Murder, with Peacocks

by Donna Andrews

  “But you don’t know that anything’s happened?”

  “No. Good grief, I’m not suggesting she’s another murder victim. Although wasn’t there a story in the Arabian Nights where the wicked king was killed because someone knew he licked his finger to turn the pages when he read and gave him a book with poison on all the pages? Maybe we should interrogate the printers; maybe they were intending to poison Samantha and accidentally bumped off Mrs. Thornhill.”

  “I know you think this is ridiculous, Meg,” Dad said, with a sigh. He took off his glasses to rub his eyes, and then began cleaning them with the tail of his shirt. Since this was the shirt he’d been gardening in all day, he wasn’t producing much of an improvement. He looked tired and depressed and much older than usual.

  “Here, drink your tea and let me do that,” I said, grabbing a tissue and holding out my hand for the glasses. With uncharacteristic meekness, Dad handed over the glasses and leaned back to sip his tea.

  “I don’t think it’s ridiculous,” I went on, as I polished the glasses and wondered where he could possibly have gotten purple glitter paint on the lenses. “I’m just trying to keep my sense of humor in a trying situation.”

  “Yes, I know it’s been difficult for you, trying to get these weddings organized and having to help me with the investigation.”

  “Not to worry; it’s probably kept me from killing any of the brides.”

  “It’s just that it’s so maddening that despite all the forensic evidence, the sheriff still believes I’m imagining things.”

  “Well, consider the source. I’m sure if I were planning a murder, I wouldn’t worry much about him catching me,” I said, finally deciding that the remaining spots on Dad’s glasses were actually scratches, and giving the lenses a final polish.

  “No,” Dad said, glumly.

  “But I would certainly try to schedule my dastardly deeds when you were out of town,” I said, handing him back his glasses with a flourish. Dad reached for them and then froze, staring at them fixedly.

  “Dad,” I said. “Are you all right? Is something wrong?”

  “Of course,” he muttered.

  “Of course what?”

  “You’re absolutely right, Meg; and you’ve made an important point. I don’t know why I didn’t think of that.”

  “Think of what?”

  “This completely changes things, you know.” He gulped the rest of his tea and trotted out, still muttering to himself. With anyone else I would have wondered if they were losing their marbles. With Dad, it simply meant he was hot on the trail of a new obsession.

  It was getting dark, so I lit some candles and spent a couple of peaceful hours addressing invitations by candlelight.

  Sunday, June 19

  DAD DROPPED BY THE NEXT MORNING WITH FRESH FRUIT. HE WAS looking much better, smiling and humming to himself. Obsession obviously suited him.

  “Oh, by the way, I’m going to borrow Great-Aunt Sophy,” he said, trotting into the living room.

  “You’re going to what?” I said, following him.

  “Borrow Great-Aunt Sophy.”

  “I wouldn’t if I were you; Mother is very fond of that vase,” I said, watching nervously as Dad lifted down the very fragile antique Chinese urn that held Great-Aunt Sophy’s ashes.

  “Oh, not the vase, just her. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”

  “What makes you think Mother won’t mind?”

  “I meant Sophy,” Dad said, carrying the vase out into the kitchen. “We won’t tell your mother.”

  “I know I won’t,” I muttered. “Here, let me take that.” Dad had tucked the vase carelessly under his arm and was rummaging through the kitchen cabinets. “What are you looking for?”

  “Something to put her in.”

  I found him an extra-large empty plastic butter tub, and he transferred Great-Aunt Sophy’s ashes to it. Although ashes seemed rather a misnomer. I’d never seen anyone’s ashes before and wondered if Great-Aunt Sophy’s were typical; there seemed to be quite a lot of large chunks of what I presumed were bone. After Dad finished the transfer, I cleaned his fingerprints off the vase and put it back, being careful to position it precisely in the little dust-free ring it had come from. I still didn’t know what he was going to do with Great-Aunt Sophy. I assumed he’d tell me when he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He trotted off with the butter tub in one hand, whistling “Loch Lomond.”

  I decided that vendors and peacock farmers were not apt to call on a Sunday and went over to Pam’s at noon for dinner. Pam had air-conditioning.

  “What on earth is your father up to?” Mother asked as we were sitting down.

  “What do you mean, up to?” I asked, startled. Had some neighbor told her about Dad’s visit earlier that morning? Could Dad have revealed to someone what he was carrying around in the plastic butter tub?

  “He went down to the Town Crier office yesterday, and even though it was almost closing time, he insisted they drag out a whole lot of back issues.”

  “Back issues from the summer before last? While he was in Scotland?”

  “Why, yes. How ever did you know that?”

  “Just a wild guess,” I said, feeling rather pleased with myself for putting together the clues. Dad was obviously pursuing the theory that Mrs. Grover’s murder had something to do with something that had happened while he was away. Though what Great-Aunt Sophy, who had been quietly reposing in Mother’s living room for three or four years, could possibly have to do with current events was beyond me. I couldn’t think of anything odd that had happened that summer. No deaths other than people who were definitely sick or definitely old.

  Or definitely both, like Jake’s late wife.

  How very odd.

  Could Dad possibly suspect Jake of killing his wife? And if so, what could it possibly have to do with Mrs. Grover’s death, for which Jake, at least, had a complete alibi?

  Perhaps he suspected someone else of killing the late Mrs. Wendell. Someone who also had a motive for killing Mrs. Grover? And of course, if someone was knocking off the women in Jake’s life, Dad would certainly want to do something about it, in case Mother were at risk.

  At least I assumed he did. I toyed briefly with the notion of Dad going off the deep end and trying to frame Jake for his late wife’s murder so he could get Mother back. And then disposing of Mrs. Grover when she found out his plot.

  Or Mother, knocking off Mrs. Wendell in order to get her hands on Jake, and then doing away with the suspicious Mrs. Grover who called her a blond hussy and tried to stop the marriage.

  I sighed. Dad couldn’t possibly carry off such a scheme; he’d have been visibly bursting with enthusiasm and would have dropped what he thought were indecipherable hints to all and sundry. Mother would never have done anything that required that much effort; she’d have tried to enlist someone else to do it for her.

  No, I couldn’t see either parent as a murderer. But then, I was a biased witness. For that matter, like most children, I had a hard time seeing my parents as sexual beings, despite the evidence of Pam, Rob, and myself. Perhaps I was missing all the telltale signs of a passionate geriatric love triangle being played out in front of my nose.

  I glanced over at suspect number one. She was looking at me with a faint frown of genuine concern on her face.

  “Are you all right, Meg?” she asked.

  “A little tired,” I lied. “The weather, I’m sure.”

  “Perhaps you should stay here this afternoon, where it’s cooler. Jake and I are going over to have tea with Mrs. Fenniman, so you’ll have some quiet. Or you could come with us; Mrs. Fenniman’s air-conditioning is working.”

  I was touched by her concern, but realized in that instant that I had other plans for the afternoon.

  “No, I have a few things to do.” With Jake and Mother safely out of the way, I was going to play detective. After all, if Dad could do it, why not me?

  I waited until Mother and Jake took off. Then I grabbed an u
nfamiliar-looking dish—one that I could plausibly claim I had mistaken for something of Jake’s—and trotted over to his house. Quite openly; just one neighbor returning another’s pie plate.

  I knocked, in case someone was there. Then I reached out, heart pounding, to open the door.

  Which was locked. Unheard of. People in Yorktown don’t lock their doors.

  Searching Jake’s house was going to be a little harder than I thought. I wandered around to the back door, calling “yoo-hoo” very quietly. The back door was locked, too.

  But he’d left the window by the back door open.

  I had pried open the screen and was halfway in the window when I heard a voice behind me.

  “Lost your key?”

  I started, hitting my head on the window frame, and turned to find Michael behind me. Holding Spike’s leash.

  “I know what this looks like,” I began, turning to look over my shoulder and lifting the tips of my sneakers out of Spike’s reach.

  “To me, it looks very much as if you’ve been reading too many of the same books your dad has. And why Jake? Isn’t he the one local who’s not a suspect? Or is this only one in a series of clandestine searches?”

  “He’s not a suspect, but he has a whole roomful of the victim’s stuff. I want to see Mrs. Grover’s stuff.”

  “Surely the sheriff took any important evidence?”

  “The sheriff wouldn’t know important evidence if it walked into his office and introduced itself. Look, either call the cops or go away; I’m getting very uncomfortable hanging half-in and half-out of this window.”

  “I have a better idea,” Michael said. “I’ll give you a cover story. Here.” He picked up Spike and, before the little beast could react, tossed him over my leg into the house. Spike shook himself, looked around, and then ran out of sight, growling all the way.

  “You were helping me retrieve Spike,” Michael said, offering me a leg up and then jumping nimbly in after me. “Don’t ask how he got into Mr. Wendell’s house. The place obviously needs to be vermin-proofed.”

  Now that I’d succeeded in getting in, I felt temporarily disoriented. I had a whole house to search, and I had no idea what I was looking for.

  Of course there wasn’t that much to search. It was a rather bare house. There seemed to be even less furniture and fewer decorations than the last time I’d seen it, just after Mrs. Grover disappeared. I reached under the sink and fortunately found a pair of kitchen gloves.

  “Here,” I said, handing them to Michael. “You wear these. I brought my own.”

  “So where do we start?” he asked, following me from the kitchen into the living room.

  “I’ll look in the guest room,” I said, more decisively than I felt. “You search his desk.”

  “What am I looking for?”

  “How should I know? Discrepancies. Anomalies. The missing will. Blunt objects still bearing telltale traces of hair and blood. We’re working blind here.”

  Michael chuckled and sat down at Jake’s desk. He began deftly rummaging through the desk, whistling “Secret Agent Man” almost inaudibly.

  “Smart aleck,” I said, and went into the guest room.

  It wasn’t a complete loss. I continued to be amazed at the number of small, portable valuables Mrs. Grover had appropriated while at Jake’s. I did find an envelope containing two thousand dollars in cash, mostly in hundreds. Perhaps evidence of a blackmail scheme, although it must have been a penny-ante one if this was all she had collected. Still, perhaps she had been stopped before she’d hit her stride. Then again, perhaps she just didn’t believe in traveler’s checks. And I found nothing else of interest. No diary with a last entry announcing her intent to meet X on the bluff before dawn. No list of suspects’ names with payoff amounts jotted beside them. No incriminating letters or photos. Nothing out of the ordinary.

  Well, one thing out of the ordinary. I found the late Emma Wendell. What remained of her, anyway. I opened a rather nondescript box marked Emma, expecting to find another piece of silver or china bric-a-brac and found something greatly resembling Great-Aunt Sophy, only slightly less lumpy.

  “Yuck!” I said, rather loudly. Michael was at my side in an instant.

  “What is it?” he asked eagerly.

  “The first Mrs. Wendell.”

  “I see,” he said, showing no inclination to do so. “Is this significant?”

  “Not that I know of.” Although it began to give me ideas about why Dad had borrowed Great-Aunt Sophy.

  “Let’s leave her in peace, then. What else have you found?”

  I showed him the cash, which he agreed was poor pickings for a blackmailer. He showed me his findings. Sales receipts, complete with the date and time, that tended to confirm Jake’s alibi rather thoroughly. A bank book and other papers showing that Jake was in no danger of starving no matter how many valuable little knickknacks the late Jane Grover had purloined. An envelope marked Jane containing a key to a self-storage unit and a neatly itemized list of oriental rugs, antique furniture, and other objects that were certainly more than knick-knacks. Another envelope marked Safety Deposit containing a key and an impressive itemized list of jewelry. I made a mental note to suggest that the sheriff see who inherited Mrs. Grover’s estate. A framed certificate of appreciation on the occasion of Jake’s retirement from Waltham Consultants, Inc., whatever that was. Neat stacks of promptly paid bills and perfectly balanced bank books.

  “Commendably businesslike,” Michael said.

  “But not very illuminating,” I said. I stood up and looked around. “Something’s missing here.”

  “Like any sign that the man has a personality.” Michael had wandered over to the shelves on either side of the fireplace. They were largely empty, except for a few pieces of bric-a-brac that were presumably either too large for Mrs. Grover to hide or too cheap for her to bother with. There were maybe two dozen books, all paperback copies of recent best-sellers.

  “Doesn’t he have any more books?” Michael asked.

  “Good question.”

  We looked. Not in the guest room. Not in the bedroom, which looked more lived in than the rest of the house but still depressingly tidy. Not in the dining room or the upstairs bath or the kitchen. Not in the basement, where Spike lay in wait for us under the water heater, growling. Not in the attic.

  “Depressing,” I said. “Irrelevant, but depressing.”

  Just then we heard a car go by, and peering out, I saw it was Jake’s.

  “We’d better leave; Jake may drop Mother off and come back soon,” I said.

  We lured Spike out from under the furnace and left the way we came.

  “That was a bust,” Michael said.

  “Well, we do have corroboration for his alibi.”

  “I thought we had that already.”

  “The sheriff had it,” I said. “Now that I’ve seen it myself, I believe it.”

  And, as I admitted to myself before falling asleep that night, I was more than a little hoping to find some evidence against Jake because deep down I just didn’t like him. How much of that was justifiable and how much due to my resentment that he was taking Dad’s place, I didn’t know. But I had to admit, I’d found nothing against him, other than further confirmation that he was a bland, boring cipher.

  I pondered the other, more viable suspects. I could certainly find the opportunity to sneak into Samantha’s room … Barry’s van … even Michael’s mother’s house, although if I were seriously considering him a suspect, I had already made a big mistake by letting him find out I was snooping. Two big mistakes if you counted letting him paw through Jake’s things. It all seemed rather pointless.

  “I give up,” I told myself. “Let Dad do the detecting. I have three weddings to organize.”

  Monday, June 20

  ON MONDAY MORNING, I COERCED PAM INTO WAITING FOR THE electrician while I traipsed down to Be-Stitched for some fittings—along with Samantha and Mother and half a dozen hangers-on. I wondered for
the umpteenth time if my presence was really necessary at every one of Samantha’s fittings. Having to stand perfectly still while Mrs. Tranh and the ladies did things with pins and tape measures seemed to throw Samantha’s brain even further into overdrive, and she used the energy to cross-examine me on my progress (or lack thereof).

  “How is the calligrapher doing?” she asked, as Mrs. Tranh frowned over some detail of the sleeves. “Are the invitations back yet?”

  “She wanted a full week,” I said, glossing over the fact that the week had been up the previous Friday and I’d had no luck getting in touch with Mrs. Thornhill, the calligrapher, over the weekend. Best not to upset Samantha until absolutely necessary.

  “What about the peacocks?” she asked.

  “I’ve got some leads.”

  “It’s nearly the end of June,” she complained.

  “Yes, have you been to see Reverend Pugh for the premarital counseling yet?” I asked, partly to change the subject, partly to see her squirm, and partly because it was another item I’d like to get checked off my list.

  “Yes, you really must get that out of the way,” Mother chimed in. Samantha looked uncomfortable.

  “Well, not yet,” she admitted. “We have been wondering if he is quite the right minister,” she added, glaring at me because she didn’t dare ask aloud how the search for a substitute was going.

  “Fat chance finding another this late,” Mrs. Fenniman remarked.

  “Why shouldn’t he be?” Mother asked.

  “Well, isn’t he rather … elderly?” Samantha said. “Are you sure he’s up to the strain?” What a very tactful way of saying that he was older than the hills, looked and acted peculiar even by local standards, and she didn’t want him within five miles of her elegant wedding.

  “Oh, he’d be so hurt if we didn’t let him,” Mother said. “And he still does a lovely ceremony.”

  “He’s had so much practice,” I said, trying to imply that even the eccentric Reverend Pugh could probably manage to get through something as well known as the standard Book of Common Prayer wedding service without difficulty. “Besides, the Pughs have been marrying, burying, and baptizing Hollingworths for generations.”