Perfect Nightmare: A Novel

Kara Marshall glanced surreptitiously at her watch and wondered if there were any way ' any tactful way ' to get Claire Sollinger to eat just a little faster. But of course there wasn ' t; everyone in Camden Green knew that if you had lunch with Claire, it was going to be at least a two-hour event. Not that Kara minded. She and Claire had known each other ever since Claire had turned up as a volunteer for her project to restore the old town square to the park it had been before succumbing to the ' modernization ' of the post ' World War II era when Camden Green, along with a dozen other towns along the north shore of Long Island, had decided to pin their future to the automobile and ripped out the old square in favor of a parking lot. The plan hadn ' t worked: ten years after the lot went in, so did the mall on the southern edge of town, and parking lot or not, Camden Green ' s downtown had gone the way of dozens of others. At least it had until she and a few of her friends decided to change things, and organized a committee to rebuild the square in an effort to revitalize the town.

Claire Shields Sollinger had shown up at that first meeting. A silence fell over the room when she walked in, for no one expected anyone from the huge mansions in the Flinders Beach area along the shore to come to the meeting.

Give money, yes. But not come to the meetings, let alone do any actual work.

But there Claire had been, and after looking around at the shocked faces, she ' d raised a sardonic eyebrow and spoken directly to Kara. ' It seems my husband has traded me in for his secretary, which means I have a lot of time on my hands. I ' m a good gardener, and I don ' t mind getting my hands dirty. So how can I help ' By directly confirming the gossip that had been running through the town for weeks, she utterly disarmed everyone in the room, and she ' d proven as good as her word, showing up at every work party in the square, helping Kara find (and paying for) a landscape architect to re-create the square as it had looked decades earlier, and generally making herself useful. Except that the lunches tended to drag on, and even after ten years, neither Kara nor anyone else had worked up the courage to tell Claire Shields Sollinger that they had other things they needed to do.