Death Will Extend Your Vacation by Elizabeth Zelvin Page B

together, and she only pitched in in the kitchen when at least one of the guys was helping too. And she couldn’t leave a man and woman having a private conversation alone. She’d come strutting up and butt in.”
    “She sounds narcissistic,” Barbara said.
    “If that means ‘me me me,’ she was,” Stephanie said.
    “Was she in therapy?” Barbara asked.
    “No,” Jeannette said.
    “Don’t drink and go to meetings was as far as it went with Clea,” Stephanie said.
    “How long had she been sober?” Barbara asked.
    “I don’t know,” Stephanie said. “Jeannie?”
    “Five years.”
    “No step work to cut the narcissism,” Barbara diagnosed. “‘I’m looking after me today’.”
    “She had had a rough time,” Jeannette said.
    “The usual, I suppose.”
    I’d heard enough alcoholic women share to know she meant sexual abuse. I hoped they wouldn’t get explicit. I didn’t want to hear the R word or see the way women looked at the closest male when they used it.
    “She was adopted.” Jeannette shook up a can of whipped cream and started shooting as if the dessert were men.
    “Is that bad?” I asked.
    “Not necessarily,” Jeannette said. She set a giant strawberry on top of each dessert.
    “You should know,” Stephanie said. “Jeannette works in adoptions. She’s a social worker.”
    “Really?” Barbara asked. “I’m thinking about social work school. Do you like it?”
    “Most of the time I love it,” Jeannette said. It seemed to me she seized the change of topic with relief. “Most of the adoptive parents are great. Every once in a while a rotten one slips by us.”
    “How did you happen to get into it?”
    “My second year field placement in social work school was an adoption agency. When I graduated, they offered me a job. Actually, I thought the birth mothers didn’t get much of a break. This was years ago, and some of the workers despised them. It’s gotten better.”
    “Sure, open adoption and all that,” Barbara said. “Did Clea know her birth mother?”
    “I don’t know.” She picked up two bowls and started across the kitchen. “Can one of you run some water and detergent in the sink?”
    “Bruce will do it,” Barbara said. “Was she a sexual compulsive?”
    “I don’t know.”
    “She wasn’t in recovery, that’s for sure,” Stephanie said. She picked up two bowls and crossed the kitchen in Jeannette’s wake. “She didn’t go to SCA. I heard Stewie invite her to a meeting and she turned him down. And when somebody mentioned SLAA, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, you know? Addiction to romance and intrigue? Well, Clea said romance was not her style, but she was all for intrigue.”
    “She sounds like a borderline to me. Histrionic too, the whole cluster.”
    “To me it sounds like she was showing off,” I said.
    “That’s what I said.” Barbara ran her finger around the cooling top of the double boiler, gave the crème anglaise a farewell lick, and plunged the pot into the sink.

Chapter Eleven
    Barbara hitched up the straps of her backpack so the load rode slightly higher on her back and wiggled her hips to center it. She and three other women from the house were bound for a secluded cove at the foot of the cliffs near Montauk. Karen, who knew the way, had announced that the beach there was “clothing optional” and that the men were not invited. Barbara grinned as she remembered the transparent look of relief not only on Jimmy’s face, as expected, but on Bruce’s too. Stephanie had agreed to come once she heard no men would join the party. Jeannette had been coaxed with assurances that most likely they’d have the beach to themselves and that she could wear her bathing suit, even her muumuu, if she wanted. Barbara hoped she’d get to know the three women better, maybe have a chance to ask them more about their relationships with Clea. But even if she didn’t, she looked forward to getting sunlight on her bare skin.
    The drive had led them