Robert B. Parker’s Revenge Tour

Ten

We ate dinner at 4 River Street Place. Formerly Melanie Joan’s home. Now mine. I insisted that she take the master bedroom. She out-insisted me and took the guest bedroom on the second floor, which, I had to admit, wasn’t like moving into the Y.

Spike cooked. It was our shared and dirty little secret that he was a much better chef than the one he employed at his restaurant. He had gone to DeLuca’s Market on Charles and come back with the proper fixings for gemelli pasta with chicken sausage and broccoli rabe, Caesar salad with fried oysters on top, fingerling potatoes. When I told Melanie Joan that Spike was a better chef than his employee, he told me to stop it.

“Do you really want me to?” I said.

“God, no,” he said. “Don’t stop... believing...”

Just like that he was singing. It happened that way a lot.

“Is there any way to stop you from bursting into song?” I said.

“There is,” he said. “But it’s really really hard.”

We sat in the dining room on the first floor I rarely used. Spike, being Spike, did most of the talking. Normally that would have been no small thing in Melanie Joan’s presence, like being in there with the champ. But she was remarkably subdued tonight, at least for her. She did talk about her day, and shared that one of the male hosts had hit on Spike before Melanie had politely informed him that Spike was otherwise engaged at the moment.

“But before we left,” she said, “I did tell him to keep hope alive.”

Before long Melanie Joan was wondering when she might return to The Newbury. I told her on her next trip to Boston. I quoted Jesse Stone, something I still did a lot, unable to help myself, on how being overly cautious never got anybody killed.

“Do you honestly believe my life is in danger?” Melanie Joan asked me.

“No,” I said. “But that doesn’t mean it’s not.”

Spike poured more wine for everybody.

“Will somebody be watching this house?” Melanie Joan said.

“Yes,” I said. “I will.”

It occurred to me that she seemed less blond than she used to be, and of course less lined. It made me think of the old Indiana Jones line, about how it wasn’t the years, it was the mileage. In Melanie Joan’s case, it wasn’t so much the years as the maintenance.

I had read a line once, I forgot where, about the mask becoming the man. In all ways, physical and not, the mask had become the woman seated across from me.

She sipped some wine, and seemed suddenly, and quietly, lost in thought.

Finally she said, “How did John look?”

“I told you,” I said. “As old as the Cryptkeeper.”

“Did he ask about me?” she said.

The same faraway look in her eyes.

“It really wasn’t that kind of conversation,” I said.

“What kind of conversation was it, if I might ask,” she said, “if the subject wasn’t me?”

“And the object, too!” Spike said brightly.

Melanie Joan stared at him as if he’d just said something in Farsi.

“I wasn’t there to catch up with the son of a bitch,” I said. “I was there to get a sense as to whether or not he might be looking to get even with you for putting him there.”

“I didn’t do anything to the son of a bitch other than marry him,” she said.

“He’s sick,” I said.

“Well,” she said, “he wasn’t always.”

“Be that as it may,” I said.

“Tell me again how he looked,” she said, undeterred.

“You mean, did he look like someone who could have written you a threatening email to follow up on a threatening letter?” I said. “Hell, yes.”

“But you said he denied it,” Melanie Joan said.

“I’m sorry, Melanie Joan,” I said, “but are you acting as a prosecutor here or defense attorney?”

“There’s no need to be mean,” she said.

“If it’s any consolation,” Spike said, “she can do meaner.”

“He really looked that old?” Melanie Joan said.

Like trying to take a bone away from a dog, I thought.

“Like he’s aged thirty years,” I said.

“Well, now,” she said, suddenly brightening herself. “Then it’s not as if the visit was a total loss.”

Spike turned to me. “Do you really think he could be behind this?”

“He’s only the first person I’ve talked to,” I said. “For now, let’s call him a person of interest.”

“Let’s,” Spike said.

We’d finished the wine, and dinner, by then. Spike was already hinting about some secret dessert he’d hidden in the refrigerator.

“Melanie Joan,” I said, “before Spike and I clear the table, there’s something I need to ask you.”

“How could I say no to my guardian angel?” she said.

“Well,” Spike said, “maybe the guardian part.”

“Is there someone in your past,” I said to her, “who might have reason to believe, even incorrectly, that he or she once had an idea for Cassandra Demeter similar to your own?”

“How dare you even ask me that?” she said.

Going for indignant. But coming up well short, I felt.

“You’re sure?”

“I am not the person of interest here,” she said. “My God, Sunny, you can be impertinent sometimes, when you’re not being downright rude.”

Spike grinned.

“She swears she’s trying to quit,” he said to Melanie Joan. “But I frankly feel she’s full of shit.”

Melanie Joan’s phone, on the table next to her plate, suddenly played the first few bars of the Gone With the Wind theme.

She turned the phone over, looked at the screen, said, “Excuse me, I need to take this.”

She pushed her chair back and got up and walked toward the back of the house, keeping her voice low. Spike and I began clearing the table while we waited for her to come back.

She didn’t.

I finally called out to her. No answer. She wasn’t in the kitchen and wasn’t in her room.

Wasn’t anywhere in the house.

“You think it was something we said?” I said.

“Some guardian angel you are,” he said.

“Look who’s talking.”