The Good, the Bad, and the Emus

by Donna Andrews

  “Don’t look now, but someone’s watching us,” Stanley murmured.

  I had noticed it, too—the slight twitching of the curtains in the glass panel to the left of the door.

  And why were we pretending not to notice that the woman whose doorbell we’d rung was peeking out at us instead of opening the door?

  I smiled and waved cheerfully at the glass panel.

  The curtain fell shut.

  Stanley smothered a chuckle.

  Then the door slowly opened, and we found ourselves face-to-face with a tallish, angular, elderly woman. Her gray hair was pulled back in a bun, and her brown eyes studied us intently over a pair of gold reading glasses.

  “I don’t need to ask who you are and why you’re here,” she said to me. “Not sure I like the look of him, but come on in, both of you.”

  She stepped back and opened the door wider so we could enter. She wasn’t that much shorter than me. Maybe five six or seven. If, like most people, she’d lost height as she grew older, she must once have been eye to eye with my five foot ten. Or maybe taller.

  And she was wearing a green T-shirt emblazoned with the words COMPOST HAPPENS.

  I made a provisional decision that I liked Annabel, in spite of the tepid welcome.

  “Have a seat,” she said, gesturing to an archway that led to the living room. “You come in, too, Dwight,” she called out the doorway.

  She left the door open to follow us into the living room. Dr. Ffollett scurried up the front steps and inside, closing the door carefully behind him.

  I liked the house. At least the parts I’d seen, the foyer and now the living room. Both were high-ceilinged and airy, with both walls and woodwork painted white. And although the house and some of the furniture were Victorian in style, I appreciated the most un-Victorian lack of clutter and fussy details.

  “Miss Annabel Lee?” Stanley held out out his hand. “I’m—”

  “Stanley Denton, private investigator,” Annabel said. “I read the card.” She ignored his outstretched hand and turned to me. “And you are?”

  “Meg Langslow.” I held out my hand and, after a beat, she took it and gave me a firm handshake.

  “James’s daughter,” she said, nodding. “Go on, sit.”

  I tried not to show how surprised I was that she knew Dad’s name. Stanley and I sat down in two wing-back chairs while Annabel took the matching love seat and Dr. Ffollett perched on the edge of a Windsor chair just inside the archway from the hall.

  “So you know about us,” I said. “That we exist, I mean.”

  “Oh, Cordelia kept an eye on all of you,” she said. “She was proud of you.”

  “But she never got in touch,” I said. “Why?”

  Annabel shrugged.

  “Maybe she thought you were doing just fine without her,” she said. “Maybe she didn’t want to shake things up after so long. Rake up the old scandal. Who knows? Well, she would have, but it’s not as if we can ask her now. She’s dead.”

  Dr. Ffollett made a choking noise.

  “Sorry, Dwight,” Annabel said. “He thinks I’m very indelicate. Thinks I should say she ‘passed away,’ or ‘went beyond.’ I like plain speaking. And so did Cordelia.”

  “Tell me more about her,” I said.

  Annabel frowned and studied me.

  “You were her cousin,” I went on. “I understand you grew up together.”

  “Only six months apart,” she said with a nod.

  “You must know a lot about her.”

  “I do,” Annabel said. “And I’ll tell you whatever I can. Show you all the photo albums. I can probably even round up a few home movies. But there’s one condition.”

  She paused. I wasn’t sure if she was just pausing for effect or if I was supposed to ask what condition. Stanley beat me to it.

  “What’s the condition?” he asked.

  “You need to solve her murder,” Annabel said.

  Chapter 4

  “Her murder?” Although it wasn’t really a question. Stanley had already told me that Annabel thought Cordelia had been murdered. But sitting here comfortably in the cousins’ brightly lit old-fashioned room—the room where Cordelia had probably sat hundreds of times—the idea seemed both more horrible and a lot less plausible. “You really think she was murdered, then?”

  “She was.” Annabel looked grim. “Find out who killed her and prove it, and I’ll tell you everything you could possibly want to know about Cordelia. In fact, it’s easier than that, because I can tell you who did it—Theo Weaver, that no good son-of-a—”

  “Now, now,” Dr. Ffollett murmured.

  “Theo Weaver,” she repeated. “I know it, you know it, half the town knows it, and if our numbskull of a police chief had any gumption—”

  She clamped her mouth shut and shook her head.

  “What did the police do?” Stanley asked. I noticed he’d taken out his notebook.

  “Nothing,” Annabel said. “Oh, they poked around the remains of the shed a little. And then they apparently decided her death was merely an unfortunate accident.”

  “They haven’t even—” Dr. Ffollett began.

  “As I said,” Annabel said, frowning at the interruption. “They did nothing.”

  “What do you think happened?” Stanley asked.

  “Here’s what I know happened.” Annabel sat back with a rather satisfied look on her face. And why not? It looked as if she was getting her way.

  “It was December,” she said. “The day we had that early snow. And of course the power went out. Three drops of rain or more than a single snowflake and the power goes out around here, regular as clockwork, as far back as I can remember. And I don’t care what the power company says, it’s not getting any better. So we installed a generator about twenty years back. Smartest thing we ever did.”

  I nodded in agreement. Living as far out of town as Michael and I did, we also lost power much too often. A generator was on my home improvement list. As soon as we dealt with the need for a new furnace and possibly new air conditioning.

  “But we don’t like to run the thing all night,” Annabel went on. “No need, really. In the summer it usually cools off enough after dark to get by, and in the winter we can bundle up.”

  “There’s also the fact that Mr. Weaver keeps complaining about the noise,” Dr. Ffollett said.

  “Theo Weaver?” Stanley asked. “The one you think…”

  “Theo Weaver, yes,” Annabel said. “He lives next door.”

  “Beyond the hedge,” Dr. Ffollett added.

  “He’s the reason for the hedge, actually,” Annabel said. “To cut down on his snooping. And we didn’t turn the generator off to please him. He could have bought himself some earplugs. Or installed his own generator. But having it on while we slept fretted us. Cordelia, mainly. She kept worrying it would catch on fire or poison us both with carbon monoxide. That’s why we installed it way at the far corner of the yard, behind the garden shed. For safety. Cost an arm and a leg, running the line so far, but it kept her happy. And even way out there the noise bothered me at night. So one of us would go out and turn it off at bedtime. Usually her.”

  “So she went out that night to turn off the generator?” Stanley asked.

  “And I kept an eye on her, because I was afraid the path might be icy. She disappeared around the back of the shed and a few moments later, the generator stopped. But she didn’t reappear, and just when I was getting worried and starting to get my coat to go out and check on her, I heard a loud whomp! and the shed went up in a ball of flames. And there was enough light from that fire that I could get a glimpse of the killer sneaking away. It was Theo Weaver.”

  “What do the police say?” Stanley asked.

  “That it must have been an accident. That she was carrying a kerosene lantern and the open flame must have ignited the gasoline vapors.”

  “Sounds plausible,” Stanley said.

  It didn’t sound plausible to me, and I was trying to f
ind a polite way to say so. Annabel beat me to it, possibly because she wasn’t worrying about being polite.

  “Plausible, my eye,” she said. “Don’t you know the first thing about how a generator works? It was behind the shed, not in it—for safety. You want a well-ventilated site for a generator. And it was a cold, windy night. No way for vapor to build up even if there had been gasoline there in the first place—which there wasn’t. And besides, she wasn’t carrying a kerosene lantern. Those things are a fire hazard. She had a perfectly nice LED headlight that she kept on her bedside table in case she needed to get up in the night. One of these.”

  Annabel reached over to her left and opened a small drawer in the end table that flanked her love seat. She took out something and pulled it onto her head. A small headlight, similar to what a miner would wear, but attached to a light elastic strap instead of a helmet.

  “We try to keep one handy in every room, for the outages. Better than a flashlight, because you have both hands free.” She reached up and pressed a button on the side of the headlight. A light shone out, bright enough to make me blink even though the room, while shaded, was far from dark. “And with something like this, why in the world would she haul out a stinky old kerosene lantern?”

  “A good point.” Stanley had raised his hand over his eyes to protect them from the LED beam. “Surely, then, if the police didn’t find a kerosene lantern…”

  “They found one, all right,” she said. “I expect we had one out in the shed, along with a lot of other old junk that we should have thrown out years ago. They might have found a butter churn and an old wooden washboard in the debris, too, but that doesn’t mean we were using them that night. Or maybe the killer planted the lantern. The point is, she wasn’t using a kerosene lantern or any other kind of open flame, so the police explanation of how it happened is nonsense.”

  Stanley was scribbling rapidly. I was just listening, and trying to decide if Annabel’s version of events sounded plausible. Was she a keen-eyed witness being ignored by the police—and if so, why? Or was she a lonely old woman who was taking the death of her cousin hard and looking for someone to blame?

  “Cordelia and I have been running that generator for twenty years now,” Annabel said. “I know how the thing works. What I saw wasn’t consistent with any kind of accident with a kerosene lamp. But it’s exactly what would happen if you poured gasoline around the shed and then threw in a match just as Cordelia showed up.”

  “And you think it was your neighbor, Theo Weaver, who did this?” Stanley asked.

  “Damn right I do,” Cordelia said. “I told you, I saw him slinking away from the shed and hopping over the fence.”

  Hopping over the fence? It was eight feet tall if it was an inch. Was their neighbor a recreational pole vaulter? I could see Stanley frown at this, too.

  “You recognized him?” he said aloud. “Wasn’t it dark?”

  “It wasn’t that dark. There was a full moon, so with all the snow around, you could see pretty well when there was a break in the clouds. And not that bad even when the clouds were there. Wasn’t so much the darkness as the glare from the flames that made it hard to see. Hard, but not impossible. And I know Weaver well enough to recognize him. He was carrying something that could easily have been one of those red plastic gas cans, slipping along the hedge and then jumping the fence into his own yard.”

  Stanley glanced over at me. If he was waiting for a signal, or the answer to some unspoken question, he was doomed to disappointment. I shrugged. Whatever question he was asking, that answer seemed to satisfy him.

  “It does sound as if there may be some scope for investigation,” Stanley said.

  “Good,” Annabel said. “You can start today. No time like the present.”

  “There are a couple of things I need to do before I agree to go forward with this,” Stanley said. “First, I need to consult my client.”

  “Consult away,” she said. “If you two want some privacy, use the study.”

  “My client is actually Meg’s grandfather, Dr. Blake,” Stanley said.

  “Wait—Blake hired you to find Cordelia?” Annabel asked.

  Stanley nodded.

  Annabel looked puzzled, and not entirely pleased.

  “A little late in the day, don’t you think?” she asked.

  “Better late than never,” I said.

  Annabel’s face wore a thunderous look. Clearly she was not a fan of her late cousin’s lover.

  “Dr. Blake was unaware, until a few years ago, that his relationship with Cordelia had produced a son,” Stanley said.

  “He should have known it was a possibility,” Annabel retorted. “Some biologist he is.”

  Stanley nodded, conceding the point.

  “Technically, I’ve completed the task Dr. Blake hired me for,” he said. “Find Cordelia. If she was alive, see if she wanted any contact with her son and his family. If she was dead, tell him what I’d learned about her life since their parting. We never anticipated this—finding she’d been murdered and being asked to investigate it. I need to clear it with him before I can continue.”

  “And if Blake says forget about it, case closed?” Annabel snapped. “What then?”

  “Then Stanley will talk to my dad,” I said. “Who obviously has an even stronger reason for wanting to find out what happened to his mother. For that matter, so do I, and I bet my brother and sister will, too.”

  “I feel reasonably sure Dr. Blake will authorize the expanded investigation,” Stanley said. “And if he doesn’t, I can terminate my contract with him and work with others in the family. But I do have to talk to him first.”

  “That works,” Annabel said, with a brisk nod. “And you know, the more I think about it, the more I like the idea of old Monty footing the bill for this. From what I hear, he can certainly afford it. So one way or another, you can move ahead, then, once you clear up the question of who’s the client.”

  “Correct,” Stanley said. “I’ll also need to talk to the local police.” His pen was poised over his notebook. “Can you give me the name of the police detective who worked the case?”

  “Detective!” Annabel snorted. “We don’t have police detectives here in Riverton. We have Chief Heedles and four patrol officers. The chief did the investigation, if you can call it that.”

  “Chief Heedles,” Stanley repeated. “No involvement from the county sheriff’s office, or the state police?”

  “Riverton’s an incorporated town,” Annabel said. “County doesn’t have jurisdiction. I hear they offered, but Chief Heedles didn’t seem to want any interference.”

  “I’ll need to talk to Chief Heedles, then—could you spell it?”

  “H-e-e-d-l-e-s,” Annabel said. “First name, Mo.”

  I could tell from her tone that she probably wasn’t crazy about Stanley wanting to consult the chief. Evidently, Stanley picked up on that as well.

  “It’s a touchy business,” he said. “Coming onto a law enforcement officer’s turf and conducting an investigation of what’s probably considered a closed case. It’ll go better if I contact the chief up front, try to smooth any ruffled feathers beforehand.”

  “Suit yourself,” Annabel said. “Just don’t let her snow you.”

  “Her?” Stanley was the one who made the mistake of saying this aloud.

  “Surprised?” Annabel’s tone was sharp, and just a little triumphant. “The Mo is short for Maureen. So you think a police chief has to be a man?”

  “No,” he said. “But I know quite a few very competent women law enforcement officers who are still banging their heads against the glass ceiling. I’m pleasantly surprised that Riverton is so progressive.”

  “Nice save,” she said. “And we’re not that progressive—her daddy was the chief of police before her, and she didn’t have any brothers. Anyway, don’t let her snow you. There was nothing accidental about Cordelia’s death. Wait a minute. I’ve got something for you.”

  She stood up an
d strode briskly across the room to where some papers were lying on a side table. My heart beat faster suddenly. I had the feeling she was about to show us something of Cordelia’s. A photo, perhaps. Or a letter she’d left in case her son or any of her grandchildren ever showed up after her death. Romantic nonsense, I knew, but still—

  “Here’s a copy of my file on the case,” she said, holding out a slender manila folder. “I put it together so I’d have something to show the state police if I ever got them interested.”

  Stanley took the folder and tucked it under his arm. Annabel must have seen my disappointment.

  “Not what you were hoping for?” She patted my arm. “Don’t worry. Give me her killer and I’ll give you her life story, all of it. Dwight, see them safely on their way.”

  She turned and left through a door at the back of the room. I suspected it led to the kitchen. She wasn’t quite fleeing, but still—I was reminded that she was a recluse. Maybe she had used up her tolerance for other human beings for the day.

  Dr. Ffollett escorted us out of the house. He was hustling us down the front walk when Stanley stopped.

  “Before we go,” he said. “May we inspect the shed?”

  Ffollett blinked.

  “The shed?” he said finally. “It burned down.”

  “Sorry,” Stanley said. “Imprecise of me. The remains of the shed. The scene of the crime.”

  Dr. Ffollett looked anxious and hunched his shoulders slightly as if bracing himself to repel an assault. Then he sighed, and stepped to the side, as if getting out of our way.

  “It’s back there,” he said, pointing. “At the back of the lot, on the right side of the yard. The right side as you’re facing the house.”