Baltimore Noir - Laura Lippman [98]
The prospect of serving a cocktail was also an unending worry. Jeannie usually had a few bottles of wine stashed somewhere, but she sensed an eighty-year-old woman would probably take a mixed drink, or some kind of spirit straight up. She wished the walls would talk, in this case, tell her something like, Sherry, neat! Or, Old-fashioned! Jeannie could mix a margarita, but that was about all.
Charlie thought she should hire a bartender to come with his own stash, and thus be perfectly assured of making the drinks right, but Jeannie figured this would be pretentious. In the end, Jeannie ran into the liquor section at Eddie’s, where a nice young man helped her spend $200 in fifteen minutes, and had someone drive it back to the house and actually unpack it in the butler’s pantry. Too bad everything in Baltimore wasn’t that easy. She had to drive to Hecht’s in Towson to buy Waterford glasses of every shape and size, and was just unpacking them when the doorbell chimed.
Hortense was an hour early. Jeannie hadn’t time to change from her shopping clothes to her gardening ones, let alone get all the sticky labels off the bottom of the glasses. The doorbell awoke Ivanhoe from his nap so he was screaming from above, and Jeannie now felt the picture was complete; she was a totally decadent, uncaring trophy wife who knew nothing about caring for children or gardens.
“Oh dear,” said Hortense, immediately ascending the stairs. “May I?”
Ivanhoe was terrified when he saw Hortense peeping round the edge of the door, and had to be mollified with a sippy cup of warm soy milk. Then the three of them went outside and Hortense started snipping away, much lower than Jeannie would ever have cut.
“Are you sure I’ll get them all back next year?” she asked, looking at the stumps where outstretched boughs holding faded blue blooms had been.
“It’s good wood. It will survive. Just like this house.” She paused. “Just like you, my dear.”
“You can tell I’m out of my element, can’t you?” Jeannie said, starting to collect the flowers and branches in a trash bag. She knew that a more organized woman would save the hydrangeas to dry them and then spray-paint gold for the holidays. The holidays. She found herself flinching at the thought of putting on the kind of Christmas Charlie would expect in the house.
“I don’t think that’s the case.” Hortense looked levelly at Jeannie. “If there’s a problem, you’ll be the only one in this house to solve it. That’s all I meant.”
The problem. Over drinks—it turned out that Hortense drank whiskey, straight up—Jeannie tried to fish around and find out exactly which of her many discomforts was the problem Hortense had gleaned. But for a straight talker, she was surprisingly evasive—as curvy, in fact, as Edgevale Road.
That night, Jeannie awoke at 2 a.m. and couldn’t get back to sleep. The whiskey she’d had with Hortense and Charlie, who came home early, true to his word, had thrown her sleep-wake cycle out of whack. She’d be a mess when Ivanhoe woke up at 6—although he seemed to be awake now.
As the whimpering continued, Jeannie slipped out of bed and padded down the hallway to his room. Ivanhoe was sitting bolt upright in bed, and when he saw her, his whimpers turned to an outright scream. Jeannie pressed him against her breast, and gradually the cries lessened.
“Did Ivan have a bad dream? Everything’s okay now—”
“Bad boy,” said Ivanhoe. “Bad, bad boy in room!”
“Nobody’s here, Ivan. You just had a bad dream.”
“No, Mama, he real.” Ivan pointed toward the closet. “He shine like, like moon.” Ivan pushed the curtain over his window aside, pointing with emphasis