The Orchid Affair

Chapter 22

It was a comedy, all right. A dark comedy.

Colin’s mother’s party was being held in a gallery in the Place des Vosges, just two houses down from the building that would have once held Antoine Daubier’s studio. The clear plate glass of the windows looked very incongruous between the heavy stone arches. Inside, the gallery space had been entirely gutted, the walls painted a glaring white against which the jewel tones of Colin’s mother’s paintings showed to even greater effect.

Colin led me up to his mother, Serena following quietly behind. Mrs. Selwick-Selwick-Alderly was talking to someone, a champagne glass already in one hand, but she turned as we approached, letting out a little cry of greeting as Colin approached.

Like Serena, she was thin, but her skin sat comfortably on her bones, making her slenderness a pleasant thing rather than a sickly one.

I hadn’t realized, looking at old pictures, just how tall she was. In heels, she was nearly as tall as her son. He scarcely had to bend to brush her cheek with his lips.

“Mum,” he said. “Happy birthday.”

“My son, Colin,” she said to the man standing next to her. “You’ve met Alan, Colin, haven’t you? No?”

“You? A grown son?” The man had an American accent, vaguely Texan. “You’re pulling my leg. I don’t believe it.”

When she beamed down at Alan, Mrs. Selwick-Selwick-Alderly’s eyes crinkled at the corners just like Colin’s. They were a different color, though, brown where Colin’s were hazel. “I scarcely believe it myself.”

“Not just a grown son, but a grown daughter, too,” said Jeremy, presenting Serena like a trophy. He had one hand on the small of her back, just where her shawl ended. From the expression on her face, you would have thought he was holding a gun in it. “Well, nearly grown.”

Given that Jeremy was as near in age to Serena as he was to Caroline, I thought that was a bit rich. Colin’s father had married late and Jeremy’s father early, but they had been of the same generation—just as Jeremy was, technically, of the same generation as Colin and Serena. They were on the same line on the family tree, a line below Colin’s mother.

Serena mustered a sickly smile. “Happy birthday.”

Mrs. Selwick-Selwick made a face over the rim of her champagne glass. “I wish you would stop speaking of birthdays,” she said plaintively. “You make me feel so frightfully old.”

“You, Caro?” Another man slid an arm around Mrs. Selwick-Selwick’s waist. “You can never grow old. If you’re old, where would that leave the rest of us?”

“Positively doddering,” she said definitively. She frowned at her daughter. “Darling, you need a glass. Jemmy, won’t you go? And who is this? We haven’t met, have we?”

She smiled politely at me, her eyes already drifting over my shoulder. She gave a fluttery little wave to someone who had just entered.

“This is Eloise, Mum,” said Colin patiently.

His mother looked blank.

“Eloise,” he repeated. “My girlfriend.”

“Hi,” I said quickly, before things could get awkward. “Thank you so much for having me to your party.”

“Not at all,” Mrs. Selwick-Selwick said vaguely. “Delighted to have you. Do enjoy yourself. Oh, Alan, be a love and snag Lydia for me. I’ve been longing to talk to her.”

With a vague smile and a tap on the cheek for Colin, she drifted away, earrings tinkling gently.

I began to see what Serena had meant when she said I had nothing to worry about. This wasn’t going to be your classic parental grilling. Watching her make the rounds, I could well believe that Colin could tell her he was joining an ashram in India, and her sole response would be “Darling! How lovely. Do enjoy.”

“Champagne?” Colin asked me.

“Lovely,” I said, and stepped aside to allow him room to maneuver past, towards the table that had been set up as a bar. There was a plate of tiny canapés set out on one side, but no one was eating them. The champagne, on the other hand, was going like gangbusters.

Given Serena’s reaction to any mention of her mother, I had expected something straight out of Mommie Dearest, with snide comments and the odd sizzle of a cigarette burn. But it wasn’t like that, at all. There were none of the digs about Serena’s appearance that I’d expected, no unkind comments about her clothes or hair. But then, maybe one didn’t have to be critical to be cruel. Maybe it was enough just not to care.

I watched as Colin’s mother—“Caro,” they all called her, fondly and familiarly—lit up among her friends. Despite her height, she had a way of tilting her head that made it seem as though she were looking up rather than down, an endearingly open way of laughing, and that crinkle-eyed smile that reminded me so viscerally of Colin.

Unlike the other women, Mrs. Selwick-Selwick’s good looks were the product of fortunate genetics, not plastic surgery or expensive makeup. She made no effort to hide the wrinkles next to her eyes, or the brown spots from years of too much tanning. Her hair must have been assisted, but you would never have been able to tell; the dark blond, so like Colin’s, looked completely natural, expensively cut but otherwise left free. The same was true of her manner. Her tones, unlike Jeremy’s self-consciously estuary English, were the unapologetic cut glass of the English upper class, but she carried it naturally, just as she did her exaggerated earrings and too-short dress.

There was a childlike charm to Mrs. Selwick-Selwick. I’d almost call it an innocence.

It was all the more disconcerting given the nature of her friends. Colin hadn’t been exaggerating when he referred to her cronies as Eurotrash. There was much dropping of names and discussion of private jets and ski resorts and this or that exclusive vacation spot. They were a type I recognized from New York—the genuine jet-setters, hard-eyed and hard-edged. Jeremy fit right in, a classic hanger-on on the scene. In contrast, Colin’s mother was Alice in Wonderland, frolicking in perpetual wide-eyed wonderment through a psychedelic landscape.

The most incongruous part of the whole affair was that Caroline Selwick-Selwick, or whatever combination of hyphens she affected following her second marriage, was as good an artist as Jeremy had claimed. Whatever else might be an act, this much was true. Colin’s mother was talented. Really, truly talented.

Leaving Colin to fight his way to the bar, I wandered along the side of the room, examining the paintings. Colin had one at Selwick Hall. From a distance, I had originally thought it was a Canaletto, until I noticed that the miniature people in the Italian piazza included a skateboarder and various folks on mopeds. Not all the paintings were street scenes; she had done still lifes as well, turning the traditional into the radical with a daring use of nearly neon color. One thing I did notice, though. Aside from the tiny figures in the Italian scenes, there were no portraits. Humans, as such, weren’t of much interest to Mrs. Selwick-Selwick.

I tried to reconcile these meticulously constructed compositions with the aging socialite on the other side of the room, scattering “darlings” like diamonds, dashing from group to group and conversation to conversation. It was hard to imagine her capable of any kind of concerted attention, and yet, each of these compositions represented hours of painstaking work, away from the world, locked alone in a studio. They weren’t the sort of things one could just dash off in a moment; if anything, they were the reverse of the rapid charcoal drawings of Julie Beniet, distinguished by precision rather than passion. Not at all what one would have expected.

I was turning away when someone bumped me from the other side. Champagne sloshed onto my toes.

“Sorry,” I said automatically, even though I was the bumpee. And then, “Oh my goodness. Melinda?”

I couldn’t say Pammy hadn’t warned me. There she was in the flesh. A fair amount of flesh, since her dress draped on a diagonal from one shoulder and under the opposite arm, leaving a great deal of collarbone bare.

Age hadn’t done much for Melinda. She had never been particularly pretty, but that hadn’t mattered much when we were all in the same kilts and collared shirts, our hair crammed into scrunchy buns. Now her once-curly hair had been meticulously straightened and her naturally broad body dieted into angularity. She had tanned herself a color just short of orange. It didn’t suit her. Not that it really mattered. What Melinda did, she did on connections, not looks—or, for that matter, brains.

I wondered if she was still spelling her name Melynda.

“Wow!” I exclaimed. “Small world. How are you?”

She blinked at me for a moment. Okay, we had only gone to school together for thirteen years. Neither of us had changed that much. I was pretty sure she knew who I was. On the other hand, this was the same woman who had gotten a six on her practice French Lit AP Exam.

That’s six out of a hundred, in case you were wondering.

“Eloise. Oh. Hi.”

The man next to her held out a hand. From their body language, I couldn’t tell whether he and Melinda were together, or simply acquaintances of chance. He looked like he came from the art world side of things, a turtleneck under a sport coat. Judging purely on superficials, he was closer to Jeremy’s age than ours. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Eloise Kelly,” I said. “Melinda and I went to school together.”

“It was a while ago,” she said, with a rapidity that made me wonder just how old she was pretending to be these days. We were well past the point of doctoring our IDs to get into bars. Melinda had been a fixture at Dorrian’s back in Upper School, twenty-one before she was sixteen.

“Pammy mentioned that she’d run into you,” I said, determined to be nice. “What a great coincidence.”

“Oh yes. I saw Pammy in London.” She turned to the man next to her. “Pammy Harrington.”

He nodded knowingly. Everyone knows Pammy. It’s one of those laws of nature.

Melinda lifted a languid hand. “Nice to see you. Give my best to your parents.”

“Likewise,” I lied. Melinda’s mother had been colloquially known as the Dragon Queen. Mrs. Horner had controlled the lists for all the junior cotillions. You’ve never seen pure, raw power until you’ve watched a society matron decreeing who shall be invited and who shall be denied.

“Eloise?” It was Colin, champagne glass in hand.

“Hi,” Melinda said to Colin, tilting her head at a Cosmo-approved angle.

I will admit to a certain petty satisfaction as I slid my arm through Colin’s and said quietly, “Colin, this is Melinda. Melinda, I don’t believe you know my boyfriend, Colin Selwick.”

“Selwick?” said Melinda.

“Caro’s son,” Colin added helpfully. “And you are?”

“Melinda went to Chapin with me,” I said cheerfully. “She’s assistant to—Mike Rock?”

“Micah Stone.” Melinda drawled out the name as though she were used to the reaction it inspired, but her attention was all on Colin, her eyes narrowed as though she were trying to work something out and finding it rough going. I’d seen her look the same way during those Lower School math marathons called Mad Minutes. “You’re Jeremy’s stepson?”

Colin stiffened, ever so slightly. “The one and only,” he said charmingly. “Are you friends with Jeremy, then?”

“I wouldn’t say we were friends.” Melinda was very careful about things like that. You wouldn’t want to be caught being friends with the wrong people. “You mean, he hasn’t told you?”

“Told me—”

Colin was cut off by the clink of a metal implement being wielded against glass. The stepfather in question was belaboring the side of a champagne flute with a cheese knife, calling everyone to attention.

“I’ve invited you here . . . ,” I whispered in Colin’s ear in a very bad fake British accent.

Colin grinned down at me. “To reveal the identity of the murderer?”

Jeremy upped the level of his clinking. “Everyone!”

That meant us.

Having successfully silenced the peanut gallery, Jeremy relinquished the cheese knife to a white-coated waiter but held on to the champagne glass. “I would like to extend my thanks to you all for joining us tonight to celebrate the birthday of my lovely wife, Caroline—my lovely and talented wife,” he corrected himself.

Mrs. Selwick-Selwick crinkled her eyes at the assemblage and gave a shimmy of self-deprecation.

Jeremy turned back to his audience. “As you can see, we have a great deal to celebrate. There’s Caro’s new exhibition, which has been praised by—”

I have to admit, I tuned out a bit there. Jeremy went on for some time, listing various critics, whose names meant nothing to me—much as, I assume, the top historians in my field would have meant nothing to him. The overall message was clear, though. They all liked Mrs. Selwick-Selwick’s paintings.

I clapped politely with the others and tried not to slosh my champagne, wondering if this meant that the party was almost over. Could we take our leave, or would we be expected to do family time after? I knew there was a birthday dinner planned for the following night—just Colin’s mother, us, Jeremy, Serena, and ten of their closest friends—but I wasn’t sure if that meant we were off the hook for tonight.

“—Micah Stone,” announced Jeremy.

Jeremy said Micah Stone much the way Pammy had, as if it were just one step away from God.

Huh? I had missed something. When had we gone from Colin’s mother to the new Keanu Reeves? I was very confused.

I poked Colin in the sleeve, and mouthed, “What?”

Colin raised his eyebrows and held out his hands in the universal gesture of “Search me.”

“We have the great privilege of being among the first to know of Micah’s new project.” Jeremy held out a hand to my old classmate, who was sucking in her cheeks in an attempt to create cheekbones. “Would you like to tell them, Melinda?”

Not really. “It’s a musical version of Much Ado About Nothing,” she drawled. “It’s Shakespeare. With music.”

That was some enthusiasm. I had a feeling she might have mustered mildly more emotion for Die Hard Five. But Shakespeare? Nah.

That was okay. Jeremy was emoting enough for two. “There’s more,” he said, shifting his grip on his champagne glass.

More? What more could there possibly be than Don John doing a kick-line? Somewhere, Shakespeare was rolling. Hopefully with laughter.

I rolled my eyes at Colin, but Colin’s attention was on his stepfather, who had abandoned all pretense of fêting his wife’s birthday. He had stepped a little ahead of her, dominating the room, his jacket very dark against the white walls and white-coated waiters.

“After prolonged consultations and negotiations, Micah and his team have arrived at what I believe—and I do hope you’ll agree with me—is the perfect location for the production. I’d like you to join me in raising your glasses”—Jeremy was practically sizzling with excitement, as effervescent as the bubbles in his glass—“to the new location of Micah Stone’s latest and greatest film.”

I looked around for Serena. She was standing all the way at the back, her knuckles very white against the raspberry and silver silk of her wrap. She didn’t look bewildered. She looked sick.

Something was wrong. Something was very wrong.

I looked from Jeremy, smug; to Colin’s mother, oblivious; to Colin, confused; to Melinda, bored.

Jeremy’s lips spread in a grin that made me think of the Cheshire Cat, the one that lingers and lingers long after the cat himself has gone.

“To Micah Stone’s new movie!” Jeremy hoisted his champagne glass high. “And to Selwick Hall!”