hands of a maniac like Qaddafi. Smallpox let loose in a subway tunnel? Introduced into the water supply of a major American city? Why hadn’t we heard about this on Sixty Minutes or the eleven o’clock news?

“Everyone under the age of thirty will be dropping like flies,” LouElla warned. “We’d never be able to manufacture enough vaccine to vaccinate everybody in time. It’s an evil conspiracy to get rid of all the young ones, isn’t it? First the babies, then the teens, then all the brave young men who would be our best defense in time of war!”

Then LouElla found a chink in my armor, stuck the tip of her knife in, and twisted.

“Don’t you see? You’d be spared and so would I, Hannah. We’ve been protected. But Emily and Chloe, precious little Chloe, they’ve never been vaccinated, have they?” She paused, as if waiting for me to answer her. “No. I thought not. So, we have to be vigilant. We have to be careful. Think about it! What do we know about Virginia before she came here? Not much, do we? Virginia’s husband was assassinated for a reason. Somebody wanted to stop him.”

There was more, much more, about caches of weapons in the hands of private militias right here in “Merry-Land,” about the perils of our nuclear power plant at Calvert Cliffs, and about water fluoridation conspiracies that I thought had gone out of fashion with Mamie Eisenhower’s bangs and fitted hats. I began to relax.

I was still sitting there, sipping wine and listening to LouElla rave on about how misunderstood Ollie North was, when Paul breezed through the kitchen door like a breath of fresh air. He approached me from behind and kissed the top of my head. “Ed Metzger was terrific!”

“Who’s he?” I suspected Ed was some sort of computer guru, brought in by the Naval Academy to handle Y2K compliance.

“Plays Einstein, the practical Bohemian. I stopped by the Legislative Services building this afternoon just in time to catch his show.” He pointed to the phone. “What’s up?” he whispered.

I pushed 33 on the keypad, cutting LouElla off in mid-rant, then 2 to save the message in our in-box. Maybe I’d finish listening to it later… much, much later. “It’s a message from LouElla Van Schuyler.” I stood, hung up the phone, and turned to face my husband. “She wants our help saving the world from Virginia Prentice.”

“And you’re taking her seriously?”

“LouElla’s grasp of reality is rather on-again, off-again, isn’t it?” I said, more to reassure myself than my husband.

“Then let it go, Hannah. Relax.” He used his thumbs to knead the tension out of the muscles over my shoulder blades.

“I’ll try. Emily did call Virginia to warn her that LouElla was having one of her off days.” I gestured with my glass. “Wine?”

“You read my mind.”

I poured Paul a glass of Chablis and we sat down together at the kitchen table. “So, you were out gallivanting, huh? And I thought you’d be spending the afternoon making sure the math department computers wouldn’t go into meltdown tonight.”

“No, we didn’t need to do anything special with the computers.” Paul raised his glass. “Mark my words, Hannah, Y2K will go down in history as the biggest bust since Comet Kahotec.” He took a sip of wine and leaned back in his chair with a sigh. “I had to write up a couple of MAPR reports is all, for some mids who have to appear before the Academic Board. But I finished early so I thought I’d catch the Einstein show.” He rested his elbows on the table and rolled the wineglass between his palms. “So, what does the old dear want this time?” he asked, referring to LouElla’s message.

“To warn me about smallpox virus on the loose.”

“Oh.” He smiled. “Is that all?”

“And to wish us a Happy New Year,” I said.

Paul laughed out loud. “Are you going to return her call?”

I shook my head. “She left me her number, but I doubt I’ll use it.” I grinned. “That would be one sure way to spoil our evening.”

Paul grinned back. “Speaking of which, what’s the plan for tonight?”

“Emily and Dante already took their admission buttons and have gone with Chloe to the magic show at St. John’s, then they’re going to get their faces painted and after that, I think it’s the Punch and Judy Show.”

Paul glanced around the kitchen where there was absolutely no evidence of a meal being prepared, raised an eyebrow, and asked, “Dinner?”

“We’re stopping by Mother Earth to pick up Daddy and Ruth, then we’ve reservations for dinner at McGarvey’s.”

Paul carefully positioned his glass in the wet ring it had made on the tabletop. “McGarvey’s? I thought you’d had enough of that place.”

I shrugged. “Daddy’s choice. I think he’s hoping to run into Darryl. He actually liked the guy.”

“I thought Darryl would be arrested by now.”

“Younger tells me he needs proof. Based on what the clerk at the post office said, he’ll probably be able to get a search warrant. He’s looking for the fake ID Darryl used to set up the post office box. And credit card receipts. There’s also the possibility he’s been taking advantage of his position as a waiter to steal credit card numbers from customers at McGarvey’s.” I remembered my recent lunch there with Deirdre and was glad I had paid cash. “There may be merchandise, too, although Younger suspects Darryl’s already fenced most of it.”

“And in the meantime?” Paul asked.

“In the meantime we have to live with the creep.” Captain Younger had asked me not to tell anybody what I had learned about Darryl at the post office for fear it would leak back to him. I had sworn Paul to secrecy, of course, but it took every bit of willpower I possessed not to set Ruth’s mind at ease. I tugged at Paul’s hand. “C’mon. We need to get dressed.”

Paul remained firmly seated. “If Ruth’s going with us, who’s minding the store?” He nibbled playfully on my fingers.

“She’s arranged for some temporary help.”

“Are the kids going to join us?” Paul asked, referring to Emily and her husband.

I smiled. “No. Dante didn’t want to rent a tux.”

“Tux? What for?”

“Dinner at McGarvey’s is special tonight. Black tie.” Before Paul could groan, I laid my fingers lightly on his lips and cooed, “And I’ll be wearing my new electric blue number.”

Paul clutched at his heart with both hands. “Short skirt? Spangles? Back bare all the way down to your ratsgazabo?”

I nodded. “The very same.”

“My goose,” he said, “is cooked.”

“I certainly hope so.” I told Paul that the kids planned to pick up a bite somewhere on Main Street and that we’d meet them at the laser light show at City Dock around eleven. Then we’d wander over to the sea wall where we’d have an unobstructed view of the countdown clock and the fireworks.

“Isn’t midnight a little late for the wee one?”

I shrugged. “Lighten up, old man. It’s the new millennium, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.”

Paul looked around. “Does that mean nobody’s home?”

“Just us chickens.”

“How about a little Afternoon Delight?” He took my hand and pulled me around the table and into his lap.

Outside our kitchen window, the winter sun had set. The bare branches of the trees danced in black silhouettes against the tangerine-and-pink sky. “Five o’clock is afternoon?”

He kissed me then, soft and long, his tongue just tickling my lips in a way that drives me crazy. Later, much later, as I stood in the shower with the hot water sluicing over my head, I remembered something. First thing after the holiday, I’d call Captain Younger about it. It was about the mailboxes. Maybe Virginia wasn’t putting things into mailboxes at all. Maybe she was taking things out.