“Little old you. Come sit down.”
My dress wasn’t made for sitting, but with a wee trifle of leg crossing I made myself decent. Lily eased herself next to me in the sinuous athletic style of a woman who kept herself busy, which Lily did. Apart from her husband and her merry band, she swam daily—I’d tried and failed to keep up with her at the Colony Club pool one morning—and wrote. Wrote for real money, actual checks made out in her name. Mostly articles about New England history, that kind of thing, but rumor had it she’d been short-listed for the Pulitzer one year for her book about the hurricane of 1938. She’d doled out generous helpings of advice to me over the years, not that I’d followed more than a few green peas of it, but she persevered because she was Lily and she’d give you the food off her own plate if you needed it, the brassiere off her back.
She propped her elbow atop the back of the settee and gave me the old conspiratorial smile. “How are you, Vivian? How’s the Metropolitan? How’s old Tibby?”
“He likes his coffee black and sweet. But I have a plan.” I tapped my temple.
Laugh laugh. “I knew you would. Now, listen up. Julie had lunch with us this past week and told me you were poking into the old stories about Aunt Violet.”
The heart leapt. “I might be.”
She patted her pocketbook, a sleek blue wedge that matched her sleek blue dress, and which must also have been picked out for her by said Aunt Julie during the aforementioned shopping expedition, for among Lily Greenwald’s many virtues was not, how shall I put it, the eye of style. “Then I might just have her letters to my mother tucked away in here.”
The heart crashed into the moon. I itched my fingers at her. “Ooh. Ooh. You always were my favorite cousin.”
“Now, now. Wait a moment, you greedy thing.” She laid a protective hand over the pocketbook. “I also received a fascinating telephone call from your mother later that day—she’s looking at us right this second, as a matter of fact, now don’t look so alarmed—asking me whether I possessed any such letters—”
“That Mums.”
“—and if I did, could I please burn them down to ash and then dispose permanently of the ash itself, at my earliest convenience.”
“And you told her to get lost?”
She assumed an angelic aspect. “I would never use those words, Vivian. I just told her that I had no idea where any such letters might be. Which was true, to a point.”
“Which point was that?”
“I mean I had no idea which box they were in. We put all my mother’s old letters in boxes after she died. A storage closet in the apartment building. I didn’t have the heart to go through them all at the time, and then . . . well, we had Nick Junior right away, and got so busy. Anyway.”
A shadow cast across our conspiratorial laps. I looked up and smiled.
“Mums. I was just telling Cousin Lily how lovely she looks tonight. Doesn’t she look lovely in that shade of blue? It brings out her eyes.”
“Lovely. Vivian, my sweet, you need to mingle.”
“Why do I need to mingle?”
The lips pursed. “Because that’s how you meet people, dear. When I was your age, I had already been engaged three times—”
“The lucky dears,” I said.
“Now, Vivian. Your mother’s right. You shouldn’t spend your Saturday night all tucked up in the corner with your old cousin Lily.” Lily rose to her feet and held out her hand for me. “Come with me, and I’ll have Nick Junior introduce you to his friends.”
Mums’s face went all hallelujah, as good as a facelift. “That’s so dear of you, Lily. She only seems to be interested in the most unsuitable young men.”
“Well, now,” said Lily. “I’d be disappointed if she weren’t. Distraction,” she whispered to me as we drew away. “I learned that trick as a mother myself. Anyway, I’ll slip you the letters before I go. There aren’t many, to be honest, so I hope you can get something useful from them. But be warned: your mother doesn’t want any of this to come to light.”
“This I already know.”
Lily stopped and turned around to face me. “No. I mean she really doesn’t want this. So you need to decide, Vivian Schuyler, if the prey is worth the hunt.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning you may find yourself on the outside of the cozy Schuyler circle if you find Violet’s corpse and dig it up for a public viewing. And trust me”—she glanced at her husband with a wistful old smile—“that’s no place for the faint of heart.”
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