Croaked

Chapter Three

Chapter ThreeThe first day of June! Easing the Morris onto Route 6A, Lydia congratulated herself (since no one else was likely to) on being upright, dressed, clean, and functional at 6:45 AM. Now at last she could leave behind DeAnne Ropes, who’d haunted her all night. A new day! A fresh start! Time for simple, practical questions: Could she support herself as a sous-chef? Would she walk in the door to find Sue back and herself out? Would Alistair show up for breakfast?

Part of her hoped he would, part of her wished he wouldn’t. She was curious to see him again, if only to find out what (if anything) he was up to, but she didn’t want to go all distracted and klutzy while she was chopping vegetables.

Not much traffic at this hour. Colder than she’d expected. After an afternoon nap and a walk on the beach, she’d stayed up late, watching TV to drown out her turbulent thoughts; so once she finally got back to sleep, the alarm clock had beeped way too soon and catapulted her, shivering, into daylight.

Maybe she wouldn’t have to stay at the Blue Moon much longer.

She’d asked Alistair over lunch what kinds of films he made. Documentaries, he said, mostly biographical. Was that as cool as it sounded? He’d laughed and described his day: Check e-mail, footage, and phone calls; mow lawn, go to lunch, and—the high point—help a stranded motorist change her tire. Did he have coworkers? A family, anyone around through all this? He smiled and said no, so go ahead and order dessert. Which she did: a remarkably tasty Choklit Moose cake. Toward the end of lunch she tried again: Was he, as they say, seeing anybody? His smile grew more enigmatic. He shook his head: “I gave that up.”

Meaning, she presumed, he’d loved too passionately and plunged too deep into disillusion and despair to keep an open heart. That was a problem she totally understood.

Which did not mean (she reminded herself then and now) they should plunge right in with each other. Talk about out of the frying pan! Just because her drawbridge was still down, and he’d gallantly rescued her, and this wasn’t Cambridge, didn’t make him a knight in shining armor.

In fact why was she even thinking about him? She hardly knew the guy. They’d spent—what?—maybe an hour together?—most of it focused on Leo or the Morris.

Because they’d connected. The hand-of-fate meeting? The electricity when they touched? And look at the 180-degree turnaround he’d triggered in her luck!

Then there was DeAnne.

Not a bond you’d wish for, but powerful. To Lydia’s frustration, Alistair had nothing to say about her death beyond the gist: filming, studio, ladder, accidental fall. Died instantly, Leo added. No pain. For Alistair apparently it hadn’t been so painless—a nightmare aftermath of cops and cordons, accusatory parents, intrusive paparazzi, upset employees. As for DeAnne herself, he claimed to have been too busy and distracted to pay her much attention.

Lydia tried again as they finished lunch and hit the same wall of silence. Why, dammit? Did she look like a cop, or reporter? Would it kill him to cough up a recollection? Couldn’t he see that for her this was a huge shock?

For whatever reason, after such a charged beginning their good-bys were abruptly formal. Midway through coffee Alistair announced that Edgar Rowdey was leaving and they needed to catch him. He’d hustled Lydia up to the cash register and out the door, but too late; Rowdey had gone. OK, big disappointment. Still, she’d expected more from him than a stiff hug in the parking lot, mini-kisses on both cheeks like the French, and a wave as they drove off in separate cars.

He did ask “When will I see you again?” but the irony was obvious. She’d given the obvious answer: “You know where to find me.”

6:58 AM. No Mercedes in the parking lot. Those few cars must be the regulars Leo had said might show up before the Back End opened. He left a hidden key rather than come down from his apartment (classic, Lydia thought, living over the shop) just to make coffee for insomniacs.

Really, it would be bad, not good, to find Alistair here. You don’t want a man who’s up with the chickens, do you?

The breakfast rush was so overwhelming that Lydia didn’t get a chance until mid-morning, when the kitchen crew paused for bagels, to notice how miffed she was that he’d never appeared.

She whisked eggs, she chopped celery, she rang up customers. Ten-fifteen. She sensibly made cream of broccoli soup instead of curried cauliflower. (Next time.) Around her Mudge raced like Ben-Hur’s chariot and Dinah moved with the slow majesty of an ocean liner. Eleven-fifteen. Leo praised her soup extravagantly. She suggested they divide tomorrow’s chili, one batch with meat and one without. Twelve-fifteen: rush hour again. Chop, fry, toast, garnish, serve. Still no Alistair.

Two-fifteen. As they peeled off their aprons, Lydia asked Leo the question she’d been formulating since the first egg hit the griddle. “Does your friend Mr. Pope usually eat here, or did I just meet him on a lucky day?”

Leo groaned, dramatizing how hard he’d worked, how his old bones ached. “Istair? You never know. Mostly he comes in to stalk Edgar here.” His hand flicked out and grabbed the writer’s arm. “Edgar, meet my new second cook. Edgar, Lydia Vivaldi. Lydia, Edgar Rowdey.”

She’d noticed the balding, white-bearded man sitting alone at a center table with a book. Cup of Brockli Soop and a Tooner Sallid, was it? He’d been here for breakfast, too. The Ing Muff she remembered; the Scram Egz had left their mark down the front of his faded blue sweatshirt. So this was the friend Alistair had so urgently wanted her to meet, the famous author of intricate, spooky little books that had given her nightmares as a child. Not dead, or English, or ghoulish, as she’d assumed. What to say?

“Hi. Good to meet you.”

He had an admirable handshake, firm and dry. “Welcome to the madhouse,” he drawled. “Your soup is a godsend, dear. Whatever you do, keep this skinflint here away from it, and please don’t quit.” And to Leo: “Treat her with respect, will you? You’re lucky a real chef is willing to set foot in this place. Don’t go sucking her dry and cast her aside like all the others.”

Leo patted his arm. “My biggest fan,” he told Lydia. “You can tell by how he talks to me.” To Rowdey: “Why don’t you keep your mouth shut if you can’t say anything nice? Vicious brute.”

Under their harsh words was an affection Lydia had missed in Leo’s exchanges yesterday with Alistair. This, she perceived, was a real friendship. Alistair, although he’d picked up the Back End’s conversational style, remained outside its inner circle.

She looked with more curiosity at Edgar Rowdey. Would she have recognized him as a man renowned for deadpan tales of violence? Not a chance. Of course there was the egg-stained sweatshirt. But his face too looked more kindly than dangerous. His full lips were rosy as a baby’s cheeks. Sparse white hair, unruly beard, half-glasses sliding down his aquiline nose . . . and blue eyes: not piercingly blue, like Leo’s, but changeably, like the ocean. Like the faded jeans he wore with his once-white sneakers.

“Do you live around here?” she asked him.

“Oh, yes.”

“Just up the road. You can’t miss it,” said Leo. “Big old pile, looks like it’s falling down in a heap. Same as the owner. Whoops! Sorry.”

Rowdey ignored him. “And you?” he asked Lydia.

“So far, the Blue Moon Motel. Leo’s promised to find me a place if I last out the week.”

“Trust him no farther than you can throw him. Ta-ta,” he told them both, and strolled off toward the parking lot.

Lydia watched him leave the path and cross the grass to the Back End’s ornamental pond. On the far rim, where a branch from the giant beech tree beside the restaurant hung low over the water, he folded his arms and gazed into the pool.

The famous author. Possibly soon to be a friend of mine.

A surge of happiness washed over her. This is me, world! This is my new life!

“Gotta watch that fella,” said Leo. “He’s after my frogs.”

“Your frogs?” Lydia had spotted only three goldfish among the water plants.

Leo nodded darkly. “He studied French in college. Probably wants the legs.”

They moved to the kitchen to join the rest of the crew for a quick lunch of leftovers. Lydia helped Dinah store the remaining food while Leo and Mudge went over the day’s receipts. The dishwasher, Bruno, who spoke neither English nor French as far as she could tell, washed the floor, wheeling a tin bucket with rollers, pumping vigorously with a rag mop. Stepping around him, Lydia spotted a familiar profile through the window. Half hidden by beech branches, like a satyr emerging from a sacred grove, stood Alistair Pope.

Would he come in? No, the door was locked.

Why was he here? To see her?

She didn’t dare rush out on her first day. Anyhow, she didn’t want to give him ideas. Or give Leo and the others any excuse for gossip. Surely nobody on earth had ever taken as long as Dinah to fasten a piece of plastic wrap around a bowl! Why didn’t she get proper tubs with lids?

He was still there when Lydia, Dinah, and Mudge emerged, contemplating the frog pond with Edgar Rowdey. Greetings were exchanged. Dinah chaffed Alistair—whom she called Al—for missing lunch. He replied with an insult to her cooking that was too automatic to be offensive. Edgar Rowdey asked Mudge if he planned to make the Tarte again this summer. Mudge said you bet, if it was OK with him and Leo and Dinah. Dinah said it was fine with her as long as Al didn’t get any. Alistair said that was harsh when he hadn’t been getting any all winter. He didn’t even glance at Lydia. It struck her that the Back End was its own kind of frog pond; but what this might mean, especially for him and her, she was too flustered to think.

After what seemed to her a very long and pointless chat, Dinah moved off to her blue Honda sedan and Mudge to his ancient multicolored pick-up truck.

“Mr. Rowdey,” said Lydia. “Leo thinks you’re after his frogs.”

“Oh, too true.”

“Cuisses de grenouille?” said Alistair. “Revolting. But you must call him Edgar. Can’t she? Since you’ve evidently been introduced.”

“By all means,” he murmured. “A pleasure.” Speaking to the frog pond. “I must be off.”

“But we haven’t reached a conclusion,” Alistair objected. He explained to Lydia: “How they get here. Where they go. Some days there are several, some days none.”

She surveyed the little pond. Layers of slate and stones around it created plenty of sunning spots for frogs, in addition to the lily pads in the water. No frogs were visible.

“Do they hop off under the tree, or up into it?” Rowdey elaborated, miming with a gesture.

“Are there tiny caves in the rocks where they hide, like Al Qaeda?” Alistair one-upped.

“Or tunnels? leading to some distant unknown lake?”

“Or does Leo materialize them afresh every morning, like Moses?” Alistair flung up his arms. “Are they conceived in the clouds, heavenly tadpoles, to drop with the gentle rain upon the place beneath?”

Edgar Rowdey pushed up his glasses. “I must,” he repeated, “be off.”

“Well, off you go, then.”

And off he shambled. Lydia and Alistair stood where they were, watching, not looking at each other, until Rowdey and his black VW station wagon—license plate WARDOG—had gone.

Lydia turned first. “Wardog?”

“One of his pseudonyms. E. Dyer Wardog, putative author of his breakout book, Hidden Turnips. Thirteen weeks on the Times best-seller list, banned in three cities, including Boston. Bid on by three movie studios who wanted to turn it into, I don’t know, some kind of animated soft-porn comic thriller. That never happened, thank God, but the advance paid for his house.” He faced her; held out both hands. “Lydia. Come and see the rest of our Elephant Tree.”

She had never encountered a tree so enormous. Judging from its trunk, which truly was as gray, as wrinkled, and half as wide as an elephant, it must be older than Massachusetts. Branches taller than the Back End roof curved down to touch the ground and reascend. New leaves of vivid translucent chartreuse made a shimmering multilayered curtain above and around them. Within this magical bower, she and Alistair were completely concealed.

Staring upward, she felt his arms encircle her, his chest press against her back. Then they were kissing, mouths melting together, entwined in each other, kissing till the cows came home, till the mountains tumbled to the sea, till the stars fell from the sky like tadpoles, till Lydia forgot where she was or who she was and only barely, occasionally, remembered to breathe.

Then they were standing apart, panting; still touching, gasping for air. Her hands were on his waist. His hands stroked her neck, her cheek, her hair.

“I have to go,” he said, with aching tenderness.

“You can’t.” Lydia pictured rolling with him on the damp brown leaf-strewn earth under the tree: Adam and Eve.

“I’m wretchedly late. For a meeting. This blasted film.” He pulled her close again and covered her mouth with his.

Lydia caressed his ear and the small gold ring that hung from it. She felt him shudder against her and draw back. “Oh, god! Lydia! You’re unbelievable. I can’t stand it. Please. Let me see you again. Soon. Very soon.”

He led her out into the world. It was so bright it hurt her eyes. Part of Lydia recalled that this was her workplace, as well as her boss’s home, with windows looking onto this very parking lot. There was Mudge, too, or the bottom half of him, working under his truck. She thrust a hand through her hair, ineffectually, and prayed to the tadpoles in heaven that luck was still on her side.

Wallace Hicks looked at the clock. Quarter to three. Ken had been shut in his office with that man for almost half an hour. What could they be doing?

He thought of him as that man because that was what Dinah Rowan had called him at lunch, so fiercely that Wally had to cough so as not to laugh. Really, it wasn’t funny. No, it really was funny. The other customers at the counter pretended it wasn’t, because they assumed Dinah’s agitation was over his fame, or his race, or his presumptuousness, or all three: a huge black football star, driving a car that cost more than some people’s homes, strolling into the Back End for the second time this week! But that (Wally knew) wasn’t what bristled Dinah’s hackles. Roosevelt Sherman was the only person in Quansett, man or woman, Irish or Wampanoag or Cape Verdean, who outweighed Dinah Rowan.

His first appearance, on Tuesday, counted as a celebrity sighting. The regulars at the front counter had nudged each other in a wave as he passed: Isn’t that . . . ? Neighbors murmured as they wrote their slips or ladled their soup: Hey, did you see . . . ? Only two tourists were gauche enough to ask him for an autograph. When he departed, the normal lunchtime ebb and flow closed behind him like the Red Sea behind the Israelites.

But when he came back this morning, he might have been Moses parting the waves. What’s he doing here? Does he mean to stay? Where? Why? How long? Fred Tiller actually walked up to Roosevelt Sherman’s table and offered his card—whether hoping to funnel some of the man’s riches into a Tiller Homes waterfront estate, or just to show off, no one was certain.

Wallace Hicks had explained to Mr. Sherman that the Frigate was not for sale. Yup, that sure was a realtor’s sign in the window; but if he looked closer, he’d see BOOKS written in above FOR SALE. A marketing gimmick, that’s all. No sirree, Mr. Boose and his bookstore were not in any kind of trouble. Those boxes in the parking lot would be unpacked and shelved real soon. The stacks in the aisles, too. What with folks tromping in and out all day, who had time? Oh, no no, he wasn’t an owner, only an employee. One more local boy who’d crossed the bridge in search of adventure and come back years later like a bad penny. Found one of those Airstreams, like a little old silver blimp— Well, OK, sure. If Mr. Sherman insisted, he’d go ask when Mr. Boose might be free to speak to him.

For one instant Wally feared he’d overdone it. But no; the man wasn’t suspicious, just backing out for some elbow room. Reaching for his cell phone. What did he care about a long-haired, weatherbeaten bookstore clerk who’d returned to the scene of his childhood?

Thirty-two minutes.

According to Dinah, Roosevelt Sherman had turned around the Patriots almost single-handed. Wally didn’t know about that. Yes, the man probably could could squash her like a bug. But it might not be a bad thing if he threw his weight into Quansett.

The bell jingled: customers.

“Caroline! Carlo! Good to see you.”

Air kisses and handshakes were exchanged, although they had just said good-by at Leo’s two hours ago.

And here came Gromit, tags jingling as he wagged up to greet his friends. Ken Boose hadn’t wanted a dog in the shop, until he saw what a magnet Gromit was. Being a black lab, he offered an adoring welcome to everyone. Maybe two customers a month asked why he didn’t look like his cartoon namesake. At least two customers a day confided that they used to have a dog exactly like that.

“What can I do for you folks this fine afternoon?” Wally led them inside, with Gromit close behind. “Sorry about all this mess. Ken keeps swearing he’s gonna hire us some help, soon as he finds the time.”

Carlo was nodding sympathetically. “Only he never finds the time.”

“Mudge would be glad to help out, I’m sure,” said Caroline Penn. “He could probably use the money.”

“Get that truck of his fixed,” Wally agreed. “Take out girls, whatever.”

“Oh.” Caroline’s eyebrow arced into a Nike swoosh. “Speaking of girls! What about Leo’s new sous-chef?”

“Wasn’t that a surprise! What planet do you suppose she dropped from? Boston?”

“Unusual hair.” Carlo scratched Gromit’s ears. “Dinah seems pleased.”

“More rings in one ear than I’ve got in my whole jewelry box.” Caroline’s lobes glittered with hand-blown glass. “Wherever she’s from, her broccoli soup is scrumptious.”

“Is what’s-her-name gone for good, then?”

“Sue. She generally comes back,” said Carlo.

“Like a yo-yo,” said Caroline. “It’s a crime how she’s taken advantage—”

From the office came the short whooping laugh they all recognized as Ken Boose’s: hiu! hiu! hiu!

Caroline arched an inquiring eyebrow at Wally.

“Oh, gosh,” he said. “Sorry, folks. Here I am shooting the breeze, when you must have come in here for a reason. A book? What can I get for you?”

“Ah, yes,” said Carlo. Caroline continued to gaze with lizardlike intensity at the office door. “I’m having a birthday next weekend, and Caroline hoped— Well, you tell Wally what you want.”

“Who’s in there with him?” Caroline asked.

“Well now best wishes, Carlo!”

“Is that the football player Dinah was going on about?”

Wally sighed and conceded. For a moment they eavesdropped in unison; but there was nothing to hear.

“I won’t push, Wally. If you’d rather not say.”

“It appears he’s a reader,” Carlo said cheerfully.

“Not much to say.” Wally leaned on his crystal-headed cane, which he carried mostly to reach books on high shelves. “Aside from yes, his name is Roosevelt Sherman and he used to play for the Pats. Came in here asked me a bunch of questions; wanted to see Ken. There you have it.”

“Dinah said he’s eaten lunch at Leo’s twice this week. Reading the Cape Cod Times. The real estate section.”

“Seeking an investment opportunity, perhaps,” Carlo suggested. “Somewhere to put his winnings.”

“Earnings,” said Wally.

“Of course. No winnings in football.”

“Unless he cheated.” Caroline glanced hopefully at the door.

“Whereas we,” said Carlo, “are seeking a more modest investment opportunity for our earnings, or winnings, namely a book. Caroline?”

What they sought was an early volume of Edgar Rowdey’s that Caroline could have him sign for Carlo. Wally pointed out, to be fair, that if she asked Edgar he’d probably give her the book, and be happy to honor his friend’s birthday. Caroline insisted that would be taking advantage; and after all, the Frigate was their beloved local bookstore.

Wally found the book—a first printing of The Mute Soprano—and rang it up. Carlo and Caroline took their leave. 3:15 PM. Ken Boose and Rosey Sherman still hadn’t come out of the office. If I’m right, Wally thought, this is gonna rattle Quansett like an earthquake. They sure as heck better know what they’re doing.