Worth

Chapter 7 (cont.)

Dinner was no picnic either. To start with, Paul and Marcia instigated a short-lived food fight with dinner rolls. With the muscle memory of tennis still fresh, a bread plate was used to volley a roll over the centrepiece and it smacked Edie right in her crepe-y throat. The velocity of the flying bun was rivalled by that of the chunk of ham that Edie spat, half-chewed, calling for Paul's head. Joan, clearly referring to her Folly of the Stocks handbook, suggested a creative apology challenge, but neither woman would get her wish. Philroy seized the tribe's talking stick once again and began yammering on about the fingerprints being sent to the imaginary lab at the imaginary police station. He said that Paul had discovered a usually locked window partially open in Leo's study with some stress to the frame, and that Kyle and Fiona had found a partial footprint on the study carpet so shoe soles might have to be examined.

Violet was rendered incapable of caring about any of these details because while everyone had been served an Irish stew, she had been served a sweet potato casserole congealed by cheese with an aroma so pungent, so horrendously ripe, that it was only a matter of moments before silent discomfort had befallen the table, and those who dared speak did so without involving their nasal passages in the mechanics. The casserole turned out to have a delicate savouriness, but Violet felt she owed it to the suffering room to pretend to dislike it.

Vera was forced over dessert to spread false lies about pretend movies stars who in the end were being sadistically exposed, not for scandalous addictions of salacious affairs, but for being too old for close-ups, too clumsy to be shot knees down, or too chunky for words. And yet the words came.

Thomas tried to get John to help him improvise a comical account of accounting, and while John obliged with, "I heard you had to eat half a payroll ledger with a Revenue agent waiting outside your bathroom stall," poor Thomas could only repeat exactly what John had said and the routine, like his chest, fell with a laughless thud.

James had scarcely said a word all meal. He'd hardly spoken to Violet since tennis but not for lack of trying. It was uncanny how either his parents or Philroy wanted his attention for something just as he was attempting to make contact with her. When he ran out of items to be passed to him at the table, he nearly ran out of conversation completely. He dabbed the corners of his mouth with his napkin and said, "So, Philroy, is there no getting out of charades? Are there any board games in these closets or are there just dead bodies?"

"Anyone for coffee first?" Philroy asked. No, was the consensus. "Well I think I'll have a small one."

"Bring it into the sitting room with you," Rolph said.

"I'd rather take it here."

"So we all have to wait around for you to finish?" Elizabeth protested with a curled lip. Philroy looked at his watch and fidgeted.

Rolph rocked back in his chair. "If you're staging a sit-in, old man, then I guess I'll have a little brandy."

"That sounds nice. One for me," said Thomas.

Philroy had not yet flicked his wrist to ring the bell for the servants when a tremendous gonging sounded from the front of the house. It was the doorbell breaking the staleness hanging over the dining room. Philroy looked somewhat relieved. "Whoever could that be?" he said too curiously. Only Vera's face remained unmoved, but then, the less expression the fewer wrinkles.

"As if you don't know. Who is it, Philroy?" Edie scowled over a glass of bicarbonate antacid.

"I'll go and see for you, Sir." Fiona said, passing them all briskly.

"The Witnesses must want someone here pretty badly if they've followed us to the sticks," John said.

Fiona returned moments later followed by a figure she seemed to be trying to shake. He was heralded as Mr. Pierpont, an introduction, which by the startling looks of him, should have been accompanied by a bolt of lightning and a crescendo of frantic brass instruments. It was instead met with a modest belch of disinterest from Edie. Still, the hairs on Violet's arms rose, and for the second time that evening, the table sat silenced by something that did not seem quite natural. The stranger had wild, glass-coloured eyes surrounded by crumpled eyelashes one should never see staring back through a peephole, and mangled yellow hair which seemed to be growing upward like his slow spreading, syrupy smile. He was done up, top and bottom, in parts of a pair of mismatched suits, neither of which fit him properly, accentuating his spindly length so that he looked like a fox on stilts. If that fox was crazy and wearing a wig.