Roadblock VII
Restored in October 2026 from a 2003 copy of the original PenBase page saved by the Wayback Machine; Pentrace’s own database copy had been cut short.
I could tell right away that I was not the only one glad to see Andrew. Laurel’s face lit up, as if her own personal knight in shining armor had come to her rescue. I could see from Andrew’s expression that her admiration had registered and did not displease him one iota.
As soon as Andrew took the purse from her hand, Paula sat down on the sofa and announced, “I’m not going anywhere until I’ve gotten what I came for.”
Andrew looked embarrassed, and I felt sorry for him. He cleared his throat and said, “Now ladies, I’m sure we can get everything straightened out without such dramatic displays.”
I glanced at Anita who was smiling as she, with Roadblock tucked firmly under one arm, fiddled with what might have been a pen but looked more like a pen barrel topped by a small, gold-encased mace or club, or maybe a large, gold-plated, hollowed out chicken bone with ragged edges. My eyes are not what they used to be, but I was certain I’d never seen anything like that object in my life.
“Good grief, Anita! What is that thing?” I called out.
She looked up. “That, my dear friend, is a Michel Audiard limited edition fountain pen, and one of the objects of contention between these two women.”
“Oh good heavens!” I replied. “You mean there’s more than one of those things?”
Anita chuckled. “Yes, Dennison has a small collection of pens by Michel Audiard. This one is called ‘the Herd’. I think it is the most outlandish of the bunch, though ‘Butterflies’ is rather odd as well. At issue is whether these objects are, in fact, pens or works of sculpture. If the former, Laurel gets to keep them. If not, according to the terms of the divorce agreement, they belong to Dennison, who has delegated this young woman as his agent and requested that she retrieve those pieces of art still remaining in this house.”
“Oh my,” I said softly, “I can see where this could turn into quite a battle.”
“I sincerely hope not, Mother,” Andrew declared. “I don’t have time. I must be back in the city by mid-afternoon.”
“Mother?” Paula repeated. “Mother? What is your mother doing here?”
Laurel looked from Andrew to me to Anita, and Paula continued to glare accusingly at Andrew, who was momentarily speechless.
Laurel spoke up, “While we’re exploring family relationships, would someone please tell me if this home-wrecker is related to anyone else in the room?”
Paula snarled. Andrew cleared his throat, blushed and started to stammer, which he only did in situations of extreme discomfort.
Anita seemed to feel sorry for him, for she put down the object (I hesitate to call it a pen) that she’d been examining and explained, “Andrew used to be married to the young lady’s mother, if I’m not mistaken.”
“Used to be?”
“Ah, yes,” Andrew found his tongue. “We are divorced. Paula here is…was…is… my stepdaughter.” He looked over at Anita and addressed his question to her, “Tell me, Miss Carswell, does one cease to be a step-parent when one ceases to be the spouse of a birth parent? I’ve always wondered about that.”
Paula’s snarl became more pronounced as she folded her arms across her chest and glared at Andrew. When she spoke up, there was a strained, teary whine to her voice. “I’m your stepdaughter, whether you like it or not. You can’t dump me the way you did my mother. And you promised to help me look out for my interests here. Which,” she added accusingly, “you’re not doing.”
Andrew fixed her with what I always called his “general’s stare.” He was a major in the army reserve but had ambitions to rise higher. He certainly had the stare down pat. I always wondered if mastering it were a prerequisite for promotion.
“Now Paula,” he said firmly, if a bit pompously, “I agreed to come along and help you retrieve some agreed upon objets d’art. I did not come to engage in hairsplitting about what you are entitled to take. And I would not have agreed at all, had you not told me, falsely it seems, that there was likely to be a man here who might try to obstruct you in the performance of your…uh…duty.”
I could tell that Andrew was having difficulty construing Paula’s attempt at pillage as her duty, and I was glad about that. Laurel, however, had gone from regarding Andrew as a savior to seeing him as the enemy.
“What man?” she demanded. “There’s no man here! There used to be, but he was lured off by that…that…stepdaughter of yours.”
She pronounced the word “stepdaughter” as if it were half obscenity and half joke. Andrew seemed genuinely upset by her change in attitude toward him and tried to regain favor.
“Well, you see, Ma’am,” he began, “I was misinformed. In fact, I think this whole conflict is more of a misunderstanding than anything else.”
“Oh really?” Laurel responded, not mollified in the least. “Is it a misunderstanding that after stealing my husband, she is trying to steal the possessions he agreed would be mine under the terms of our divorce settlement?”
“I, uh, well, I know that Paula is acting as your husband’s representative, so he must believe that the objects in question are his under the terms of your agreement. It’s a misunderstanding, as I said, or a disagreement about the interpretation of terms that should have been spelled out more precisely.”
Anita sniffed. And I felt called upon to chime in, “Surely pens are pens, no matter how strange they look. If Laurel is supposed to keep the pens, then she is supposed to keep all of them.”
Paula shook her head. “Those things are portable sculpture. So are the rest of these limited additions. Dennis said so.” Anita smirked and caught my eye. Limited additions indeed! Paula held out a list that included, along with the Audiard pens, the Omas Mandela series, a Pierre Lepine Graphyscaf, the Mount Everest and the Shakespeare by Krone, as well as a Stipula Laurus in solid gold, and several pens by Montegrappa, including the Aphrodite, the Silver Dragon, and the Luxor Blue Nile.
Anita read through the list quickly. “What?” she said, a slight smile playing across her face, “No Parker Snake?”
Laurel piped up. “Handsome is afraid of snakes.”
Andrew snorted in disdain. I was not sure if he was reacting to his stepdaughter’s fiancé’s fear of snakes or his nickname. In either case, his disapprobation was obvious. Laurel saw it and smiled at him. “I couldn’t get him to help me in the garden at all. He was terrified even of grass snakes and garter snakes.”
Andrew shook his head. “Well, I’m sorry to hear it. That he was of no help to you, I mean. You are a lady who surely deserves much better than that.”
Laurel blushed and I could see that Andrew was making some headway in his attempt to regain her good opinion of him. I was unsure how much to read into his obvious wish to please her. Laurel is an attractive enough woman, but much older than the twenty-five year olds to whom Andrew is generally attracted. If he were to be interested in Laurel, that might mean he was finally growing up, I thought, surely a good sign. But of course, he may just have wanted to be well thought of. Like Lawrence, he allowed his sense of his own worthiness to depend to excess on what others thought of him. In that respect, he was truly his father’s son.
Andrew cleared his throat, and I used the pause in the interaction to make eye contact with Anita, who was stroking Roadblock and watching everyone with those hawk-eyes of hers. When she caught my eye, she grinned and nodded slightly, I thought, approvingly.
Roadblock chose just that moment to break for freedom, and he began to strike out at Anita with his hind claws. She was wearing her usual blue blazer. The fabric was a thick twill, so all Roadblock did was catch his claws in it.
“I’d better take him outside,” Anita observed, and before Paula could launch into another tirade about the cat, Anita had disappeared into the kitchen. Paula looked from Laurel to Andrew to me and stood up. She started to move towards the chest of pens, saying, “I’m going to take the pens and the paintings I came for. If you want them back, you can call our lawyer.” Laurel was quick but not as quick as Andrew. He took three large steps and stood hovering over the pens. “I think we’d better wait until Miss Carswell returns,” he said calmly. “She is the duly elected mediator for this town, after all.”
Paula tried to reach around him, but Andrew grabbed her arm. “Paula, sit down!” he ordered. “I meant what I said. Let’s wait for Miss Carswell.”
“Why?” Paula demanded. “She has no authority. Dennis has moved out of this ridiculous, one horse town, and so have you. Why do we need to wait for that old woman’s permission to take what we’ve come for and leave?”
“Because if you do that, I’ll call the police,” Laurel announced. “And they won’t hesitate to arrest you for theft, even if they are only the police force of a one horse town.” Her voice was calm, but Paula seemed recognize that she’d best back off. She turned away from the pen chest and walked back to the sofa onto which she fell as if she had no bones.
“From now on,” she mumbled, “Dennis can do his own dirty work. This is so damned boring I could puke.”
Andrew blushed again. I suppose he felt responsible for Paula. Andrew always exhibited what I considered an odd obsession with ladylike behavior on the part of women of his acquaintance, and Paula’s behavior and choice of vocabulary obviously bothered him. I found this quirk of his more amusing than annoying most of the time. But then I can be as ladylike as the best of them, if and when I choose.
Anita came back into the room and went right to the pen chest. She closed it carefully and turned to face all of us.
“I think both of you,” she began, looking from Laurel to Paula, “need to contact your respective lawyers. Or rather,” she continued, focusing on Laurel, “Dennison needs to contact his attorney.”
“We have the same lawyer,” Paula interrupted. “And the same doctor, accountant, and realtor. We’re in love, for heaven’s sake!”
Anita smirked again, though she tried to keep her expression neutral. Laurel just rolled her eyes.
“As I was saying,” Anita began again, “the attorneys can clarify the language of the agreement and decide which pens belong to whom.”
Andrew cleared his throat. “An excellent suggestion,” he rumbled. “There is, however, the matter of the two paintings I was under the impression Paula and I were coming her to retrieve. I don’t see any reason why we shouldn’t take them and be on our way.” He looked at Anita as if to gauge her reaction. She kept her face blank.
Laurel spoke up. “I don’t see why you have come at all. Handsome and I agreed to wait until the divorce decree was final before dividing the property. We planed to wait until the weekend after we’d gotten the papers.”
“That’s not what he told me,” Paula complained. “He wants his paintings and his pens, and he wants them now.”
“Well,” Andrew replied, looking irritated, “he can’t have them now, can he?” He took Paula firmly by the arm and started in the direction of the door. Before leaving, he addressed Laurel, “We’re sorry to have troubled you. I hope you will follow Miss Carswell’s suggestion. I will see to it that her advice is communicated to Mr. Wayne. Good afternoon.”
And with that they were out the door. The three of us stood silently until the roar of an engine and the sound of tires moving across pavement told us they’d really gone. Then Laurel turned to Anita and said, “What happens now?”
She seemed strangely calm, almost as if she’d been sedated.
“Now,” Anita said, “you put the pens away and phone your attorney.”
“But I fired my attorney.”
Anita and I exchanged glances. “I suppose you’ll either have to rehire him or find another.”
Laurel looked upset. “I can’t,” she replied.
“Why not?” I demanded.
“I just can’t.” She seemed on the verge of tears, which only annoyed me. Anita, however, is more soft-hearted than I.
“It will all work out,” she said in the same tone of voice I’ve heard her use when trying to persuade a frightened cat to come out of its inaccessible hiding place. “Now go put the pens away. Marian and I have to leave soon.”
Laurel did as she was told. As soon as I heard her footsteps going upstairs, I said, “Well, I came to hear a story, and now it looks as if I’m in the middle of one.”
“How so?” Anita demanded.
She wasn’t usually this dense, so I stared at her for a moment, then said, “Andrew. My son and his stepdaughter are in the middle of this mess.”
Anita shrugged. “But you are not Andrew.”
“Of course, I’m not Andrew!” I replied, exasperated. “But I am his mother.”
Anita laughed. “Marian, Andrew is a fifty year old man.”
“So what?” I countered. “He’s still my son.”
“Indeed, he is. Your son who lives only fifty miles away but never visits and only phones to pick fights with you about his future inheritance.”
“That makes no difference,” I insisted, knowing I was being irrationally stubborn. “You wouldn’t understand. You don’t have any children.”
Anita just shook her head. “Marian, I think you are bored with your business and your life and are looking for some excitement. You just haven’t been yourself since Phoebe went off on her honeymoon. Maybe you need to travel or find a new hobby.”
I peered at her. “You’re just trying to recruit me to fountain pen collecting, Anita. I know you.” I glared at her as convincingly as I could. “You promised that I’d hear the story of how Laurel came to fountain pen use through adversity, you know. Though she has come into the possession of a number of pens, I didn’t see any sign that she was actually using any of them. She didn’t seem to know a thing about them.”
“Not about the L.E.s she doesn’t, but she does use fountain pens. Three very special vintage pens that came her way when Dennison moved in with Paula.”
“Wait a minute!” I demanded. “You forget that I haven’t heard the story of the collapse of Laurel’s marriage to Handsome. I’ve gotten only a few tantalizing bits and pieces. And nothing at all about fountain pens.”
Anita nodded. “Yes, this visit has been rather less informative and more dramatic than I’d bargained for. Let’s say our good-byes to Laurel, and I’ll treat you to a late lunch and tell you the story myself. Unless you need to go back to work.”
I don’t get invited to lunch everyday, and work was quite slow. My assistants could handle any emergencies that might arise. And my role as witness to the melodramatic interactions of the day had aroused my curiosity. So Anita and I said good-bye to Laurel and headed further away from the center of town to the inn by Split Lake, a recently opened restaurant run by yet another of Anita's former students. I was determined to have my story, and knowing Anita, I was sure I’d be well-received at the restaurant and., even more important, well-fed.