A few moments later I heard a slight noise and opened my eyes to see that a blond teenager was setting a glass of lemonade in front of me.
“Thank you, Shannon, dear,” Mother said. “Meg, are you hungry?”
I shook my head, and Mother dismissed her acolyte with a smile and a nod. She gazed around the tent to make sure nothing was happening that needed her attention, and then sat down across from me.
I grabbed the lemonade and reminded myself to sip, not gulp.
“Don’t let me interrupt you,” I said to Mother, as I sipped.
“Nonsense, dear,” she said. “Everything here is under control.”
Yes, if Mother had anything to do with it, everything probably was.
When Mother had volunteered to help out at the Trinity Episcopal tent whenever she was in town, the organizers had wisely refrained from assigning her a job requiring manual labor. Instead, they’d made her one of the dining tent hostesses. She greeted incoming customers as if they were long-lost relatives, made sure they found seats, had their tea or lemonade refilled until they positively sloshed on their way out, and made sure the teenagers who were bussing and cleaning the tables did their jobs with astonishing speed and efficiency.
She’d also organized the decoration of the tent. I had no idea whether the rest of the Episcopal women appreciated that or whether, like most people, they just found it easier not to argue with Mother. The long folding metal tables were now covered with bright blue-and-red-checked vinyl tablecloths and decorated with sturdy white vases full of flowers. Flower garlands looped between the inside tent poles, supporting strings of miniature red and blue Chinese lanterns. She’d even managed to get all the waitstaff to wear red- or blue-checked chef’s aprons.
Before too long the Catholics and Baptists noticed that the Episcopal tent was getting more than its share of attention from the tourists and began retaliatory decorating of their own. It was, of course, an article of faith, at least in the Episcopal tent, that Mother’s décor was the pinnacle of elegance, while the rival tents, though worthy efforts, were somehow lacking. I’m sure competing doctrines were held in the other two tents, but since there were more than enough tourists to keep everyone busy, everyone publicly praised everyone else’s efforts and a spirit of ecumenical harmony reigned.
And I reminded myself that I should look around to see if Mother had added any more little touches that I should praise. You’d think after thirty-some years of knowing me, Mother would have made peace with the fact that I didn’t share her passion for decorating, but she could still have her feelings hurt if I didn’t notice some new frill or furbelow.
But I might have drifted off to sleep if I hadn’t heard the ding my phone made when someone texted me. I pulled it out and saw that Michael had sent me a picture of Josh and Jamie, obviously enjoying their hay ride. I smiled at seeing their excited faces.
“We’re heading back to the tent,” Michael texted.
When I looked up from my phone, I found Mother staring at me.
“Is there really a murder?” she asked.
My smile vanished. I nodded.
“Oh, dear,” she said. “We were all so hoping for an unfortunate accident. Was it anyone we knew?”
“Not really,” I said. “Someone who worked for First Progressive Financial.”
“Still distressing, though,” Mother said. Was she reminding me or herself? “And at least it will keep your father happy.”
I nodded and gulped more lemonade. Yes, Dad was never happier than when he could combine his two great passions, crime fiction and medicine, by taking part in a real life murder investigation.
“How was he killed?” she asked.
“She was shot,” I said.
“She?” Mother looked distressed. “I didn’t know the lender had any women working for him here. Unless you mean—not that nice-looking young woman with the lovely Donna Karan shoes?”
“Probably,” I said. “She was about my age, more or less, probably nice-looking when she was alive, and her shoes didn’t look like anything I could afford much less walk around in without tripping.”
“Poor woman,” Mother said, her sympathies thoroughly engaged by the knowledge that the victim was a fellow shoe aficionada. “I think I saw her wearing a pair of Stuart Weitzmans, too.”
“If I hear that they’re giving away her wardrobe, I’ll go for the footwear,” I said. “Unfortunately, her choice of employers wasn’t as refined as her taste in shoes, and odds are that had something to do with her death.”
The blond teenager who’d filled my glass appeared at my elbow again.
“More?” she asked.
“It’s all right, Shannon, dear,” Mother said. “The murder victim wasn’t your young man.”
An expression of relief and joy crossed Shannon’s face, quickly erased by a stern frown.
“He’s not my young man!” Her tone was defensive. “It’s not my fault one of the Evil Lender’s guards keeps stalking me.”
“Of course not, dear,” Mother said.
“I wouldn’t talk to him at all if I wasn’t trying to get useful information,” Shannon said.
“And now you can continue trying to get useful information,” Mother said. “Because it wasn’t he who was murdered. I, for one, am very relieved that the victim isn’t anyone I know personally, and I’m sure you feel the same, no matter how much you disapprove of the young man’s current career choice.”
Shannon looked anxious for a moment, and then a sunny smile returned to her face.
“Yes, that’s just how I feel,” she said. “More lemonade?”
I held up my glass. She refilled it and then bounced off.
“So she’s dating one of the Flying Monkeys?” I asked.
“Heavens, no,” Mother said. “She’d bite your head off if she heard you say that. But as she points out as often as possible, she has no control over where he chooses to eat his meals. And as a dedicated citizen of Caerphilly, she doesn’t want to discourage him from talking to her if there’s any chance he might reveal information that would be useful to the cause.”
“Don’t encourage her to do too much information gathering,” I said. “It’s possible one of the guards was the killer.”
“Are you sure?”
“Either one of the guards or someone they’d think nothing about letting in and out of the courthouse,” I said. “So tell her not to do too much prying. Even if her boyfriend isn’t the killer, it’s almost certainly someone he knows. And right now the killer just might be a little suspicious of townspeople asking questions.”
“I’ll warn her,” Mother said. From the fierce look on her face, I suspected she’d be keeping a hawklike eye on the young guard. I felt a little less worried about Shannon’s safety.
“I’ve got to get back to the tent to change out of this robe,” I said. “Thanks for the lemonade.”
I strolled back to the tent to the strains of “The Pennsylvania Polka.” The lemonade had restored my energy a bit. I still wasn’t up to walking in time to the music, but I could at least appreciate that if you were a polka lover you were probably having a great time out here in the square.
When I got back to the tent, I found it swarming with half-dressed people. I blinked, and then realized they were Michael’s drama students from the college, getting ready to perform their play. I took a deep breath and put on what I called my Mrs. Professor Waterston face. I’d learned from one of the students that I had a reputation as one of the nicer faculty wives, and I didn’t want to blow that.
Standing just inside the doorway holding a clipboard was Kathy Borgstrom, who served as the drama department’s administrative assistant—which meant that it was her job to keep dozens of creative, temperamental, impractical, and often dangerously absentminded people from becoming completely disorganized. Today she looked even more than usual like a border collie who’d been saddled with a herd of half-grown kittens.
“Good God, they haven’t added anoth
er scene at the last minute, have they?” she asked, glancing back and forth between me and her clipboard a couple of times. “Just what are you supposed to be?”
I took in the crowd. A pair of British redcoats were eating ice cream cones and talking with a World War I doughboy. A woman wearing a Caerphilly College T-shirt and a Civil War–era hoopskirt was trying to squeeze through the crowd and getting nowhere. Another woman wearing a fringed and beaded leather American Indian dress was lounging on a blanket in one corner, reading a graphic novel. A Union private and a Confederate colonel were feeding cheese crackers to Mr. Throckmorton’s pigeons. A woman dressed in black pedal pushers and a black sleeveless shirt was powdering an entire row of Colonial–era wigs on wire stands. Half a dozen actors in various stages of undress from several centuries were pacing back and forth in every part of the tent, loudly doing vocal exercises.
“I’m actually here to get out of costume,” I said. “What’s all this?”
“The play,” Kathy said. “Actually more like a series of historic scenes illustrating the high points of American history. John Smith and Pocahontas. Patrick Henry’s ‘Liberty or Death’ speech. The Boston Tea Party. The Battle of Bull Run.” She glanced around and then continued in an undertone. “It’s a bit heavy on the noisy bits of history—anything with a lot of shouting or cannon fire made the cut.”
I nodded. I noted, with approval, that Rose Noire had retreated to the other end of the tent, taking both dogs with her to guard the entrance to the tunnel. Eric and the twins were pressed against the fence, watching the costume parade with wide eyes.
I went to the bins where I kept useful stuff and pulled out a change of clothes—I usually kept several in the tent in case I wanted to look presentable after a bout of blacksmithing in the heat. I stepped behind a clothes rack, shed the bulky choir robe, pulled on the jeans and T-shirt, and breathed a sigh of relief. I wanted to grab some cold water from my minirefrigerator—not to drink, after all that lemonade, but to pour over myself. Alas, unlike Kathy, most of the students weren’t in on the secret of the tunnel, so I refrained.
I settled for giving the boys a quick hug.
“You think the play’s going to be something the boys would like?” Eric asked. “I was thinking of taking them out front to watch.”
“Check with Michael,” I said. “There might be a lot of battle scenes.”
“They seem pretty good with loud noises,” Eric said. “Even—ow!”
A deafening screech of feedback had interrupted him.
“Good grief,” Eric said. “Do those guys know anything about how to run a sound system?”
“They’re doing just fine,” I said.
“Fine?” He was staring at me with that look teenagers get when they think adults are being particularly dense. “Fine? You mean you can’t hear that feedback?”
“The feedback’s part of their job,” I reminded him. “If someone opens the trapdoor during the concert, the noise it makes will just sound like more feedback.”
“But— but—” Clearly Eric was having a harder time than most of us accepting this now-standard feature of life during Caerphilly Days. “It’s awful,” he said finally. “Like fingernails on a chalkboard. Worse than fingernails on a chalkboard, in fact.”
“That’s an interesting comment,” Rose Noire remarked. “Did you know, there’s been some research done on why humans find that sound so universally unpleasant?”
“Maybe because it is?” Eric asked.
“The leading theory is that it resembles primate warning calls,” Rose Noire went on. “Or possibly the hunting call of some predator that primates found particularly terrifying.”
“You’ve been talking to my grandfather, haven’t you?” I asked.
“The boys didn’t even flinch at the feedback,” Eric said. “So as long as there’s no blood, only noise, I expect they’d love the play. But I’ll check with Michael to make sure.”
“Good man,” I said. “See you later.”
I paused by Kathy on my way out of the tent.
“Horace should be here shortly,” I murmured. “See if you can find him an unobtrusive way to slip into the crawl space.”
“They should all be going onstage soon,” she murmured back.
“I think I’ll head over to the forensic tent to return this.” I was folding up the choir robe as neatly as its bulk and slipperiness would allow. “They might be running low on choir robes.”
“I’m sure they have enough if you want to stay and rest before the play starts,” she said.
“Not ones big enough to fit the Flying Monkeys,” I said. “Besides, it will give me an excuse to snoop.”
Kathy didn’t argue with that logic.
I found the chief outside the tent talking to Horace.
“You want to test their shoes for GSR?” the chief was asking.
“Not GSR,” Horace said. “That’s hard to get from clothes. But blood isn’t. And if someone had blood spatter on his clothes, that’d be a lot harder to explain away than GSR. On the shoes, it’s less significant—anyone who was at the crime scene could have stepped in the blood, but still—”
“If someone has blood on his shoes who wasn’t legitimately there after we heard the shots, it’d be significant as the dickens,” the chief said. “But we need to get them out of here pretty soon. The choir doesn’t have special shoes to lend us. And if you think my budget will run to buying flip-flops for all of them, you’re crazy.”
“How about those booties workmen wear over their shoes so they won’t track dirt into your house?” I suggested. “I bet Randall’s construction company keeps them around.”
The chief thought for a moment, then nodded.
“I’ll go ask him,” Horace said.
“No, I’ll have someone take care of it,” the chief said. “You get on over to do Mr. Throckmorton and Mr. Langslow. We’ve been keeping them waiting far too long already.”
Was it just my imagination, or did Horace turn pale?
“Right, Chief,” he said, and strode off in the direction of the bandstand.
The chief raised the tent flap and peeked in. I looked over his shoulder. At the far end of the tent, a dozen of the guards were clustered as if they felt less ridiculous in a group. Actually, I thought their numbers magnified the humorous effect. None of their gowns went down farther than mid-shin, and most displayed marvelously hairy knees atop well-thatched legs. As I watched, several of them gave surreptitious tugs at the bottom hems of their robes, in a gesture I remembered well from my own days of wearing too-short skirts.
By contrast, the flowing sleeves seemed more than adequate to cover their arms, and yet the guards repeatedly shoved or rolled them up to reveal their bulging, hairy, often tattooed biceps, and then repeated the shoving and rolling when the sleeves inevitably tumbled down.
Several of them appeared to be arguing with Deputy Vern.
“Protesting the lack of AC,” the chief said. “Apparently they keep the thermostat jacked down pretty low over there in the courthouse.”
“How environmentally irresponsible of them,” I said. “You’d think the choir robes would be more comfortable than those uniforms.”
“You’d think,” the chief said. “Anyway, their employer just brought over a bus to take them back to where they’re staying—mostly at that run-down motel in Clay County, from the sound of it. Soon as we confiscate those shoes, we can get rid of them. Of course, before we do, it would be gratifying if those Star-Tribune reporters could find their way back here.”
“I thought you already tested them,” I said. “Or do you want to snag their shoes?”
“Well, that’s not as critical, since you and Randall can pretty much alibi them—and each other—for the time when the shots were fired. But I expect that photographer would enjoy getting a few shots of our Flying Monkeys leaving the premises in the choir robes and booties.”
“I’m sure he would,” I said, trying to suppress a grin. “I will se
e what I can do to bring it about.”
“I’d appreciate it. I suppose I should go arrange the booties.”
“I’ll call Randall,” I said. “You’re busy.”
“Thanks.” He nodded genially to me, then forced his face back into a more stern expression and turned back to the room.
Randall promised to have booties over to the forensic tent in ten minutes.
“And I’ll convene a little press conference in front of my tent in a few minutes,” he said. “It’s got a good view of the entrance to the forensic tent. We’ve had three or four more reporters show up since the news got out. No reason the Star-Trib should have a monopoly on the photo op.”
I was tempted to stick around and gawk, but I had things to do. I was just pulling out my notebook-that-tells-me-when-to-breathe to remind me what those things were when my cell phone rang.
Chapter 12
“Meg?” It was Rob. “Could you see what’s keeping Horace? Phinny and I really want to go to the bathroom and Sammy says we can’t until after Horace processes us.”
“I’ll check,” I said. “I’m on my way to the tent now.”
Apparently the play was about to begin. The tent was empty except for two women knitting just inside the entrance and the two dogs, sleeping in the pen. Presumably Eric had taken the twins out to watch the pageant.
“Tunnel door needs opening before your cousin can go in,” one of the knitters said in an undertone. “We were going to haul it up while everyone was applauding the polka players, but there were too many students still around.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “The play will have a lot of noisy parts.”
Spike looked up hopefully when I stepped into his pen, then sighed and went back to sleep when he saw that I wasn’t bringing him one of his playmates.
In the crawl space under the bandstand, Horace was crouching by the closed trapdoor. With his back to it, actually, and his nose buried deep in the case in which he kept his crime scene tools and supplies.
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