Diane Davidson - Chopping Spree

“ I helped Aunt Linda find the new doctor who did her so much good,” Page was insisting, gesticulating with her wineglass. “ I fired that cardiologist who’d misdiagnosed her, and I was the one who ordered new tests and hired her a new cook. You couldn’t be bothered, Pam, because you were too busy trying on nighties for men twenty years your senior—”

“Excuse me, but at least I have a job,” Pam retorted, then slugged down wine. “That’s unlike some people, who live off others’ unearned wealth.”

“Oh, so you’re a communist now?”

“Furthermore,” Pam steamed on, “ I didn’t go rifling through Aunt Linda’s cobalt stems until I found the goblet where she hid the diamond pendant—”

“That diamond pendant was stolen!”

“By whom?”

“The cook!”

“Would that be the same cook you hired?”

“I didn’t know she was a thief!” Page screamed.

Pam took another noisy gulp of Burgundy. “Excuse me , but I think you know all about thieves!”

“Exactly what are you insinuating?”

“You’ve got that pendant and I want to know where it is!”

“Shane,” I said in a low voice. “I’ll need payment before we can proceed.”

Shane’s face was frozen in pain. While the two sisters screamed, he hauled himself out of the love seat and motioned for me to follow him down the hall. Intent on their argument, Pam and Page did not register our departure, which was probably for the best.

“These are the bathrooms, in case clients ask,” he told me, pointing to each side of the hallway. I told him this was good to know. I reached in to flip on the lights of a black-and-silver rest room on one side, and a peach-papered and marble-countered one on the opposite wall. I never broke my stride. I didn’t want to give Shane the chance to get distracted—again.

“OK, now we need to be quiet and quick,” he warned, as he creaked open a door that bore a floral-bordered needlepoint sign: Page’s Place.

“You’re going to take the ring out of your wife’s room?” I asked, incredulous. I looked around the room. Page’s Place was as disheveled as Pam’s Audi. Clothes spilled out of drawers of white-and-gold French Provincial furniture; open closet doors revealed a heap of discarded coats next to a heap of shoes; the plush cream-and-floral carpeting was so paved with discarded stockings and rejected lingerie that it was like a Victoria’s Secret obstacle course.

Like her sister, Page was a dedicated slob.

Shane put his finger to his lips, then paused to listen. Page and Pam were now squabbling over who Aunt Linda would have wanted to have the cobalt.

“I bought the ring for her birthday next month,” Shane told me. “But she always goes through my stuff, and she found it and took it.” His nose wrinkled. “See, one time I had to take one of her presents back and she’d already gone through my stuff to find out what she was getting. When the bills came in, I decided to return one gift, an emerald bracelet. She was furious and…well, you’ve seen how Page is when she’s furious. So now, no matter how good I get at hiding stuff, she gets better at finding it, and she takes her presents, so I won’t decide I’ve been too extravagant and return them. What she doesn’t realize is that I’ve gotten better at going through her stuff, so—” He stopped when he saw my mouth hanging open. “What’s the matter?”

“You said we needed to be quiet and quick.”

Shane took long, zigzagging steps across the large room, avoiding discarded outfits as if they were piles of elephant dung. Since my legs weren’t quite as long as his, I had a hard time following him.

“Here we go,” Shane announced, pulling open a drawer dripping with slithery nightgowns. He groped in the back of the drawer for a silk sachet of potpourri. “This’ll just take a sec,” he promised.

He untied the lace drawstring of the sachet, sending bits of dried rose petals fluttering to the floor. His stealthy behavior was making me so nervous that I averted my eyes hastily and looked around the room. Four lacy bras, black, beige, white, and pink, were laid out on the chaise lounge. Clearly, Page hadn’t been able to decide among them. All four were of the amply padded variety. Page Stockham may or may not have been a thief, as her sister claimed, but there was no doubt the woman stretched the truth.

“Here we go,” declared Shane, as he extracted something shiny from the potpourri. More dried petals fluttered to the carpet. He handed me the ring—it was a dazzling trio of jewels: sapphire, diamond, and ruby—and told me to try it on.

“It looks like something for the Fourth of July,” I commented, as I obeyed. The ring was a tad big for me. Not that it mattered, because this was collateral. I took it off and slipped it deep into my skirt pocket.

“Yeah, well,” Shane muttered, as he hastily reassembled the gutted potpourri bag, tucked it back into the drawer, and picked at the dried bits at his feet. “Let’s just hope she doesn’t go looking for it before her birthday.”

“Shane,” I protested, as he hustled me down the hallway. “I really don’t think this—”

“Aunt Linda never intended for you to have the chandelier! We specifically talked about it when I was visiting her!” Pam’s voice shrilled from the living room.

“You mean, visiting her when you were ten ?” Page shrieked back.

The doorbell rang. Peeping through the hole, Shane gasped. “It’s four of my investors!” he said, trying to be heard above the yelling. “Can’t you do one of those distractions you mentioned?” he begged me. The ringer bonged again: Page and Pam raised their hollering a notch. “Just do something, will you?” Shane implored desperately.

I zipped into the kitchen, where Liz was spooning out juices and melted fat from the standing rib roast pan. The roast wasn’t quite done, of course, but I really needed to start on the gravy from the drippings Liz was gathering. The doorbell chimed again. OK, first things first. When in doubt, reach for a cliché. I nabbed a pack of matches, hopped up on a chair, teetered perilously toward a stack of bookshelves, and lit the entire pack without closing the cover before striking. Then I thrust my little conflagration up to the kitchen smoke alarm.

Within seconds, the pealing of the alarm made me think I would go prematurely deaf. But the alarm certainly had the desired effect. I heard Pam screeching to Shane for her car keys. Shane, his face stricken, appeared at the kitchen door, while I imitated one of the Broncos’ razzle-dazzle plays by doing a one-handed toss of the keys to him, while keeping my little book of matches held high.

Over the racket Liz cried, “Goldy, what the hell are you doing?” Still, she had the presence of mind to slam the kitchen door shut behind Shane. We heard Pam make a noisy, stamping exit out the front door—so much for keeping the investors out of the fracas—while shouting, “I’ll be back to talk about this some more! I’m not done!” Liz actually giggled.

Next Page’s voice shrieked at the kitchen door, accompanied by her pounding on same. Liz cried, “Please go to a separate part of the house, Mrs. Stockham! We don’t want the smoke smell to wreck your—uh—cobalt stuff! Not to worry! We’ve got the situation under control!”

Page stamped away. I hoped it was not in the direction of Page’s Place, where she might want to try on some of her jewelry to calm herself down. But I had no time to worry about that: The chatter from arriving guests was unmistakable. My mind chattered, too, when a volume on an upper bookshelf snagged my attention. Unfortunately, it was then that the fiery matches reached my fingertips. I yelped and flung the ball of flame toward the sink. It hit the roast, landed in the pan, and ignited. Without thinking, Liz grabbed an open bottle of Burgundy and poured it over the flames, and a genuine explosion rocked the kitchen. I screamed, jumped down from the chair, nabbed an extra-large bottle of Evian, and dumped the contents on our beautiful, blazing, twenty-dollar-a-pound prime beef.