by Joyce Harmon
I set the table and peeked at the casserole. After a few minutes, I heard a call from the back yard. “Su-SEEEEL-ya!”
Well, something was bothering the man. I went to the back door to see what it was. Jack was standing in the middle of the garden. He was holding a couple ripe tomatoes and staring back toward the back of the garden.
Oh. Looks like the cat is out of the bag. I went out to join him.
“What is it, honey?” I asked in my best June Cleaver manner.
He pointed. “What are those?”
“Those? Those are grape vines.”
“What kind of grape vines?” he asked dangerously.
I lifted my chin, remembering Admiral Hopper. “Scuppernong,” I said defiantly.
Oh, the enormity! “You planted a rotundifolia in my vineyard?” My eyes had barely begun to flash when Jack recognized his error and stepped back from the ledge. “Our vineyard,” he corrected lamely.
“They’re not in Our vineyard,” I told him sweetly. “They’re in Our garden. You know, the garden that I plow, I plant, I fertilize, I weed, I harvest? That garden. The garden where they’ve been since I planted them this spring and you’re just now noticing.”
“And what are they doing here?”
“They’re growing,” I said impatiently. “In the fullness of time, they will produce grapes, which we will then eat.”
Why was Jack making a fuss? And if I wanted to eat grapes, there was a whole vineyard full of them, right? Well, truth is, there are grapes and there are grapes. The grapes in the vineyard are vitis vinifera. Sure, they come in a lot of varieties, the cabernet, the chardonnay, the pinot and the merlot, but those are all sub-groups of the vinifera, the classic Euro-asian wine grape.
Wine grapes are great for making wine. For eating? Not so much. They’re tasty, but tiny and full of seeds. Scuppernong has seeds too, but they’re good hefty grapes, some of them the size of golf balls, which makes navigating the seeds worth it. I’d coveted Evelyn Ledbetter’s scuppernongs for years now, and this spring she gave me a couple, which I smuggled in to the back of the garden.
“Table grapes?” Jack said skeptically.
“Table grapes,” I assured him. I didn’t cross my fingers, except mentally. Because to tell the truth, when the Queen Anne Historical Society meets at Evelyn’s house, she always serves us tiny glasses of her homemade scuppernong wine. And to tell even more of the truth, I liked it. So I couldn’t help thinking that perhaps someday, years down the road, these vines might produce more grapes than we wanted to eat, and if that day ever came I was going to try my hand at a small batch of scuppernong wine. Not to sell, not to put the Passatonnack label on, just for home consumption.
I knew better than to mention that to Jack, though. The very idea of making a wine from a non-vinifera grape would strike him as blasphemy. I’m married to a wine snob. I know it, I can’t change it, I’ll just have to work around it.
“They’ll stay in the garden?” Jack asked.
“Jack, they’re going to stay right here! And the closest vineyard is over there!” I pointed toward the nearest part of the vineyard. “What do you think this is? Little Shop of Horrors? Attack of the Killer Tomatoes? The vineyard is fine, the garden is fine. Chill. Out.”
Mention of tomatoes brought Jack’s attention back to the tomatoes he was holding. He held them up and smiled weakly. It was almost an apology.
I accepted it as such. “Come on, before the casserole dries out.”
Peace restored, we returned to the house.
During dinner, Jack wondered what my plans were for Paco. “Oh, I’m sure I can find him a good home,” I told him airily. “It’s a very popular breed.”
Jack looked down at Paco, who was watching us eat. “They are?!” he asked incredulously. “They’re the size of a large rat, they have weird buggy little eyes, shrill voices, nasty personalities, and they’re not good for anything.”
“They’re companionship,” I told him sternly. “And a lot of people like little dogs. He’s – apartment sized.”
“He’s sure not a farm dog,” Jack agreed.
EIGHT
The next morning, rather than dithering while waiting for my interview with the investigator, I tackled the Paco issue. I called the vet’s office and talked to Doc. She suggested that I post on her bulletin board, with all the lost dog and free kitten notices. And she dug around and found a phone number for the chihuahua rescue people.
So I called them. I got a nice lady named Lorraine on the phone and explained that I had a situation here in Queen Anne with a chihuahua whose owner had recently died. Lorraine was sympathetic, but the first thing she wanted to know was, “Is he at a kill shelter?”
“He’s HERE,” I said. “He’s at my house. I’m not even a relative but the brother told me to take him to the animal shelter. And our shelter here does kill animals that aren’t adopted pretty quick.”
Lorraine took my contact information and asked me for details about Paco. I gave him as good a review as I could. Two years old (Doc told me that), house-broken, trainable, the whole ball of wax. She said she would see what she could do.
“Wait a minute,” I protested. “Isn’t someone going to come get him?”
Lorraine sighed wearily. “We have volunteer foster homes, but everyone is maxed out right now. If you can just be patient a while longer.” She explained the situation. Apparently chihuahuas had become too fashionable lately. Some rich party girl who was famous for being famous had been making all the tabloids being photographed at trendy spots carrying her chihuahua, which started a craze for the little guys. Turns out it’s not good for a breed to become trendy. The breeders churn out more litters to meet the increased demand, and people buy them on a whim and then abandon them when they turn out to require actual work and caring for. The long and short of it was that there was a nationwide chihuahua glut just now.
Lorraine was spending quite a lot of time talking to someone she wasn’t going to be able to help; gradually it dawned on me that she saw me as a potential recruit for chihuahua fostering. Once I realized where this was going, I got off the phone fast.
I looked at Paco and imagined a whole bunch of Pacos running around the house. Lordy!
Well, there was always Doc’s bulletin board. I still had Amy’s camera, and took a series of pictures of Paco. He turned out to be surprisingly photogenic. I downloaded the pictures and added the most appealing to a Free To A Good Home flyer, and sent it to the color printer.
While I was at it, I took pictures of several Barbies and Breyer horses and the toy tea set. I was admiring my current auctions (Amy is right – the bidding is always most intense on the last day) when I realized I’d let time get away from me again. I realized that when I saw the large rental sedan coming up the driveway; it was time for my VBI interview.
Drat. And here I was in my third-best blue jeans and my six year old Qu’aot III tee-shirt (Under The Catacombs!). Well, the Man From Richmond was just going to deal with me as I am.
I stashed Paco in the laundry room, because I didn’t trust him to behave. And I started a new pot of coffee, because the old one was breakfast leftovers and getting nasty.
I thought I was all ready, but I jumped when the front doorbell rang. Oh, right – I mentally thumped myself on the forehead. Special Agent Maguire was at the front door, because she wasn’t from around here and she didn’t know any better.
I answered the door and tried to seem less flustered than I really was. I got the agent settled in to the living room, speaking sternly to Polly who wanted to hail her as a long-lost sister. She politely refused coffee and settled herself onto the sofa and pulled out a notebook. I’d gone over the sofa with the lint brush, but I suspect Agent Maguire would be leaving with a few souvenir pet hairs.
First, she asked me to describe how I found Rose. I explained my thought process, how I’d called Rose and she hadn’t returned my call, so when I was going by on an errand I decided to stop by.
&
nbsp; “So you’d say you were a good friend of Rose’s?”
“Oh, no!” I was stunned by that interpretation.
“If you were dropping by…” the agent asked.
“That’s just being neighborly,” I insisted. “You know, looking out for one another. You don’t have to like someone for that.”
“So you didn’t like Rose?” she persisted.
“I didn’t KNOW Rose!” I took a deep breath. “I’d only met her that week, at the auction, and just to talk to.”
So we had to go back and go over the auction, and meeting Amy and seeing Rose and Paco and talking to Rose for a few minutes in the line at the BBQ Hut. I wondered if Special Agent Maguire had ever talked to a stranger in line at a concession stand. I suspect not.
Then we covered Julia and Amy’s visit here. When I started to explain eBuy, Agent Maquire just said dismissively that she knew about eBuy. (What was she shopping online for, I wondered.) And the break-ins at Julia’s and Amy’s houses, and my theory that the big buyers at the auction had been targeted.
We returned to the scene of the crime and she took me backwards and forwards over the events several times. What I saw and what I did and when and how and why. Looking at her notebook, she said, “Now I understand that the on-scene investigator allowed you to remove some items from the crime scene?”
“Items? He allowed me to remove the dog!”
“Only the dog?”
“Well, along with his crate and his leash and his bag of food. I have dog food of course, but I have a big dog and the kibble bits are larger…”
“And that’s all you took?” She referred back to her notes. “The dog, the crate, the leash and the food?”
“That’s all,” I assured her.
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.” What was this about?
“Nothing heavy?”
“Heavy?” I was puzzled. “Depends on how you define heavy. I guess the dog food was about four pounds, it’s a five pound bag but it wasn’t full. The crate’s pretty light, but with Paco in it, that might be seven or eight pounds or so.”
“I’d like to see this crate,” she said.
So we headed to the back of the house, me relieved that my cleaning frenzy of yesterday had the kitchen looking better than it usually does.
We went to the door of the laundry room. Paco started yapping furiously from behind his baby gates. I pointed to the plastic traveling kennel on top of the dryer.
“That’s not it,” Agent Maguire murmured.
Then I got it. “The murder weapon!” I exclaimed. “You don’t have it, do you? And you don’t know what it was.”
Maguire looked momentarily chagrined, but then nodded. “There was nothing at the scene that we could identify as the murder weapon.”
“Couldn’t the killer have just washed it and put it back?” I asked. I got myself a cup of coffee and held up the pot to the agent. This time she accepted the offer and we settled down at the kitchen table.
“It’s harder than people think to clean a weapon so a modern forensics lab won’t find traces,” she explained. “And nothing at the site fit the wound.”
“I should have known you folks didn’t have the weapon,” I mused. “If you had, word would be out by now.”
She frowned. “That doesn’t speak well of the sheriff’s department.”
“Agent Maguire,” I said impatiently, “this is a small, rural community. People mind one another’s business whether they ought to or not. Word gets around.”
“Perhaps,” she admitted. But she looked doubtful.
“What sort of thing are you looking for?” I asked.
“Something heavy, with a straight edge,” she told me.
I winced. “Like an axe, maybe?”
But she shook her head. “Straight, not sharp. Heavy enough to break bone, but not sharp enough to cut.”
“Hmm.” I considered the possibilities. Unfortunately, I could think of a lot of candidates. “Do you think the killer brought his own weapon?” I asked.
“I don’t know what to think,” she admitted.
We wrapped up the interview then. I noticed that her eyes were a bit red and wondered if she was tired. Before we left the kitchen, I gestured toward the laundry room. “Could I interest you in a dog?” I asked, because it never hurt to ask. “I seem to be stuck with him. The brother told me to take him to the animal shelter.”
But Agent Maguire shook her head. “I love dogs,” she said sadly, and then let out an enormous sneeze.
Oh. “Allergies, huh?”
She nodded, fishing a tissue out of her purse. “I can be around dogs or cats for a little while, but pretty soon it catches up to me.”
“Won’t Washington House be a problem for you, then?” I asked. “They have those two big mastiffs.”
“It seems okay so far,” Maguire admitted. “The dogs aren’t allowed upstairs or in the restaurant. If it becomes a problem, I’ll have to move to the Motel Six, but it’s twenty miles away.”
As I escorted her to the front door, I asked, “Have you checked the brother’s alibi?”
She looked at me curiously. “Why do you ask?”
I shrugged. “I gather he’s inheriting all Rose’s stuff, and from what I hear some of the things are valuable.”
“Enough to be a murder motive?”
“Anyone who would take or suggest taking their dead sister’s beloved pet to the animal shelter is capable of anything,” I said darkly.
She considered for a moment, finally saying without inflection, “Well, that’s certainly one point of view.”
After she left, I realized that she hadn’t answered the question.
And five minutes after that, Julia’s Expedition rolled into the back yard. Julia got out and came to the kitchen door, where I was drinking coffee and pondering the Paco question.
“I see you survived the interrogation,” she said, helping herself to the coffee.
You have to pass Julia’s place to get here; Julia had obviously been watching for the agent’s departure. She settled down at the table, ready to dish. “So? What did you talk about?”
“We just went over the same things I already discussed with Luther. Finding the body and the auction, and what all I touched in the kitchen, like that.”
Julia frowned. “Nothing new?”
“Oh, wait,” I remembered. “There was something new. Did you realize they don’t know what the weapon was? It wasn’t there and they can’t figure out what it might have been.”
“Reeeeally?” Julia perked up. “Well, isn’t that interesting?” She fished around in her enormous purse and pulled out a stack of index cards.
Oh, no – I’d been here before. “Put those away,” I said crossly. “We’re not doing this again.”
“Doing what?” Julia asked innocently.
“We’re not playing Miss Marple,” I told her firmly. “It’s Agent Maguire’s job to find out who killed Rose. Not us. It has nothing to do with us.”
“I think it does,” Julia argued. “What if this agent can’t solve the murder? What happens to her? Nothing. She just goes back to Richmond and gets on with her life. But we’re here. We’re right here, with a murderer on the loose and no idea who or why or if it’s going to happen again.”
I shivered. So many people had talked about how exasperating Rose was that I’d been thinking she just got on someone’s last nerve and they snapped. But what if that wasn’t it? And even if it was, people are allowed to be annoying, it’s not a capital offense.
Queen Anne was a friendly community. Sure, it was changing and growing, but still, there was the small town rural ambience. We kept an eye on one another and noticed if we could help out. But what if Rose’s murder was never solved? How would it affect us, to go through our lives with the unspoken knowledge – somebody here is a murderer?
Julia was right. We needed to know who. I hoped it was the brother.
“Now remember last time?” Julia
said. “Get to know the victim and you’ll know why they were killed.”
“I’m not sure it’s the same,” I objected. “Obadiah Winslow was a stranger, we had to go find out things about him. But everyone here knows Rose. Knew, I mean. She’s local. What else is there to find out?”
“But did we know her, really?” Julia asked. “I’ve been here for thirty years and I didn’t know she’d been married.”
“You don’t think a fellow would divorce someone they’d been married to for several years and then wait three decades or so to murder them?” I asked skeptically.
“No, but it’s something we didn’t know. Maybe there are other things we don’t know,” Julia pointed out. She fanned out her blank index cards importantly. “I’m going to make a biography of Rose Jackson. Speak to the old timers. There’s bound to be something.”
We got our opportunity to quiz the old timers that very evening, which was the monthly meeting of the Queen Anne Historical Society. Now, Queen Anne doesn’t really have a lot of what you might consider ‘history’. We had no famous Signers and no battlefields. (I know! A county in Virginia with no battlefields?! But so it was.) The Historical Society was really more of a social club and an excuse to get together. We’d been talking off and on for years about opening a museum, but the catch, besides the expense, was – what would we put into a museum?
But it was a nice outing and get-together, and all the old timers seemed to belong. Tonight’s meeting was at Evelyn’s, so we’d have scuppernong wine as well as the usual cookies and coffee.
There were nine of us today. I think I was the youngest person in the room. The only two men were George Haines, Buddy’s dad, and Reverend Lou, who’d retired from the Methodist church here. Then me and Julia, and a bunch of other old biddies. They were the assembled collective memory of Queen Anne.
Like I say, it’s really more of a social thing. And of course, the main topic this evening was the murder of Rose Jackson. George, presiding, raced through the Robert’s Rules of Order part of the meeting with even more haste than usual so we could get to the heart of the meeting, which was the socializing and gossip.