This morning the tech from the furnace guys came to do tuneups on the furnaces. All either one needed was a new filter so I got it all done for just over a hundred bucks. Hooray! (no charge for the tuneups because we're in the Comfort Club, a good plan for a rental property)
After the tech left I sewed up a pair of brown leggings. Do you know that brown leggings are really hard to find? They are, so I got enough fabric for two pairs last time I found some but ran out of brown thread just at the end of the first pair. I'll go get more and keep working.
19 November--Barbara Malcolm, Spies Don't Retire.
Billie Holland-Smythe was a
planner, a schemer, and a manipulator extraordinaire. She sat in her aerie on the second-highest
hill on the island and moved people and events to her satisfaction. As pleased as she had been with the
thunderstruck looks on Major Clemment and Colonel Roskova’s faces at her party,
she was even more pleased at the rumors of the behavior of Sonia and Irina in
the weeks since.
One of the few times she really
missed her late husband James was when she missed out on the intelligence of
how the men were managing since she dropped her little bombshell. Billie was not the kind of person who got up
before dawn, put on sturdy boots and drab clothes, and tramped around with
binoculars around her neck, filling in some piddling little list of the birds
she had sighted in her life, so she didn’t know how her two guinea pigs fared
at the birder’s get-togethers. She also
didn’t deign to enter the ocean. Oh, she
was more than agreeable to invitations on someone’s yacht, but to put on one of
today’s ghastly swimming suits that clung so ruthlessly to every bump and mole,
then parade around in the merciless sun, courting skin cancer and ruining her
coiffure by plunging into the nasty, salty, fish-poopy ocean? I think not. So she had no way of
ascertaining how Dimitri and George handled the proximity. Billie didn’t even really know for sure if her
little spies met at those functions.
She considered making friends,
well, more than friends with some single man who was involved in each group for
the purpose of inducing him to share what happened at the meetings or outings
or whatever they called it when they got together and got all sweaty and dirty
together. But there were very few single
men anywhere near her age on the island and the few there were she looked
over and decided that she just couldn’t stomach much of their company. The only one of them that interested her at
all was Mason James, who she knew was involved in both the snorkeling and
birding groups, but he was gay, an unapologetically, unequivocally, flamingly
homosexual and even Billie couldn’t imagine using her feminine wiles to pry
information out of him. And those
feminine wiles were the biggest gun in her arsenal. That is not to imply that Mason was not prone
to gossip, in truth he was one of the world’s biggest gossips, but that works
both ways and Billie could not be certain that her little operation would not
be the main topic of conversation at Mason’s next dinner party or
cocktail. So she was reduced to
observing the two wives at Art League and Literary Roundtable meetings and
inferring by their viciousness that their husbands were fighting the same sort
of battles when they met.
Oh man, it's the night to haul the trash to the street. I'd better go do that before I decide that it can wait a week. Well, it actually can wait a week and I'm not in the mood to go out and get chilled. Later, dudes and dudettes.
--Barbara
1 comment:
I guess every "closed community" has a person like Billie. Stirring the pot for whatever reason. Sounds like she's going to be our villain. Can't wait to see how you arrange her comeuppance. Glad you decided to wait on hauling out the trash. In your cold weather, even the garbage out in the garage is under refrigeration. Can't get away with that down here in the tropics.
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