In that, he was a match for Eve. She looked amazing, and I gave her credit for the hard work she put into that—the perfect hair, darker than Harvey’s but expertly done and done often enough that her roots never showed, and the tightly trim figure that showed the effects of her hours at the gym, and the make-up that didn’t look heavy until you got close. But her jawline and neck were beginning to soften and let her down anyway, and I felt sorry for her about that, because she was the sort of a woman who wouldn’t adjust to age well.
Sharon, on the other hand, had embraced middle age and the power it brought. Back in high school, she’d probably been the head cheerleader, queen of the popular girls, used to getting her way. But while Eve hadn’t ever left high school, not really—she’d just moved from being a student to teaching them, only retiring a year ago—Sharon had moved on and upward, becoming the wife of a local policeman who now was the chief of patrol for the county. He seemed nice enough, and was certainly capable, but I suspected his rise through the ranks had been driven by Sharon’s ambition. She knew how to lead from behind.
It was how she’d positioned herself even now, at the table.
The board of trustees for the Wilde House Museum met here, in the dining room on the Victorian side of the house. It was one of the few rooms downstairs that had kept its Victorian trappings. The ceiling had lovely crown mouldings and plasterwork around a glass chandelier, and an elegant bow window draped with long curtains looked over the lawn to the edge of the trees, which were blending now into the darkening sky of the evening.
Not having a vote, I preferred to sit off to the side by the marble-faced fireplace and wait until I was called upon to supply facts or opinions, as curator.
This gave me the advantage of observing all the personal dynamics at the table. Field Marshal Montgomery, in the Second World War, had said something about soldiers needing to know how their own smaller battles fit into the bigger one, and I had learned this was useful advice, so I always tried now to take stock of the whole field around me before I marched onto it.
From where I sat, it was easy to see where the battle lines lay in the board of trustees.
Three trustees hadn’t made it tonight to the meeting. Our legal adviser was sick, and one of my favourite trustees, a young single mother who owned her own fashion boutique on the main street, was still at her eldest boy’s Little League game. And our most flamboyant trustee, Don Petrella—an actor who’d shot to cult status some years ago playing a crime-fighting vampire on TV—was off on a film shoot, as we had been told several times by his wife, who was also a trustee.
Rosina Petrella was little and likeable, one of those women whose age scarcely mattered because they were almost like pixies or fairies who seemed to be living on some different plane from the rest of us. She moved with fluttery grace and she smiled like she meant it. If she had a fault it was being too fluttery, too indecisive. But she was quick and the notes that she took of the meetings were nearly verbatim, which made her a great secretary.
And tonight she marked the neutral territory between the two factions of the board. Sharon and Harvey and Eve hadn’t sat all together, but from their shared looks and the way they supported each other’s opinions it would have been clear to an outsider they were a team.
At the head of the long polished table, Malaika sat coolly and calmly in charge, while Frank lounged in his chair to her right. Frank was no politician. If he thought a person was full of it, he let them know, by his facial expression if nothing else, and his muttered asides, if you managed to catch them, could be entertaining. Certainly they’d been amusing Tracy Chow, our treasurer, who had the seat across from Frank tonight.
Tracy and Harvey got under each other’s skin. Harvey would have looked you in the eye and sworn he wasn’t homophobic or a racist, but he seemed to make assumptions that proved otherwise and when he told a joke it was most often inappropriate. I’d been told that he had commented, when Tracy joined the board, that it was logical that someone of her ancestry had gone into accounting, and that Tracy had replied she hadn’t been aware that people born in Idaho had any greater skills at math than anybody else. Which had made all the other trustees laugh, and from that point there’d been a thread of friction between Harvey and our treasurer, made stronger by the fact that Tracy’s longtime live-in partner was a woman.
I might have been persuaded that, in Tracy’s case, the problem wasn’t Harvey’s homophobia but his belief that every woman ought to be attracted to his manliness. He’d side-eyed me, as well, as though suspicious of a woman who refused to do his bidding when he smiled.
Malaika handled him with grace and skill. She let him feel important while not letting him take over. She was good at running meetings, keeping everybody moving smoothly through the night’s agenda.
She had opened with the news about the window sub-contractor and his injury, and there had been a quick vote of approval for Sam Abrams taking on the extra restoration work. There had been reports from Tracy on the new donations we’d received on Saturday from people at the ribbon-cutting ceremony, and from Sharon on the number of new members we had gained. Eve, with her teaching background, was in charge of education, and reported on her efforts to engage the local schools.
There’d been a minor bump when Frank had named the people he had picked to join him on the sub-committee that would be in charge of vetting artifacts donated to and bought by the museum. “Lara,” he’d said, starting with the trustee who was off at her son’s baseball game, “and Tracy, and Dave Becker.”
David Becker wasn’t on our board, but sub-committee members didn’t have to be. He owned a fine antiques store and had been the local auctioneer at one time, and still worked as an appraiser, which in my view made him an excellent addition to the acquisitions committee, but since nobody had asked my view I hadn’t made a comment.
Harvey had made some remark about Dave’s work and conflicts of interest, and Frank had fired back, “You’d know all about that, Harvey, wouldn’t you?”
And then Malaika had settled them both and a vote had been taken, Frank’s choices approved, and the meeting had moved on.
The next item on the agenda had been less contentious: a Fall Harvest Festival on the museum grounds.
This had been Sharon’s idea, I gathered, a couple of meetings ago before I had been hired, and she’d lit up tonight when discussing it. “I’ve got the spinners and weavers, they’re going to put on a whole demonstration, and six of the eight craft table places have already sold, so we’ll probably want to add more. Isaac Fisher says we can use his little donkey for children to ride on. And Frank, you’re still bringing your cider press?”
Frank had assured her he was, and when Tracy had asked where the apples were coming from, Frank had replied not to worry. “I’ll call in some favours.”
Malaika had added we’d need to apply for a permit for serving the cider, and Harvey had said, very sure, “I’ll take care of the permits.”
Eve had agreed to make up the promotional flyers. Rosina had said Don had offered to come dressed in character from his TV show. “He’s always a big draw at Comic Con,” she’d told us proudly, “and he figured people could make a five-dollar donation to the museum fund to have their picture taken with him.”
Even though the discussion had gone on a little long, it had been nice to watch the board working in harmony, each member giving something, no one arguing.
But now we’d come to new business, and all that had changed.
“I don’t like it,” Eve told me again. “I mean, with respect, it just takes us outside of our mandate. We agreed—and you can read this in the package you were given when we hired you—we agreed our purpose was to show the role that Captain Wilde played in the War of Independence. Maybe you didn’t read that part? But it’s a very specific focus, and this proposal’s asking us to go too far beyond that.”
Not rising to her accusations of my ignorance, I only said, “I know what our mission statement says. But this still involves Captain Benjamin Wilde. He was living here, too, at the time.”