Swan for the Money

by Donna Andrews

  “Actually, I was coming to see Meg,” Horace said. “Meg, do you think you could find Mr. Darby and get him to move the rest of those goats out of our crime scene?”

  “Are they disturbing evidence?” the chief asked, frowning.

  “Mainly they’re just disturbing us,” Horace said. “Most of them are okay, but there’s one who keeps coming up and trying to butt us whenever we bend over. That’s why I’m carrying this.”

  He indicated the pitchfork.

  “Go back and fend the blasted thing off, then,” the chief said. “Meg, I’d appreciate your help finding Mr. Darby.”

  I was already flipping the pages of my notebook.

  “I’ve got his phone number,” I said. “Cell phone, I think. It’s what I’m supposed to call if I need anything while we’re here for the show.”

  The chief pulled out his cell phone and dialed the number as I read it. I watched his face, which grew gradually more impatient. Apparently the phone was ringing on unanswered.

  “Mr. Darby,” he said finally. “This is Chief Burke. Please call me when you get a chance.”

  He hung up and looked at me.

  “Next suggestion?” he said.

  I pulled out my own cell phone and dialed the house.

  The butler answered.

  “Hello, Mr. . . . I’m sorry; what is your real name? I can’t very well keep calling you Marston now that I know it’s not really your name.”

  “Thank you,” he said. “I have become accustomed to using the name professionally. But I much appreciate your courtesy. How may I help you?”

  “We need to find Mr. Darby to help us move the goats,” I said. “And he’s not answering his cell phone.’

  “He’s probably in his cottage, madam,” Marston said. “It’s in the woods, between the goat pasture and the rose garden.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and hung up.

  “His name’s not really Marston?” the chief said.

  “Mrs. Winkleson named him that,” I said. “I think he’s Russian, so maybe she can’t pronounce his real name. He thinks Mr. Darby is in his cottage. Do you know where that is?”

  “No.” The chief glanced up from scribbling in his notebook. “Do you?”

  I hesitated for a few moments. When it comes to finding my way around, I am an urban creature. Set me down in any city in the world, and I could probably find anything I wanted in half an hour. Fifteen minutes if the natives spoke some variant of English. Give me directions like “in the woods, between the goat pasture and the rose garden” and normally I resign myself to staying lost. But after a day of blundering around Mrs. Winkle-son’s property, I was beginning to get a rough map of the place in my head.

  “I think I could find it if I try,” I said finally, hoping I was telling the truth.

  “Good,” the chief said. “Find him and send him over here. I have some questions for him as well.”

  I slogged through the muddy goat pasture. Horace and Sammy were over to one side. They’d marked off a large, roughly circular area with yellow crime scene tape and were defending it by waving pitchforks at the encroaching goats. One of the goats left the herd and headed my way. I hadn’t yet learned to tell one goat from another, so just in case this was the belligerent Algie, I made a run for the fence and leaped over just in time to miss getting butted.

  “Bad goat, Algie,” I said, shaking my finger at the goat before turning to look around. I strolled along the edge of the woods, heading away from the fence, and eventually spotted a corner of Mrs. Winkleson’s rose garden in the distance. Since I was looking for it, I spotted a path to my left, leading into the woods. If it wasn’t the same path Mr. Darby had taken when he left me at the rose garden earlier, it led in about the same direction. I followed it until I arrived at a tiny, dark cottage that appeared to be squatting in a small clearing like a malign toad.

  “How unfortunate,” I muttered. If you painted the cottage white, with maybe a nice soft accent color for the shutters, it would have looked like something out of a fairy tale and almost too cute for my taste. But since Mrs. Winkleson had painted it dark gray with matte black shutters and had shingled the roof in black, the poor cottage looked like the perfect home for a wicked witch. As I walked toward it, I more than half expected to hear a gleeful cackle and then a cracked crone’s voice saying, “Come in, my pretty.” Instead, silence.

  I knocked with my knuckles before noticing that there was a black wrought-iron knocker on the door, almost invisible against the black paint. After a minute or so I tried again with the iron, and added my voice.

  “Mr. Darby!” I called. “It’s Meg Langslow. Are you there?”

  Chapter 22

  I was reaching for the knocker to try again when I finally heard a stirring inside Mr. Darby’s cottage. A thud as if something had fallen from a table. A scraping sound, like a chair being moved.

  The door finally opened, and Mr. Darby peered out. He looked a little befuddled.

  “Wha’s up?” he asked. There was a faint odor of bourbon on his breath.

  “The goats are interfering with the crime scene,” I said. “Can you move them to another pasture?”

  He blinked as if it was taking the words a few seconds to reach his brain, and then nodded.

  “Of course,” he said. “Be right there.”

  He stepped back into the interior of the cottage, without closing the door, and I seized the chance to step inside and look around. I breathed a sigh of relief to see that Mr. Darby hadn’t followed Mrs. Winkleson’s decorating rules. Even I might have felt claustrophobic if he had, so tiny was the room. Room rather than apartment. There was a kitchenette at one end and a carelessly made bed at the other. It was overheated for my taste, but it was so small it probably didn’t cost much to overheat, especially since the heat appeared to come from a wood stove. He could probably get his firewood for free in the estate’s woods.

  An open door gave a glimpse of a minuscule bathroom, and a curtain partially concealed a closet only about two feet wide. Every square inch of the walls was covered with shelves, mostly mismatched and battered— probably trash heap rescues— and every square inch of the shelves contained the sort of paraphernalia you usually saw in a barn. Bits of tack and grooming equipment. Veterinary manuals and supplies. A few framed pictures of cows, horses, sheep, or goats. Everything neatly and tidily arranged, but the sheer amount of stuff was overwhelming, as if he’d tried to squeeze the entire contents of a half-acre feed and tack store into his cottage. Okay, the mystery of the over-tidy barns was solved.

  And I saw no signs of canine occupation.

  “Anything I can do to help?” I said, trying to pretend there was a reason for me to hang around. A reason other than snooping. I reached for the door knob as if about to close the door.

  “No, they’ll pretty much follow me if I bring some special feed,” he said. He snagged a bucket from a hook and grabbed a scoop from a burlap bag on the floor. He filled the bucket halfway from the bag— the special feed, I assumed— and then began stumbling toward the door.

  I preceded him out. As I hoped, he simply pulled the door shut, without checking to make sure it was locked, so he didn’t notice that while he was filling the feed bag, I’d surreptitiously twisted the button on the inside of the doorknob to the unlocked position.

  Instead of taking the path, he dived into the woods. Taking another, less visible path, I realized. I glanced at my watch and followed.

  A mere two minutes later, we arrived at the edge of the goat pasture.

  “I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said, pausing still inside the woods. He didn’t seem to notice. He stumbled forward, shaking the bucket slightly, and I could see goats converging on him from all over the field.

  I took the barely visible path back to the cottage.

  It would have taken him five minutes at the most to walk from the rose garden to where I’d found Mrs. Sechrest’s body. Not a lot of time, but still enough to get there and commit the deed.
The short time frame actually made it more plausible that he wouldn’t notice he was killing the wrong woman, as long as Mrs. Sechrest had her back to him. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the body. Yes, she had been facing toward the barns, and away from the direction Mr. Darby would have been coming from.

  If he’d gone to the pasture to kill her. He could have been just going back to his cottage to take a break. Maybe to sneak a drink. I couldn’t remember him smelling of bourbon before, though, and suspected that he’d achieved his current tipsy state in an effort to cope with the shock of the attempted murder.

  Interesting that he hadn’t seemed all that shocked until the true identity of the body was revealed.

  I reached his cottage, glanced around to make sure no one was in the little clearing around it, and slipped inside.

  Fifteen minutes’ careful search revealed nothing at all suspicious. From the look of it, Mr. Darby had no interests other than animals, mainly farm animals. I saw no signs that he was a dog own er or lover. Even his TV was tuned to the Animal Planet channel, and the only light reading in sight was a complete set of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small series.

  A framed diploma informed me that Mr. Darby had a B.S. in Agriculture from Caerphilly College. Behind it was another framed diploma from Clay County High School. So Mr. Darby was relatively local, Clay County being Caerphilly’s more rural next-door neighbor.

  He had a few anti-hunting pamphlets in the mix, which would make it hard for him to explain away any little bottles of doe urine I might have found. But I didn’t find any, or, for that matter, anything that seemed to indicate he was plotting revenge on Mrs. Winkleson. Of course, my search was a little hampered by the fact that I couldn’t really pick things up or dig too deeply into anything. I didn’t want to leave any trace of my hurried search— or for that matter, any fingerprints, in case Chief Burke eventually decided that Mr. Darby was suspicious enough to warrant Horace’s attention.

  I stood by the wood stove for a few moments. I wasn’t looking forward to going back out in the drizzle, especially since I’d become used to the temperature in Mr. Darby’s overheated cocoon. And—

  I suddenly caught a hint of a familiar smell. The sharp, metallic smell of blood. Was it coming from the stove? Or somewhere else in the room? Or—

  After a few minutes of sniffing the air like a hyperactive beagle, I realized that the smell was coming from my own jeans. The rain had washed away most of the blood, except, I suppose, in the cuffs. When I stood by the stove, the heat brought the smell out more strongly.

  I wasn’t going to find anything incriminating or useful here in Mr. Darby’s cottage. I decided to return to the barns by way of the house. I had a change of clothes in the trunk of my car. I made sure everything looked untouched, clicked the door knob button back to the locked position, and shut the door carefully behind me.

  I only made two wrong turns on my way up to the house, and the swan had not returned to haunt my car. I grabbed my black pants and shirt from the trunk and trotted up the steps to ring the doorbell.

  Marston answered and made no objection to my using the powder room off the foyer to change out of my bloodstained clothes.

  “If you’d like us to launder the soiled garment, I would be happy to arrange that,” he said.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Tempting, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”

  I shed my jeans and T-shirt and looked to see if there was any blood on the underwear or skin beneath. I couldn’t see any, but then the light in the powder room wasn’t the greatest. Considering that this was where any guests would go if they wanted to check their hair and makeup, I’d have installed something brighter than a 25-watt bulb. But Mrs. Winkleson might not have many guests to worry about.

  I’d also have gone for a different interpretation of the black and white color scheme. The black sink and toilet were a little hard to spot against the black tiles, black walls, and black ceiling. Even the mirror was black tinted glass that made me look like one of the undead.

  It occurred to me that since the hand towels were also black, I didn’t need to worry about leaving stains on them. I grabbed one, drew a basin full of water, snagged the soap— where in the world had she found black soap?— and gave myself a quick scrub, just in case there was blood that I couldn’t see for the dim light.

  As far as I could tell, I was bloodstain-free and looking reasonably presentable in my party gear. Of course, by party time my nice clothes would probably be damp and mud-spattered. The other party guests, the ones who hadn’t spent part of the day finding a blood-soaked stabbing victim, would have to overlook that.

  I didn’t see a laundry hamper, so I placed the towels I’d used on the floor beside the sink, neatly folded. Knowing Mrs. Winkleson’s staff, I had no doubt that they’d be replaced with fresh ones within minutes of my departure.

  I drove my car back to the barns and parked it near Horace’s truck. When I strolled into the goat barn, I found four volunteers there gathered around a box. They looked up when they saw me enter.

  “Thank goodness you’re back!” one of them said. “We have a crisis!”

  Chapter 23

  A crisis? On top of a real or attempted murder? I braced myself as three of the volunteers surrounded me, waving copies of the show program.

  “There’s a horrible typo in the program!” one of them shrieked.

  “We’ll have to throw them away!” the second added,

  “We should burn them!” the third exclaimed.

  Molly Weston, the fourth volunteer, strolled up in a more leisurely fashion. She was the only one who didn’t look panic-stricken.

  “There’s no time to print a new program,” she said, shrugging. “These will have to do.”

  “There’s no need to throw away the whole program over a single typo,” I said. If there was only a single typo, I was going to award myself some kind of medal, since I’d done most of the proofing all by myself, despite many calls for help. “If it’s something that would confuse people, we can always run off some error sheets.”

  “We can’t possibly use it,” one of them said. She held out her program, one finger pointing dramatically to a spot on the page. I read the entry in question: “Category 127: The Winkleson Trophy for the darkest rose grown or hybridized by the exhibitor. Trophy donated by Mrs. Philomena Wrinkleson.”

  Oops. Old Wrinkles wasn’t going to like that.

  A pity that instead of my suggestion of a one-page, black-and-white photocopied program they’d opted for a much longer, saddle-stitched booklet with a four-color picture of a rose on the cover. It was beautiful, but there was no way to do a reprint by tomorrow.

  “She’ll be furious,” one of the volunteers said.

  “She’ll have to deal with it,” Molly said. “We got the name right on the first line, so it’s obviously just a silly typo.”

  Or was it? I dug into my tote bag and found the two-inch-thick folder in which I kept all the paperwork about the show. I leafed through the papers until I found my copy of the printer’s proof. I’d kept a copy because I’d found and corrected two typos, and meant to demand a discount from the Caerphilly Quick Print Shop if the corrections hadn’t been made.

  I checked. My corrections had been made. Then I flipped the proof to the page with the offending entry.

  “Just as I thought,” I said. “That typo was not there when I proofed the program earlier this week.”

  The three agitated volunteers crowded around to inspect the proof.

  “Then how could it possibly have gone so wrong?” one wailed.

  “Clearly, someone at the print shop doesn’t like Mrs. Winkleson,” Molly said. “Nothing we can do about it now.”

  This viewpoint visibly upset the three other volunteers.

  “Actually, I can think of something that would help,” I said. “Hand me one of those.”

  I pulled a black felt tip pen out of my tote bag and carefully made a small black spot tha
t completely covered the R and I in Wrinkleson, along with a little bit of the W and the N.

  “There,” I said. “R’s a pretty narrow letter. You might not even guess that there are two letters covered instead of one. Looks like what would happen if you had a dirty spot on the printing plate.”

  The volunteers inspected my work and cheered up significantly.

  “Of course, someone would have to make little fake ink blots on all the programs we pass out,” Molly said. “Just doesn’t seem that important to me.”

  “Or me,” I said. “But if anyone wants to work on it . . .”

  The three volunteers eagerly accepted black felt tip pens from my tote and hauled the box off into a corner.

  “Silly things,” Molly said to me, in an undertone. “But everything else is in pretty good shape. I’m going home to change for the cocktail party.”

  “Already?” I said. But when I glanced at my watch, I realized it was five o’clock. Where had the day gone? Well, at least it was so late that my party clothes wouldn’t get too messed up after all.

  “You need anything, just holler,” Molly said. “See you at the party.”

  I took a quick tour through both barns. They looked ready for tomorrow. In the show barn, row after row of tables covered with spotless white tablecloths stood ready to receive the entries. The little black and white plastic category tags were all in place along the front edges of the tables. At the far end of the room was the table where the winners would be displayed. A few of the trophies were already on display there, mainly ones that had no great material value. The rest of the trophies, including all the silver cups, gold medals, Waterford bowls, and other objects that a thief might find of interest, were still locked up at my house. I checked my notebook to make sure “load trophies” was on my action list for the morning.

  In the other barn the tables were covered with white plastic tablecloths, and each already held a dozen large and half a dozen small glass vases. At the far end, several tables held more regimented rows of vases, along with a supply of tags, black pens, and other paraphernalia that the exhibitors might need while prepping their roses.