“Or maybe, she knew her husband had robbed us, and she didn’t want to give anything away,” Mallory said with a snap of her fingers.
“I don’t know,” Elsa shot back. “It still doesn’t make any gosh-darn sense, Mallory. Peter and Agnes have gobs of money. We all used to go sailing for hours and hours back in the day. The champagne flowed easily. And this wasn’t your typical cheap Prosecco. This was like two hundred, three hundred dollars a bottle, all courtesy of Peter.”
“Sounds like the kind of lifestyle that has an expiration date,” Mallory countered, crossing her arms over her chest.
Elsa and Mallory faced off for a pregnant pause. Elsa’s head continued to stir with fear. She wanted to scream,NO, but couldn’t ignore how certain Mallory seemed. After a month in the legal system, a month as Susan’s and Bruce’s intern, Mallory had wrangled true criminal instincts. Perhaps she was right.
“Let’s just find an excuse to pop in and see Agnes,” Mallory coaxed. “We can play it up like an islander thing. Islanders just stop by people’s houses in the summertime, don’t they?”
Elsa’s smile crept from ear to ear. “No, honey. No, they don’t.”
Mallory’s face fell.
“That is, they don’t just ‘stop by’ without pie,” Elsa continued. “And I just so happen to have a big batch of freshly-picked blueberries from the Murphy Blueberry Farm.”
* * *
Elsa and Mallory ditched the Katama Lodge and Wellness Spa by noon, set on performing the age-old ritual of “dropping off a pie” at a dear friend’s place. Together, they gossiped as Elsa splayed the pie crust across her big wooden worktable, letting the rolling pin “roll” violently as they discussed how they might analyze Agnes’s face for clues.
“I mean, can’t you tell when people lie?” Mallory asked, shivering nervously near the big kitchen window.
“I could tell when your sister lied to me, but never you,” Elsa said, remembering those long-lost days when her children had been teenagers. “She had this way about her. She always curled her hair around her ear and stared at the corner.”
Mallory laughed. “I remember that. It’s how I figured out she’d read my diary.” Mallory grabbed a small corner of the pie crust dough and dropped it on her tongue, chewing at the floury goop. “By the way. I was surprised that you didn’t make a big fuss about Alexie’s hair when she came back from New York in June.”
Elsa groaned. “You two arrived the day we learned about the robbery. On that day, in particular, I had bigger fish to fry.”
“I knew it. She always gets off scot-free!”
Elsa slung her rolling pin hard across the dough. “To be honest with you, Mallory, as my three children head out into the world and become real, accomplished adults, I’m pushing myself to learn, learn, learn along with you. What do I know about the NYC art world? Nothing. Your sister probably feels like she has to have pink hair just to fit in. I’ve even noticed that you’ve taken on elements of Susan Sheridan to become more lawyer-like. Surer of yourself. None of that is bad. It’s just advancements toward a future nobody really understands yet, least of all me.”
Mallory stepped forward, throwing her arms around Elsa so violently that Elsa had to stop rolling out the dough. She padded her shoulder with a floured hand and whispered, “I really am proud of you, you know.”
Mallory lifted her eyes toward Elsa’s. “I never actually thought I’d hear you say that.”
The fact broke Elsa’s heart. But more than that, she understood why Mallory had to say it. Alexie and Cole had been her “brave” children, the ones she’d counted on to make strides forward. Now, it was Mallory’s turn, and Elsa was fully on board to support her. Finally.
While the blueberry pie baked in the oven, Mallory relaxed on the back porch with a book while Elsa remained inside, a glass of wine lifted to calm her nerves. It was three o’clock in the afternoon, which gave them several hours before Peter probably darkened the door of their multi-million-dollar home. Agnes had always been a homebody, calling it her destiny to “laze around the house, reading and cross-stitching the days away.” Elsa had laughed at this years ago, saying that Agnes “perfected the art of leisure.”
Was Agnes’s life of leisure one of the reasons they’d decided to rob them? Or did it all have to do with Peter’s wild obsession with spending huge sums of money?
Don’t let the wine get to you. You don’t know if they did it. It’s just Mallory’s hunch. Nothing is for sure.
Elsa’s phone vibrated across the counter. It was Bruce, calling during a rare mid-afternoon break to say hello.
“Hi, there!” Elsa called.
“Hi.” Bruce let a brief moment of confused silence pass. “You sound happy?”
Elsa laughed. “Mallory and I skipped out on work today to do a little sleuthing.”
“Sleuthing? What do you mean?”
Elsa hardly thought twice as she continued on, describing what Mallory had heard Peter Larker say at the bar the previous evening and that they now planned to bring Agnes a pie just to “see what she was up to.” She was practically giddy as she translated the plan over to Bruce, not realizing her mistake until Bruce brewed in silence immediately after.
“I really don’t think you should do this, Elsa,” Bruce said, sounding domineering.
“Oh, Bruce. Seriously. I’ve known Agnes forever,” Elsa shot back.