Murder, with Peacocks

by Donna Andrews

  Aha, I thought. Second thoughts already. Well, he wasn’t drafted.

  “I egged them on. The more energy we bleed off now, the less hellish the drive will be.”

  “Good plan. You did bring the stun gun, I hope?”

  “It’s all packed.”

  “By the way,” he said, “have you seen Spike? He never came home yesterday.”

  “No, not since we lost him chasing the peacocks.”

  “Maybe I should ask someone to keep an eye out for him,” Michael said. “Feed him when he shows up.”

  “I’m sure Dad would do it; we’ll ask him.” Just then I saw Dad’s car turn into the driveway.

  To my surprise, instead of slowing down as he approached the house, Dad began blowing his horn at us. We jumped aside as he whizzed by at nearly forty miles per hour and, instead of following the curve of the driveway back out to the street, plunged full steam ahead across the yard, sending the peacocks running for their lives in all directions. He lost some speed going through the grape arbor, then plowed through the hedge that separated our yard from the one next door and came to a halt when he ran into a stack of half-rotten hay bales left over from when the neighbors used to have a pony.

  “Something must have happened to him,” I said, dropping my carryall to run to the scene.

  “Grandpa!” Eric shouted. “You wrecked your car!”

  The car was, indeed, something of a mess, but once we’d gotten him out from under the hay, Dad was unharmed. In fact, he was positively beaming with exhilaration.

  “Grandpa, why did you wreck your car?” Eric asked as we hauled Dad out. Good question. The approaching next-door neighbors would soon be asking similar questions about their hedge and haystack. The peacocks had disappeared but were shrieking with such gusto that I was sure the entire neighborhood would be showing up soon to complain.

  “Call the sheriff,” were Dad’s first words. “I think someone’s tampered with my brakes.”

  Pam, who had come running out when she heard the commotion, ran back in to call. Eric and his friends looked solemn.

  “Grandpa, what’s tampered?” Eric asked. His grandpa, however, was crawling under the car. As was Michael. I didn’t know about Michael, but I knew perfectly well Dad was incapable of doing anything underneath a car but cover himself with grease. Fascinating the way even the most mechanically inept males feel obliged to involve themselves with any malfunctioning machine in their immediate vicinity. And usually, at least in Dad’s case, making things worse. The small boys were crouching down and preparing to join their elders.

  “Tampered means Grandpa thinks somebody messed around with the car to make it crash,” I said. “So all of you stay away from that car until Grandpa and Michael are sure it’s safe.” They were ignoring me. The lure of male bonding beneath an automobile was too strong. Then Michael’s voice emerged sepulchrally from beneath the car.

  “Anyone who does come under here will be left behind!”

  The herd backed up to a respectful distance. About then the sheriff turned up. Dad and Michael emerged from beneath the car for a conference with him. The sheriff crawled under the car, popped out long enough to ask Pam to call a tow truck, and then disappeared again, followed by Dad. And then one or two deputies.

  “You seem very calm about this,” Michael remarked, as we watched the growing number of feet sticking out from under various parts of the car.

  “I’ll postpone my hysterics until later,” I said, feeling a little shakier than I’d like to admit. “I think it’s important that we stay calm and avoid traumatizing the children.”

  “Are we going soon, Aunt Meg?” Eric asked. The children didn’t seem particularly traumatized. The excitement of the car wreck was evidently fading. There was a growing herd of small boys swarming over the haybales and getting in the deputies’ way. I made a mental note to make sure only four of them came with us to the amusement park.

  “Yes, let’s maintain a façade of normality,” Michael said. “I’ll get Mom’s station wagon. They’d kill each other stuffed in the back of your Toyota, and my car’s a two-seater.”

  By the time we got the boys loaded into the station wagon and drove off, Dad was recounting his wild ride through the yard for the third time, to a spellbound audience of deputies. The sheriff was down at my sister Pam’s house, interviewing any neighbors who might have seen someone tampering with the car. The cousin who ran the local plant nursery and gardening service was working up an estimate for replacing the damaged portions of the hedge for the neighbors’ insurance agent, who happened to be another cousin. A wonderful day in the neighborhood.

  Although I’m sure Eric and his little friends would disagree, I found our trip to ride the roller coasters blissfully uneventful—at least compared to how the day began. Oh, I was exhausted by the end of it, of course, and was trying hard to hide a tendency to jump at loud noises. But no new bodies were discovered. Apart from the sort of mayhem that small boys routinely inflict on each other, no one tried to murder anyone. Only one of the kids threw up. And the only new item added to my list of things to do was “Hit Dad up for reimbursement.”

  “Where do they get the energy?” I asked, as we watched them careening around in the bumper cars for the fifth or sixth time. “I don’t want to sound like a stick in the mud, but I just can’t keep up with them.”

  “Oh, don’t worry,” Michael said. “They don’t think of you as a stick in the mud. I overheard A.J. telling Eric how great it was that his Aunt Meg wasn’t scared to go on the big rides like most girls.”

  “I’m flattered. Even if A.J. is a little male chauvinist pig.”

  “And Eric told A.J. that his Aunt Meg wasn’t scared of anything.”

  “I wish that was true.” I sighed.

  “You’re worrying about your Dad,” Michael observed.

  Eric and the horde bounded up demanding food just then, cutting off my answer. Which would have been that I was worried about all of us. If someone was trying to kill my Dad, he—or she—might already have killed at least one innocent bystander in the process by tampering with Dad’s lawn mower. Michael and the four little boys and I might have just missed becoming victims ourselves.

  Michael brought up the subject again on the way home, after a glance to make sure that Eric and his friends were curled up asleep in the back of the station wagon.

  “Wonder if they’ve had time to find out anything about your dad’s car?” he said quietly. “Brake line cut, or brake fluid drained, or whatever.”

  “Did it look suspicious to you?” I asked.

  “I’m not exactly a master mechanic,” he admitted. “Your dad seemed to find something of interest.”

  “Dad’s no master mechanic either. In fact, anything he might possibly know about how car brakes work would pretty much have to have come from a detective story. But I’d be willing to bet that either they find the brakes had been tampered with or at least that they can’t rule out sabotage.”

  Michael nodded.

  “I’m going to have to give Mom a hard time when this summer is all over,” he said. “I distinctly remember her telling me this was a quiet, peaceful little town where nothing ever happened.”

  “Until we got our own serial killer.”

  “If that’s the right name for it.”

  “True. ‘Serial killer’ does seem to imply some sort of random, sick, purposelessness, and I get the feeling there is a very rational purpose to everything that’s gone on this summer, if only we knew what it was.”

  “So what do we know?” Michael asked. “I mean really know—”

  “As opposed to Dad’s highly imaginative speculations?” I asked.

  “Right.”

  “Not much,” I admitted. “On the day after Memorial Day, a visitor from out of town either was killed or died in a freak accident. And while she managed to alienate a significant portion of the county before her death, the only person who would seem to have known her well enough to want to do he
r in has a cast-iron alibi.”

  “Is it so cast-iron?” Michael asked. “I mean, apart from the alibi, Jake’s so perfect for it.”

  “If it were just Mother giving him his alibi, I’d say no. Not because I think she’d lie, but because she’s too spacey.”

  “What a thing to say about your own mother,” Michael said.

  “Do you disagree?”

  He shrugged.

  “But anyway,” I continued, “since they spent the entire day billing and cooing in front of half a dozen waiters and sales-clerks, the sheriff can say with complete confidence that Jake couldn’t have been within twenty miles of the neighborhood for hours before or after the time Mrs. Grover died.”

  “Hard to argue with that.” Michael sighed. “Pity. There’s something about Jake that gets on my nerves. He’s so aggressively banal. I’d love to see it turn out to be him.”

  “You and me both.”

  “Not to mention your dad.”

  “Right. Though for different reasons.”

  “Like disqualifying Jake as a suitor for your mother.”

  “Exactly. But unless he’s sitting on some really dynamite evidence, I think he’ll have to find some other way of breaking up the match. As a murderer, I’m afraid Jake’s a non-starter.”

  “Sad but true.”

  “Getting back to what we know: two weeks after Mrs. Grover’s suspicious death, an electrician is nearly killed in a freak electrical accident that may have been a booby trap. And if it was a booby trap, the most logical person for it to be aimed at was Dad, who would have fixed the fuse box if he hadn’t been AWOL.”

  “And a little more than two weeks after that, we’re all nearly blown up by a bomb, just before you and a dozen other women are made severely ill by what appears to have been poison that may have been deliberately placed in a bowl of one of your dad’s favorite foods.”

  “Thank God for the bomb. All the rest could possibly be accidents, although the number of accidents is beginning to make even the sheriff suspicious. But there’s no way to argue with that bomb.”

  “True; I think about it whenever I’m tempted to doubt your dad.”

  “And shortly afterward, a harmless neighborhood layabout is killed in what again may have been sabotage, and again the more logical target would have been Dad.”

  “And now today your father has a car wreck that he thinks may have been due to sabotage. So maybe the big question is, who is trying to kill your father, and why?”

  “Either he knows something or the killer is afraid he’ll find something out,” I said. “Dad’s the one who kept the sheriff and the coroner from declaring Mrs. Grover’s death an accident. Dad’s the one who points out the suspicious side of all these so-called accidents. Dad keeps turning over stones, and maybe the killer is afraid he’ll eventually find something.”

  “If that’s the case, it all goes back to Mrs. Grover. If we figure out who killed her, we know who’s trying to kill your dad.”

  “Or, conversely, if we figure out who’s trying to kill Dad, we’ll know who did in Mrs. Grover.” We rode a while in silence, no doubt both trying to come up with a plausible suspect.

  “Maybe I’m too close to this,” I said with a sigh. “I can think of dozens of people who would have been capable of doing all this, but I can’t for the life of me see why any of them would want to kill Mrs. Grover. And I have a hard time seeing most of them as cold-blooded murderers.”

  “Is there anyone you can see as a murderer?” Michael asked.

  “Samantha,” I said, only half joking. “I can see her killing anyone who seriously inconvenienced her. I certainly go out of my way to avoid crossing her.”

  “I can see that. But what could Samantha have against Mrs. Grover? Granted, Mrs. Grover was a supremely irritating person, but that’s hardly grounds for murder,”

  “They had some kind of small run-in at the Donleavys’ picnic. But then, who didn’t? I know I did.”

  “So did I,” Michael said.

  “Maybe she knew something damaging about Samantha. Although I can’t imagine what. She was here less than a week before she died. Even Mother would have difficulty unearthing any juicy skeletons after only five days in a strange city.”

  “Maybe it was something she knew about Samantha before she came here,” Michael said. “I seem to recall being an object of mild suspicion myself because she knew my mother from Fort Lauderdale. Was Samantha originally from Florida?”

  “No, but her fiancé was. The one before Rob.”

  “The bank robber?”

  “Embezzler. But that was Miami, not Fort Lauderdale.”

  “It’s the same thing,” Michael said. “All part of the same metropolitan area. Like Manhattan and Brooklyn.”

  “Is it?” I said. “Geography was never my strong point. So they both had ties to the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area.”

  “Samantha through her shady former fiancé,” Michael expanded. “This is much more promising.”

  “If I remember correctly, the fiancé claimed his partner had gotten all the money, and the partner claimed that the fiancé had gotten the lion’s share.”

  “Wouldn’t it be funny if Samantha’d somehow gotten her claws into most of the loot? Played both of them against each other and made off with the loot under their greedy noses?”

  “It’s probably beastly of me, but I can definitely imagine Samantha doing it. Or killing, for enough money,” I said. “And the estimates of how much they milked out of their clients range between ten and fifteen million dollars.”

  Michael whistled.

  “There’s a motive to be reckoned with. But do you really think she’d try to kill her future father-in-law to keep it quiet?”

  “She’s never much liked Dad,” I said. “And besides, I can also see her disposing of anyone who tried to get in her way about the wedding.”

  “What, has your dad tried to butt in on the wedding? Insisted on a nonpoisonous wedding bouquet, perhaps?”

  “She’s probably overheard him trying to talk Rob out of marrying her. I know I have. And come to think of it, even if she didn’t hear him talking to Rob, I know for a fact that at the picnic she overhead him tell me he thought the marriage was a bad idea and he was going to keep trying to talk Rob out of it.”

  “Oh,” Michael said.

  “You can see how she might resent that.”

  “Definitely. Samantha goes at the top of the list of people on whom I will not willingly turn my back. And on whom I will keep an eye when your father’s in the neighborhood. Any other suspects?”

  “It’s a pity we can’t frame the Beastly Barry for it,” I said. “I thought we’d be rid of him, at least for a little while, after Eileen’s wedding, but it begins to look as if he’ll never leave. At least that’s the way it looks to poor Mr. Donleavy. I’m surprised he didn’t try to join us today.”

  “I doubt if his enthusiasm for small children extends to doing anything with or for them that involves actual work,” Michael said, glancing at the backseat where the small boys appeared to be still asleep. “Is he frameable, do you suppose?” he added, with seemingly genuine interest. Civil of him to adopt my dislike of the Beastly so enthusiastically.

  “Well, he was here for the Donleavys’ Memorial Day picnic when Mrs. Grover was killed. I remember she did something or other that ticked him off pretty seriously, and he’s normally about as excitable as a house plant.”

  “Maybe he’s one of those people who’s slow to anger but even slower to get over it, and he’s been plotting revenge,” Michael suggested.

  “And he was here shortly before the fuse box incident. It was just after Eileen went on the Renaissance kick, and I remember you had him measured for his doublet that day.”

  “He could have put the bomb in the jack-in-the-box and lied about it,” Michael said.

  “And he could have poisoned the salsa; he was hanging around here for the whole Fourth of July weekend, and some days afterward—I remembe
r he kept trying to come up and read to me while I was recovering. He’s had plenty of time to have rigged the lawn mower or the car since he practically moved into the Donleavys'.”

  “The hell with framing him,” Michael said. “If he has even a shadow of a motive, he’s worth suspecting for real.”

  “I’m afraid I have a hard time believing that he’s capable of rational thought, much less planning two murders and several attempted murders.”

  “Well, they weren’t very well planned,” Michael said. “The killer seems to have missed his intended victim at least three out of four times, and missed altogether all but two attempts. Hell, maybe Mrs. Grover wasn’t the intended victim. Maybe he missed that time, too.”

  “That would explain why we’re having such a hard time figuring out why she was killed.”

  “Maybe it would help if we eliminated some more suspects. We’ve more or less eliminated Jake and your mother for lack of opportunity. And as the intended victim, your father’s pretty much out of the running.”

  “Unless you like the theory that Mother and Jake are in cahoots, or alternatively, that Dad is the murderer and is trying to divert suspicion by staging a series of crimes that appear to be aimed at him. I mean, it has been remarkable how he’s escaped every time.”

  “Do you really see either of your parents as a multiple murderer?” Michael asked.

  “No. But I can’t expect the rest of the world to take my word for it.”

  “We’ll classify them as highly improbable.”

  “I would have called Pam a likely suspect at one point,” I said. “Mrs. Grover was horrible to Natalie and Eric.”

  “That’s no reason to kill someone,” Michael said.

  “Not in and of itself, no,” I said. “But if she caught Mrs. Grover doing something she felt was seriously damaging to her kids—mentally or physically damaging—then yes. Pam thinks child molesters should be executed. Preferably at the hands of their victims’ parents.”

  “That’s a little extreme, but I see her point,” Michael said.

  “But there’s no way Pam would sabotage a car the kids ride in all the time, or poison salsa they might find as soon as Dad.”