she removed that for us to sit on while we dined. We made our way across the lawn and found a perfect spot near the estate, yet with a panoramic view of the Hudson River and West Point on its western shore. Max spread the blanket and I began taking the food from the basket.
“Any chocolate in there?” she asked, peering into the wicker basket.
“Yes, but not until you eat all of the other food that I brought.” If it were up to Max we would eat the chocolate, drink the bottle of wine, and skip everything else. I took out everything that I had bought and arranged it on the blanket. People were scattered all around the grounds of the estate, doing exactly as we were: drinking wine and eating dinner. There was a festive feel to the gorgeous evening and I rejoiced in being out of my house, with my best friend, and preparing to enjoy the performance.
Max pulled a white paper bag out of the basket and opened it. “Oh! Cookies!” she exclaimed, pulling them out.
I hadn’t bought any cookies. Max held them up: two heart-shaped cookies with the word “amore” written across them. Tony.
She looked at me and gave me a sweet smile. “I love you, too,” she said, kissing my cheek.
“I didn’t buy those for us, Max. I think maybe Tony, my deli boyfriend, put them in there.”
She dropped them back into the bag as if they had burst into flames. “Ewww.”
I opened the bag further but only the two cookies resided at the bottom. Thank God…I was hoping not to find an engagement ring embedded in a salami.
“Crawford could take a page from this guy’s book. He’s very romantic,” she said. Max stretched out on the blanket, her shirt riding up to just beneath her black bra, exposing her flat stomach. Max doesn’t engage in any kind of physical activity besides yoga and sex, and both were keeping her in very good shape; you could bounce a quarter off her abdominal muscles. I pointed to her six-pack of muscle. “Sex or yoga?”
She picked her head up and looked at her stomach. “A little bit of both. You should try at least one of them.” She rolled over on her stomach and surveyed the crowd. She let out a disgusted groan as I saw her eyes fall on a couple a few blankets away who were rolling around in the throes of passion. “Get a room, for God’s sake,” she said, and turned back to me. She popped a grape in her mouth and held out a wineglass for me to fill. “If The Merry Wives of Windsor isn’t porn, then I don’t want to be watching that,” she said, throwing her head in the direction of the amorous couple.
I stayed focused on the couple in question and almost threw up when the man rolled onto his back and off the woman; I got a look at his face and gasped out loud. The woman sat up and put her hand to his cheek. Her breathy giggle wafted over to our blanket on the fragrant breeze.
Terri. And Jackson.
Chapter 7
It took me a minute to really understand what I was seeing. Fortunately for me, Terri never saw me, jumping on top of Jackson soon after I spotted them to resume their juvenile public make-out session.
“Look who that is,” I whispered. She turned her head to look and I hissed, “Don’t look!” Max isn’t really very good at the art of surveillance. But she did catch a look at my supposedly murderous neighbor and his supposedly terrified wife. I don’t know—if you really think your husband is a cold-blooded killer, do you make out with him in public? I think not.
“It’s Jackson,” she said. “I’d know that weak chin anywhere.”
“Does that look like a woman who’s afraid of her own husband?” I continued to keep them in my peripheral vision; although they were far enough away that I could spy unobserved, I turned to the side in the hopes that they wouldn’t see me.
Max eased up onto her elbows, looking like she was setting up her position in a foxhole. She studied them for a few minutes and then looked at me. “Do you really want to see this play?”
“Let’s go,” I said, throwing all of the food back into the paper bag and rolling up the picnic blanket. I handed her the paper bag and threw the blanket over my shoulder. “But we’re not breaking into