Murder, with Peacocks

by Donna Andrews

  “All gone!” I shouted over the side.

  “You said how much strength it would take was one of the things you were finding out,” Michael said. “What else is this intended to discover?”

  “All sorts of grisly things. Could the underbrush or the water break Mrs. Grover’s fall enough to result in the relatively minimal injuries she sustained?”

  “And could it?”

  “Not bloody likely. And how much noise a hundred-and-five-pound object makes when landing, on sand and in the water, and how far away you can hear the noise, and the answers are less than you think, and not with the riding lawn mower running.”

  “Was it running?”

  “Much of the time, yes. And whether there’s any possibility she could merely have tripped and fallen over.”

  “Somehow I doubt that.”

  “Yes, it’s so unlikely that we can pretty much discard it, no matter where you try it. Similarly, it’s highly unlikely that anyone could have shoved her over. It very much looks as if the only way she could have gone over under her own steam would be if she took a running broad jump at the edge. And even then she’d have to be pretty athletic for a fifty-five-year-old.”

  “Aren’t you afraid of destroying evidence?” Michael asked.

  “They’ve been all over this stretch of the cliff, and found nothing,” I replied. “No sign of one-hundred-five-pound weights having crashed through the brush, no scraps of clothing, no stray objects. At least none that could reasonably be assumed to have fallen off Mrs. Grover. That’s another thing Dad wants to prove, how unlikely it would be for Mrs. Grover to have fallen over the cliff without leaving any traces on her or the cliff.”

  “How do you know this is where she went over?” Michael asked. “I thought she was found a little farther downstream than this.”

  “We’re trying it at all the likely places along the bluff. All upstream from where she was found, of course. Next he’s planning to do some tide and current tests to see if it would be plausible for a dead body dumped in the river to wash up where hers was found.”

  “Using what?” Michael asked, dubiously. “I mean, sandbags obviously won’t cut it.”

  “Rob and I are trying to convince him just to use a whole bunch of floats instead of actual dead bodies. Of animals, of course,” I added, hastily, seeing the look on Michael’s face. “He’s been talking to meatpacking houses.”

  “Lovely,” Michael said, just as Dad and Rob came puffing up the ladder. I hoped Michael wouldn’t laugh when he saw that Rob was carrying a camcorder.

  “Michael!” Dad said, enthusiastically, as he flung himself down by us, mopping his face with his handkerchief. “Glad to see you; we could certainly use your help!”

  “So Meg was telling me.”

  “Oh, Meg, how about some lemonade or iced tea?” Dad said. “Or a beer. Anything cold.”

  “Meg’s been playing stevedore,” Michael said. “How about if I fetch the refreshments?”

  “Good idea,” Dad approved. “And when you get back I’ll tell you what you can do.”

  I don’t know whether Rob’s videotapes and the meticulous notes Dad had been taking impressed Michael with the value of our efforts or whether he allowed himself to be recruited for the entertainment value. There are people in town who gladly help Dad out with his most hare-brained projects and then dine out on the stories for months afterwards. Or maybe it was the camcorder. Michael was an actor; perhaps the ham in him couldn’t resist the chance to be in front of a camera. Whatever the reason, for the next couple of hours Michael joined in energetically as we shoveled sand into the bags, dragged them up from the beach with a winch the next-door neighbors had installed to haul their boat up to their driveway, weighed them, and then heaved them down again while Dad scribbled more pages of notes. Jake came over to watch briefly at one point, and Dad tried to enlist his help, but as I pointed out, it was his sister-in-law’s demise we were trying to reenact, so he could hardly be blamed for feeling a little squeamish about the prospect.

  It’s always entertaining to watch a couple of men who’ve been bit by the macho competitive bug and are earnestly trying to outdo each other at something relatively pointless, like heaving giant sandbags over cliffs. Once he got the hang of it, Michael proved to be slightly better at sandbag-heaving than Rob, and so it was Michael who got to demonstrate for the sheriff when he came out that evening.

  The sheriff couldn’t help smiling at Dad’s enthusiasm, but I could tell Dad was beginning to convince him.

  “So you see, I think we’ve pretty clearly established that Mrs. Grover did not fall from the cliff accidentally,” Dad pontificated over lemonade on the porch after our demonstration. “There was nothing on the cliffside to indicate the passage of a falling object the size of a body.”

  “There is now,” Michael said.

  “Don’t worry, young man,” the sheriff said. “We searched it pretty thoroughly for a couple days. Nothing to be found.”

  “No traces of leaves or dirt on her body,” Dad went on, relentlessly. “And, as you can see from the effect on the sandbags, it is highly unlikely that she could have fallen, either postmortem or antemortem, without significantly greater injury. I postulate that she was taken to the beach, probably by the Donleavys’ path, possibly by the neighbors’ backyard staircase.”

  “Or by boat,” Rob suggested.

  “Yes, it’s possible,” Dad conceded, frowning. “Of course it’s unlikely. Unless someone risked discovery by bringing her by boat from quite a distance. They’d have been just as noticeable carrying her down to a boat anywhere near here as they would simply carrying her down to the beach to dump her body. But you’re right; we can’t overlook the possibility of a boat.”

  He looked very depressed. Doubtless the possibility of a boat either contradicted his pet theory or, more likely, emphasized how difficult it would be to catch the culprit. I felt sorry for him.

  “Call the Coast Guard,” I said. “Maybe they’re still staking out suspicious inlets for potential drug runners.”

  The commandant of the local Coast Guard station was convinced that his colleagues had made landing in Florida too risky for the Colombian cocaine merchants. He thought a small, unassuming town like Yorktown would be the perfect base for a major drug smuggling ring. So far his intense surveillance of the local waterways had not produced any stray smugglers. However, fishing out of season and poaching from other people’s crab pots had fallen to an all-time low.

  “Yes, it was the Coast Guard who arrested young Scotty Ballister and your cousin,” Dad said, happily. In addition to being caught crab poaching, which wasn’t actually illegal but hadn’t won them any friends, the two of them had been arrested for possession of marijuana—the closest the commandant had actually come to a drug raid. But although the baggie of grass had inconveniently floated long enough for the Coast Guard to fish it out, the prosecutor’s office couldn’t prove that Scotty or the cousin had tossed it overboard—at least, not after Scotty’s father the attorney had finished with them. Rumor had it the Coast Guard were patrolling the beaches of our neighborhood intensively, in the hope of catching Scotty and the cousin red-handed.

  Dad trotted off to call the commandant.

  “Excellent thinking, Meg!” he reported a few minutes later. “There were no craft other than the Coast Guard cutters anywhere near the beach any night this week. They’d had an alert, and have been putting on extra patrols.” Translation: they were, indeed, still lurking off the shores of our neighborhood, hoping to catch Scotty and my cousin. “It looks as if our criminal must have delivered the body by land after all.”

  “Unless she got there on her own,” the sheriff added, shaking his head.

  “I’m just glad I didn’t somehow overlook seeing someone shove her over,” I said. “That idea really bothered me.”

  “Of course there’s the question of whether she was killed there, or moved there after her death,” Dad continued. “And if she wasn�
�t killed there, whether she was put there for a reason, such as to cast suspicion on someone, or merely because it was the most convenient place in the neighborhood to dispose of a corpse.”

  “And regardless of where she was killed, where was she all morning?” I put in.

  “Good point,” Dad replied. “How come no one saw her either walking or being carried down to the beach?”

  “And for that matter, has anyone remembered searching the beach that day we were all looking for her?” I asked. No one, alas, had; so the question of whether she was on the beach on June 1 or put there sometime later remained unanswered.

  “We’re going to start the current tests tomorrow, to see how far it’s feasible for her to have drifted before she was found,” Dad said, turning back to the sheriff. “Did you bring the tide tables?”

  Wednesday, June 8

  DAD SPENT MOST OF WEDNESDAY PREPARING HIS TIDE AND CURRENT tests. In the morning, he cruised upriver for several miles, noting every place where someone could have dropped a body into the river. Rob weaseled out, pretending to study. So since Dad’s mechanical ineptness is particularly pronounced with outboard motors, I ended up as pilot, with Eric as crew. Eric could have run the boat himself, but it took both of us to fish Dad out whenever he got carried away and fell in.

  Thursday, June 9

  “EILEEN STILL HASN’T SHOWN UP,” I REPORTED BY PHONE TO Michael Thursday afternoon. “I’ve begun to wonder if she and Steven might have eloped after all.”

  “Well, just bring her in as soon as you can.”

  “Roger.”

  “Or maybe you’d like to come in and do some pre-selecting for her, eliminating things that you know wouldn’t work for her body type and so forth.”

  “Sounds like a good idea. I’m rather stuck out here today, but maybe I should do that as soon as I’m free.”

  “I could bring some of the books out to the house for you now,” he offered, eagerly. Evidently he was more anxious about the deadline than he was letting on.

  “Thanks, but I’m not at the house right now.”

  “Where are you, then?” he asked. “They need to get their phone checked, wherever you are; this is a lousy connection.”

  “I’m in a rowboat in the middle of the river. I’m using Samantha’s cell phone.” There was a pause so long I thought we’d been disconnected.

  “I know I’m going to regret asking, but why are you in a rowboat in the middle of the river?”

  “Dad’s driving up and down the bank, releasing flocks of numbered milk jugs at intervals. To test the speed and direction of the current and narrow down the sites where Mrs. Grover’s body could have been dumped into the water.”

  “That’ll take forever, won’t it?” he asked. “After all, she was missing for several days before we found her.”

  “Yes, but she couldn’t have been in the water for more than a few hours. Trust me on that. If you want to know why, ask Dad, although I advise not doing it just before dinner.”

  “I’ll take your word for it. So you’re out helping your Dad release bottles?”

  “No, he and Rob are doing that, and keeping a log of exactly where each one was released. I’m out here to record my observations. Scientifically.”

  “And what have you observed, so far? Scientifically speaking.”

  “That there are getting to be a truly remarkable number of milk jugs bobbing around out here, but unless they start showing a great deal more enthusiasm, none of them are going to make it to the beach anytime this century. Most of them don’t seem to be going anywhere at all. Except for the ones the sheriff is dropping into the current in the middle of the river. They’re travelling rather briskly, but they’re not coming anywhere near the beach.”

  “Oh, the sheriffs involved, too?”

  “I don’t know whether Dad’s convincing him or he’s humoring Dad, but yes, he’s out in the powerboat releasing jugs. That’s why I’m in the rowboat.”

  “Rather tedious for you,” Michael sympathized.

  “Oh, it’s all right. It’s peaceful out here, and it’s also amazing how much you can get done even in the middle of the river with a cellular phone. And I brought the stationery so I can keep on with the addressing for Mother.”

  “Well, come in when you can. With or without Eileen.”

  “Roger.”

  I had a quiet day, but on the bright side, Barry took off to meet Steven and Eileen for a craft fair in Manassas. Good riddance.

  Friday, June 10

  I SPENT FRIDAY IN MUCH THE SAME WAY—BOBBING ABOUT ON THE water watching Dad’s latest crop of milk jugs. I found I couldn’t write invitations after all; the sunscreen smeared them. I’d made all the phone calls possible. All I could do was fret about the identity of the murderer, if there was a murderer. I resolved that once I was released from my observation post, I was going to go around to question some of my friends and family. With subtlety. The sheriff was about as subtle as a plowhorse.

  Saturday, June 11

  AFTER TWO DAYS OF BOBBING ABOUT ON THE RIVER HERDING milk jugs, I devoted Saturday to helping Dad with the roundup)—tracking down as many of the milk jugs as possible and recording where we’d found them. We even started getting calls from people down river, claiming the small reward we had offered for turning in the jugs that got past us. Most of these, as expected, were the ones the sheriff had dumped into the current. None of the jugs washed up anywhere near the beach where Mrs. Grover was found, which Dad and the sheriff concluded was convincing enough proof that her body had been dumped there rather than washing up there. I had to admit, I was convinced. Thanks to the vigilance of the Coast Guard and the contrariness of the currents, we now knew that Mrs. Grover must have arrived on the beach by land, not by sea.

  But for the moment I’d decided to let Dad investigate alone. Wonder of wonders, Eileen had showed up Saturday afternoon, even more sunburnt that I was, but in one piece, and presumably available for measuring and gown selecting. If she didn’t take off before Monday morning.

  “Having trouble with your car?” Michael asked. He came across me peering under the hood of my car, owner’s manual in hand, so I suppose that was the logical assumption.

  “I’m trying to figure out where the distributor cap is, and how one removes it.”

  “You’re having trouble with your distributor cap?” he asked.

  “No, but I want Eileen to have car trouble if she tries to leave before I get her in to pick out her gown. In the movies, they’re always removing the distributor cap to keep people from leaving the premises, but I can’t even figure out where the darned thing is.”

  After much effort, we succeeded in locating something that we thought was the distributor cap; more important, we confirmed that, whatever it was, once it was removed the car wouldn’t start. After considerably greater effort, not to mention some help from Samantha, who happened to be passing by, we managed to get it reinstalled and start my car again.

  We then staged a daring midnight raid on Eileen’s car.

  Sunday, June 12

  I SLEPT IN SUNDAY MORNING AND THEN FLED BEFORE MOTHER AND her court arrived for the midday dinner. I didn’t want to face what the assembled multitudes had to say about either the murder or the Langslow family’s latest eccentricities. Instead, I went over to Eileen’s house to read her the riot act about staying in town until the gown business was finished. We arranged to go down to Be-Stitched bright and early Monday morning. She promised repeatedly that of course she wouldn’t think of leaving town before the gown was settled. Cynic that I am, I took more comfort in the thought of her distributor cap safely stowed in a shoebox at the very back of my closet.

  As I was walking down her driveway, Eileen came back out and called to me.

  “Oh, by the way, Meg,” she called, “Barry’s coming in tonight. He called to say he’s dropping by on his way home from the show and can stay around for a few days.”

  “How nice for him. I’ll pick you up at five of nine to
morrow.”

  I rejoined Mother, Dad, and Pam on the porch of our house. Dad had several dozen medical texts scattered about. He kept reading bits in one, then switching to another, all the while nodding and muttering multisyllabic words to himself. I hated to interrupt him, but—

  “Dad,” I asked, “do you have any heavy yard work that needs doing?”

  “I need to saw up that fallen tree, but I don’t think you’d want to do it.”

  “Besides, dear, don’t YOU have enough to do with the invitations?” Mother hinted. “All this excitement over Mrs. Grover seems to have taken such a lot of your time.”

  “I wasn’t volunteering for yard work,” I said. “But Eileen says Barry is dropping by on his way back from the craft fair to spend a few days.”

  “How nice of him,” Mother purred.

  “Good grief,” Pam said.

  Dad snorted.

  “And I see no reason why he should be loitering around underfoot, getting in everyone’s way,” I continued. “He could make himself useful. He’s a cabinetmaker; he should feel right at home with a saw. Have him cut up the tree.”

  “He could come with me up to the farm,” Dad said. “They’ve promised me a load of manure if I help haul off a few more truckloads of rocks. Barry’s a big lad; he should be able to handle the rocks.”

  “What a good idea,” I said. “Barry spends a lot of time at the farm with Steven and Eileen. I’m sure he’d love one of your manure trips.” Perhaps we could also take Barry on all the little expeditions we’d dreamed up to help run poor Mrs. Grover out of town. Waste not, want not.

  “By the way, Dad,” I added, “remind them about the peacocks.”

  Monday, June 13

  “EILEEN WILL BE CHOOSING A GOWN THIS WEEK,” I ANNOUNCED over breakfast to Mother and Mrs. Fenniman—who had dropped by shortly after dawn to borrow some sugar and had now been discussing redecorating schemes with Mother for several hours.