My sister might well be drugging her daughters.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

We Graceys aren’t a drop-in kind of family. In the years I’ve lived in Delray Beach, I’ve never driven to Seabank just to surprise my parents. And whenever I visited Wendy in Connecticut, we made elaborate arrangements, consulting a multitude of calendars before selecting a date.

This pattern has history. After my mother moved my eighty-five-year-old grandmother to a retirement community in Seabank, she and Nana still made appointments to see each other, arranged between Nana’s bridge games and Mom’s yoga or Pilates. While I’ve never asked if they arranged my grandmother’s death to suit their schedules, I’ve always wondered.

All this is to say that late Wednesday morning, when I realized my mother was standing unannounced at the town house front door, I wondered if the sky had fallen. Where was Chicken Little when I needed him most?

“Are you busy?” she asked before taking a step inside.

I had been. I’d finally taken a morning to do some much-needed work, but I wasn’t going to waste such an unusual opportunity.

“Never too busy to see you.” I gave her an awkward hug.

Arlie Gracey can take in everything around her in one sweeping glance. Today she swept before she spoke. “The place looks good.”

I was ridiculously pleased. “The girls help me pick up before bedtime.”

“How do you manage that?”

“With a whip and chains.”

She smiled stiffly. “They weren’t what I’d call cooperative when they were with us.”

“I’m reading them the Paddington books. The sooner we finish cleanup, the more time I have to read.”

“You’ll be a good mother.”

“Yeah, well.”

She gave a decisive nod. “You can get pregnant. You’ll just have to be carefully monitored.”

Heart valve replacement, and other assorted surgeries, won’t make pregnancy or childbirth easy, but I’d been told that with the right level of care, I can probably pull it off safely. Still, there was a larger issue.

“First I need a good man.”

Since she had no answer for that, I moved on and offered her tea or coffee.

“Coffee would be nice. We’re not drinking it at home anymore.”

“Good. I could use a cup, too.”

She followed me into the kitchen. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard from your sister.”

I was surprised Mom hadn’t called out the cavalry to find her older daughter. She could certainly afford to. The fact she was letting me run with Wendy’s disappearance was as odd as any of the many things happening in our lives. I could only guess she was suspicious that things were worse than I’d told her, and wasn’t ready for details. Lately even her questions were perfunctory, as if she hoped my answers would be, as well.

I told her I had no new information for her. In my mind, “for her” changed a lie to a fib, although the nuns who educated me might not have noted the subtle shades of gray.

“You’re much neater than she is,” Mom said.