Murder, with Peacocks

by Donna Andrews

  Barry obligingly did so.

  “Still tastes fine,” he said, when he’d finished.

  “Maybe it’s the crackers. They have a strong flavor. Just try some by itself.” I handed him a heaping spoonful.

  “It’s fine,” he said, again.

  “Here, clear your palate with this water,” I said, handing him a glass. “Now try again. Are you sure it tastes like real Beluga?”

  “I’m not sure I know what real Beluga tastes like,” he said finally. “But this stuff tastes great.”

  “Go take some to Mrs. Fenniman, will you? See what she thinks.”

  Barry lumbered off with a plate of caviar and crackers for Mrs. Fenniman.

  “Well, the ceremony went off,” Michael said, arriving at my side.

  “I notice you didn’t say anything about how it went off,” I said, craning over his shoulder. “The less said about that the better.”

  “What are you looking for?”

  “Barry. Does he look healthy to you?”

  “As a Clydesdale,” Michael said, frowning. “Why?”

  “I’ve just fed him a vast quantity of caviar. If he doesn’t keel over in the next ten minutes or so, I’m going to have some myself.”

  “Bloodthirsty wench,” was his comment.

  “Has he tried the shrimp yet?” Dad asked, plaintively. “And the salsa?”

  “I’m sure he’ll wander back in a minute,” I said, reassuringly. “We’ll have him graze his way through the whole buffet if you like.”

  “Not a bad idea, at that,” Michael said. “The guests seem curiously reluctant to eat today.”

  He was right. Usually by this time the buffet would have been decimated. Now, most of the crowd sat around sipping drinks and surreptitiously watching Barry, Cousin Horace, and the few other hardy souls who’d already braved the buffet. I decided to load up my plate while the coast was clear. I could always stand around and hold it until enough people had dined that I felt safe.

  “Damn, I’ll be glad to get out of this dress,” I said. I tried to scratch my blisters unobtrusively and then realized that I shouldn’t have. Scratching set everything revealed by my décolletage into jiggling motion.

  “You look very nice,” Dad said approvingly. “Michael, you’ll have to tell your ladies what a fine job they’ve done.”

  “Thanks; I will,” he said.

  “It may look nice, but if I ever wear a dress this low-cut again, I’m going to put a sign at the bottom of my cleavage,” I said. “I’ve seen a bumper sticker with the wording I want: If you can read this, you’re too damn close.”

  “It’s not really that bad,” Dad said, as Michael spluttered on his champagne.

  “Oh no?” I said. “Watch what happens when he comes over,” I said, pointing to Doug, my nemesis from parties past, who seemed to be looking in our direction. Michael and Dad looked at him, and he seemed to change his mind.

  “Did one of you glare at him?” I asked. “If so, you have my eternal thanks.”

  “I think we both did,” Michael said, as he and Dad burst out laughing.

  “Well, at least for the moment all I have to worry about is stray bits of food,” I said, as I caught a bit of caviar before it disappeared into the bodice. I noticed that more people were eating, and Barry was showing no signs of distress, so I’d begun nibbling from my plate.

  It took a while for the guests to find their way to the buffet, but after a few centuries the party began to show signs of life. Especially after word spread through the crowd that the county DA’s date was an FBI agent she’d met during the bureau’s local investigation on Samantha’s former fiancé. I had to give Samantha credit: she hadn’t turned a hair when he came through the reception line. Maybe she didn’t remember him. I could spot half a dozen of the preternaturally clean-cut new “cousins” cruising the crowd like eager human sharks, waiting to pounce. I was torn between hoping they’d find someone to pounce on and hoping everything went off quietly.

  Dad was installed by the punch bowl, and from his gestures I suspected he was relating the graphic details of the usher’s injury to anyone who would listen. I was trapped by a long-winded aunt who was telling me every moment of the weddings of each of her four daughters. I was smiling and making polite noises while daydreaming of pulling off my dress, scratching my poison ivy, and then flinging myself naked into the pool. I almost jumped out of my skin when Mrs. Brewster suddenly appeared behind me.

  “Where’s Samantha?” she asked. “Shouldn’t she be getting ready to throw her bouquet?”

  “She’s—she was right over there,” I stammered. Mrs. Brewster frowned. Losing the bride was not acceptable behavior for a maid of honor. “I’ll just go and find her and hurry her up,” I babbled.

  I cruised through the crowd. Samantha was nowhere to be found. Everyone had just seen her a few minutes ago and expected she’d be right back. I could see Mrs. Brewster fuming by the punch bowl. Evidently Dad’s adventures in the emergency room were failing to charm her. I decided to check the house. Perhaps she’d gone in to use the bathroom. Or to cool off.

  I grabbed a few hors d’oeuvres on my way past the buffet and trudged upstairs to Samantha’s room. She wasn’t there. I saw only Michael and the two little seamstresses staring out the window.

  “Where’s Samantha?” I asked. Michael pointed out the window. I managed to find enough space to peer out over the seamstresses’ heads.

  “Dashed out without even changing,” he muttered.

  Mother and Mrs. Brewster came in.

  “So where is she?” Mother gushed. “I can’t wait to see her in that lovely suit!”

  It was a long driveway, but down at the other end we could see that Rob, still faintly elegant in his damp, limp gray morning suit was helping Samantha into the passenger’s seat of her red MG. Stuffing her in, actually; she was still in her bridal gown, hoops and all, and he was bashing armfuls of expensive fabric down around her. God knows how he was going to find the gearshift under all that froth. He didn’t even try to deal with the veil, just took it off, crumpled it into a ball, and shoved it down in the space behind the seats.

  It was a lucky thing their backs were to us; they couldn’t see the venomous looks they were getting from the two seamstresses. Or hear Michael sighing, “Oh, shit.” I echoed his sentiments: what, pray tell, had happened to the bouquet throwing? We’d had a special throwing bouquet made, a slightly more compact version of the one Samantha had carried down the aisle, thereby nearly doubling the bouquet budget. Perhaps she’d held an impromptu throwing while I’d been looking for her. I peered down the driveway. No signs of a bouquet. But I did see Mrs. Fenniman pop up, apparently from the azalea bed, and begin throwing birdseed at them from one of the little lace-trimmed bags, and Rob was just getting into the car when—

  “Where’s Samantha?” Rob said, sticking his head in the door. Wearing his traveling clothes.

  “Rob?” I said.

  “If Rob’s here—” Mrs. Brewster said.

  “Who the hell is that?” I asked.

  “Such language!” said Mother.

  “Who the hell is who?” asked Rob.

  “Who the hell is that driving off with Samantha?” Mrs. Brewster and I said, in unison.

  “Oh, dear,” Mother sighed. “That’s very bad luck when two people say the same thing. You must both link your little fingers together and say—”

  “Not now, Mother,” I said, on my way to the door.

  Despite the handicap of my hoop skirts, I won the race to the end of the driveway, finishing a hair before Mrs. Brewster. Michael came loping along close behind us, while Mother and Rob, not being quite sure what the fuss was all about, finished in a dead heat for last. Mrs. Fenniman, who had obviously gotten rather heavily into the Episcopalian punch, still had a great deal of birdseed left, so she chucked some at us as we pulled up. But, of course, we were all too late. As Mrs. Brewster and I reached the end of the driveway, we could just see the MG disappearing aro
und the corner. And catch a few bars of a Beach Boys song blaring from the radio. “I Get Around.”

  That’s Samantha for you. Always a stickler for those appropriate little details that really make an occasion.

  As we stood, dumbfounded, something fell out of the dogwood trees above us and bounced off my head onto the gravel. Samantha’s wedding bouquet. I heard a burst of high musical laughter from the upstairs window and looked up to see the seamstresses bobbing back out of sight.

  “So that’s what she did with it,” Mrs. Brewster said triumphantly, as if the discovery of the bouquet more than made up for Samantha’s absence.

  “You seem to have an affinity for these things,” Michael remarked, as he picked up the now-battered bouquet and handed it to me.

  As soon as Rob understood what was going on, he insisted on dashing after them in the first car available. Mine. Several other birdseed-bearing guests had arrived at the end of the driveway, and they and Mrs. Fenniman cheered and pelted him as he pulled out. As word of the—was elopement the appropriate word? Flight, I suppose, was more accurate. As word of the flight spread, most of the male guests felt compelled for some reason to drive off in pursuit. No one was too clear on who they were pursuing, Rob, or Samantha and her fellow traveler, who turned out to be Ian, the last-minute substitute usher. There was a great deal of coming and going as cars drove up to report on where they’d been and what they’d seen, or hadn’t seen and then set out again fortified with food and drink from the buffet. Mrs. Fenniman and her fellow harpies stood around by the driveway, swilling punch and sniping at the passing cars with handfuls of birdseed, giggling uproariously all the while, until at last they reached the point where they couldn’t open the little bags and began throwing them whole, at which point somebody had the good sense to confiscate the remaining birdseed. They tried to keep up the barrage with acorns and pine cones, but that took most of the fun out of it and they lost interest fairly quickly.

  Except for a couple of bridesmaids who considered themselves entitled to have hysterics and the mothers or friends who evidently felt compelled to cater to them, most of the women gathered around the food tables like a twittering Greek chorus. The peacocks, unsettled by all the chaos, adjourned to the roof for a filibuster. Mrs. Brewster retired to her bedroom with a migraine. Jake undertook the job of running around fetching her cold compresses, relaying her messages to Mr. Brewster (who had locked himself in his study with a bottle of Scotch), hunting down and locking up valuable items Mrs. Brewster feared might disappear in the confusion, and generally serving as chief toady and errand boy. I had no idea why—maybe it was a role he was used to playing with Mother—but he certainly made points with me for taking it off my hands. Personally, I had my doubts at first whether Mrs. Brewster’s headache was real or merely convenient. I decided it was probably real—she did, after all, have reason—when she emerged looking absolutely ghastly and demanded, imperiously, that someone Do Something About Those Peacocks. Which was how I found myself at about seven o’clock, sitting on the roof of the Brewsters’ house with Michael.

  He was the only male who was neither half-drunk nor off in pursuit of the elusive trio. Instead, he had been lounging elegantly around the house, sipping punch, supervising the seamstresses’ packing, flirting with me, eavesdropping shamelessly on every conversation within earshot, and obviously enjoying the hell out of the whole situation. But with a straight face, I had to give him that. When Mrs. Brewster issued her ultimatum, he volunteered to help me with the peacock roundup. We changed into jeans, unearthed Dad’s ladder, and together managed to chase the birds back down into the yard. Some of the men who were tipsy enough that their wives had restrained them from driving off in search of Rob, Ian, and Samantha took over the roundup.

  “I vote we let them handle it from now on,” I said. “After all, someone’s got to stay here, to repel the peacocks if they attempt another boarding.”

  “Fine by me,” Michael said. “I think there’s actually a breeze up here.”

  He stretched out luxuriously on a flat part of the roof with his head propped up against a second-story dormer. He was right about the breeze. It was ruffling the lock of hair that had fallen over his forehead. I decided at that moment that I’d had enough punch.

  “Everyone seems to be getting on rather well in spite of everything,” he remarked, startling me out of my reverie.

  “Why shouldn’t they?” I asked. “I mean, what did you expect?”

  “I don’t know. His friends at one end of the yard reviling her, her friends at the other darkly hinting that he drove her to it, the minister darting back and forth striving in vain to prevent bloodshed, people storming off in outrage. Everyone seems rather … I don’t know. Cheerful?”

  “I expect they are, really. I mean, for one thing, half the people here have known both of them all their lives, so the friends of the bride versus friends of the groom thing is out. The main debate is between the people who are saying ‘I told you so’ and the ones saying ‘Well, I never!’ And no one’s going to leave now; they might miss the next disaster. Samantha surprised us all, she really did throw the event of the season, although not quite in the sense we expected. Cheerful is an understatement; they’re having the time of their lives.”

  A cheer went up from the side yard. Somebody had dragged the nets off Dad’s strawberry beds and trapped one of the peacocks. Unfortunately, two guests had gotten entangled as well, and the peacock, somewhat the worse for wear, escaped before the guests did.

  “If they deduct for damages, you’re going to lose your deposit on those peacocks,” he remarked.

  “Not my deposit,” I replied. “The Brewsters are footing the bill for the livestock.”

  “Aha! The first crack in the facade of interfamily solidarity. But somehow I expect you’ll still be the one who has to cope with their owner.”

  “Probably,” I replied. Perhaps I hadn’t had enough punch after all. Then again, maybe my suspicions were right and Mr. Dibbit didn’t really want them back.

  Just then Rob burst back into the yard. He was disheveled and slightly bloody, attempting to shake Uncle Lou and Cousin Mark from the death grip they seemed to have on his arms. And trailed by several deputies.

  “Now what?” I moaned.

  Just then one of the peacocks gave a particularly ghastly shriek. Both deputies drew their weapons and swung into a defensive formation in an impressively calm and efficient manner. Michael and I crouched behind a dormer until that misunderstanding had been settled and then climbed back down the ladder to catch the next act.

  Samantha and Ian had apparently gone to the airport and taken a commuter flight to Miami. Uncle Lou and Cousin Mark had restrained Rob from taking the next flight and had escorted him back home. They were still standing guard over him. Presumably, so were the deputies. Silly, if you asked me. Did they think he would rush out onto the runway at Miami International to challenge Ian to armed combat, with Samantha going to the victor? An aunt who owned the local travel agency was on the phone using her connections to find out if they’d booked a continuing flight.

  “They don’t need to book one,” I pointed out. “They’ve got the honeymoon tickets.”

  “Surely she didn’t give Ian Rob’s ticket,” Mother said incredulously.

  “She ran away with him,” I countered. “Why shouldn’t she give him Rob’s ticket?”

  “She didn’t even wait to see if I passed the bar exam,” Rob kept saying, in an indignant tone.

  “Rob,” I said, when I could get his attention, “where’s my car?”

  “Car?”

  “You were driving my car,” I said. “Where is it?”

  “Oh, God, I left it at the airport.”

  “At the airport? You drove away and left my car parked in the airport parking lot?”

  He winced.

  “Well, in the loading zone, actually.”

  “Good heavens, Rob,” Uncle Lou said. “Why didn’t you tell us that? They’l
l have towed it by now.”

  “Was that Meg’s car?” Cousin Mark asked. “I saw them towing away a little blue car when we drove off.”

  “You left my car to be towed?” I said. Rob hung his head.

  “Don’t scold your brother, dear,” Mother said. “Think what a trying day he’s had.”

  “What do you mean a trying day?” I said. ‘Trying day? He’s just had one of the luckiest escapes in history. What the hell is trying about—”

  “Meg,” Michael said, grabbing my arm with one hand and steering me toward the house, “let’s go call the airport.”

  “Trying!” I shrieked back over my shoulder as Michael dragged me away.

  “We can find out where they’ve towed your car—”

  “Talk about trying! How about someone trying to find out if Samantha and Ian happen to be carrying a suitcase full of embezzled cash!”

  “I’ll give you a ride,” Michael went on relentlessly.

  “How about trying to find out if she knows anything about digitalis—”

  Michael managed to drag me away from the reception, though not before I’d made a fool of myself shrieking several more wild accusations about Samantha. We collected his convertible and sped out to the airport to find where they’d towed my car. And then across the county to the towing company’s lot. Which was run by one of Mother’s more feckless cousins. And was closed tight when we arrived, with a sign on the gate: Back Soon.

  “I wonder how soon is soon,” Michael said.

  “Great,” I said. “He hauls my car out here in the middle of nowhere and then dashes off looking for another victim.”

  “Well, relax. Look at the bright side: it’s probably a great time not to be around your neighborhood.”

  “I’m sorry to drag you out like this.”

  “The fun was just about over at the house,” he said. “And I wanted the chance to talk to you.”

  “I’m not very good company right now.”

  “Understandable,” he replied.

  “Do you think she did it?” I demanded.