Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [97]
“What was he doing to your back?” Charlie demanded, sotto voce, after Hodder was gone.
“I didn’t ask for it,” Jeannie said under her breath, as they were mercifully interrupted by an elegant white-haired dowager already sitting at the table.
“What a pretty dress. I see everyone’s admiring it, including that crazy Hodder Reeves. I’m Hortense Underwood, by the way.”
“Charles and Jeannie Connelly,” Charlie said, reaching out a hand to her and slipping back into his happy, social personality. “We’re new in town, and this is our first time at the Historical Society gala. How about you?”
“Oh, I’ve been coming for about a million years. Can’t you tell?” Hortense said dryly.
“We just moved here,” Jeannie said. “Hodder is our real estate agent. That’s why he stopped to say hello.”
“Oh, so you moved here to buy a house! How exciting. Where is it?”
“Roland Park. On Goodwood Gardens,” Charlie added. “Not the German Embassy? I heard sometime back that a young family had bought it.”
“I can’t believe anyone really calls it the German Embassy, because my own private name for it is the Austrian Embassy.” Jeannie smiled at the woman, who was turning out to be a rescuer.
“The house was built for a furniture tycoon whose lineage was German. In those days, houses went to children, so there were two generations there, and I knew all the Erdmanns. During the war, you can imagine how hard it was for them. They spent all their time at home; nobody would receive them.”
Jeannie knew the name: Erdmann & Sons was a company famous for building reproduction furniture from 1900 through the 1960s that cost almost as much as eighteenth-century Maryland antiques. Charlie had seen a picture of an Erdmann sideboard in an auction catalog and been on the hunt for one ever since. Maybe it was fated that they were in the house. But still, Jeannie was unsettled. She said, “I heard they had a bowling alley in the basement.”
“Oh yes! I grew up on Edgevale Road and I played with the daughter while we were at Roland Park School—the public primary school,” she added. “I was invited to bowl at her home a few times during the ’30s. I heard the alley was taken out by some of the later owners. Heaven knows what’s there now.”
“An au pair suite. As if there aren’t enough bedrooms in the house already.”
“Yes, but that goes with the territory, my dear.” A wry smile cut new creases in Hortense’s worn, intelligent face. “So, how is the embassy changing under your command?”
Jeannie glanced at Charlie, who, from his spot across the table, was watching her. It was a loaded issue, because he’d asked her to hire a decorator and she hadn’t done so yet.
“Not much,” Jeannie admitted. “I’m doing a little bit of weeding, trying to keep up appearances—”
“You do your own gardening?” Hortense Underwood raised her almost nonexistent white eyebrows.
“Yes. I’m from California, originally. I like to be outside.”
“There are a lot of others in the neighborhood who garden, too. Once you meet them, you’ll feel at home.” Hortense smiled, as if Jeannie had been doing the right thing all along. “I’ll stop by one day next week. Now’s a good time of year to cut back your hydrangea. I want to show you a personal trick that I bet they don’t know about in California.”
Jeannie didn’t know why the visit of an eighty-year-old neighbor should throw her into such a tizzy, but it did. She declined Hodder when he called, inviting her for lunch again, and she practically bit Charlie’s head off when he wanted her to organize a dinner party for his friends the night after. Everything, Jeannie felt, had to be just so for Hortense. Their furniture—a motley mix of Pottery Barn, Maurice Villency, and Gaines McHale—was minimal, but at least it could be free of the litter of