Chapter Seventeen #2
My mother drives a gunmetal gray 1968 Pontiac Firebird.
It’s so incongruously not her, but it was a gift from my father, so she cherishes it almost as much as she cherishes her other gift from him.
Me. He bought it for her on sight because it matched her silver hair, and I spent a lot of years as a kid being embarrassed by it whenever she picked me up from school.
I don’t know why really; I’ve come to appreciate it as I’ve grown older, and given my current wheels, people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.
I watch through the reception hall window as she sedately parks her muscle car next to Babs, and I sigh as my gran climbs out of the passenger seat dressed in a full-length turquoise and violet wraparound dress with a trailing bejeweled belt.
It wouldn’t look out of place on J.Lo, yet somehow, with her piled-up vintage curls and slash of hot pink lipstick, she pulls it off.
She has a knack with clothes: a curious mix of outrageous charm and couldn’t-care-less verve that carries her seamlessly through pretty much any situation.
I’m more startled to see Glenda Jackson unfurl herself from the backseat, a picture of restrained elegance in a bottle-green silk sheath dress and perfectly color-matched high-heeled pumps.
My mother rounds the hood and joins them beside the car, her black lace dress neither as restrained as Glenda’s nor as rock star as my gran’s.
“Well, well. Who do we have here?” Britannia lets out a low whistle as she appears beside me in the bay window.
“My family,” I say. “You’re back, then.” I’m almost surprised to see her here when she could be over in the tower fraternizing with Leo. I’m also more than a tiny bit pissed off with her for deliberately luring him in and rendering him next to useless.
“I haven’t been anywhere but here for over a hundred years, Melody,” she says pithily.
“You know what I mean. I last saw you bleeding out on the ballroom floor and now here you are again without so much as a scratch on you.”
She shrugs. “Would you prefer it if I were black and blue? Or if I let my skull hang open and my brains drip down the back of my neck? I can, you know, if you want.”
“I’d prefer it if you didn’t suck Leo into your already tangled web of a love life, if you must know.”
She laughs under her breath. “Jealousy really isn’t very becoming on a woman, darling,” she says. “Men get away with it because it makes them look manly, but on a woman it’s shrewlike, and no one likes a shrew now, do they?”
I resent her outdated implications. “I’m not bloody jealous,” I hiss, watching my family approach the castle with their heads flipped back like a bunch of gawking sightseers.
“The lady doth protest too much,” Britannia quips, and I wish she were flesh and blood so I could kick her in the shins.
“Melody?” My mother’s voice rings out loud and clear even through the two-foot-thick wooden door. She waits a beat and then bangs the huge iron door knocker a few times.
“That’s my cue to leave.” Britannia wiggles her fingers at me, cute as a super-annoying button. “Places to go, people to see.” She’s gone in a blink, leaving me in no doubt that the place she has to be is over in the far tower and the person she has to see is Leo.
I vent my frustrations by stamping loudly across the flagstones and pause before I open the door to pull myself together into the hostess with the mostest.
I plaster a broad smile onto my face as I swing the door wide. “Do come in, do come in,” I say, sweeping my arm out grandly to indicate that the paupers are allowed to cross my threshold.
My mother shoots me an assessing look as she passes, but she’s suitably distracted and impressed by the castle’s grandeur not to grill me. Not yet, at least.
“Glenda, how lovely to see you too,” I say as she pauses and hands me a box of chocolates.
“Your mother invited me. Is that okay?”
It’s a polite enough question, but I read the subtext behind it: Your mother wanted me to come with her and check out what’s going on here, because your gran’s opinion and observations will very soon be compromised by champagne.
“You’re very welcome, Glenda. It’s great to see you.” I smile, even though her direct eye contact is making me nervous and I fear that she’s passing judgment on the furnishings of my new pad, even though they’re not actually mine.
Lestat must have caught the overpowering, familiar scent of my gran’s Chanel, because he comes galloping from the kitchen in a flurry of clattering claws to greet them like his long-lost pack members.
“I think it might be best if you take him back with you, if you don’t mind,” I say as he disappears underneath Gran’s dress. “He had an awful fright earlier on with the lion; I honestly thought he was going to have a heart attack.”
“Well, he seems to have made a full recovery,” Gran says. “I think he’s trying to make whoopee with my ankle, dear.” She lifts the hem of her dress and reveals him, and he rolls his little black eyes like a teenager caught with a copy of Playboy before he slouches moodily away from her sandals.
“The dog could see the lion?” my mother asks, fascinated.
“I know, it’s odd, isn’t it? He’s never reacted to any other ghosts before.” I shudder at the memory of Lestat attempting to take on Goliath.
“It’s not unheard of,” Gran muses. “Beefcake used to have a ghost girlfriend in the alley around the back of Blithe. I’m going back to the sixties, mind.” She pauses to think about their old family pet. “Chloe the Chihuahua, if my memory serves me right.”
I sincerely hope that her memory hasn’t served her correctly, because Beefcake more than lived up to his name and would have squashed Chloe the Chihuahua flat on sight. I can’t help but wonder if Chloe the Chihuahua was alive before she encountered Beefcake.
The table has been laid for three at my request, so I quickly lay a fourth place for Glenda as they all head toward the open French doors and admire the rolling lawns and abundance of summer color in the flower beds.
“It’s bucolic,” my mother sighs. She loves this kind of thing.
You only have to look at her farmhouse-style kitchen and her beeswaxed surfaces in the shop to know that she’s someone who admires the traditional look, and this place has it by the bucketful.
She makes a much more appropriate lady of the house than I do in every way, given that she’s willowy and elegant and I’m pocket-size with a beloved character T-shirt collection.
I watch her fondly as she takes a seat at the dining table.
She looks every inch the dowager Duchess of Maplemead with her upswept silver hair and discreet pearl and diamond necklace.
“So, tell me, darling,” she says, as I wheel the hostess cart nearer to the table and ladle minestrone soup into our bowls. “How did you manage to scare Fletcher Gunn away? We’ve been trying to shake him off for years without success.”
It’s true. Fletch has sniffed around our business since he was a wet-behind-the-ears intern at the paper, always looking to debunk mysteries or expose fraud where there’s none to be found.
He’s a thorn in the side of anything with a whiff of the occult or the unexplained, which is precisely why our worlds are too different ever to collide without war.
My mother’s words make me pause for thought though.
Have I scared him away? Did he make up the excuse of being called back to work to get away from me?
I can’t help but let that idea creep under my skin, and it’s like when you’re given a general anesthetic and you feel it slide like ice through your veins.
I crawl out from beneath the crushing weight of rejection and take my seat.
“He was called back to work,” I say, nonchalant. “Or maybe he’s too much of a scaredy-cat to sleep here again.”
“Whatever did you do to him last night, darling?” Gran deadpans, but her eyes sparkle with mischief and I send her a look that suggests she tread very carefully.
“His kind never have any backbone, darling. No sticking power,” she adds in a vague attempt to placate me, popping the cork on the bottle of vintage champagne in the wine cooler after she’s looked approvingly down her nose at the label.
I feel an irrational urge to offer some kind of defense for Fletch in his absence, but why should I, really?
He’s done nothing to earn any loyalty from me, aside from several shockingly hot encounters, and if anything, they’re more frustrating than satisfying in the long term.
He’s ruining me for other men. Or ruining other men for me.
I’m not sure which is the right way around, but you get the gist. He’s scuppering my chances of a satisfying love life with my future husband by being all bone-melty.
“Actually, he did prove useful today. He sort of saved Lestat’s life.”
Three sets of eyebrows lift in my direction.
“He did?” My mother looks unconvinced. “How?”
“Well…he laid him down on the steps to get his breath.”
Glenda narrows her eyes. “Did he perform mouth-to-mouth?”
I shake my head.
“Heimlich maneuver?” Gran says.
Again I shake my head. “He wasn’t choking, Gran. Fletch just laid him flat on the step. But he did it in a special, lifesaving sort of way, okay?”
I catch my mother’s eye and she sends me a long, considered look that suggests she isn’t entirely happy with my defense of Fletcher Gunn or even the way I just referred to him as Fletch, and I don’t know what to say to wriggle off the hook.
“This is delicious, Melody.” Glenda spoons her soup, delicately changing the subject while also taking the piss. “Did you make it yourself?”
She knows perfectly well that I didn’t make it myself.
“Yes,” I say, relieved to have moved on from my inappropriate spot of Fletch worshipping. “From scratch. I’ve been inspired by the castle’s kitchen to have a go.”
“Really?” My mother, bless her, is always keen to think the best of me.