Chapter One
Jane Jeffry had seen her son Mike off to his second year
of college several weeks ago. Her daughter, Katie, started
her senior year in high school, and younger son Todd moved
to ninth grade. This time next year, she'd have only one
child to take care of on a daily basis. And Todd would be
at the age when no young man wants to hang out with his
mother. He already was.
She was sitting at her kitchen table, idly flipping
through her calendar. It used to be full of notations, but
except for a dentist appointment in three weeks and a hair
salon appointment to touch up her roots, the pages were
nearly blank.
As Jane was pondering this wistfully, her next-door
neighbor and best friend, Shelley Nowack, turned into her
own driveway, which adjoined Jane's. Not quite fast enough
to touch the pavement on only two wheels, but giving that
impression. The tires of her minivan squealed as she
slammed on the brakes. This was her normal mode of
driving.
Shelley tapped on the kitchen door just as Jane was
opening it. "You look glum," Shelley said. "I have
something to cheer you up. Remember that old Victorian
house that turned into such a blight when some fool
divided it into crummy apartments and the druggies took it
over?"
"Who wouldn't? It was one of our larger civic battles,
getting the lowdown on the zoning. Someone was supposed to
tear it down, I thought. Why's it still standing?"
"Because Bitsy bought it to restore."
"Bitsy?"
"You don't remember Bitsy?" Shelley asked.
"I do remember her, if you mean Bitsy Burnside. The all-
time Queen of Room Mothers. I never knew a woman who could
turn something like that into a full-time job."
"Bitsy's past that stage," Shelley said, airily waving
this recollection aside. "Her kids are grown. She divorced
that overbearing stockbroker husband and must have taken
him to the cleaners. And there's gossip that she also got
a huge inheritance from a childless oil baron great-
uncle."
"Wow. No wonder Bitsy's moving into real estate. Why don't
things like that happen to us?"
"Luck of the draw, I suppose," Shelley said.
"But even if she has wads of money, what the devil does
she know about renovating a wreck of a house?"
Shelley shrugged. "I suppose with enough cash, you can buy
very good advice." "I guess I wish her well."
"Perk up, Jane. She wants to talk to us over lunch
tomorrow."
"Why? She's a dangerous person to talk to. Every time I
let her bend my ear, I ended up making two hundred strings
of paper garlands or baking fifty-five highly decorated
cupcakes."
"Because she wants to hire us."
"To make garlands?"
"Jane, get a grip and forget about garlands. And quit
lolling about with your elbows on the table and make us a
big pot of coffee. Use the good kind. Bitsy wants us to be
her decorators. A paying job that requires a lot of
shopping." Jane's eyes lit up for a moment. "Paid to go
shopping? Who would have thought life had such a thing in
store for us, so to speak? But what do we know about
decorating that everyone else doesn't know more about?"
"I guess she thinks we have good taste," Shelley said.
"She thinks we're patsies," Jane said, turning the tables
on Shelley, who was usually the more cynical one. "I tell
you, Shelley, this is going to involve some thing we
really don't want to do. She'd be doing it herself if it
were a desirable thing for her to spend time on."
"You really are grouchy today, aren't you?"
"I'm bored," Jane admitted. "I'm so seldom bored that it
makes me cranky." Widowed when her husband died in a car
accident years earlier, Jane thought she'd done a pretty
good job raising her children. Mike and Todd were normal
boys, interested in girls and cars, but not doing anything
remarkably stupid about either.
That she knew of.
Katie was a normal teenage girl, which is to say a bundle
of conflicting personalities, and extremely high
maintenance. Katie, who had recently decided she wanted to
be called Katherine, sometimes regarded her mother as her
archenemy, always as the source of food, money, and
housing, and more and more frequently, as a semi-friend.
But who am I? Jane had been wondering lately. Her role as
daily cook, car pool driver, arbitrator of sibling rivalry
outbreaks, and soother of hurt feelings was nearly over.
"Then this is the perfect time to turn your time and
attention to something new and different," Shelley said
with remarkably good cheer. "Make us that coffee before I
need intravenous caffeine."
Jane got up and filled the coffeemaker, saying as she did
so, "I see your point. Really I do. Our attempts to be
wedding planners went up in flames. But we both need
something to do now that we're free of little children.
The only thing we're really good at is shopping. But I
don't think this is it."
What Jane really meant was that Shelley loved shopping for
anything. Jane wasn't half as enthusiastic, but had
recently sprung for a few luxuries and enjoyed spending a
little money on herself for a change.
"It won't hurt to let Bitsy pay for a very nice lunch
before we decide that," Shelley said, drumming a perfectly
manicured nail impatiently on the kitchen table.
"I guess not," Jane said. "Decorators? Hmm."
"... and this lunch is at Michelle's Bistro."
"Oh?"
"Did I forget to tell you about it?" Shelley asked. "A
cousin of mine hosted a family party there a month ago,
with all our aunts and the other woman cousins, and it's
divine. Tall food."
"Tall food?" Jane said, watching for the instant the ...
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