The Blood Red Indian Summer

CHAPTER 2

The traffic was backed up all the way to Old Shore Road. A state trooper was trying to move people along. Whatever. Mitch waited there patiently in his bulbous kidney-colored 1956 Studebaker pickup. He was delivering cartons of nonperishables from the Food Pantry to the Joshua sisters, who lived in the waterfront estate just this side of the Grantham place, and he was in no hurry. Quite honestly, Mitch saw very little point in ever being in a hurry. It was the single most important life lesson that Mitch Berger, a child of the streets of Manhattan, had learned since he’d taken up residence in his antique caretaker’s cottage out on Big Sister Island.

He reached for an Entennman’s powdered donut, munching on it contentedly. Until a few months ago, Mitch had been the lead film critic of the most prestigious newspaper in New York City-as well as the buffed, primped on-air reviewer for its parent empire’s cable news channel. But he’d said good-bye to all of that. These days, he was perfectly happy to write two essays a week for the e-zine that Lacy Nickerson, his former editor at the newspaper, had launched. Right now he was putting together his annual Halloween Scare-a-palooza, which was something that he, his readers and Netflix had all come to look forward to. Mitch always tried to avoid the obvious candidates like Psycho or The Shining. He’d choose fright films that were a bit more obscure, offbeat or just plain bizarre. And he’d come up with some good ones so far, like The Maze with Richard Carlson and Hillary Brooke, a 1953 William Cameron Menzies 3D non-classic that had a real jolter of an ending (spoiler alert: You won’t feel like eating frog legs for a really long time). And 1980’s Can’t Stop The Music, starring The Village People, Valerie Perrine and Olympic gold-medalist Bruce Jenner, which had to be the most outright terrifying Hollywood movie ever made.

Mitch helped himself to another donut, pleased by how relaxed he felt even though The Big Event was a mere day away. True, his forehead was breaking out for the first time in fourteen years. True, he’d just inhaled his fifth donut since he left the house. But, hey, it wasn’t every day that his parents flew up from their retirement village in Vero Beach to meet the new woman in his life. And her father.

I love Des. I love my parents. Why am I freaking out?

Chet and Ruth Berger were terrific people who had devoted thirty-four years of their lives to giving inner-city schoolkids a chance. His dad taught Algebra at Boys and Girls High in Brooklyn. His mom served as school librarian at the Eleanor Roosevelt Middle School in Washington Heights. They raised Mitch in a two-bedroom rent-stabilized apartment in Stuyvesant Town. Scrimped and saved so he could attend Columbia. Took their pensions when they were sixty-two, and were now enjoying the Florida retirement they so richly deserved. In fact, this would be the first time they’d been back to New York in over a year. They were staying in Mitch’s apartment on West 102 Street for a couple of days and coming out to Dorset tomorrow. He’d booked them a nice room at the Frederick House Inn.

I love my Des. I love my parents. Why am I freaking out?

It wasn’t as if they didn’t know she was a Connecticut state trooper who knew at least eighteen different ways to kill a man with her bare hands. Or that she wasn’t Jewish. Mitch’s beloved wife, Maisie, who’d died of ovarian cancer, hadn’t been Jewish either. But, well, she had been white. And there was no way tomorrow night’s real-life version of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? wasn’t going to be tense.

Not that Chet and Ruth had flown north solely to meet Des. They also had a couple of “appointments” to take care of in the city. “Appointments” that they’d been stubbornly tight-lipped about when Mitch tried to press for details over the phone. As in, perhaps one of them was in town to see a specialist regarding a grapefruit-sized tumor. Then again, perhaps Mitch was just a bit spooked. After losing Maisie he had every reason to be. Not to mention what Des had just gone through with the Deacon. One day, he was fine. The next day he was on the operating table having quadruple-bypass surgery. That was how these things happened when they happened. Bam. You never saw them coming.

Slowly, the traffic crept its way near Stalag Grantham, with its eight-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire and festooned with KEEP OUT signs. All it needed was guard towers manned by helmeted storm troopers. Outside of Da Beast’s front gate the news crews and paparazzi were jabbering and jostling like a slavering mob at a freak show. Which, in fact, was what they were.

Finally, Mitch was able to inch close enough so that he could pull into the long gravel driveway that belonged to Da Beast’s neighbors, Luanne and Lila Joshua, a pair of wifty spinsters in their sixties. The Joshuas were one of Dorset’s most distinguished founding families. Old, old money. Not that you’d know it by the condition of their place. The tall weeds in the rutted driveway brushed the undercarriage of Mitch’s truck as he bumped his way toward their three-story center-chimney mansion, which dated back to the early 1700s and, you’d swear, hadn’t been cared for since. It was a moldering wreck with broken windowpanes, missing roof shingles, peeling paint, rotting door frames, rotting sills, rotting everything. It was sad to see what had happened to such a fine old colonial showplace. But the Joshua sisters happened to be penniless due to a toxic combination of poor investments, soaring property taxes and almost no income beyond the monthly Social Security check that their beloved seventy-two-year-old brother-in-law, Winston, received. The three of them would be starving if it weren’t for the Food Pantry deliveries Mitch made three times a week. And the rent money they were receiving from their boarder, Callie Kreutzer, an art student at the renowned Dorset Academy. Mitch had a hand in that, too. Callie’s mom, an art critic, was tight with Lacy, his editor.

Callie’s bicycle was parked by the sagging front porch. So was the sisters’ ancient blue Peugeot station wagon. Winston’s vintage MGTD ragtop was parked there, too, though it no longer ran.

Which was just as well. Winston, who’d been married to Luanne and Lila’s late sister Lorelei, was in no condition to drive it or any other vehicle. He’d been a celebrated New Yorker cartoonist back in his heyday, a dashing and colorful personality with a signature handlebar moustache. Near as Mitch could tell, both Luanne and Lila had harbored schoolgirl crushes on him when Lorelei was alive. These days they functioned as his full-time caregivers. He needed full-time caregivers. At first, folks around Dorset had attributed Winston’s increasingly peculiar behavior to his tippling. He did like his liquor. And Dorset was no stranger to elderly drinkers who liked to kick up their heels after eight or ten martinis. But Winston’s case took an extreme turn. One day, he ran stark naked down Turkey Neck in broad daylight shouting about how badly he wanted to stick his pecker in “some one or some thing.” Actually made it all the way to the mini-mart on Old Shore Road before Des was able to corral him. Then he took to behaving badly in the dining room at the Dorset Country Club. Groping the breasts and bottoms of the waitresses. Groping himself. And then-the final straw-diving under a table and burying his face between the enormous wattled thighs of Amanda Heyer, age eighty-two.

Quite simply, the poor man seemed to have lost all sexual inhibitions. It wasn’t Alzheimer’s disease, as some around town had speculated. It was frontotemporal dementia. There was no cure and no effective way to slow its progression. All that the doctors could do was try to manage Winston’s behavioral symptoms with medication. All that the sisters could do was try to keep him calm, clean and fed-and watch him get steadily worse. They’d have to put him in a nursing home when they could no longer handle him.

Mitch climbed out of his Studey, gathered up the two cartons of food he’d brought and let himself in the front door. Like a lot of the old houses in Dorset, the Joshua place had wide-planked oak floors and low ceilings. Unlike a lot of the old houses it reeked of mildewed rugs and cat urine. Nearly a dozen cats dozed here, there, everywhere. The sisters needed them. They had mice here, there, everywhere. Also spiderwebs and dust bunnies like he’d never seen before. If they owned a vacuum they hadn’t used it since the dawn of the twenty-first century. There was an eerie, lost-in-time aura about the Joshua place. Maybe it was all of those antique, hand-wound wall clocks that were tick-tick-ticking away in every room, each one keeping its own sweet time. Or maybe it was all of those empty spaces on the walls. Luanne and Lila had been forced to sell off many of the old family paintings. A lot of their antique furniture was gone, too. He could still see the depressions in the rug where their dining table once stood.

He called out to them.

“Good morning, Mitch!” Luanne responded cheerily.

“We’re in the kitchen, dear!” Lila chimed in.

They were sipping their morning coffee at the kitchen table, each of them immaculately turned out in a crisp summer dress, freshly made-up, coiffed and perfumed. Luanne and Lila were always very particular about their appearance. They were also unfailingly gracious and upbeat. Both sisters were blue eyed and silver haired, but the resemblance ended there. Lila, the younger of the two, was slender, shy and had a fluttery, clueless manner. Luanne, her big sister, was stockier, calmer and gave the impression of being on top of things. She wasn’t. They were equally helpless. As far as Mitch knew, neither sister had ever held a job. Or lived anywhere else. All they had was each other and this old house, which they refused to sell but couldn’t afford to keep up. To save on heat during the cold months they occupied a mere half-dozen of its twenty-eight rooms. There were entire wings of the place that Mitch felt certain they hadn’t entered in years. He couldn’t imagine what manner of wildlife lived up in the attic.

There was a glassed-in sun porch off the kitchen that the sisters were letting Callie use as a studio. She liked to work on her free-form paintings in there. Fling paint, in other words. It was all over the windows, walls and floors. Think Jackson Pollack. Think projectile vomiting.

“It’s a beautiful day, is it not, Mitch?” Luanne exclaimed, petting the black cat that was sprawled on the kitchen table.

“Yes, it certainly is,” agreed Mitch, who was starting to feel light-headed. It wasn’t just their heavy, fruity perfume. It smelled awful in there, as if something had died in one of the cupboards. He deposited the cartons of provisions on the counter. The canned goods, cereal and bread were courtesy of the Food Pantry. He’d bought the milk, eggs and orange juice at the A amp;P with his own money. Not that they knew. There was no reason for them to know.

“This is so kind of you, Mitch,” Lila said in that trembly voice of hers that always reminded him of Katherine Hepburn in Stage Door. He kept expecting her to come out with: “The calla lilies are in bloom again. ”

“My pleasure,” he said, edging over toward an open window for some fresh air. From there he could see their stone patio and the two acres or so of lawn that he’d mowed for them last week. Beyond the lawn there was a sliver of beach at the water’s edge. And an incredible panoramic view. On a clear day you could see Long Island. A dense thicket of trees stood between the Joshuas and their new neighbor. “How is Winston doing this morning?”

“Fine and dandy,” Luanne replied. “I just shaved him with that nice Norelco you picked up for us. You’re so clever.” A decline in personal hygiene was another symptom of Winston’s dementia. The sisters had been unable to shave him with a blade because he refused to sit still. “Right now he’s having a good soak in a hot tub. Or I should say a warm tub. Our furnace is on its last legs. Assuming, that is, furnaces have legs.”

“Ours does. It most certainly sits on legs.” Lila glanced at him hesitantly. “Mitch, I hate to bother you but have you noticed a slight odor?”

“Why, no, I haven’t.”

“That silly sink of ours is backed up again. Could you?…”

Mitch had a look. And a whiff. The sink had two inches of fetid brown water in it. “Where do you keep your plunger?”

“In the cupboard under the sink,” Luanne said.

He could hear all sorts of scurrying around in there as he searched for the plunger, shuddering inwardly. There was no telling what lived under there. Or how sharp its teeth were. He took the plunger to the clogged drain and brought up a fist-sized clump of either stringy vegetable matter, hair or, possibly, the earthly remains of a drowned mouse. He didn’t know. Didn’t want to know. But that black cat was watching him from the kitchen table with keen interest. Mitch bagged it-the clump, not the cat-and took it out to the trash. Then he ran the faucet for a minute to make sure the drain was clear.

He was just about to take off when he heard a loud thud upstairs.

“Ah, that’ll be Winston,” Luanne said. “Mitch, would you mind lending us your strong back? He’s a bit heavy for us to hoist out of the tub.”

There were at least eight bedrooms on the second floor. The bath that adjoined Winston’s room was right at the top of the stairs.

He was sitting in an old claw-footed tub calmly soaking away. Winston was a big man, well over six feet tall. He’d rowed at Princeton and still had the broad shoulders to prove it. But the rest of him resembled a sagging old water buffalo. His skin hung from him in loose, billowing folds. Winston’s hair, what little there was of it, was white. So was his handlebar moustache, which Mitch noticed looked kind of ratty and uneven.

Luanne noticed it, too. “Winnie, have you been chewing on our moustache again?”

“I’d rather chew on yours,” he replied, his blue eyes twinkling at her.

“Now don’t you be naughty, dear.”

“What’s that man doing in my bathroom, Lorelei?”

“I’m Luanne. Lorelei is gone, remember?”

“Then what are you doing in here?”

“Helping you take your bath.”

“In that case, get out of that dress and hop in.” Winston reached for her with his wet, soapy hands. “We’ll go for a little spin.”

“Behave, Winnie. You’ll get me all wet.” She bent down to wipe him with a washcloth. He immediately reached for her left breast and gave it a good squeeze. “And please remember you’re a gentleman.”

“You’re mistaken. No gentlemen here. Who is that curly haired fellow?”

“Why, that’s Mitch,” Lila answered.

“ Who?”

“Brubaker,” Mitch said. For some reason, the old fellow had taken to calling him that.

“Oh, sure.” Winston grinned at him. “How are you, Brubaker?”

“Just fine, sir. And you?”

“Horny beyond belief. And I really have to take a piss.”

Luanne shook her finger at him. “Not in the water again, hear me?”

“Okay,” he grumbled. “But only because you’ve got great tits.”

Luanne sighed wistfully. “And to think there was a time when I would have sold my soul for just one night in the feathers with this man.”

“Don’t you get all earthy, too,” Lila said to her primly.

“You’re one to talk,” Luanne shot back. “Considering that wild fling you and he had.”

Lila reddened. “Winston and I did not have any fling, wild or otherwise. That was entirely Lorelei’s imagination.”

“Did you or did you not go to Scranton together for the weekend back in seventy-eight?”

“Strictly to look at a wardrobe cupboard that he wished to buy for her. Antiques have always been a passion of mine, as you know perfectly well. Winston wanted my advice. We stayed in separate rooms at the inn. Why, we never so much as… as…” Lila’s fine-boned face got all scrunched up. Then she ran from the bathroom, sobbing.

“I guess I have to stop teasing her,” Luanne murmured. “She’s getting so sensitive.”

“She’s always been sensitive,” Winston said. “And she had the loveliest titties I’ve ever seen. Milk white, with a birthmark right here under her left nipple.”

Luanne looked at him in alarm. Possibly, it was that specific mention of Lila’s birthmark. “He’s just spouting nonsense now, Mitch. He was always faithful to our Lorelei. Weren’t you, Winnie?”

“We spent that weekend in Scranton screwing our brains out,” he answered happily. “Hey, Brubaker, have you checked out those hot new babes next door? They stretch out by the swimming pool wearing next to nothing. And they’re colored girls.”

“You mean women of color,” Mitch said.

“You can see them through the trees if you get over next to that fence.”

“Winnie, I want you to leave those people alone. They have enough trouble with those awful reporters. Besides, we haven’t been introduced.”

“Sometimes they even get up and dance,” he prattled on. “Shake those butts of theirs. You don’t see butts like those on white girls. By God, I’d like to take a great, big bite out of-”

“Okay, we’re done here,” Luanne announced firmly. “Mitch?…”

Mitch grabbed Winston by one wet, slippery armpit while she reached across him for the other. They’d just managed to hoist the old fellow up onto his feet when Callie Kreutzer came bouncing past the open door on her way to the stairs.

Callie didn’t seem the least bit fazed by the sight of the naked old man standing there in the tub. “I’m off to the academy, Luanne!”

“Have a lovely day, dear,” Luanne responded sweetly.

“Don’t go running off again!” Winston called out as Callie started down the stairs. “I’ve got something huge here for you!”

“Winston, behave!” Luanne barked as she began to towel him off. “I can take it from here, Mitch. Thank you so much.”

By the time he’d made it outside Callie was getting ready to ride off on her bike, her art portfolio slung over one shoulder. She was quite a gifted painter. Her miniature still lifes were amazingly luminous.

“Callie, are you okay living here?”

“What do you mean by that?” Callie possessed a voice that was, well, nasal. She sounded a lot like a spacey high-school girl. Looked like one, too, for that matter. She was twenty but she could easily pass for sixteen. Barely five feet tall with long, straight blond hair, chubby chipmunk cheeks and big gray eyes. Mitch doubted she weighed over a hundred pounds. She hid her slender figure inside an oversized, paint-splattered T-shirt and baggy jeans.

“I mean that Winston is getting worse. Has he ever?…”

“Not to worry, Mitch. He’s totally harmless.”

“Plus it smells awful inside of that house. Maybe we should find you somewhere else to stay.”

“No way. I’m totally cool here. My room has an incredible view of the water. And the girls let me fling paint half the night out on their sun porch. I can put on an old bikini-or not-and just let it fly. Which, like, totally keeps me sane. Because once you walk in the door of the academy everything you do has to represent. I have a great set-up here, honest. Besides, when Winston’s lucid he’s really very insightful about my work. He was a marvelous draftsman. Um, okay, maybe sometimes I…” Callie hesitated, her lower lip clamped between her teeth. “I do get the feeling he’s, you know, watching me when I’m flinging paint. From outside the window, I mean. But that could just be my imagination. And, hey, if it makes him happy to stand out there eyeballing my tush, it’s no big. Besides, I have an open invite to crash with June on board the Calliope any time.”

Callie had been romantically involved with June Bond for a couple of months. Thanks to him, she’d landed a cushy part-time gig as the Bond Girl on those inane “Just ask Justy” commercials that ran day and night on local TV.

“Can I give you a lift to school? We can throw your bike in back.”

Callie shrugged her narrow shoulders. “Why not?”

He hoisted her bike into the back of the Studey and made room for her on the front seat. She got in next to him and Mitch eased the truck down the long, rutted gravel drive. He offered her a donut. Callie declined. He helped himself to one. “How’s June doing?”

“He’s fine,” she answered as Mitch inched out into the traffic snarl on Turkey Neck. “Except he doesn’t want to sell cars anymore. Never did, if you ask me. He’s just been trying to please his father. As if.”

“What does he really want to do?”

“Sail the Calliope down to the Florida Keys. His dream is to work on sailboats there full-time. Restore them and sell them for a profit. It’s something he’s real good at, Mitch. The Calliope was an absolute wreck when he bought her. Now she’s a thing of beauty. He… sort of wants me to sail down there with him,” Callie added with a casual toss of her hair.

“And when would you do that?”

“This weekend.”

Mitch shot a startled look at her. “That’s a bit sudden, isn’t it?”

“It’s totally sudden. He just dropped it on me last night. He really, really wants the two of us to get away from this place.”

“Are you saying he wants you to quit the Dorset Academy?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t decided.”

“I don’t get it, Callie. What’s the big rush?”

“Don’t ask me. He’s just real unhappy here.”

“Are things okay between June and his dad?”

“As okay as they ever are. Justy rides him awful hard.”

“And how about between you and Justy?”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, puh-leese. Not you, too. Everyone figures that because I’m so sucky in those commercials that I must be doing him. Darlene, the last Bond girl? She totally was. I hear Bonita caught the two of them getting busy on the sofa in the customer lounge. An epic screechfest went down. Next thing anybody knew there was a sudden opening for a Bond girl.” Callie changed her mind and reached for a powdered donut, munching on it as they broke free of the traffic on Turkey Neck and started cruising up Old Shore Road toward the Historic District. “Justy gave me the job as a favor to June. He knows I really need the money to help cover my tuition. Although he still owes me like a thousand bucks from the last spots we filmed. Mitch, I swear he’s never put a move on me. Not that he’d ever get anywhere. I mean, God, he’s fifty-five years old. He smells like cheese.”

“Do you get along okay with Bonita?”

“I guess. She’s not really my kind of person. She’s a total taker. She broke up Justy’s marriage to June’s mom, you know.”

“Justy had a little something to do with that.”

“June thinks Bonita took advantage of him. Justy tries to come across as all take-charge but he’s really just a horny, clueless trog who drinks too much. Bonita sized him up right away and moved in for the kill. Or so June thinks. He doesn’t like her very much.”

“You say Justy owes you money. What’s up with that?”

“I think he’s having cash flow problems. People aren’t buying cars like they used to. There was nobody around the place last time I was there.”

“Do you think that’s why June is suddenly so anxious to leave-because Bond’s Auto Mall is circling the drain?”

“Mitch, I really wish I knew. But I don’t.” Callie sighed woefully. “Are you going to eat that last donut?”