Murder, with Peacocks

by Donna Andrews

  “I see.”

  “If you listen closely for that little beat, you can start picking up all sorts of useless information. Being down here for the summer, I seem to be regaining all my lost small-town survival skills.”

  “Any advice for dealing with the irate mother?” he asked.

  “Let Mrs. Tranh and the ladies handle it. Now that they know, I’m sure they can guesstimate what size she’ll be in two weeks.”

  “I’m sure they can, but what if her mother starts bad-mouthing the shop all over town?”

  “Don’t worry about it; everyone knows being abused by that particular grand dame is a normal rite of passage for the local merchants. Besides, she and Mother loathe each other, so I’ll tell Mother about it at lunch. By dinner, your side of the story will be all over town.”

  “I’d appreciate that. I’d hate to be responsible for running Mom’s business into the ground while she’s laid up. And speaking of business,” he said, briskly changing tone, “let’s have Mrs. Tranh get your dress.”

  Having seen the pictures, I thought I would be prepared for Samantha’s hooped monstrosity. But I’m sure Michael and Mrs. Tranh were disappointed at the look on my face when she came trotting out with the dress and held it up.

  “Oh, dear,” I said.

  “I’m crushed.” He chuckled. “You’ll break the ladies’ hearts.”

  “Don’t get me wrong. It’s lovely. Lovely fabric. Wonderful workmanship.”

  “But not the sort of thing you’d ever think of wearing.”

  “Or inflicting upon an unsuspecting friend.” I walked around and looked at it from another angle. “Somehow I wasn’t expecting the hoops to be quite so … enormous.”

  “Although my experience is limited to this summer,” Michael said, “I’ve evolved a theory that bridesmaids’ gowns are generally chosen either to make the bride look good at her friends’ expense, or to force the friends to prove their devotion by having their pictures taken in a garment they are mortally embarrassed to be seen wearing in public.”

  “You’ve left out inflicting acute physical torment,” I added. “Think of Eileen and her velvet and these damned corsets.”

  “True. When I publish the theory, I’ll put you down as coauthor.”

  “Well, let’s get this over with,” I said, following Mrs. Tranh behind the dressing-room curtain.

  Several of the ladies had to help me get into the dress. I made a mental note to ask Michael if we could hire some of them to help out on the wedding day. And when we finally got me into the thing, I realized that in my dismay over the enormous size of the skirts, I had failed to notice the correspondingly tiny size of the bodice.

  “I feel as if I’m falling out of this,” I said, more to myself than anyone else, since obviously Mrs. Tranh and the other ladies could not understand me. I twitched the neckline slightly, and Mrs. Tranh slapped my hand.

  “I don’t see why you don’t have mirrors back here,” I called out.

  “So you won’t be tempted to look until the ladies are satisfied it’s ready,” Michael called back.

  So we won’t run away screaming, I added, silently. The ladies finished their manipulations, and I was surrounded by their smiling, bobbing faces. Mrs. Tranh began shooing me toward the doorway.

  “Well, here goes,” I muttered. I swept aside the curtains, awkwardly maneuvered my hoops through the doorway, and planted myself in front of the mirror.

  “Oh, my God,” I gasped, and gave the neckline of the dress a few sharp upward tugs. “I really am falling out of this.” Surprisingly, the dress wouldn’t budge, although the neckline looked even lower and more precariously balanced in the mirror than it felt.

  “The effect is historically accurate, I believe,” Michael drawled. He was grinning hugely, enjoying my embarrassment.

  “Sadist! I don’t care if it’s required by law, it’s just not gonna work. I can’t possibly walk around like this. Especially in church. And around drunken relatives.”

  “On Samantha and the others, this style gives to meager endowments a deceptive appearance of amplitude,” Michael said, pedantically. “However, we may have miscalculated the effects of this amplification on your … radically different physique. Let me talk to the ladies,” he added quickly, and backed away as if he suspected how close I was to swatting at him.

  He exchanged several rapid sentences with Mrs. Tranh, punctuated by gales of giggles from the ladies. Mrs. Tranh and two of the other seamstresses surrounded me and began pulling and tweaking at the bodice of the dress, applying measuring tapes to one or another angle of me or it and pointing to or even poking my troublesome endowments. The fact that the tallest of them still fell short of my shoulder only compounded my feeling of being huge, awkward, and ungainly. Michael was carrying on a running dialogue with the seamstresses. I assumed he must be a very witty conversationalist in Vietnamese as well as English; every other sentence of his provoked a fresh crop of giggles. Or maybe they were just all enjoying themselves at my expense. Michael wasn’t giggling with the rest, but he couldn’t suppress a huge grin.

  “They think they’ve got it figured out,” he said at last.

  “Good; does that mean I can take it off? I feel like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.”

  “Sorry,” he said, choking back laughter. “I had a hard time convincing them that anything needed fixing, and once I did, they kept trying to talk me into letting them not change it until Samantha had seen it. They don’t like her very much, and they kept insisting they wanted to see her face when she saw it.”

  “You’re right; she’d have a cow. And then she’d probably put the evil eye on me or something.”

  “That’s more or less what I told the ladies,” Michael said. “And they agreed that it would be a shame, since they like you at least as much as they dislike Samantha. They’re going to fix the dress so you look beautiful, but in a somewhat less spectacular manner, and Samantha will have nothing to complain about. Don’t worry,” he added, momentarily serious, “Mrs. Tranh will manage; she’s really very good.”

  “Thanks,” I said, feeling a little bit better as I ducked back into the dressing room to take off the dress. The giggles of the seamstresses seemed somehow friendlier, as if they were laughing with me at the ridiculousness of the dress rather than at how I looked at it. Of course he might have been lying outrageously, but since I would never know, I decided to think positively. Well, I told myself, at least Michael is in a better mood than when I walked in. For that matter, so was I—at least until I got home and tried, for what seemed like the millionth time, to reach the calligrapher. Surely, by now, she had found the time to finish addressing Samantha’s wretched invitations.

  Dad was also incommunicado. Like the parents of a small and mischievous child, I had learned to be most suspicious when Dad was seemingly quiet and on his best behavior. I was beginning to regret having let him abscond with Great-Aunt Sophy.

  After my search of Jake’s house, I deduced that either Dad was planning to steal Emma Wendell’s ashes and leave Great-Aunt Sophy behind in her place, or he wanted to run some kind of test on Emma Wendell and was using Great-Aunt Sophy to rehearse. Neither one of which seemed like a particularly pleasant thing to be doing. And considering there wasn’t much left of either lady but ashes and a few bits of bone, I wasn’t sure what on earth he thought he was going to test for, anyway. I decided to drop by and see him tomorrow.

  I would have tried to call him, but I had to fight Mother for the phone to call the calligrapher. She was busy putting the word out about the costume party. Apparently she and Eileen had decided to hold it in ten days’ time.

  “Before any of us gets too busy,” Mother remarked. Apparently it had escaped her notice that some of us were already rather busy.

  Friday, June 24

  I SPENT THE MORNING PHONING TENT RENTAL COMPANIES AND THE afternoon tracking down a supplier for the mead that Steven and Eileen had decided was the only appropriate drink to serve at a
Renaissance banquet.

  I was tired by the end of the day, but the fact that Steven and Eileen had taken Barry with them to a craft fair in Richmond raised my spirits considerably. I decided to take the weekend off, doing only the most necessary tasks—like continuing to hunt for the errant calligrapher. And keeping an eye on Dad.

  Which was harder than I thought. I tried to hunt him down after dinner, and he was definitely nowhere to be found. Not in our garden, not in his apartment over Pam’s garage, not in her garden. So I dropped in on Pam.

  “Pam,” I said. “What’s Dad been up to recently?”

  “Up to? Why, what should he be up to?”

  “Has he been doing much gardening?”

  “No, come to think of it, he hasn’t,” she said, looking out at the rather shaggy grass in the backyard. “That’s odd.”

  “Has he been performing experiments?”

  “What kind of experiments?”

  “You know, chemical ones.”

  “How would I know?”

  “Noticed any funny smells? Heard any explosions?”

  “No,” Pam said. “And he hasn’t been dragging home stray body parts, or putting out a giant lightning rod on the roof, or drinking strange potions and turning bad-tempered and hairy. What do you mean, experiments?”

  “Never mind,” I said. “Can I borrow your key to the garage apartment?”

  I wanted to check out Dad’s lair. I could always pretend that Pam had asked me to help her clean up.

  There were several hundred books lying about, apparently in active use. Medical books. Criminology texts. Electricians’ manuals. Heaps of mysteries. Bound back issues of the Town Crier, the weekly local newspaper, for the past five years. All of them fairly stuffed with multicolored bookmarks. Dad’s messy little laboratory looked recently used. His bed didn’t. I saw no signs of Great-Aunt Sophy.

  I sat down on the cleanest chair I could find with the old Town Criers and began checking out Dad’s bookmarks.

  I found Emma Wendell’s obituary, two years ago this month. She’d died in her sleep of heart failure, following a long illness. She’d been quietly cremated and memorialized in a service at the nearby Methodist church. Jake and sister Jane were the only survivors.

  I also reread the articles about what the Town Crier had called the “Ivy League Swindlers”—Samantha’s ex-fiancé and his friend. It had a list of local residents who had been bilked out of large sums. Including, I was surprised to note, Mrs. Fenniman, who was quoted as saying she’d lost a few hundred thousand and was glad they’d been exposed before she’d invested any real money with them. Interesting. I knew Mrs. Fenniman must be well off if she lived in our neighborhood; I’d had no idea she was that well off. And apparently Samantha’s father’s law firm had been involved as local legal counsel for the Miami-based swindlers—although the articles made it clear they had been duped just as the investors had—in fact, had lost some of their own funds. I noticed only one very distant relative among the list of fleeced locals. Apparently Hollingworth solidarity had kept most of Mother’s family using one of the half-dozen relatives who were brokers or investment advisors. Lucky for us.

  Dad had bookmarked all of these articles. He’d also book-marked Mrs. Fenniman’s “Around Town” columns for the summer. I read them, too, but did not find any enlightenment in Mrs. Fenniman’s meticulous recountings of who entertained whom, who was engaged to whom, and who had returned from vacationing where.

  I saw an interview with Michael’s mother on the opening of Be-Stitched. No picture, alas, and not much personal information. Widow of an army officer. She’d moved to Yorktown from Fort Lauderdale to be nearer her only child, Michael, who was an Associate Professor in the Theater Arts Department of Caerphilly College.

  I was impressed. Caerphilly was a small college with a big reputation located about an hour’s drive north. Michael was doing all right.

  As I moved back in time, I saw the occasional reference to people visiting Mrs. Wendell in the hospital or Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Wendell being honored for their generous donation to various local charities. Quite the philanthropist, Jake—or was it Emma? I checked the columns since her death. If Jake was still supporting the local charities he was doing it more quietly.

  Moving still further back, I found a short article welcoming the Wendells to town. Emma Wendell was the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut state supreme court justice. Jake had just retired from Waltham Consultants, a Hartford-based engineering consulting firm where he’d held the post of senior executive administrative partner in the special projects training division. Whatever that might be. A desk jockeying bureaucrat, no doubt; it was hard to picture Jake as an executive. They were overjoyed to be in Yorktown, and hoped that the milder winters would be good for Mrs. Wendell’s delicate health.

  Beyond that, Dad had only marked the occasional article. One or two mentioning Mr. Brewster’s law firm. One or two about various neighbors and relatives. One about the use of natural plant dyes in colonial times that I presumed he’d marked because he’d found it interesting, not because it had anything to do with the case.

  I didn’t feel I’d learned anything in particular. Dad’s investigation seemed to have been following the same frustrating dead-end paths as mine.

  I thought of tidying up a bit, then thought better of it and returned the key to Pam.

  On my way home, I ran into Eileen’s dad.

  “Meg! Thank goodness!” he said. “I was looking for you.”

  “Why, what’s wrong?”

  “We’ve got to do something about these wedding presents!”

  “What about them?”

  “They’re all over the house, and people are starting to call to ask if we’ve gotten them. We need to do something.”

  “Why doesn’t Eileen do something?”

  A stricken look crossed Professor Donleavy’s face.

  “She says she won’t have time, and asked me to take care of it. And I have no idea what to do.”

  I thought he was overreacting, but I let him drag me back to the house and he was right: the presents were taking over the house. The professor had started piling them in the dining room, and had run out of room. The living room was filling up fast, and some of the larger things were overflowing into the den.

  “I wish Eileen had mentioned this,” I said. “This would have been a lot easier to deal with gradually.”

  I promised him that I’d come around tomorrow to unpack and inventory the presents. So much for taking the weekend off.

  Saturday, June 25

  I WAS ALREADY IN A BAD MOOD WHEN I SHOWED UP AT THE DONLEAVY’S to unpack and inventory the presents. Imagine my dismay when the front door was opened, not by Eileen’s father but by Barry.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were in Richmond with Steven and Eileen.”

  “Helped set up,” he said, with a shrug. “Don’t need me till tomorrow afternoon. It’s only two hours.”

  Wonderful. Well, if Barry was going to be underfoot, I was going to do my damnedest to see he didn’t enjoy it. First I had him move all the presents from the dining room into the living room. Then I had him bring in a few at a time. I unwrapped them—what was wrong with Eileen, anyway? Present-opening wasn’t work unless they were someone else’s presents—and made up an index card with a description of each present and the name and address of each giver. It took hours. Even Barry began showing signs of restlessness toward the end.

  “That’s it,” I said finally. “I guess I should take the index cards with me; they’ll only get lost around here.”

  I turned to leave the dining room only to encounter an obstacle. A very large obstacle. Barry’s arm.

  “Don’t go yet,” he said.

  “I have things to do, Barry,” I said, backing slightly away from the arm. “Let me go.”

  “Stay here,” he said. I backed up a little further, against the dining room wall, which was stupid, because it gave him the chance to put an arm on eit
her side of me. I looked up and saw on his face the unmistakable, slightly glassy-eyed look of a man who has made up his mind to make his move. The sort of look that sends pleasant shivers down your spine when you see it on the face of the right man. And on the wrong man, makes you mentally kick yourself and wonder why the hell you didn’t see this coming and head it off.

  “Don’t even think of it,” I said.

  He reached up to take my chin in one hand. I put my hand against his chest and shoved slightly.

  “Go away,” I said.

  He didn’t budge. I felt suddenly a little afraid. Barry was so much larger than me, and stronger, and so aggressively determined, and Steven and Eileen were not around to provide a calming influence … and then a wave of temper replaced the fear.

  “I mean it, Barry. Move it or lose it.”

  He leaned a little closer.

  I mentally shrugged, grabbed his arm with both hands, and twisted. Hard.

  “Owwwwwwwwww!” he yelled, and jumped back, nursing his arm. Thanks to self-defense courses, I knew exactly how to do it. Thanks to my iron-working, I’m strong for my size. And I’m not small. Barry glared at me, resentfully.

  “You didn’t have to do that,” he said, taking a small step closer. “What’s wrong?”

  I lost it.

  “What’s wrong!” I yelled. “What’s wrong! I told you to let me go, and I meant it. Did you think I was kidding? Flirting with you, maybe?”

  “Don’t be like that, Meg,” he said, taking another step closer.

  I grabbed a candlestick off the buffet. A nice, heavy iron candlestick that wouldn’t fall apart if you banged it around a little. I should know; I made it. I got a good two-handed grip on it and waved it at Barry.

  “Come one step closer and I’ll use this,” I said.

  Barry paused, not sure what to do.

  “Am I interrupting anything?”

  I glanced at the doorway to see Michael. He hadn’t adopted his usual pose of leaning elegantly against the frame with one hand in his pocket. He was standing on the balls of his feet, looking wary, alert, a little like a cat about to pounce. More than a little dangerous.