Yeah, call her a throwback. She sighed.
“What was that, Shelley, dear?”
Shelley looked up. Sitting at the head of the conference table was Lionel Toynbee. Reading glasses slipped down his pencil-thin nose.
Lionel, founder and owner of Dream Villas, was checking the proofs for the latest newsletter of his travel firm that specialized in renting luxury European estates—estates that featured top-of-the-line plumbing against the backdrop of fading Flemish tapestries, grand marble staircases and massive gated entrances, preferably emblazoned with crests for families like Romanov and Medici, or even those parvenus, the Windsors.
“Shelley?” Lionel repeated, turning her two-syllable name into three, so that it became “She-el-ley.” It was a habit that she found particularly annoying, second only to the measly salary Lionel paid her. “The piece on the Montfort chateau comes across very well.”
Bowled over by Lionel’s rare outburst of praise, Shelley almost fell off her chair. But then she quickly realized the reference wasn’t to her prose. It was about the seventeenth-century villa built on the ruins of a medieval convent on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence in southern France.
“But take out that line about the cool, damp walls of the subterranean caves. They make the place seem old. I was just there recently, as I’m sure you recall, and the feeling was one of timeless grandeur, not moldy decay.” Lionel tsked. “In theory, customers say they like atmospheric old things like caves, but they don’t really want to know the details. Talk up the whirlpools in the bathrooms instead. More jet sprays, less caves.” He turned to the next page.
“Fewer caves,” Shelley corrected under her breath, the curse of having a mother who was a tenth-grade English teacher. She took her blue pen and deleted the line and was about to flip the page when her eyes rested on a quotation from Madame la Comtesse de Montfort herself. Shelley stared at the words: “To savor the snow-white blossoms of the almond trees that cover the hills in springtime is to tantalize the senses with a pleasure so exquisite, it marks the soul ever after.”
She saw the passage was missing a closing quotation mark and was about to make a notation when she stopped and reflected. Would she, Shelley wondered, ever be able to forget the world of missing punctuation marks and experience a pleasure so exquisite it would mark her soul ever after?
The fax machine in the conference room hummed into action. She looked up. Was it a sign from above?
The cover sheet had a handwritten message scrawled in large letters: “MONSIEUR TOYNBEE. URGENT. PERSONAL.”
“Looks like something for you, Lionel.” She passed it across the table.
Lionel moved his lips as he read silently, then slowly lowered the fax to the table. “My God. Françoise, the comtesse de Montfort, has died.” He removed the yellow Hermès silk ascot from around his neck and patted the moist sheen that had popped out on his baby-smooth forehead.
Speaking of baby-smooth, Shelley had recently discovered a bill from a society dermatologist in the accounts payable folder of her desk drawer. But the evidence for BOTOX injections and dermabrasion was beside the point, especially in light of Lionel’s obvious distress—the ascot was, after all, silk. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I know you and Madame la Comtesse go back a long way.”
Lionel strummed his fingers on the fax. After a moment he looked up. “Wha-at? Oh, it’s not that. It’s the chateau. It’s aw-aw-ful! The family is threatening to take the property out of our catalogue before the start of high season.”
1
“YOU’LL NEVER GUESS WHAT happened today.” Shelley slid into the booth at the Down Home Diner and looked up. “Oh, Paul.” She pulled a wad of paper napkins out of the dispenser on the table. “If you’re not going to bother to wait to eat, could you at least not drip your cheesesteak all over the place?”
Paul Gufstavsen, the pride of St. Cloud, Minnesota, took the napkins and swallowed. “Listen, I’ve just come off a double shift at the hospital, so don’t complain. The important thing is I came.”
“From what I understand, you always were a bit premature.” The comment came from the horsey-looking woman who’d just arrived. She gave Paul an overly sweet smile that was anything but nice before turning her attention to Shelley. “Move over, girlfriend, I’m starving.”
Shelley scooted down while Abigail Braithwaite stashed her briefcase under the table and sidled the straight skirt of her St. John suit along the bench. Abigail had recently been made partner in a white-shoe law firm and was also an heir to a fortune based on little things—coal, steel and the building of the transcontinental railroad. So, naturally she could afford to wear St. John suits. Shelley’s couture, on the other hand, was exclusively T.J. Maxx.
Shelley waved off the waitress’s offer of menus and waggled her finger in Paul’s direction. “I’ll have what he’s eating but with Cheez Whiz and onions.”
Abigail nodded. “You can get me the same.” She held off until the waitress left before flaring her nostrils at Paul. “Only a heathen—or someone from the hinterland—would have a cheesesteak without Cheez Whiz and onions.”
Paul munched, undisturbed. “My midwestern heritage is a burden I proudly bear. Besides, I seriously doubt that cheesesteaks were a staple of your tony family, even if they do come from the area. Tell me again. Where exactly is the family estate located along the Main Line?” He turned a puzzled brow in her direction. “I seem to have forgotten.”
Abigail sat up straighter, if such a thing were possible. “Stop trying to act the innocent. It’s Haverford, as well you know, having visited more than once when you and Shelley were what I can only euphemistically call an item. Thank God she saw the error of her ways and told you to take your little stethoscope elsewhere.”
Shelley cleared her throat to restore order. “Abby, stop picking on Paul. Anyway, as you well know, our breakup was entirely amicable.” Translation: she no longer got sex, but she still picked up his dry cleaning.
Not that Shelley’s comments would in any way establish a permanent détente. To say that Abby, her best friend, did not get along with Paul was the understatement of the year. Even Abigail’s initial evaluation had been less than enthusiastic. “I can understand the appeal of his blond, Scandinavian good looks and his above-average intelligence, but beyond that—I mean, if he’s going to be a doctor, does he have to be an ear, nose and throat specialist?”
And when Shelley related these comments back to Paul—she had been in that stage of their relationship when she thought they should share all—he had responded, “I don’t know where she comes off criticizing me. Not when she talks about going to Brandeis instead of Bryn Mawr as her act of rebellion—a gesture undoubtedly lost on the vast majority of the population. Hell—” a rare example of Paul blaspheming and evidence of his rancor “—I don’t even get it.”
The relationship had only deteriorated over time. No matter. She needed their attention—divided or otherwise—now.
“If you two ever stopped to listen to yourselves, you’d realize you sound like something out of a bad Tennessee Williams play—without benefit of an intermission,” Shelley forged on. “And I really need you to focus on something else for a change—me.”
Abigail
