“She was going to turn it over to you—she asked me to at the accident scene,” I said. “But when she found Jasper’s body, she panicked. Knew he was in with some bad people, and she was afraid they’d come after her and her son. So she brought him to me for safekeeping. And she was probably afraid you’d suspect her of the murder, at least to begin with, so she hid until you’d have time to find the real culprit.”
“More likely she was expecting you to figure it out,” he grumbled. “If more people would talk to the police, we’d have a lot easier time solving crime around here. And you have no idea how much trouble you’ve been the last few days, popping in and out of that damned cockatiel farm every five minutes. Been a full-time job convincing the damned Feds that you’re not a drug smuggler, just a meddling busybody.”
“Sorry,” I said. “If I’d known you were taking Karen’s disappearance seriously and making the hunt for her a priority, maybe I’d have stayed out of it. I thought you suspected her of the murder. Now that I know what was going on that I didn’t see—well, I’m sorry I added to your stress.”
The chief snorted.
“Which is a good ways still short of promising you’ll never do it again,” he said. “Well, it all worked out in the end.” And then, as if annoyed with himself for unbending that far, he stomped off. Dad and Dr. Blake came in.
“Meg, what’s wrong?” Dad asked. “You look pale.”
“I think Chief Burke understands that Karen wasn’t involved in the embezzlement or the murder,” I said. “But I’m not sure about some of the other agencies.”
“I’m sure the chief will bring them around,” Dad said. Did he really think that, or was he just being optimistic?
“Don’t worry,” Dr. Blake said. “I’ve already called both those lawyers whose names you gave me. They’re on their way down to the station, and I’ll make sure they have Karen on the list of people they’re supposed to represent, if need be. Between the two of them, I’m sure they’ll sort all this out.”
“Speaking of sorting all this out,” I asked, “where did all those finches come from? There were only six here yesterday.”
“Well,” Dad said. “Last night we were right in the middle of stealing them—”
“Confiscating them,” Dr. Blake corrected.
“When a car drove up, and we thought it was Freddy coming home,” Dad went on. “It turned out to be Rob, bringing Ms. Hamilton home from the airport, but it still meant we had to cancel the mission for the evening. We thought we’d have to call it off entirely—it was heavy work, carrying those cages, more than we could handle at our ages.”
“Speak for yourself,” Blake said, with a sniff.
“But when Michael volunteered to help us—well, that was perfect!”
“Unless they put all three of you in jail for burglary,” I said.
“I’m sure it will turn out all right,” Dad said. “But we should be getting down to the station to make our statements. Wish us luck.”
“Good luck, Dad,” I said, giving him a quick hug.
Dr. Blake looked rather wistful. What the hell.
“And you, too, Grandpa,” I said, giving him a hug of his own.
He stiffened, as if he wasn’t quite expecting my hug, but he looked pleased.
“Don’t worry,” he said. “If they try to railroad your friend, we’ll stir up a hornet’s nest!”
Something he was all too good at, I thought with a sigh. But strange to say, I found it nice to think that he was on our side.
They strode out, passing Michael on the way in.
“Here, let me help you,” he said. “Timmy, want a horsie ride downstairs?”
Timmy thought about it a moment, then held out one arm as if to agree to the transfer. Clearly he was very tired. He merely slumped over Michael’s head as if about to fall asleep.
“He should be in bed,” I said, hoisting the bulging diaper bag to my shoulder and heading for the stairs again.
“Well, it’s been an unusual night,” Michael said. “He’ll love having another ride in the police car, and we can get him back into his normal schedule tomorrow.”
“Not really,” I said. “After all, his normal schedule would involve being with Karen. I don’t think Karen is guilty of anything except panicking, but what if they convict her of something anyway? I can see Karen pleading with me to take care of Timmy, just until she gets parole. And me dutifully mailing off pictures of his first day at school, his lead role in the class play, his prom date, his wedding . . . .”
“Well, if it comes to that, we’ll cope,” Michael said. “He’s a good kid. Make a good consolation prize if I can’t convince you we need a couple of our own.”
“Or a nice big brother to those couple of our own,” I said. “But let’s hope in a few days’ time he’ll be back with his mother and we can discuss the whole kid issue in peace and quiet.”
Michael looked happy at that, and there was a bounce in his step as he carried Timmy out to Sammy’s patrol car and set him down. Timmy reflexively grabbed onto my pants leg.
“Okay, Timmy,” I said. “We’re going to take a ride in the police car, and then we’re going to see your mommy!”
Timmy perked up slightly. He wiped his nose, partly on my pants leg and partly on Kiki, and nodded.
“Come on, Kiki,” he said. “Go see Mommy.”
Read on for an excerpt from
Swan for the Money
the next Meg Langslow tale from Donna Andrews—
available soon in hardcover from Minotaur Books!
“Dreadful news!” Dad said.
He collapsed into a chair at the foot of the breakfast table, as if no longer able to bear the weight of his dire tidings, and wiped his balding head with a pocket handkerchief. The head, the handkerchief, the hand holding it, and nearly every stitch of his clothing were so encrusted with mud and garden dirt that Mother would probably have ordered him off to take a shower immediately if she weren’t so visibly curious to hear his news.
“Yes?” she said, one hand clutching her throat in a gesture that would have looked artificial and old-fashioned on anyone else. On her it merely looked elegant.
“We’ve lost Matilda,” Dad said.
“Oh, no!” she exclaimed. From her expression, I could tell that she found this news genuinely heartbreaking.
Faint murmurs of sympathy arose from the dozen assorted friends and relatives seated around the table, but I could tell from their uniformly puzzled faces that they were all mentally asking the same question I was: who the heck was Matilda?
We used to have a Matilda in the clan, my Great Aunt Matilda. But she’d been dead for years, and I couldn’t recall anyone else gracing a recent arrival to the family with such an unusual name. Nor could I remember any friends or neighbors named Matilda. There was a time when I would have assumed Matilda was one of Dad’s patients, but he was semi-retired now, and his medical practice consisted mostly of those same family, friends, and neighbors, whose names I would recognize. Not a Matilda in the bunch.
“And what’s more,” Dad went on, sitting up and frowning fiercely, “it was foul play. No question. I only suspected it with Adelaide, but I’m sure of it now.”
“It’s the Pruitts,” Mother said. “I’ve suspected them all along.” Not surprising. The Pruitts were an old local family who used to own most of Caerphilly County and often behaved as if they still did. Most locals were quick to blame the Pruitts whenever anything sneaky or underhanded took place. Mother and Dad only spent weekends here in Caerphilly, in the old farmhouse they’d dubbed their summer cottage, but they were quickly picking up many local attitudes.
“You suspect the Pruitts of two murders?” my brother, Rob, asked. “Have you told the police?”
“Murders?” Dad echoed. “What murders?”
“This Matilda and Adelaide you’re talking about,” Rob said.
Dad burst into laughter. I suddenly realized what he’d been talking about.
&nbs
p; “It’s not murder,” I said. “Because Matilda and Adelaide aren’t people, are they? They’re roses.”
“Meg’s right, of course,” Mother said, sounding slightly cross, as if baffled at how long it took us to figure this out.
“Sheesh.” Rob returned to his food. “Roses. That’s all we talk about these days.”
“Now you know how I feel,” I muttered, though not loud enough for anyone but Michael to hear. For the last two months, ever since Mother had recruited me to organize the Caerphilly Garden Club’s annual rose show, roses had taken over my life. Normally I’d be asleep at this hour, not trekking to my parents’ farm to collect boxes of rose show equipment and hauling them to the farm whose owner, Mrs. Winkleson, was hosting tomorrow’s show. And normally the gala breakfast might have made up for the early hour, but today my stomach was wound too tightly to enjoy it.
“Can’t we talk about something else for a change?” Rob was saying.
“Peonies, for example,” my husband, Michael, said. “Much more practical for our yard. They don’t require a lot of cosseting, like roses, and the deer don’t seem to eat them.”
I could tell from Rob’s face that he didn’t consider peonies a conversational improvement over roses, and Mother and Dad ignored the interruption.
“Meg,” Mother said to me, “your father needs coffee.” She managed to give the impression that only with an instant infusion of caffeine could Dad possibly survive this new horticultural tragedy.
“I could use some, too,” Michael said, and shot out to the kitchen before I could even push my chair back.
“Matilda and Adelaide were two of my most promising black roses,” Dad said to the rest of the table.
“And two of our best chances for winning the Winkleson Trophy,” Mother said. “Which will be given out this weekend at the Caerphilly Rose Show to the darkest rose,” she added, on the off-chance that any of the assembled relatives had managed to escape hearing about the Langslow household’s new hobby of breeding and showing roses.
“Is there a big prize?” Rob asked.
“No money involved,” I said. “Just the thrill of winning.”
“Big thrill,” Rob said, through a mouthful of scrambled eggs.
“And a trophy,” Mother added. “Quite possibly a lovely engraved Waterford bowl. That’s what I suggested.” Yes, that sounded like Mother’s kind of suggestion. She was a confirmed human magpie, easily seduced by anything that glittered, and a sucker for anything that had ever come out of the Waterford factory.
“Well, if the winning rose is bred by the exhibitor, there’s always a remote possibility that a commercial rose company might want to buy it,” Dad said. “Of course, that would only happen if it were a significant advance toward the creation of a truly black rose. All the big commercial breeders have their own black rose breeding programs.”
“And ridiculous programs to begin with,” put in my grandfather. “A genuinely black rose is a scientific impossibility.”
“Oh, I hope not,” put in my cousin Rose Noire, aka Rosemary Keenan, to those who had known her before she’d become a purveyor of all-natural cosmetics and perfumes and adopted a name to match. “I do hope one day to greet one of my namesakes!”
She probably would. Talking to plants wasn’t even unusual in my family. Although Rose Noire was one of the few who expected the plants to answer.
“Useless things, roses,” my grandfather said. “Had all the vitality bred out of them, so the poor things can barely survive without massive applications of chemicals all the time. Environmentally unsound.” A typical reaction from my grandfather, Dr. Montgomery Blake, the world-famous zoologist and environmental activist. Of course, he could merely be vexed that Dad’s rose-growing was preventing him from working full-time on the Blake Foundation’s latest animal welfare campaigns, whatever they were.
“Getting back to Matilda and Deirdre—” I said.
“Adelaide,” Dad corrected.
“Sorry,” I said. “It’s no wonder I didn’t recognize the names—last time I got an update on your rose breeding program, you were just referring to them by numbers.”
“But that’s so dehumanizing!” Rose Noire exclaimed.
“Don’t you mean deflowering?” Rob asked, with a snigger.
“How can you expect a living creature to thrive when all it has is a number, not a name?” Rose Noire went on.
“That’s why we decided to name them,” Mother said.
“Unofficially, of course,” Dad added. “I haven’t yet registered them with the ARS. Officially, Matilda is L2005-0013.”
“But we’re going to name them all after family members,” Mother said.
“No shortage of names there,” Dr. Blake muttered. He was still getting used to the fact that when he claimed Dad as his long-lost son, he’d found himself allied by marriage with Mother’s family, the Hollingsworths, whose numbers exceeded the population of some small countries.
“I hope you stick to dead relatives,” Michael said, as he emerged from the kitchen with a pot of coffee. “Otherwise we’ll have no end of confusion. And imagine if it got around the county that Rose Noire was suffering from black spot disease, or that Rob had thrips.”
“What are thrips?” Rob asked, looking alarmed.
“Getting back to Matilda and Adelaide,” I repeated. “What happened to them, and what makes you think it was foul play?”
“They were eaten,” Dad said. “Undoubtedly by marauding deer. And I found this in some bushes nearby.”
He held up a small brown glass bottle with a neatly printed label proclaiming that it contained “100% Doe Urine.”
“James!” Mother said. “At the breakfast table?”
“Someone obviously sprinkled this near Matilda,” Dad said. He tried to pocket the bottle discreetly, out of deference to Mother’s sensibilities, but Dr. Blake held out his hand for it. “In fact, they probably sprinkled the stuff in a path leading from the woods straight to Matilda.”
“Yuck,” Rob said, making a face. “If I was a deer, I’d steer clear of roses some other deer had already peed on.”
“But you’re not a deer,” my grandfather said. “To a deer, especially a male, doe urine would be an irresistible lure. Hunters have used deer urine for centuries to cover up their human scent and attract deer to their hunting areas. It’s particularly effective if the urine is—”
“Dr. Blake!” Mother exclaimed. I wasn’t sure whether she was objecting to his words or to the fact that he had opened the bottle and was sniffing it curiously.
“So hunters use the stuff,” I said. “You’re sure that bottle wasn’t just discarded by some passing hunters?”
“We hadn’t given anyone permission to hunt our land,” Mother said.
It took a few seconds for the grammatical implications to sink in—the fact that she said “hadn’t” rather than “haven’t.” Did her use of the pluperfect tense mean that now, after Matilda’s demise, they had given hunting rights to someone? But by the time that thought struck me, Mother and Dad were deep in a discussion of which surviving black roses were likely to produce a prizeworthy bloom by Saturday’s contest. Everybody else appeared to be listening attentively, or as attentively as possible while consuming vast quantities of bacon, sausage, country ham, French toast, waffles, pancakes, cinnamon toast, croissants, and fresh fruit. Were the rest of the family really that interested in rose culture, or did they just figure they’d better come up to speed on the subject in self-defense?
“Meg,” Dad said, “I’m leaving this in your hands.”
He gestured to my grandfather, who ceremoniously handed me the empty doe urine bottle.
“Yuck,” I said, dropping the thing on the table. I wasn’t normally squeamish, but my stomach rose at the thought of the little bottle’s former contents. “What in the world do you expect me to do with it?”
“Find out who used it on Matilda,” Dad said. “And help me figure out how to stop it. I’m counting on you!
”
Cockatiels at Seven Page 23