Strange Encounter of The 3rd or 4th Kind: Chapter 24 of Lady Slipper Farm & The Summer People

In previous chapters: Movie stars Chichi Tatem and Nick Diehl are involved in one of the messiest divorces ever captured by tabloids, a money shot snapped in front of the Chilmark Store. Meanwhile Nick has fallen for our heroine, Mandy Pease of Lady Slipper Farm, who has her own mysterious reasons for resisting romance . . .

Chichi hates Nick but hates even more to think of him with someone new, so she hires a private detective to follow him. This P.I. happens to be Lori of the rental office who so far has been too chicken-hearted to tell Mandy she’s now in Chichi’s cross-hairs.

In another part of the woods, famous and aged author Sonja Dash decided decades ago to cryogenically freeze her ova, and has recently proposed to ex-love of her life, the dying Brit author Titus Lytton that they make a designer baby with the help of a surrogate mother before – or even after – either one of them pops off.

“I have something to tell you.”

Normally, this line would stop anyone in her tracks. It had major Portent to it. But at the rental office, Lori, who had dragged her chair around to Mandy’s desk, plopped herself down into it. The surprised look on her face at her hard landing, served no other purpose other than to make her office mate laugh.

“Let me guess,” said Mandy who was feeding carrot sticks to mini-pig Albert stationed under her desk. “I’ve had a sliver of Swiss chard stuck between my two front teeth for over a week now, and you’ve finally screwed up the courage to tell me about it.”

Lori glanced around the tiny office overlooking the boat-clogged harbor. “I wanted to wait for us to be alone.”

The word ‘alone’ made both of them momentarily sad. Kris was mostly gone, in deep mourning for her husband who had died so suddenly. He had been cremated. A memorial service was planned for early September when people could take off a couple of hours from their multiple jobs to pay their respects.

Gwyn was away with her PR hat in place – today’s gig having something to do with the new Vineyard Arts Project.

Lori picked a piece of imaginary lint from her bright yellow blouse, then gave Mandy a long hard and penetrating stare.

Mandy said, “You look exhausted, Lor. Are you getting enough sleep?”

“How would I be getting enough sleep?” she asked with a crooked grin.

Lori was live-in manager of the ultra-funky Capt. Jernegan House up from the docks. Once a gracious captain’s house, the place had gone through its phases as boarding house, late 19th century bordello, then back to several incarnations as boarding house before an Oak Bluffs businessman had bought it up and, with no intention of putting a penny into much-needed renovations, turned it into the cheapest hotel on the island.

This meant that its clientele ranged the gamut from nice-as-could-be UK schoolteachers on a budget to drunks who’d be sleeping under bridges if Vineyard bridges had anything under them besides briskly moving currents where ocean met saltwater inlets.

Some nights Lori got all the sleep a young woman could possibly have wanted, other nights she was banging on doors and telling people to “Zip it or you’re outta here!” She could summon a surprisingly mean and gutteral voice for so petite a woman.

Sometimes she had to dial 911 to follow through on her threat.

Now Lori took a breath and said mindfully, “Do you remember last year when we all joked about starting a private detective agency?”

Mandy looked askance. “Don’t tell me Ken wants us to do that too?”

“No. The truth is, I stupidly put an ad in the yellow pages to do it myself. You know what fractures me? Those late night drunk ideas that we have? We’re supposed to wake up in the clear light of day, take a couple of aspirin with a Red Bull for the hang-over, and never give a second thought to that hair-brained idea! However -- “

Suddenly Lori, whose field of vision slanted through the front door glass panel to Our Market’s parking lot, looked horrified. She half-rose from her chair, placed her palms on the desk. Her eyes opened wide. Her mouth went slack.

Mandy said, “Lori, what’s wrong?”

Mandy started to turn in seat, but her maneuver was stopped by the sound of Lori’s chair falling backwards. She swiveled back to see her friend leaning over Gwyn’s messy desk as she pried open the window. Gwyn’s folders and binders and piles of post-it notes spilled onto the floor as Lori catapulted over the desk. She dove straight out the window.

The sound of a splash volleyed up through the tiny office space.

Mandy shrieked. No one jumped into the harbor at this edge of the road into town. The water, although it looked and even smelled fine, nonetheless churned with diesel fuel and God knows what effluence from the underbellies of so many boats.

Mandy clattered over to the window, Albert, alarmed for his mistress, hoofing it behind her. She leaned over the newly-cleared portion of Gwyn’s desk to stare at the water. All she could see was a cap of Lori’s sleek wet dark hair and glimpses of her canary yellow blouse as she performed a frantic Australian crawl towards a circle of boats moored away from the cluster-jam at the edge of the harbor. To her immense relief, she saw a man on the closest boat lean over the gunwale to extend a hand to the madly flailing swimmer.

At Mandy’s back, the bell jingled as the door opened.

An ultra throaty woman’s voice said, “Hello, there! I need a rental! A big lavish beachfront rental, if you have any left in stock.”

Well, this of course was a promising enough entrée, even for the much-dreaded customer appearance. But then Mandy got a bigger shock than the sight of her friend swimming halfway across the harbor:

In a buttoned red blazer – probably Dior or some designer of that ilk – denim shorts, stunning long tanned legs finished off with four-inch platform tan sandals, Chichi Tatem, the movie star wife of the sexy star Mandy herself was starting to fall for, stood in the doorway.

“Do you have any ab fab beachfront rentals left?” asked Chichi, shaking her bob of blond hair and smiling with a perk as if the cameras were rolling.

Mandy managed to stammer out, “Well, yes, we have a six-bedroom house on the northern shore of Edgartown.”

“Then let’s go see it!” The actress swung a red leather handbag that perfectly matched her blazer. “I can pay cash up front for the whole summer!”

With an odd reluctance for so smashing a deal, Mandy padded over to the corkboard holding all the keys. She selected one, then prayed to all the real estate gods from time immemorial that her client had come in a vehicle of her own.

To make the run to Edgartown in Mandy’s mud-spattered truck was not a scenario to be contemplated without a full-on body shudder.

            * *

It was Thorn’s twelfth party with Sonja Dash since the Lyttons’. Fortunately, they’d all occurred at nighttime. He was bracing himself for his first refusal of a daytime brunch of some sort. After what he’d learned about Lady Slipper Farm struggling financially in the wake of his own misdeeds, he was putting literal shoulder to literal plow – and every other farm instrument – to make amends.

Now he and Sonja slipped out onto a patio facing a gorgeously untouched field of rosa rugosa and other indigenous beach shrubs against an expanse of moonlit-onyx ocean along a stretch of southern shore known as Scrubby Neck.

At their backs in the great room, the air had resonated with the exhilarating end-of-Act-One finale of Rossini’s L’Italiana, the young performers, imported from New York, standing on the stairs to fill the house with the full measure of their octaves.

Thorn had found the experience thrilling. He felt as if he’d time-traveled back to Georgian England when aristocrats staged musical soirees in their drawing rooms. As he gently steered Sonja across the uneven stone slabs of the patio, he whispered, “The rich aren’t different from you and me, or at least from me, but they can certainly buy themselves greater pleasures.”

“Oh, don’t be stupid, Thorn, you know there’s no greater pleasure than the one we’re about to have when we light up our smokes at the edge of the patio.”

Thorn chuckled. “So the best things in life aren’t quite free, but they only cost nine bucks a pack?”

As Thorn flicked his lighter under Sonja’s cigarette, a tall figure slipped in beside them. “May I get in on this illicit action?”

Thorn traded fist daps with the man. “Hey, Titus.” In the past couple of weeks he’d gotten used to the Brit author catching up with his ancient lady love.

Once all three of them had their smokes, winking three tiny orange dots in the dark, a waiter swooped in with a tray of three neat shots of Patron’s tequilla.  “I specially ordered these,” Titus said, clinking glasses. “I have some special news to deliver.”

“Oh God, no!” said Sonja in a voice full of consternation.

Titus grinned. “God is going too far, dear girl. You can address me as ‘Sir’. Sir Titus, if you’re feeling reverential.”

“Sir Drecknose will be more like it,” she said with a snort, knocking back her shot.

Thorn said, “Well, wow! Do I have to bow or anything?”

“If you do, I’ll pop you in the nose! But there is one favor I need to ask of you.”

Thorn noticed a look of conspiracy pass between the two elderly ex-lovers. Titus began a tentative introduction but Sonja, who seemed to have her heart and soul tied up in the enterprise, began to extol it as if it were the new sliced bread or aloe-inflected toilet paper.

Fifteen minutes into the presentation, the three of them had hunkered down in facing benches in the dunes, some fifteen cigarettes and a whole bottle of Patron’s later. Titus had asked the waiter to bring them this article, slipping a number of rolled bills into his palm.

At last a silence developed as the author and artist awaited Thorn’s response. A long rolling surf pounded the shore and Thorn was surprised he hadn’t noticed it until this moment, so preoccupied had he been by their pitch to him.

Finally he said grimly, “She’ll never go for it.”

Sonja snapped, “You know this for a fact? You feel qualified to make this decision – or any decision – for her?”

“Well, of course not, but – “

In a gentle voice Titus said, “Just set up a meeting between us, won’t you? If you think we’ll try to over-power her, you can be there in her corner. Let’s just see if we can make a deal, shall we? It never hurts to ask.”

“Yes, sometimes it does hurt to ask,” said Thorn in a voice of sad authority on the subject.”

“Well, still . . . “ said the kindly future knight.

“Okay,” said Thorn with a wrenching sigh, “We’ll ask.”