War and Peas

a low voice, but across the way, Babs McDonald’s head snapped up and she glared at him. Not awfully diplomatic of him, Jane thought, offering to step into Regina Palmer’s shoes so soon.
    “For now?“ Jane repeated innocently. “What do you mean?”
    He replied, a little too loudly, “Only that I’ll be happy to do anything the Snellen Museum needs at this time of trouble.”
    Jane went back to the booth and said, “Shelley, I think you should take the next carton over and meet Derek.“
    “Who’s that?“ Shelley said, slapping transparent tape along the lid of a box.
    “Oh, just the Snellen Museum’s very own sleaze. And a perfect murder suspect.“
    “What on earth are you blathering about?“ Shelley snapped. The tape hadn’t gone on perfectly straight, the way she felt tape was supposed to do. She considered such incidents with inanimate objects as personal insults.
    “Take that box over and you’ll see.”
    Shelley returned ten minutes later—walking hard on her heels. “What a creep!“ she said with an elaborate shudder. “He called me ‘babe.’ Babe!“
    “No!“
    “ He won’t do it again,“ Shelley said, smiling a little.
    Jane repeated his remark about being the assistant director—so far. “Babs heard him, but I wanted to make certain he knew she’d heard it. Do you think we should tell Mel?“
    “You can, but I don’t think there’s any need,“ Shelley said. “The rest of them in the trailer were treating him like he was Typhoid Mary. I don’t think there’s any love lost on him at the Snellen.“
    “But there might be elsewhere,“ Jane said quietly. “Get a load of that.”
    She gestured with her shoulder. Derek Delano was approaching the booth with a woman on his arm. She was the essence of the country-club type: stylish clothes that were once called “preppie,“ a golf tan, costly sunglasses, a surgically enhanced figure and face, and expensively streaked blond hair. And in spite of it all, she looked just old enough to be his mother, though her clinging posture and eyelash batting weren’t the least maternal.
    “Georgia Snellen,“ Shelley muttered under her breath.
    “Same family, I assume?“ Jane hissed back. Shelley nodded.
    “Closing up shop, I see,“ Georgia Snellen said as she released Derek and leaned casually against the corner post of the booth.
    Shelley didn’t bother to make the obvious reply. “I’m Shelley Nowack. We served on the Philharmonic Committee together a number of years ago.“
    “Not too many years, I hope,“ Georgia trilled girlishly. “Are you one of the Evanston Nowacks? Lovely family.”
    Shelley didn’t bother to deny it. She introduced Jane.
    There followed an interrogation of Jane’s social antecedents, during which Jane let Georgia make some unfounded leaps of belief, and Jane ended up related to both a highly respected family of Harvard philosophy professors and an early, though entirely mythical, Arctic explorer (Shelley’s contribution).
    “And what relation are you to the gentleman I met yesterday?“ Jane asked.
    “Georgia is Caspar Snellen’s sister,“ Shelley said wickedly.
    But Georgia had learned to deal with this unfortunate circumstance. “Poor old Caspar,“ she said sadly, but didn’t elaborate. It was an effective dismissal of the blood tie, and Jane had to give her credit for it. It managed to imply, in three harmless words, that they all had their crosses to bear, that Caspar was hers, and no doubt Jane and Shelley had batty old aunts who lived under bridges eating canned spaghetti, or a cousin in Leavenworth.
    “You girls will be at the groundbreaking ceremony, won’t you?“ Georgia asked. “Derek and I are just on our way over. You could walk along with us.“
    “We’ll be right behind you,“ Shelley said. “I have one more box to store.”
    Derek and Georgia drifted off, she firmly attached to his arm again. Jane laughed. “Shelley! You actually know that awful woman and never told me about her?”
    Shelley grinned. “I didn’t think you’d believe it. Honestly, I’d forgotten all about her until I saw her draped all over Derek.“
    “I should have told her I was related to Teddy Roosevelt on his mother’s side,“ Jane said. “Are you really?“
    “No. But it wouldn’t matter,“ Jane said. “She’d have loved it.“
    “What I don’t ‘get’ about her,“ Shelley mused, “is that she’s so stereotypically nouveau-riche acting, but she does come from very old