Jeffery Deaver - Ice Cold

When she returned from High’s forty minutes later, the truck was still there.

The next day was Thursday. It rained all day, and Judith decided not to walk anywhere, but to stay inside and watch the hearings.

Friday night Judith and Patrick walked down their front walk, traveled perhaps fifteen yards, and went up the Delaneys’ front walk. Judith carried a loaf of zucchini bread, although the Delaneys had come to her dinner empty-handed. But proper people, truly mannerly people, did not come empty-handed in her experience.

“I wonder what they’ll serve us,” she said.

“Probably fish sticks,” Patrick said mournfully. “I thought I was leaving this behind when I married you.”

They were both surprised—Patrick happily, Judith ambivalently—to learn that Frances Delaney was an outstanding cook. Yes, dinner was fish, but poached salmon, served with little potatoes unlike anything Judith had have ever tasted, something called “fingerlings.” The salad was served after the main course, which Frances said was how the French ate.

Her husband rolled his eyes. “Judith studied cooking in France. I promised not to bitch about her pretendions as long as her grub is good.”

“Pretendions?” Judith couldn’t help asking. “France?”

“You know,” Jack said. “Putting on airs. Pretendions.”

“Oh, pretensions,” she said, then hated herself for it. She was trying to show Frances Delaney, by example, how a well-mannered person behaved, but Frances Delaney seemed to be one step ahead of her. She was even better dressed than Judith tonight, in a modest, knee-length lace shift that exposed only her arms. As she moved back and forth between the dining room and the kitchen, serving dinner with an ease that Judith had yet to master, Frances seemed not to notice Jack Delaney’s proprietary pats on her rear end. Judith did, though. She also noticed, with a sinking heart, Patrick’s approving looks at the house, the furniture. He probably thought this dining room set was classy.

“What the fuck is in my salad?” Jack Delaney held up a fork with a yellow blossom on the tines.

Judith had wondered the same thing, but would never have questioned it and would certainly never have used that word, which she did not remember ever hearing spoken aloud before, except through the walls late at night, when the Mulcahys were fighting. At least, they started out fighting. Where they ended up was more shocking still.

“Nasturtiums,” Frances said. “They’re edible.”

“They’re flowers,” her husband sputtered. Patrick looked hopeful, as if his host’s temper tantrum might get him off the hook.

“Don’t forget your promise to me, Jack,” Frances said, her tone even and polite. “To try anything once.”

“And don’t forget yours to me,” he said. “Try everything once.”

Frances seemed paler than usual, but she said nothing, not even when he patted her rear end again, leaving a grease stain on the white lace that she had managed to keep spotless while preparing and serving this meal.

“Hey, Pat, do you know what they call the alley behind our houses?” Jack Delaney did not wait for an answer. “Bonk Alley! Could there be a better place to live? Bonk Alley. ”

“I don’t get it,” Judith said. She didn’t. She looked at Patrick. Patrick busied himself, making a little pile of flowers on the side of his plate. He was a polite man, but he had his limits.

“Bonk—it’s slang for screwing.” In some ways, Judith found that Jack’s use of that word even more shocking. “Something I picked up from the Brits.”

“Brits?”

“You know, when I was in London. God, that city is a shithole. They’re pre-verted, too, the Brits. Think they’re so superior to us. But they’re the preverts.”

“Perverts,” Frances said quietly. “The word is pervert.”

“Well, you would know honey. You would know.”

Jack fondled his wife’s rear end again as she collected the salad plates, making way for dessert. “Coffee?” she asked brightly. She made it in a Chemex, Judith observed. Judith and Patrick normally drank Nescafé. He said he preferred it, yet he had seconds of Frances’s coffee.

Frances did not serve Judith’s zucchini bread for dessert. Judith could not fault her for this lapse, as Frances had prepared something called tiramisu. “Could you get the recipe for this?” Patrick asked Judith.

“I’m not sure I could make something like this,” Judith said. She couldn’t even spell it.

“It’s not so hard,” Frances said, “if you use store-bought lady fingers.”

“Do you?” Judith asked.

A slight pause. “Sometimes I do, sometimes I don’t. I made these. But then, I like to bake. It fills the long afternoons.”

Judith felt she had lost a contest, although she wasn’t sure what it was, or who she was playing. She was almost tempted to make a crack about long afternoons, but she knew the women were in this together.

At least Judith could help clean the kitchen. She scraped the plates into the trash—the Delaney house did not have a garbage disposal, score one for her—and tried not to think about the white Silber’s bakery box she saw in the can, a box that clearly had held something nowhere in evidence. Lady fingers?

They parted, promising to do it again, knowing they never would.

The next time Judith walked to High’s, she did not return via what she now knew was Bonk Alley. She did not want to see the white Lord Baltimore truck coming and going, did not want to risk being taken into Frances Delaney’s confidences, confidences she sensed would be too heavy for her to bear. August passed. The gavel came down on the hearings and the country went on, as Judith knew it would. Everything goes on. The weather turned glorious around Labor Day, just in time to mock the children returning to school. The days were shorter, technically, although they still felt long to Judith. The vice president resigned, and while some Marylanders felt ashamed of their native son, Judith and Patrick, Stonewall Democrats, toasted the news, he with a beer, she with vermouth, which she had bought under the mistaken belief it would taste like the white wine that Frances Delaney had served. But the two couples, the Monaghans and the Delaneys, did not socialize again. Nor did the two women. Judith kept to the street, eyes straight ahead, trying not to see or hear the secrets all around her.

But it was impossible to miss, ten days before Halloween, the ambulance parked outside the Delaney house, lights twirling, Jack Delaney being carried out in a gurney, face covered. All the women of the neighborhood gathered to watch, somber yet excited in some horrible way. At least something was happening.

“Is he okay?” Judith asked Katie O’Connell, who may or may not be pregnant with number six under her shapeless coat. Probably better not to ask.

“He’s dead,” she said. “They don’t pull the sheet up over your face unless you’re dead, Judith.”

“But how?”

“Who knows? Heart attack probably. That’s what a man gets, taking up with a younger woman.”

“You mean they—in the afternoon?” The O’Connells shared a wall with the Delaneys. She shrugged.

The news would not make its way up and down the street for several days. Frances Delaney, in her quest for culinary sophistication, had harvested the yew berry bushes at a neighbor’s house a block over, asking permission before she did so. She had researched the berries carefully at the Catonsville library—or so she thought. It turned out the berries themselves were not poisonous if prepared properly. But everything else about the plant was so toxic that any preparation was risky. She had made her husband a tart. The only reason she hadn’t eaten any was because she had given up desserts, worried about her weight. He had awakened with a stomachache and called in sick to work, but Frances hadn’t thought it could be that serious. He was dead by the time the ambulance arrived.