The Good, the Bad, and the Emus

by Donna Andrews

  “Not with that hand.” Gridwell was back. “Trust me, you won’t want to be doing much blacksmithing for a few days.”

  “That’s perfect,” Stanley said. “This won’t take long. And I really don’t need for you to do anything. I just need to borrow your face.”

  Chapter 2

  “Borrow my face?”

  Gridwell didn’t say anything, but he was clearly following our conversation with interest. He stepped to the doorway of the cubicle and looked out, tapping his foot impatiently, but he didn’t roar out orders to the staff, which I knew from my earlier visits was his usual style.

  “Yup.” Stanley looked as if he was enjoying himself. “I just want to show it to someone.”

  A nurse bustled in and handed Gridwell a syringe.

  “Hold your hand still while I numb you up,” Gridwell said. “You want him to stay?”

  “Yes, if it’s okay with you.” I gritted my teeth as he began poking needles into my fingers. “He’ll distract me from whatever you’re about to do to me. Who do you want to show my face to?” I went on, turning back to Denton.

  “Someone who may have known your grandmother,” Stanley said. “Your grandfather hired me to find her.”

  “After all this time?”

  Stanley shrugged.

  “How long’s she been missing?” Gridwell asked. He had finished with the needles and a welcome numbness was spreading through my fingers.

  “All my life,” I said. “And all Dad’s life, for that matter.”

  Gridwell paused in the middle of rummaging through the Mayo tray and gave us a puzzled frown. Stanley had pulled out his pocket notebook and was looking over his glasses at it.

  “Dr. Langslow was found as an infant in a basket in a library in Charlottesville, Virginia,” he explained to Gridwell.

  “In the mystery section, according to Dad,” I added. “Although I think he made that part up.”

  “And adopted by one of the librarians there,” Stanley went on. “He never knew who his blood parents were until a few years ago, when Dr. Montgomery Blake showed up.”

  “The zoologist?” Gridwell asked. “The one who keeps appearing on Animal Planet and National Geographic?”

  “That’s him,” Stanley said. “He was in Caerphilly for an environmental conference at the college, and happened to see Meg’s picture in the local rag. Turns out she’s a dead ringer for Dr. Blake’s college girlfriend.”

  “Cordelia,” I said. Not that Gridwell would care what my grandmother’s name was, but I liked the sound of it.

  “Back when Dr. Blake and Cordelia knew each other, some seventy-odd years ago, he had received a fellowship to study for a couple of years on the Galápagos Islands,” Stanley went on. “They had parted on good terms, but she never answered any of his letters.”

  “Dad’s had a grudge against the Ecuadorian postal service ever since he found out,” I said. “That’s who delivers mail to the Galápagos. Or fails to deliver it.”

  “And when Dr. Blake came back to the States, he couldn’t find her,” Stanley continued. “So he moved on with his life. But when he saw Meg’s picture, he got curious. And when he found out Meg’s dad had been found in the same library where Cordelia had been employed, he obtained DNA samples and confirmed that he was, in fact, Dr. Langslow’s father.”

  “And my grandfather,” I said. “And presumably Cordelia was the mother, but since when has Grandfather been trying to find her?”

  “Apparently he brooded about it for a year and then decided he had to know what happened to her,” Stanley said. “But his investigative methods weren’t yielding any fruit.”

  “Don’t tell me—I bet he stormed into the library where Dad was found and demanded that they tell him where Cordelia had gone.”

  “Something like that,” Stanley said. “And he kicked up a fuss with the Charlottesville police, too, with no success. Luckily, he had no idea where her hometown was, or he’d have poisoned the well there, too. Last week he hired me.”

  “And you’ve found something already?”

  “Someone who may have known Cordelia.”

  “Known,” I said. “Past tense. She’s dead?”

  “Apparently.”

  I felt a curiously strong surge of grief. I’d never known Grandmother Cordelia—hadn’t even known her name until Grandfather showed up in my life. Even then I had told myself, sensibly, that I would almost certainly never meet her. Presumably, she had been the one to leave Dad in the library. The Charlottesville papers had carried the story of the library foundling and his adoption by the childless, forty-something head librarian and her much older physician husband—the adoptive grandparents who hadn’t lived long enough for me to meet them. Cordelia could have found Dad—and the rest of us—at any time. I didn’t blame her for not doing so. I tried to imagine how she must have felt—seventy-some years ago, the stigma of being an unwed mother could ruin a young woman’s life. And I’d always known there was a possibility she was no longer alive. Grandfather was in his nineties, and Cordelia couldn’t have been that much younger.

  But somehow knowing her name made it harder, not easier, to accept her absence from my life. And I’d hoped one day I’d meet her. Was it silly to grieve for someone I’d never known? Or maybe I was grieving because now I never would.

  “Hold your thumb still,” Gridwell said. “Unless you want me to suture that, too.”

  I started slightly. While Stanley and I had been talking—and while I’d been lost in thought—Gridwell had already stitched two of my lacerations.

  I looked up to see Stanley’s face frowning slightly in concern.

  “How long ago did she die?” I asked.

  “That’s the strange part,” he said. “Less than a year ago. And she didn’t just die. She may have been murdered.”

  “Murdered? How?”

  Gridwell paused in his stitching and looked up to hear the answer.

  “She was killed when her garden shed burned down,” Stanley said. “Arson, according to some people in town. Accidental, according to others. Or maybe her own fault—there was a power outage and she’d gone out there with a kerosene lantern to tend the generator.”

  “Killed in a fire—are they sure it was her?”

  “The police got a positive ID from her dental records,” Stanley said. “And there’s an invalid cousin who lived with her. She reported seeing Cordelia go into the shed. Of course, she also testified that she saw someone sneaking away from the shed with a gas can just before the fire blazed up, but the police don’t seem to buy that part.”

  “We could talk to the cousin,” I said. “She could tell us more about Cordelia.”

  “That’s my plan,” Stanley said. “That’s why I want to borrow your face. The cousin won’t talk to me. She’s gotten it into her head that I’m from the insurance company and trying to prove her cousin was at fault so they won’t have to pay her claim.”

  “Couldn’t you tell her who really hired you?”

  “I tried,” he said. “She’s stubborn. And the town recluse. Won’t even open the door to me.”

  “You could show her my picture?”

  “I tried that already. She pays no attention. And why should she? I could have found the picture anywhere. Could have Photoshopped one of her cousin, for all she knows. But I figure if you show up in person, a dead ringer for the cousin she grew up with—”

  “You’re on,” I said. “When do we leave?”

  “Not until I finish suturing your cuts,” Gridwell said. “And let’s check when you last had a tetanus shot.”

  “How’s early tomorrow morning sound?” Stanley suggested.

  “My face and I will be ready,” I said.

  Chapter 3

  The next morning, a Tuesday, Stanley Denton and I set off for Riverton, the town where Cordelia lived. Not as early as he had hoped. I’d arranged for Natalie to spend the day over at my parents’ house again, where she’d get plenty of help from Dad and supervision
from Mother. But it still took forever to get Natalie and the boys packed up and on their way.

  Stanley, to his credit, watched the whole thing with obvious amusement, but refrained from making any annoying comments about how in his day kids got along just fine without car seats and sunscreen.

  On our way to Riverton, I interrogated him about what he’d found, but either he didn’t yet know much or he wanted me to approach the cousin without being biased by what he did know. So eventually I gave up, and we chatted about other things while the countryside gradually grew more and more hilly. Evidently Riverton was in the foothills of the Blue Ridge mountains. As we approached the town limits, the horizon was filled with mountains—the green slopes of the smaller ones that surrounded the town on three sides, and beyond those the blue shadows of larger, more distant peaks.

  By that time, I knew what Stanley thought of the Caerphilly College baseball team’s season and how much he was looking forward to the town’s big annual fall fair, but I hadn’t learned much about our mission.

  “Riverton, two miles,” I read on the road sign. “So isn’t there anything I need to know before we get to town? Like maybe the name of this newfound distant cousin of mine?”

  “Annabel Lee. Like the Edgar Allan Poe poem,” Stanley said, with a chuckle. “She’s Cordelia’s first cousin—their fathers were brothers—which makes her your first cousin twice removed, I suppose.”

  “Cordelia Lee.” I liked the sound of it. “Grandfather never mentioned her last name.”

  “That’s because he didn’t remember it,” Stanley said. “All he remembered was that it was something short and common, like Smith or Jones. Well, Lee is common—the twenty-fourth most common name in the country.”

  “But Cordelia’s not that common.”

  “No,” he said. “So I started by looking through the social columns of the Charlottesville papers for the year before your father was born. Looking for Cordelias. When I found a note about a tea welcoming newcomers to town, including Miss Cordelia Lee of Riverton, Virginia, I knew I’d found the trail.”

  “And she just went back to her hometown?” It didn’t seem possible that the answer could be so simple.

  “Went home, then moved to Richmond when she married a man named Mason,” Stanley said. “No children, or at least none surviving. Widowed relatively young, and sold her house in Richmond to move in with Annabel, who never married and by now was living in the ancestral home. Which we’ll be seeing in a few minutes.”

  He pointed to a sign by the side of the road that said, simply, WELCOME TO RIVERTON. You could see that they’d painted over smaller letters that had once proclaimed the town’s population. They’d probably grown tired of revising the number downward. It looked like the sort of town that inspired the occasional tourist to gush about how unspoiled it was and drove most of the high school graduates to leave in search of gainful employment.

  Between the outskirts of town and the central business district, all but one or two buildings were over a hundred years old. A few solid brick houses or gingerbread-trimmed Victorians with rolling lawns and well-established banks of azaleas. A lot more plain frame houses with overgrown yards behind fading picket or wrought-iron fences.

  Most of the storefronts in the main business district were occupied, but it was only a block long and the buildings, like the houses, were at least a hundred years old and looked as if they’d been kept going rather than well maintained.

  “Makes Caerphilly look like a metropolis,” Stanley said.

  Once we passed the business district, we were back to old, mostly run-down houses. And we were climbing steadily uphill. We’d climbed at least five hundred feet and nearly run out of town. For a quarter of a mile, I could see nothing but woods along both sides of the road.

  “I thought Cordelia and Annabel lived in town,” I said.

  “Within the town limits,” Stanley said. “But just barely. That’s their house up on the right.”

  We had come to a cluster of four large houses—mansions, really, to my eyes—set far back on generous lots. Stanley was pointing to the largest, a sprawling white Victorian house in better shape than most in town. In fact, all four of these houses were larger and better maintained than anything back in the center of town, and I had the feeling we had arrived at what passed in Riverton for an upscale neighborhood.

  I studied Cordelia’s and Annabel’s house. The requisite banks of azaleas nestled around the foundations—the place must have been spectacular in full bloom. Hundreds of orange daylilies lined the high black iron fence that surrounded the yard as far as we could see, and a few bright blooms peeped through the railings to the street side. The fence defined a large yard, and I could see several outbuildings—an old-fashioned detached garage, a gazebo, a white frame toolshed. Big, well-grown trees—oaks, tulip poplars, and mulberries. And several bird feeders of various types hanging from the trees or standing on poles guarded by metal squirrel baffles.

  Beyond the iron fence on the left side of the yard the landscape became wooded again. The return to trees probably marked the edge of town—I could see the back of what looked to be another welcome sign. On the right side of the house, the fence was lined by a tall boxwood hedge. About halfway back along the fence’s length, a short, stout man in a straw hat was pruning the hedge. The fingers on my left hand began throbbing in time to the steady snick-snick-snick of his manual hedge clippers.

  “There’s a ‘no soliciting’ sign on the gate,” I pointed out, as Stanley parked the car along the street.

  “We’re not soliciting,” he said. “And it doesn’t say ‘no trespassing.’”

  “Tell that to the man with the hedge clippers,” I murmured.

  The stout man had climbed carefully down from the ladder and was trotting over to meet us at the gate.

  “This is private property,” he called out as he approached. “You can’t—oh, my!”

  He seemed to be staring at me.

  “We’re here to see Miss Annabel Lee,” Stanley said.

  Not for the first time since I heard her name, scraps of Poe’s lyric flitted through my brain, and I only just stopped myself from reciting “It was many and many a year ago/In a kingdom by the sea…”

  The man stared a few more moments, holding the hedge clippers in front of him, blades spread wide, as if preparing to defend himself. He looked to be in his sixties, perhaps even his seventies. If he was a longtime resident, then he was old enough to know what Cordelia had looked like when she was my age. No wonder he was staring.

  Stanley reached into his pocket, took out a business card, and offered it through the gate.

  After staring at the card for a bit, the man closed the clippers with a sharp snick and reached out to take it.

  “I will see if she’s at home,” he said. He turned and trotted rapidly toward the front door.

  “Of course she’s home,” Stanley muttered. “She’s a recluse. Doesn’t leave the house from one month to the next.”

  “Yes, but she may not be at home, at least not to us,” I said.

  “Still, this is more than I got last time I was here,” he said. “I rang the doorbell a dozen times with no response, unless you count seeing the front curtains flutter once or twice, as if someone was peeking out at me.”

  An unseen hand opened the door for the man, and he disappeared inside without looking back at us.

  We stood in front of the gate. Birds trilled, insects buzzed, and in the distance I could hear the steady drone of a lawnmower. I wondered if Stanley had a contingency plan in case the hedgeclipper/gatekeeper simply stayed inside and waited for us to leave. Before I got around to asking, the man reappeared. He walked out to the gate at a much slower, steadier pace, and when he got closer I could see that he was frowning.

  “Miss Lee will see you,” he said. “Briefly.”

  He opened the gate—not very wide, as if he still hoped to discourage us from entering.

  Stanley stood aside and graciously
beckoned for me to go first. Or maybe he wasn’t being gracious, just hoping I’d succeed in shoving the gate open a little wider, to accommodate his somewhat bulkier form. I obliged. When he was inside, he offered his hand to the man.

  “Thank you,” he said. “Mr.—?”

  “Doctor,” the man said. “Dr. Dwight Ffollett. Two f’s, two l’s, two t’s.” He turned back toward the house, and we fell into step on either side of him.

  A doctor. Odds were he was a volunteer gardener, then, unless the medical business here in Riverton had fallen off precipitously.

  “Nice of you to help Miss Lee,” I said. “Such a beautiful yard.”

  “Yes,” he said. “A lot of work, though, and she can’t do it herself.”

  “Did you plant all this?” Stanley asked.

  Dr. Ffollett frowned as if this were a trick question.

  “No,” he said, finally. “Mrs. Mason did it all.”

  So my grandmother had been a gardener. Like Dad.

  “Mrs. Cordelia Mason?” Stanley asked. “Miss Lee’s late cousin?” Dr. Ffollett flinched at the name, then nodded.

  “Yes,” he said, his voice shaky.

  He fell back to let us climb the steps without him. Stanley rang the doorbell. I glanced down to see Dr. Ffollett clutching his pruning shears the way Josh and Jamie clutched their favorite stuffed animals in a thunderstorm.

  Stanley and I stood there for a few moments, both of us studying our surroundings. We were on a broad old-fashioned porch that ran along the whole front of the house and wrapped around both sides. To our left were a couple of comfortable-looking white Adirondack chairs with blue cushions on the seats and a wrought-iron table between them. To our right, a pair of white wicker chairs with a matching table. An empty white china cup and saucer suggested that someone had been having tea this morning on the wicker. There were bamboo roll-down shades you could use to block out the sun if the afternoon was too hot, and ceiling fans on either side to stir up a little breeze. An assortment of Boston ferns, spider plants, begonias, and geraniums hung from the porch ceiling in brown macramé holders or on chains from wrought-iron plant brackets attached to the walls or posts. Very nice wrought-iron brackets. Just the sort of things I’d be making now if I hadn’t injured my hand. And would get back to making as soon as my hand healed.