Dead at Breakfast

  When Glory got home from that trip, she knew what world she wanted to conquer. By the time she was twenty, she was slimmer than Lisa, had had two years of acting classes, and knew all about her best camera angles. A man who had briefly loved her once described her to a casting director as being like a smart animal. Glory assumed he meant she was talented, instinctive, and valuable, like a racehorse, and rather liked it, though the casting director never called.

  Wednesday morning, when the mists were hanging low on the hilltops and Maggie joined the morning hikers, there was Glory, in becoming velvety sweats, doing her own set of stretches while she waited for the hike to start. It took all Maggie’s restraint to keep from staring at her as Bonnie led the rest of the group in a warm-up routine. After Martin Maynard took off on his run, and Bonnie led the hikers toward the mountain at a brisk clip, Nina Maynard and Maggie fell in with Glory.

  “I’m so sorry about Artemis,” Maggie said.

  “It’s really sad,” said Nina. “So much talent.”

  Glory was very fit and it was going to be a strain to keep up with her and still be able to talk.

  “You know, it’s probably a blessing,” Glory said. “She was a mess, that girl. Trouble as long as I’ve known her.”

  Maggie and Nina looked at each other, but Glory had her chin up, and her gaze was on the hills, from whence her help might or might not cometh.

  “Have you been able to learn any more . . . I mean, do they know why she did it?”

  “Was there a note, you mean? It seems not. But the girl was an addict. I think she just saw no way out. There wasn’t ever going to be a good way for it to end.”

  “Addicted to what?”

  “She never met a drug she didn’t like. The first time she got drunk, she was like eleven. Found a bottle of some disgusting melon-flavored booze someone had given my sister and drank the whole thing. The nanny found her passed out in her bed covered with vomit.”

  Nina said, “Wasn’t she on that Disney show when she was eleven?”

  “Exactly,” said Glory. “She had everything a child could want. I mean, what other children dream of. Every comfort. Beautiful parents, adorable brother and sisters. And she was famous. She was earning a fortune before she was a teen.”

  “Sounds like a lot, for a child,” said Maggie.

  “Exactly,” said Glory, missing her point. “She had it all. But you can imagine what it was like for my sister, trying to raise her own children, with Miss Eleven Going on Thirty living down the hall. There wasn’t any way to control her. Her manager gave her anything she wanted. Before she could drive, she’d just call a limo. She kept running away from home. What teenager wouldn’t, if she could afford anything in the world? The Disney people kept as much of it quiet as they could, but after she aged out of their deal and started making her own records, it was Katie Bar the Door.” That was what people had been saying for years in Hollywood about Artemis. Katie Bar the Door.

  “Why would anyone do that to a child?”

  “Who, the manager? He wanted her working. If she didn’t get what she wanted she might get difficult, so he kept her happy. He killed her, really.”

  There was a silence but for the thud of their shoes on the mountain path, and somewhere an excited blue jay complaining.

  “This must have been awful for your sister.”

  “You have no idea. She was trying to raise her own children with some values, you know? We weren’t brought up like that. Our parents were strict. We couldn’t date until we were sixteen. Got grounded for swearing or bad grades. Dad had money, I guess, but we didn’t know that growing up, there were lots of people in our school richer than us. And the worst thing was, Lisa’s kids seemed to idolize Jenny. Lisa had visions of them all following her footsteps. I blame the manager, I really do. He should be arrested.”

  “Her father must be terribly upset.”

  Glory strode silently for some time before answering. “He probably is. But he hides it. She’s been such a nightmare, and of course, he has three other children to worry about.”

  They paced onward. The sun was fully up now and the mists were dissipating. Dew sparkled underfoot like scattered crystals, and spiderwebs were etched out in the grasses, and then suddenly, when the sun rose above a certain angle, they disappeared.

  Nina asked, “Is her bio mother in the picture? I noticed she’s never mentioned.”

  “She is long gone. She just disappeared when Jenny was hardly out of diapers. Never called, never wrote. I’m not even sure what her name was. That was probably the primal wound, if you know what I mean. That was probably the thing that Jenny was never going to get over. My sister tried, she really did, but . . .”

  Nina said, “Didn’t anyone try to find her, ever? I mean these days . . . Facebook and Google . . .”

  “No idea. As far as I know, Jenny wanted nothing to do with her. That was one of the reasons she took a stage name. ‘I’m Artemis, I’m Greek, I’m my father’s daughter.’ She didn’t want some awful woman showing up saying ‘Mummy’s here, where’s the money?’”

  They had reached the peak of the hill, where Bonnie was waiting. They paused to breathe and drink from their PCB-free water bottles as the others huffed up the last grade and joined them. The view, a sea of evergreens punctuated with hardwoods in their glowing fall gowns, was a rich reward for the effort. Far below them was a farm with a big red barn surrounded by fallow fields, rows of dry yellow corn shocks, and pumpkin patches.

  Little Cherry in her gray hoodie, bringing up the rear, told Bonnie she and Mrs. Kleinkramer had seen a snake on the path, sunning itself.

  “There are no poisonous snakes in Maine,” Bonnie said. “In case you worried.”

  “That’s interesting,” said Margaux Kleinkramer.

  “I know,” said Cherry, looking as if she hadn’t enjoyed the experience much anyway.

  They started down the back side of the hill, falling into the same groups in which they had climbed.

  “I’m so glad I got to see that,” said Nina.

  “Me too,” said Glory. “You miss that in California. Fall colors.”

  “What time are you all leaving?”

  Glory looked confused. Then she sorted it out and said, “Oh we’re not leaving. Until the end of the cooking class anyway. It’s a perfect place for us to be, really. Who’s going to come bother us, the Bangor Daily News?”

  The morning class was all about soufflés. Savory ones, coffee ones, fruit ones, chocolate ones, of course, and crème anglaise to go with.

  Maggie was working with Lisa and Albie Clark, who couldn’t get the hang of separating the egg yolks from the whites. He poured the yolks back and forth between the broken halves of the shell, which Sarah had made look so easy, but he kept piercing the yolk and leaking yellow droplets into the bowl of transparent egg slime.

  “The whites won’t whip if you do that,” said Lisa impatiently, and Albie snapped, “I know!” Putting these two together on this of all mornings might not have been Sarah’s best idea, Maggie thought. Meanwhile Lisa was on a talking jag.

  “My husband’s had no sleep at all. We’ve been on the phone, getting our lawyers to try to stop this circus. Her goddamn manager is going to milk it for every dime. Death is a great career move, that’s his take. He’s busy arranging a tribute concert in I don’t know, the goddamn Hollywood Bowl or something. It’s disgusting. Meanwhile the children have gone all sentimental, Oh poor Jenny, and they want a funeral, with the body there. I’d go, I mean she is their sister, not that she ever did anything in her life except disappoint them. But Alex says absolutely not. It’s a sin, what she did. Life is all we have. He grew up very poor, you wouldn’t think it but I mean dirt poor. In Greece. He lived in like, a hovel. It’s hard for him, to see how much these kids have. He says he gave Jenny everything and she treated it all like garbage. Him, me, the children, herself, garbage. That’s what he says. I guess he’s broken up but he isn’t showing it, and you know what? I admire him.
So we’re not going back. Not for some funeral circus, anyway. The children can do what they want. I remember when the twins had their Sweet Sixteen, it was out in Southampton. We had a tent, and some famous band, the Black Eyed Peas, have you heard of them? And all their boarding school friends came out for the weekend, it was the party of the summer, I mean it, and at midnight on the best night of their lives my girls were in tears because Jenny wasn’t coming. They told all their friends she would be there. Jenny was in New York that weekend. It wasn’t like she was in Outer Oshkosh. It was always like that. Their birthdays, Christmas—she sent expensive presents. Tickets to her shows, backstage passes. But she was never there when it counted, when it wasn’t about her. I think that time her excuse was some guy had broken up with her. Please.”

  Albie said, “The music from that party went on until three in the morning.”

  Lisa looked at him. “Oh did you read about it? There was a lot of ink. My husband is very generous to the Suffolk County police, he says it always pays, and he gave them a really nice present the day of the party.”

  “I know,” said Albie. “I called them.”

  Lisa looked blank.

  “You called the police?”

  “At one in the morning, yes.”

  “Why?”

  “I live two lanes over from you.”

  There was a long silence. Finally Lisa said, “Oh.”

  Maggie found that Oliver, Sarah’s assistant, was with them. He said “Does anyone need any help here?”

  “He does,” said Lisa, and pointed to the egg whites with splats of yolk in them. Maggie resumed shaving chocolate into a mound of fatty brown shards.

  Oliver set Albie’s bowl aside and said, “This will make a delicious egg-white omelet. Let’s start over. Go wash your hands.” When Albie came back, he showed him how to separate the eggs by cradling the yolks in his cupped hands and letting the whites slip through his fingers.

  “So I assume you gave Jenny a Sweet Sixteen party too,” Albie said to Lisa as he cracked his third egg sharply on the bowl’s edge.

  Lisa whirled to stare at him. Then said, “You know what? I just lost a child, so fuck you. Just fuck you.” She threw down her dish towel and marched out of the kitchen.

  Hope had nipped out to the herb garden to gather some thyme to scent her cheese soufflé when Lisa emerged from the side veranda, weeping. Her husband was sitting on his Adirondack chair in the sun, smoking a cigar and looking out over the lake. Hope couldn’t help but overhear the angry sobbing. Nor could she help being more than a little curious.

  “We have to go home” was Lisa’s main theme. Her husband, impassive, took out his handkerchief and handed it to her to mop her streaming eyes and nose. “I don’t want to talk to that prick ever again. And that’s how everyone will be, they’re all going to say it was our fault. That asshole practically said no one loved her.”

  “I’m not sure I even liked her, after she got to twelve,” said her husband.

  “You can’t say things like that! They’re going to be like, ‘what kind of Sweet Sixteen did little Jenny get,’ for the rest of our lives!”

  “So what?” asked Alex.

  “So what?! So what?! What is the matter with you?”

  He stood up swiftly and suddenly, so that they were almost nose to nose.

  “There is nothing the matter with me,” he roared. “I know who I am, and where I stand, and how I got here, and that’s all there is. What’s the matter with you, that you care so much what other people say? Are you so empty?”

  “The goddamn queen of England cared, when people were like ‘She’s so cold, she doesn’t care Diana died, she probably had her killed,’” yelled Lisa.

  “Nobody thinks we had Jenny killed. It was all too clear that she was doing a fine job of that herself!”

  “Stop being an asshole! Don’t you see what it’s going to be like? Tomorrow, or the next day, my children will be walking into some chapel at Forest Lawn, or wherever, with every fucking news truck in California filming, and if we aren’t there with them . . .”

  Alex slapped her, hard across the face. “You don’t call me an asshole. Ever,” he said.

  With a whap, she slapped him in return. “And you don’t hit me! Ever!”

  He started to laugh.

  “Jesus, you are a sick bastard,” she yelled, starting to cry again. “We are going home. I’m going to take the car into town, where I can see the news and use my phone and then I’m going to charter a fucking plane, and we are going home.”

  Alex took car keys from his pocket and tossed them to her. “Suit yourself,” he said, and sat down. “She was my daughter and I’m not going. Not just to put on a show. And I think your sister is enjoying her cooking course.”

  Lisa had started away, but now she came back and stood over him. “Oh, is that your plan? You and Glory stay here and this will give you a chance to get into her pants again?”

  Alex paid her no attention. He was concentrating on relighting his cigar.

  “Sometimes I hate your fucking guts!” his wife yelled, and she stalked off in the direction of the parking lot.

  Deputy Sheriff Babbin was lounging around, shooting the breeze with Janet, the Bergen town clerk, when the call came. It was a lady from OnStar. Janet handed Buster the receiver.

  “We have a disabled vehicle on the Kingdom Road in Bergen,” said the OnStar operator. “GPS puts her about two-thirds of a mile out of town, right before the Dump Road turnoff.”

  “Is the driver hurt? Called an ambulance?”

  “Driver is conscious but confused. Air bags deployed.”

  “Roger that. I’m on my way,” said Buster. “Better call the ambulance just to be safe. And get ahold of Pete at the Lakeview Garage. Send a truck.” He hitched his pants and put on his sheriff’s hat. “Accident up the Kingdom Road,” he said briskly to Janet.

  “Drive safe,” she said, knowing Buster liked nothing better than to turn on the siren and drive eight hundred miles an hour to answer a call about a cat in a tree. Even though it was the firefighters who got cats down.

  When Buster reached the car, a huge Cadillac, he found the lady at the wheel still talking to her dashboard. She had been crying, and one side of her face was beginning to swell.

  “I don’t think it’s broken,” she was saying as she rotated her wrist in the air, wincing. She was pretty in a sort of plastic way, like people on television. She had clearly taken a curve too fast. Her rear wheels had clipped the guardrail and started a spin, he guessed. The guardrail was torn out and the right front tire was hanging entirely in the air over the drop. The nose of the car was crumpled against a power pole, the hood accordioned, but the pole had saved her life.

  “A policeman is here,” the lady said to the dashboard.

  “That’s good,” said the dashboard. “Do you want me to stay on the line?”

  “Did you just tell me you called a tow truck?”

  “I did, ma’am. It’s on the way. And an ambulance.”

  “Okay. Okay. Thank you.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am. You have a nice day.”

  The woman looked up at Buster. “I’m alive,” she said, as if really asking for confirmation.

  “You are,” he said. “Do you think you can get out of the car?”

  She considered. “I don’t know. Do you think I should?”

  “If you can. I think it’d be safer.”

  She was talking as if she were translating each word he uttered from a foreign language. “Safer. Oh.”

  “Have you tried opening the door?”

  She shook her head no. She pushed a button to unlock the doors and the buttons popped. So the electricals were working. He wasn’t sure that was a real good thing. If the gas tank was breached or the . . . well, he thought of sparks and he thought of gasoline and it seemed to him it might not be good. He tried the door. It was jammed, but not as badly as the door on the other side of the vehicle. He was weighing the possibility tha
t really putting his weight into getting the door open might dislodge the car and send it farther over the edge, when Pete arrived in the tow truck.

  The cooking class was eating a late lunch in the glassed-in porch looking out toward the mountains. Oliver was telling a story about catering a private fund-raiser in San Francisco for the president when Maggie said, “Isn’t that a police car coming up the drive?”

  Everyone stopped chewing and turned to look at the sedan, with its blue roof light revolving silently to announce the urgent business of the officer at the wheel. Buster parked directly at the front steps, beside the NO PARKING sign. As if he felt eyes or a camera on him, he left the car, hat firmly on his large round head, and marched importantly into the inn.

  The table started to buzz with questions. Accident? Crime? Accident?

  Cherry Weaver came to the door of the porch with Buster right behind her.

  “That one,” Cherry said, pointing to Glory.

  “Miss Poole?” said Buster, stepping forward.

  Everyone looked at Glory, who had covered her mouth with her hands when Cherry spoke, and gone rigid. Her eyes filled with tears.

  “Everything’s all right, ma’am,” said Buster, sounding like a policeman on television.

  “My sister?”

  “She’s going to be fine, ma’am.”

  Glory sprang up and hurried to Buster just as Mr. Gurrell rushed up behind them. “You can use my office,” he said. “Come this way.”