What Goes With Blood Red, Anyway?. Stevi Mittman

see me.

      “Nothing like that,” he says. Is that the same as no? “I’m just curious about Mr. Meyers and I thought that you, working with the two of them, and knowing Mrs. Meyers pretty well…”

      I ask about Jack’s alibi and Detective Scoones says they are checking into it. Helene knocks on the bathroom door and asks if I am all right.

      “So about seven, Ms. Bayer?” he says. It seems that only the time is in question. “I’ll come by your place.”

      And then he clicks off and I hear my mother’s voice.

      “I said, ‘Does Jesse like chocolate or regular rugelach?’”

      “Oh, he likes them both,” I lie, planning to eat the ones with the raisins while Jesse, ten, and Alyssa, six, gobble the chocolate ones. (Dana, the stick, will no doubt makes noises about how she’ll be fat for her bat mitzvah while scarfing down the rainbow cookies my father always brings for her. At twelve, she is old enough to watch the other two, and I could tell my mother not to come, not to bother. But rugelach sounds like exactly what I need at the moment. And I do, after all, have a date with the police. So in the end, as always with my parents, I fold and tell her that sure, they can come over to look after the kids. And yes, I add, they can pick up some pastrami and knishes as long as they are stopping at Ben’s Deli.

      I exit the bathroom to find Gina staring at me like I’m an ax murderer, clearly on the road to the electric chair.

      She hands me my BlackBerry. “Your reminder went off,” she says apologetically.

      Today is a day I’m not likely to forget.

      As if none of this has happened, Helene returns to the subject of her brother, Howard, and reminds me that he is a food critic for Newsday. “You’d never starve,” she says with a wink as I gather up my belongings. I smile and wave, opening the door without comment. “The divorce was his wife’s fault,” she shouts after me. “His ex-wife!”

      Yeah, yeah, my wave says. I bet that’s what Rio tells every woman he meets.

      My phone rings again as I am getting into the car, and of course, it’s Bobbie. The neighborhood grapevine has already begun to produce fruit. Or is it whine? She apologizes to me fifty times for refusing to come to Elise’s with me this morning. When her sister, Diane called Bobbie from the precinct to tell her what happened, she couldn’t believe it. And then, after we dispense with all the oh my Gods! that we both need to get our of our system, we start hypothesizing about who could have killed Elise Meyers.

      I didn’t mention it to the police, but between you and me Elise Meyers was a little off her rocker—not that I’m one to talk, which is probably why I didn’t say anything to them. Still, she was. Here’s an example: once when Rio called me on my cell at her house to yell at me for refusing to sign our joint tax return before my lawyer looked at it, she told me I should keep a list of every obnoxious thing he ever did. She said it could be very therapeutic. Then she told me that she kept lists, tons of them. She had brightly colored, leather-bound Kate Spade journals of every injustice ever done to her, every slight, every nasty glance thrown her way. She said she had a whole book of every bad thing Jack had ever done and why he deserved to die. At the end of it, she even had a list of what she’d do with his money after he was gone.

      She had a separate list that Bobbie knows about and that creeps us both out, and another one in a slim, lime-green book that Bobbie doesn’t know about, at all. In that one Elise claimed she had cataloged the indiscretions of virtually everyone she knew, and she made a point of saying that I was probably the only woman she knew who wasn’t in it. The way she said it made it sound like just maybe Bobbie was, like she knew about Bobbie’s one mistake.

      “What do you suppose the police would make of the How I’ll Spend His Money After He’s Gone list?” Bobbie asks me. I’ve never told her about the lime-green volume because she would totally freak, and it could be that Elise was just bragging. Maybe she told every woman she knew that she was the only one not in it.

      “If Jack was the one who was dead, it wouldn’t look too good,” I say. “But I don’t suppose it will matter now. One of the other lists could be important, though. I mean, someone on one of those lists could have been the murderer.”

      “My money’s on the husband,” Bobbie says.

      I tell her about his “alibi.” And then I mention that there was something weird about Elise’s house, something out of place or something that should have been there and wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been there and was.

      “Uh…” Bobbie says “…I guess that would be Elise’s body?”

      CHAPTER 3

      Design Tip of the Day

      The windows in your house are your eyes on the world. They frame the view of your house from both inside and outside and demand treatment. They should reflect your house’s style, be it formal, casual or eclectic. Would you let the world see you without mascara? Don’t let it see your windows without prettying them up, as well.

      —From TipsfromTeddi.com

      Okay, before you meet my family, there’s something you need to know. I was switched at birth. My parents insist this is not the case, but there is no question in my mind that I am an alien child. Now, by alien I mean either that my real parents were here illegally from some foreign country and there is no Long Island blood in me or that I was switched by body snatchers from another planet.

      Either way, I don’t belong here. Never have. This fact has escaped my mother (who, at sixty-eight, is still sure that with enough pressure she can convert me into a real Long Islander) and is irrelevant to my father (who is three years her senior and who I am convinced will love me even after my third eye makes its appearance).

      My parents clearly intend to take up residence in my house, judging from the number of suitcases and amount of food my father has schlepped in. I will argue them out of this later. I hope.

      At the moment, I am watching out the front window of my front-to-back split level home, the one I shared with Rio, while my father paces behind me repeating that he’ll call Mel Rottman—the best lawyer on the South Shore—to talk to the police with me. Each time he says it, I assure him it isn’t necessary.

      My mother, however, isn’t so sure that the innocent always go free. This is why she is telling me about a friend of hers who tried to get through customs by sewing undeclared jewelry into her brassiere and claiming it was her underwire bra setting off the metal detectors. It doesn’t matter to June that the woman wasn’t actually innocent. The point is that if a friend of hers could get frisked at JFK, I could wind up on death row.

      Even when her stories are tedious, it’s still amusing to watch my mother tell them because of all the cosmetic surgery she’s had since my father’s long-term affair with our housekeeper put her in the sanitarium and him in the dog house. He’s footed the bill for more Botox, collagen and Gore-Tex than Joan Rivers has tried to deduct from her taxes. What’s really amazing is that even though the woman can’t actually frown, grimace or pout, she can still give me “the look”—the one that says “you’re a disappointment, Teddi. You’re such a disappointment.”

      At the moment, I’m ignoring the look and wishing that one of my lovely children would entertain their grandmother long enough for me to finish filling out all the forms I need to send in for the decorator showcase at Bailey Manor before Detective Scoones shows up. Bailey Manor, for those who don’t know, is a decorator showcase. Every year there’s a benefit showcase and each lucky decorator or decorating firm that gets chosen gets assigned a room at a fabulous old mansion on Long Island that—provided they don’t destroy any of the existing architecture—they can decorate however they think will best show off their talents. Bobbie knows someone who knows someone who is sleeping with the brother of the guy who is married to the woman who doles out the spaces, so I am doing the breakfast nook. I can’t tell you how excited I would be if I had a stick of furniture that I thought was good enough to go in there or a way of getting