In earlier chapters: Sam Pease, along with his sister, Mandy Pease, owns the family’s ancestral Lady Slipper Farm in Chilmark. He and his girlfriend, Nandika Pati, are madly in love, ever since she left her rich Indian fiance´ (from an arranged marriage) for Sam.
At the rental company where Mandy works (in addition to her jobs as farmer & caterer), her friend and office mate, Lori, accepted a recent – and first-time – post as a private detective, hired by movie star Chichi Tatem to follow her future-ex husband, Nick Diehl who, it turns out, has been madly wooing Mandy at the farm. Unable to summon the nerve to tell Mandy, Lori has spotted Chichi outside the rental office, panicked, pried open a window, and splashed down into the harbor.
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Sam held muddy hands to the overcast sky to thank The Great Green Thumb for the triumph of his potager kitchen garden.
The red lettuces and Swiss chard, turbo-charged by a Lady Slipper Farm compost heap, had filled in like classy kudzu. Small paths wended to the focal point, a towering wigwam of runner beans with scarlet blossoms, purple sweet peas, and orange-petal nasturtiums. A triumph of Nature and Sam Pease design.
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He made a woof-woof noise, and pedaled his long legs in a victory dance around the wigwam, the seven farm dogs leaping at his heels in their own lavish version of canine celebration.
Suddenly he was aware that human eyes were upon him. He stopped in his tracks while the dogs went on marauding.
A supremely stylish couple in their mid-40s, stared at him from the farmhouse side of the potager. Sam’s gay-eye-in-a-straight-guy took a mental snap shot of the woman resembling a South Asian Audrey Hepburn. Her black hair was tied up in an impeccable bun. She wore -- what else? -- a mid-calf length skirt and jacket in a tell-tale St. Laurent ivory linen. A thick black belt cinched the woman’s wasp-thin waist; again so Audrey!
The man’s stiff black hair was brushed back, and black shades hid his face. He wore the full-bore black suit, white shirt and black tie of the high-powered businessman, but the lower button of the jacket hung loose, exposing untucked shirt. It was the look of an exec on vacation. Again, Sam approved.
“Hello, hello!” said Sam with his arms held wide in greeting. He guessed these folks had stopped at the farm stand on North Road and been suitably impressed, enough to ask for directions to the farm itself.
Sam gestured around him. “This my work in progress, this potager. I know it looks a bit phallic at the center, but as soon as the morning glory and nasturtiums fill in, we’ll have an earth mother / goddess thing going on. I’m naming it after my hottie girlfriend, Nandika.”
The woman said with the merest trace of an East Indian accent. “You must be Sam. We’re heard so much about you.”
At this, Sam strode over on his long legs encased in filthy jeans. This was sounding better and better. His graphic designer antennae were now fully extended and twitching. Any minute now these people would be asking to market his tee shirts to the whole of the subcontinent.
They would need to make a separate deal for Indonesia.
He wasn’t so reckless, however, as to extend a muddy hand to these impeccably dressed people. He was also aware that his last peek in a mirror had revealed a face so sun-burnt and dusty, he looked like a Grimm’s fairy tale monster. He stopped a yard away from them, and placed his fists on his hips.
“I am Sam, Sam I am! I know that’s corny, but I can’t help myself, I’m a corny kinda dude!”
The man nodded, his expression unreadable behind the black sunglasses.
“We’re Nandika’s parents,” he said with a softness that could have sounded sinister depending on how you read it.
Sam read it as sinister.
· *
Chichi turned from the smart corridor of living room windows overlooking the Sound on the northern shore of Edgartown. “I’m surprised there are houses still standing this close to the water. I have friends on Nantucket who expect to sink any day now.”
Mandy had seen this woman in so many movies that it was hard to believe she was now making casual conversation with her. On the other hand, she had felt that way about Nick Diehl in the beginning. Now that she’d spent some time with him, the famous Nick was morphing into her friend and maybe even her . . .
She could feel herself blushing along the roots of her hairline. She’d been doing this off and on during the length of their ride in Chichi’s rented top-down white Mercedes convertible, and for the quarter-hour they’d toured the downstairs of the beautifully preserved 1920s-era beach house.
Yet Chichi had made her feel as comfortable as an old girlfriend. Indeed, the two of them had already shared some giggles about the new fad of men getting surgically-enhanced butts, their own disasters with dangling earrings catching on things, their shared great love for old jeans, and how long either of them could wobble on high heels. That turned out to be twenty minutes for Mandy who, on the rare occasions she ventured out in heels, ended up barefoot for the remainder of the evening. Chichi, it happened, could wear heels day and night. “I have to for my work,” she explained with a sheepish grin. “Recently I did a bar fight scene in four-inch heels with, like fifty-seven takes!”
Upstairs they stood in the master bedroom with its yet-more sweeping views of the indigo-blue wind-ruffled ocean.
“This is perfect,” sighed the movie star, slowly pivoting with a dreamy gaze from the water to the queen-sized bed encased in a high four-poster antique frame, topped by a pale lavender-and-grey satin quilt.
Mandy admired her posture of self-confidence. It was as if she knew that at any given moment she was selling to the world not only her beauty and charisma but whatever she was wearing, in this case the striking red Dior blazer with matching, bulky red leather purse.
“You see,” she mused, her gaze on the bed deepening into a look of stark desire, “I’m hoping to reunite with my husband during this vacation.”
“Oh?” said Mandy with a gasp she hoped only she could hear. She thought of Albert whom she’d left in the backseat of the movie star’s car, thinking at the time that the homeowners might not especially appreciate his hoof-trots on their hardwood floors. Now she wished he stood at her side. Like a dog, he was sensitive to her feelings. At a moment such as this one, he would have pressed his bristly hide against her calf.
Chichi turned back to stare at the ocean. She gravitated to the goldenrod yellow window-seat set in a bay of windows. She perched there, and patted the cushion beside her. “May I tell you about it? I could use a confidante.”
Mandy felt like Marie Antoniette marching to the tumbrel to have her body relieved of her head. How could this have happened? How small of a world was it that a man could be wooing you while, at the same time, his future ex-wife reveals her plans to seduce him back?
Mandy sat tentatively beside the actress who smelled of some lovely expensive fragrance – citrus-y with tropical floral notes that Mandy, with her New England brand of horticulture, was unable to discern.
Chichi, so close now, turned on her a gaze of pure rapture. “You see, he loves me, even if he doesn’t realize it and, of course, I still adore him! We fight, needless to say. We’re stuck in a narrative from a past life when we were both Masai warriors in Kenya.”
Mandy forgot about her shock and sense of displacement as she wondered if people could really still be this gullible. Not that Chichi and Nick categorically could not have been Masai warriors. But Mandy descended from practical Puritan stock. If you entertained a fantasy about having been Masai warriors with someone from a past life, you would retain enough skepticism and decorum not to go blabbing about it.
She knew she would need to share this scene at the window seat with Thorn. She could almost plan ahead what they’d say to one another, as each put forth a riff on where the two of them had been incarnated together. Kabuki actors in 18th century Japan? Siberian gulag grunts?
Chichi sighed happily. “You see, once I lure him over here for a lovely catered dinner with a Breggo pinot noir, and then upstairs into the sack, well, you see, we make the most exquisite love, you simply cannot imagine! No one can! It is a lovemaking from another plane entirely! Well, then, we’ll kiss and make up, and all will be fantastic again! At least for a while.”
Mandy thought of another good Thorn Share: Chichi outlined making love first, followed by kissing to make up. If the movie stars’ sex was as splendid as advertised, Mandy believed it should involve kissing up front. But then, she was such a ridiculous romantic.
She unfolded into a standing position and moved backwards. “So you’ll take the house?”
The resumption of a professional tone helped to ease her out of the sticky tête-à-tête, and not a moment too soon. Steadier now, she turned to move towards the landing.
At her back, she heard an entirely different voice emerge from Chichi Tatem, a low, growling voice like Linda Blair’s in The Exorcist:
“And if you allow my husband to come to your farm one more time – “
Mandy’s jaw dropped as she turned back to her client. The actress had rapidly stepped up behind her. She opened her huge red Dior bag. She drew out a foot-long knife, its stainless steel back arched like a small scimitar.
The actress paused for effect. Her blue eyes had somehow shaped themselves into perfect circles. “If you let him come within even one hundred feet of you, I will cut your heart out.”
She pointed the scary knife, then twisted it one way, then the other, with a few quick pokes and prods, as if to illustrate precisely how she intended to surgically excise Mandy’s young heart.
Her expression brightened. “And, yes, I do intend to take this house!”