Fast Women

  “I’ve never seen anything like it,” Margie said over Suze’s shoulder. “And I was around in the seventies.”

  “It’s English.” Nell unwrapped another piece, a long-legged sugar bowl, the spindly legs crossed at the knees and the feet shod in huge yellow shoes. “My mom was English. We’d go over there to spend a couple of weeks every summer. These made me laugh, so my aunt and grandmother started sending pieces to me for birthdays and Christmases.”

  Suze unwrapped another little round cup, this one with longer legs, stretched out as if they were running.

  “That’s called Running Ware,” Nell said and then looked up startled when something thudded in the kitchen. “Where’s Marlene?” she said, and Marlene picked up her long, narrow head on the daybed and looked to see if food was involved. “Just checking, baby,” Nell said, and Marlene sighed and put her nose into the chenille again.

  Suze put the running cup on the floor beside her. It looked as though it was covering ground. “I love these. Do they all look like this?”

  “Different-colored shoes and socks,” Nell said. “I think I’m going to have to keep them in the kitchen, assuming I still have a kitchen when they’re finished in there.” She was unpacking a teapot with striped socks and black Mary Janes. “The hutch is full of Clarice and Susie.”

  “Do you have room in the kitchen?” Margie said.

  Nell frowned. “I don’t know. Maybe if I put up a shelf—”

  “Chloe has the most darling shelves in The Cup,” Margie said. “She edged them with the plastic stuff that looks like crochet.…”

  While Margie burbled on about the teashop, Suze unpacked the rest of the pieces, matching teacups to teapots and sugar bowls and creamers. At the bottom of the box, Suze found Nell’s family photo album and passed it over to her, and Margie took it and began to leaf through it as Suze lined up the running egg cups in a line and laughed. There were nine of them, some with striped socks and some with checked and some with dots, all running hell-bent for leather someplace else.

  “I have to have copies made of all those pictures,” Nell was saying to Margie. “Jase should have an album, too.”

  “Where do you get these cups?” Suze said, breaking into the conversation. “I want some.”

  “England,” Nell said. “Antique and secondhand stores mostly. Or eBay, the online auction site. They show up there pretty often.”

  “How much?”

  “Plain egg cups are about thirty or forty dollars,” Nell said. “The running ones come a bit higher. Maybe fifty.”

  “Fifty dollars for an egg cup?” Margie said.

  “I want these in my china cabinet,” Suze said, tracing the fat, smooth edge of the nearest cup. “It’s full of butt-ugly Spode.”

  “You can have them,” Nell said. “Early birthday present.”

  “No, they’re too much,” Suze said, and thought, If I got a job, I could pay for them myself. In the kitchen, something else thudded. Detective work. Nell had told her that the McKennas could use her as a decoy, but she’d known Jack would have a fit, so she’d said no. But now there were these cups.… “Can I buy these one at a time? Pay for them as I go?”

  “Sure,” Nell said, looking a little taken aback. “Or take them now and pay me later.”

  “No,” Suze said. “I want to earn them. One at a time.”

  “The Dysart Spode is beautiful,” Margie said, sounding a little grumpy. “I don’t see why—”

  “You want it?” Suze said. “It’s yours.”

  “I have my Desert Rose,” Margie said. “But that beautiful blue—”

  “Have you ever looked at those plates?” Suze picked up the cup with the mauve shoes, and her heart beat faster. It had thin blue lines around the top of the socks. It was going to look great running amok among the Spode. “They’re from a series called the British Sporting Set, and the pictures on them are awful. There’s one called ‘Death of the Bear.’”

  “You’re kidding,” Nell said. “I’ve been eating off it for years at holidays, but I never looked at it.”

  “There’s another one called ‘Girl at the Well,’” Suze said. “She looks like she’s going to throw herself in. I get very depressed looking at my china.”

  “The running cups are yours,” Nell said.

  Suze put the mauve cup down and felt immeasurably lighter. She was going to have to get a job now. She had a future that didn’t involve going to school and waiting for Jack to get home. She was doing something.

  “Thank you. I will.” She took a deep breath. “So Margie, how many days a week is this shop open? Budge is going to go nuts without you on the weekends.”

  “Just on Saturdays,” Margie said, her face clearing. “And only in the afternoons all week. It’s a darling job.…”

  Suze stared at the egg cups while Margie burbled on. They strode across the floor, confident and sure. On the move.

  “You know, Margie,” Nell said, and her voice sounded so odd that Suze looked up to watch her. “If you have a photo album, I could take it in when I take this one in to get the duplicates. You, too, Suze. That way if anything happened, you’d have a spare.”

  Suze stared at her, and Nell’s eyes slid away. She put that album in the bottom of the box on purpose, Suze thought.

  “Is it expensive?” Margie was saying. “I’m sort of broke. Budge says I should declare Stewart dead and collect his insurance since Stewart spent all my inheritance, but that doesn’t seem right. I’m not even sure he’s dead.”

  Suze shifted her surprise from Nell to Margie. “You need money?”

  “I don’t need it,” Margie said. “Yet. And he could be dead. Of course, he could not be, too.”

  “The photo place might give me a deal if I took two in,” Nell said, her voice overly bright. “You could pay me later, like Suze. It’s no trouble.”

  “Well, okay,” Margie said. “It is a good idea. I’ll bring it in to work tomorrow.”

  “Good,” Nell said, her voice so chirpy it broke.

  Suze tried to catch her eye again, and Nell said, “We should have coffee,” and stood up.

  Suze stood up to follow her, but then Gabe came out of the kitchen, and she pulled him aside. “Listen,” she said as he looked at her, startled. “Nell said once that you might need some help on your decoy work. Is the job still open?”

  “Sure,” he said, a little wary. “We’ve got one Thursday night.”

  “Where and when?” Suze said. “I’ll be there.”

  * * *

  Nell kept an eye on Gabe and Suze from the kitchen doorway. If she knew Gabe, he was pumping her for something. “Hey,” she called out to him and heard Suze say, “Thank you,” before Gabe came over to her, and she drew him into the kitchen. “What are you to talking to Suze about?”

  “She was talking to me,” Gabe said. “She wants to do decoy work.”

  “What?” Riley said, from behind them.

  “Jack’s not going to be happy,” Nell said.

  Gabe shrugged. “That’s Suze’s problem.”

  “And mine,” Riley said. “I do most of the damn decoys. Why—”

  “Ignore him,” Gabe told Nell. “He’s frustrated because we have found exactly nothing. We had high hopes for the basement, but the door to it has been nailed shut since World War II.”

  “I asked about that,” Nell said. “Doris likes the basement to herself. She makes wreaths down there.”

  “Wreaths,” Gabe said, as if he wasn’t sure what to do with that. “Okay. You’re sure Lynnie didn’t leave anything that you threw out?”

  “If she left anything, Doris took it,” Nell said. “The place was empty when I moved in.

  “Doris,” Gabe said and looked at Riley.

  “Oh, thank you very much, no,” he said. “Make Nell do it. It’s her landlady.”

  “Ask Doris what she found,” Gabe said to Nell.

  “Sure,” Nell said. “And then when she evicts me for suggesting she stole from Lynnie
, Marlene and I will come live with you.”

  “Good idea,” Gabe said, and he sounded serious. “You should come back with us, just in case your prowler comes back to search again. Chloe’s place has locks that’ll keep out anybody, and she’d love to have you.”

  Nell looked around her apartment. Her apartment. “I just moved in. My china’s unpacked. Really, I’m fine.”

  “You’d be safer next door to us,” Gabe said. “If anything happened, we could get to you in a minute.”

  That did sound appealing, but it wouldn’t be her place. “No,” she said. “Thank you, but no. We don’t even know that the guy who broke in here knew I was here.”

  “I’d still feel better with you next door,” Gabe said, but Nell wouldn’t go.

  Later that night, when Budge had collected a reluctant Margie, when Suze had climbed into her yellow Beetle with a parting shot at Riley and a fishy look at Nell, and when Gabe had tried one more time to talk her into moving to Chloe’s and then left, Nell patted Marlene and said, “Okay, puppy, anybody who comes through that door, you go for the throat.”

  Marlene sashayed her butt deeper into the chenille.

  “Unless it’s Gabe,” Nell said. “He’s on our side.”

  Chapter Ten

  With her china unpacked and her apartment livable and her midnight invader foiled, Nell turned her attention to the office. Gabe had been grateful when she’d brought him Margie’s photo album since it had several good pictures of Helena wearing her diamonds—earrings, necklace, bracelet, brooch, and ring—and even more grateful when she started organizing the freezer full of files. Unfortunately, he wasn’t grateful enough to give her a free hand with the office, so she took matters into her own hands and painted the bathroom walls a pale dove gray with gold trim along the ceiling. “Very fancy,” was all Gabe said, so she went on, surprising him one afternoon when he came back to find her on a ladder and Suze underneath, painting the reception room walls a soft gold. She braced herself, but all he said was, “If you fall off the ladder, you’re on your own,” and went into his office. “Not chatty, is he?” Suze said, and Nell said, “He’s depressed about a case that’s not going well.” She did her damnedest to cheer him up, keeping his business running seamlessly and his coffee cup filled, playing Dean Martin and Frank Sinatra in the outer office and swiping almond cookies from Margie for him in the afternoon, but he didn’t seem to notice, ignoring her if she worked at something he asked her to do, yelling if she changed something without checking with him first. “I could dance naked for that man on his desk,” she told Suze at Halloween, “and all he’d say is, ‘Damn it, Nell, you’re stepping on the reports.’ Not that I want to dance naked for him. That’s just an expression.”

  “Try it,” Suze said, adjusting Marlene’s pumpkin costume while Marlene glowered. “There, doesn’t she look cute?”

  Marlene looked like a rabid orange marshmallow peanut.

  “Gabe looks like that every time I improve something,” Nell said.

  Still, he let her get away with small things, and the place started looking a lot better. The only effective opposition she encountered was from Riley when she moved the ugly bird on the filing cabinet to the basement. “This,” Riley said when he brought it back, “is the Maltese Falcon, and it stays.” “Oh, please,” she’d said, but when she appealed to Gabe, he said, “Leave the bird alone, Eleanor,” so she gave up and it brooded over her once again from the filing cabinet.

  The rest of the agency work went well, the background checks and routine divorce work that both Gabe and Riley did so well that they turned away jobs because they couldn’t handle it all. Even the decoy work with Suze was a success, although Riley made her wear suits after the first one. “It is just not fair to send that woman into a bar in a sweater,” he told Gabe and Nell. “It’s entrapment.” So the next time Suze went out, she wore one of Nell’s gray suits, her pale hair pulled back in a chignon, and, if anything, looked even sexier. “It’s that Grace Kelly thing she’s got going,” Riley said, but all Suze said was, “I love this look,” and Nell gave her all her old suits, the grays and grayed-blues and charcoal blacks that made Suze look like a sophisticated and potentially dangerous woman instead of a college kid. Suze said Jack hated them, but she seemed to feel that was a plus, so Nell didn’t worry. In return, Nell inherited Suze’s electric wardrobe and woke up every morning to a choice of cashmere sweaters and silk T-shirts in every color of the rainbow. Gabe didn’t notice that, either.

  Nell also woke up every morning to Marlene who, while still milking her traumatic past for every biscuit she could get, had given up moaning and rolling over as a way of life and occasionally even broke into a fast trot if food was involved. Nell had meant to leave her in the apartment while she was at work, but the first day she tried it, Marlene had complained the entire day, and Doris had not been amused, and she was already unamused from Nell’s carefully worded inquiries about any of Lynnie’s leftover stuff. So Marlene now walked to work with Nell, clad in the tan trenchcoat Suze had bought her, investigating the six blocks of concrete and ground cover between the apartment and the agency with the same pessimistic suspicion with which she viewed the world in general. Once at the agency, she stayed with Riley if he was in, fluttering her eyelashes at him while he fed her dog biscuits and scratched her stomach with his foot. “Women,” Riley would say as she fluttered, and she’d whimper a little in return. “That’s a really sick relationship,” Gabe said once, but he didn’t bar Marlene from the office, and since Farnsworth had never called again in search of her, Nell felt fairly safe bringing her to work, if a little guilty that she’d taken the dog. “If he really wasn’t mistreating her, I stole his pet,” she said to Riley. “Now you think of that,” he said.

  In the meantime, and in spite of Budge’s opposition, Margie was loving the teashop, which meant that Chloe could leave without worry, so she did, flying to France with Lu’s Eurail pass. “She went where?” was all Gabe said, and Nell wondered at first if maybe he wasn’t hiding his despair at losing her as she put postcard after postcard on his desk. They all said, “Having a wonderful time” and burbled something about whatever scenic wonder was on the front of the card, and none of them said, “I miss you.” That had to hurt, Nell thought, but after working for him for six weeks, she realized he wasn’t the type to hide anything. If he was mad, she knew about it; if he was depressed, she knew about it; if he was on the track of something, she knew about it. It was exhilarating to work for somebody that direct, and the days went by on high octane, occasionally revved up by the inevitable clashes as she fixed his agency for him.

  “Don’t think I don’t know what you’re doing,” he told her in November when she stuck the old Oriental from the reception room in the closet under the stairs and put down a new gold and gray Morris-patterned rug.

  “It looks nice, doesn’t it?” Nell said.

  “No,” Gabe said. “It looks new and we didn’t need it.”

  “Now about the business cards—”

  “No,” he said and shut his office door in her face.

  A day later, trying to move the wood filing cabinet to a different place so the damn bird wouldn’t be looming over her shoulder, Nell got a splinter in her right hand and couldn’t get it out with her left. She went in to Gabe with her tweezers and said, “Help.”

  “How the hell did you get a splinter?” he said, putting his pen down.

  “The filing cabinet,” she said. “The back edge was rough.”

  “The back edge was against the wall,” he said, taking the tweezers.

  “Yes, it was,” Nell said brightly. “Now if you could get that piece of wood out of my palm…”

  He took her hand in his and stuck it under his desk lamp, and she held her breath.

  “There it is,” he said and used his thumb to draw the flesh of her palm tight so he could see it better. “Brace yourself, Bridget.” He drew the splinter out carefully and let go of her hand. “Now keep your mitts
off my filing cabinets. They’ve been there for sixty years and they’re staying there.”

  “Bridget?”

  “What?”

  “Brace yourself, Bridget?” Nell repeated.

  “Old joke.” Gabe gave her the tweezers. “Go and move my furniture no more.”

  When Riley came back, Nell said, “Do you know a joke about ‘Brace yourself, Bridget’?”

  “That is the joke,” Riley said. “It’s the answer to ‘What is Irish foreplay?’”

  “Irish foreplay,” Nell said. “Oh. Never mind.”

  The phone rang as Riley went into his office, and when she picked it up, it was Trevor Ogilvie. She tried to give him Margie’s number at The Cup, but he wanted to talk to her.

  “Jack says you’re overqualified for that job, my dear,” Trevor said. “With your background, you shouldn’t be just a secretary.”

  I’m not just a secretary. “Oh, it’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Well, we still think of you as family,” Trevor said.

  You never thought of me as family, Nell thought and began to wonder what the hell was going on.

  “So we’d like to offer you a job here,” Trevor went on. “We could certainly use your organizational skills.”

  “Well, thank you, Trevor, but I think—”

  “Don’t be hasty, Nell. Gabe can’t be paying you that much.”

  The certainty in his voice annoyed her. “Actually, the pay is pretty good,” she lied. “And it’s a very interesting working environment. But I do appreciate the offer.”

  When she’d hung up, she went in to see Gabe.

  He looked up and said, “What did you try to move this time?”

  “Trevor Ogilvie just offered me a job.”

  “What?”

  Nell sat down across from him. “I swear to God. He said Jack said I was overqualified for this one, and they could give me something better. He promised me more money, too.”

  Gabe’s face was impassive. “What did you say?”

  Nell was indignant. “What do you mean, what did I say? I said no, of course. What is he up to?”