of the crossfire,” interjected a tall, skinny man wearing a black beret, black pants, a black polo shirt, and a black blazer. He sat next to Evangeline.
“Keep my head down? What crossfire?”
“Ignore Maurice. He always looks at the dark side,” Evangeline responded.
“I do not!” Maurice was indignant. “I’m just saying.” He was craggy-faced, with large features—large, brown, expressive eyes; prominent nose; large mouth.
“Who are they?” Jane nodded at the couple holding court at the center of the Lilly Pulitzer/plaid pants table. He was a bantam rooster of a man with a thick crop of dark hair. Jane had noticed him in the cafeteria line. He was short but moved like a much larger man with his chest puffed out and a bit of a swagger. The luxuriant hair must have been an asset when he was young, and now worked even more magic, surrounded as he was by the follicly challenged. She was petite and very tan. Her face was wrinkle-free and frozen, as if she were already embalmed. Her hair didn’t move when her head did. In fact, it didn’t move at all.
Evangeline rolled her eyes. “Bill Finnerty and Doris Milner. Doris is a widow. Bill’s wife’s over in the long-term care facility.”
“Alzheimer’s,” the pretty dancer sitting across from Jane whispered.
“I hear she’s fakin’ it just to get a break from being married to that jerk,” Maurice added.
“Maurice!” Evangeline colored. “What an awful thing to say.”
“How sad for Mr. Finnerty,” Jane said.
“Sad for us,” Maurice corrected. “He takes his aggression out on innocent golfers and anyone else who disturbs his sensibilities.”
Jane looked around the dining hall and suddenly was overwhelmed by a feeling of déjà vu. The golf jocks sitting with the expensively dressed popular girls. The leather-jacketed bad boys with the greased-back hair. The tables full of couples. The lonely people sitting by themselves, staring at their trays. The dancers and the artists in the corner, Jane sitting among them. She had thought her corporate experience was what she brought to this assignment. But now it was obvious. Walden Spring was high school.
“Who disturbs Bill’s sensibilities?” Jane asked.
“Like Mike Witkowski over there.” Maurice gestured to the man in black who’d been smoking in the billiard room. He held court at the leather jacket table and didn’t seem to have a care in the world. “Bill hates Mike. And vice versa. So Bill rules the golf course and Mike runs the game room. Nobody can use either area unless they’re in the right crowd.”
“That’s why I took up dancercise,” one of the men at the table said. “I haven’t been able to get a tee time all summer.”
“None of us go in the game room. There are some great exercise games on those video players in there, and I’d love to use them, but that’s Mike’s territory,” the pretty woman who’d led the dance class added.
“And Doris thinks someone died and made her Queen of Walden Spring,” Evangeline huffed.
“They’re all making our lives miserable,” Maurice said.
At that moment, Mike Witkowski stood and bussed his tray, walking close, very close, behind where Bill and Doris were seated. Mike’s tray tilted, ever so slightly, a devilish glint in his eye. A glass tipped to its side and rolled, sprinkling liquid on Bill’s beautiful head of hair.
Bill jumped up and grabbed Mike by the T-shirt. Mike’s tray clattered to the floor. The next minute Bill and Mike were rolling on the ground. The other plaid-pants guys rushed toward them, while the leather-jackets stood on the perimeter, lobbing dessert items into the melee.
“FOOD fight!” someone yelled.
“Oh, Lord.” Maurice sighed. “Here we go again.”
Outside, another golf cart pulled up, and four burley men in groundskeepers’ uniforms jumped out and ran toward the fight. Everyone else headed for the exits as fast as they could go, which in some cases wasn’t very.
Evangeline grabbed Jane by the arm and pulled her toward the main stairwell. The press of the crowd going up the stairs took Jane’s breath away. She had a vision of a slow-motion soccer riot. When they got to the top of the stairs, Jane didn’t stop. The high school feeling had unsettled her. She bid Evangeline and Maurice a hasty farewell and hustled out of the clubhouse. Paul Peavey hurried past, headed for the melee. Jane put her thumb to her mouth, pinky to her ear, and mouthed, “I’ll call you.” She continued straight to Old Reliable, started the engine, and peeled out of the Walden Spring parking lot.
She was almost to the end of the long, winding drive, safe in the real world, when earsplitting noise surrounded her. Mike Witkowski and his gang pulled their motorcycles up on either side of her car and then roared past. There were eight of them. Nine if you counted Leon with his oxygen tank, riding in Mike’s sidecar.
Chapter Three
Jane was almost late to her Getadate meetings that afternoon at Peet’s. When she’d jumped into Old Reliable in the Walden Spring parking lot, she noticed a scary-looking white glob on the shoulder of her good, pink blouse that had mercifully turned out to be vanilla pudding, a consequence of the food fight. By the time she’d stopped at home to change and found a place to park in always congested Harvard Square, she had to hustle to get to the coffee shop before the first Getadate did.
She ordered her decaf coffee drink as soon as she got inside, so there wouldn’t be any weirdness about who paid. The coffee ordering always seemed unnecessarily complex but the petite, dark-haired barista was a pro who deftly guided Jane through the process. She gave Jane an ear-to-ear grin as she handed over the steaming cup.
Jane settled at a table in the middle of the room, in a seat facing the door, and then checked her phone for the list of date names Phyllis had sent her.
It took a few moments for Jane to recognize Calvin Marquart, but she felt she could be excused because the photo on his profile had been taken at least twenty years earlier. And he was hidden behind his giant mobility scooter.
He spotted her and drove straight to her table. “I’ll be honest,” he said before introducing himself and at a volume not usually used indoors. “My kids don’t think I should be living alone. They want to put me in a home. They call it a ‘community, ’ but it’s a home. I thought if I could get married again to someone a little younger, I could stay in my house. I’m willing to fight my kids to leave you something for your trouble.” He paused for a moment and looked at Jane appraisingly. “But you don’t look desperate enough.”
“You’re right,” Jane said. “I’m not.”
“Thanks for your time.” And with that, he rolled, very slowly, out of Phyllis’s life. Behind the counter, the little barista stood, hands out, palms up, the universal symbol for “Whaddaya gonna do?”
Mark Pearson arrived at two forty-five. Although he seemed like an okay guy, his comb-over was so distracting, Jane barely heard a word he said. She found herself staring at it and daydreaming about its construction. It was pulled up and wound around in a structure that would have made Gustave Eiffel proud. Jane was not the least surprised to learn that Mr. Pearson was a civil engineer.
She
