Ladies Courting Trouble

by Dolores Stewart Riccio

  Becky and I answered Fiona’s frantic call, rushing to her aid in my daughter’s Volvo. Thanks to the Town Car’s airbag, Fiona was unhurt except for a sprained finger, but mildly hysterical. At one point, I thought she would faint, but a big warm hug and some deep breathing brought her back to herself.

  We arrived in the nick of time. The damaged house fronted on a small square, grassy in summer, where four commemorative benches had been artfully placed. I persuaded Fiona to sit there while we waited. The officer who’d answered the accident call had been occupied in checking for injured parties, talking to the home’s owner, and viewing the damage. Satisfied now that no ambulance would be needed and the house wasn’t on fire or springing a gas leak, he asked to see Fiona’s license and registration.

  As she rummaged through her reticule to find these items, Fiona brought out a motley assortment of pamphlets, a pouch of corn pollen, a bag of butterscotch candies, lace-edged handkerchiefs, a tartan change purse, a tin of cat food, and her pistol, which she laid on the bench between us while she continued her search. After one horrified glance at the pistol and at the officer, whose attention, mercifully, was on his notebook, I swiftly moved closer to Fiona so as to camouflage the no longer concealed weapon. I found that there are two disadvantages to sitting on a pistol. One, it’s cold, hard, and lumpy. Two, a person worries about getting accidentally shot in the ass.

  Having located her papers, Fiona handed them over and began to repack her reticule. “Oh dear,” she said. “Where do you suppose…?”

  I wiggled off the pistol, quickly stuffed it back in the reticule under the butterscotch candies, and held my finger to my lips.

  After some time spent in completing the police report, arranging for a tow truck, and having an uncomfortable conversation with the historic home’s owner, finally we were able to take Fiona back to my house and pour hot, sweet tea into her. Fiona’s agitation was intensified because her brother had arranged that she collect Laura Belle right after the New Year. Fiona had been in a flurry of preparations when the accident happened. Her heart’s dearest wish had come true, and now what would she do? The Town Car had got the worst of the collision. It was the luxury model of its day, and it would need extensive and expensive repairs.

  “What will I do? I’m so afraid that my brother will change his mind. A thing like this could do it,” she wailed.

  “Fiona, we can work it out. Why don’t you plan to use public transportation to meet me in Boston,” my resourceful Becky suggested, “then I’ll drive you back to Plymouth with Laura Belle and all her gear. Or if you’re not up to that, I could drive you both ways. At any rate, I’ll go with you to your brother’s place, and we’ll bring some temporary guardianship papers for Laura Belle’s mother to sign.”

  For a moment Fiona looked hopeful. Then another worry crinkled her brow. “But my niece has already left for The Hague.”

  “Not a problem.” Becky’s voice had taken on a brisk, professional tone. “I’ll send the papers overnight through Katz and Kinder to your niece’s new office in the Netherlands. Guardianship is something you should have in case your grandniece needs medical attention while she’s in your care. Also, we’ll require a copy of her birth certificate and medical records in case you want to enroll her in pre-kindergarten.”

  “Oh,” Fiona said. “You’re the answer to my prayers, Becky. Goddess bless you.”

  “Prayers?” Becky glanced at me.

  “In a manner of speaking,” I said. “Sometime they’re called words of power. Or meditations. What did you think we do? Voodoo?’

  “Well, not with live chickens and all. But—”

  “Cass, we’re going to have to educate this lovely girl of yours,” Fiona said. “My course in women’s studies, the one you all took. The suppression of female authority and divinity. Taking back our old ways. Earth power. Tuning into the universe.” She was beginning to sound like herself again. And the sprained index finger, now bandaged and sticking straight up, showed a definite attitude.

  At first, we couldn’t be sure—was this an accident? Possibly. But the mechanic who checked the brake system afterwards said the brake-fluid line had been cleanly cut, not all the way, but just enough so that it would rupture, probably as soon as the car encountered a serious bump or pothole.

  “I insist that Fiona file a criminal complaint,” Phillipa said. “Brake lines don’t cut themselves. An evil prankster is at work here.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “But how? When? I can’t see Jean crawling under Fiona’s car, can you?”

  The next incident brought me much closer to Phillipa’s way of thinking.

  One morning soon after Becky had gone back to Boston, an unexplainable sheet of ice covered my back-porch steps. Scruffy, dashing first out the door as always, went sailing off them as if he were a Frisbee taking flight. He landed in a bed of woody lavender, and whimpered in pain. I managed to keep my footing only by clinging to the new double railing Joe had installed in another round of do-it-yourself home improvement.

  The temperature was ten degrees, true, but it was a dead, dry cold—there hadn’t been a drop of moisture in the air or on the ground. Someone would have had to drench those granite stairs with water for a dangerous skim of ice to have formed. After I brought Scruffy back into the house and checked him for injuries—mainly a sore backside—I had another look around the stairs but could find no evidence of an intruder.

  Then I remembered that just after three that morning, Scruffy had barked and run from window to window. Normally he doesn’t disturb easily once he’s really settled in for the night. I’d thought I heard a cat fight somewhere in the distance to explain his excitement.

  “It’s nothing,” I’d said. “Go back to sleep.”

  My superior canine instincts say there’s danger afoot, Toots. Better let me out to have a run at it.

  “Oh, sure, let you run outdoors to get scratched up and sprayed by a couple of tomcats. Not on your life.” At that weird hour, it wouldn’t be easy getting back to sleep. I’d poured a shot of my Universal Antidote into an old Nyquil cup that I keep in the medicine cabinet and drank it down. My cure-all is a secret mixture of herbs and vodka guaranteed to restore a blissful calm to mind and body. As a precaution against further disturbances, Scruffy had been shut out of my bedroom to sleep on his kitchen sheepskin. He’d grumped a while but then he, too, had fallen back to sleep, and so did I.

  I hate it when the dog gets to say, I told you so.

  And I had to put up with Phillipa saying the same when I called her later that morning.

  “But how can I file a complaint?” I wailed. “Did you ever hear of someone claiming that an icy doorstep was a criminal conspiracy?”

  “What are you talking about, Cass? Clearly, these incidents are all connected, my dear. Including my wiped-out files, that bitch! Was Scruffy badly hurt?”

  “He landed on his rump in a prickly herb bush. Nothing that my wintergreen liniment couldn’t cure.”

  “You could have slid down those stone stairs yourself and cracked your head open. Have you got rid of the ice?”

  “Luckily, I grabbed that new railing that Joe installed. I have to say it was a Goddess-send. A hair dryer and an old towel took care of the ice. Maybe I’ll ask Tip to have a look at the scene. Where I see only a blank page, he reads an entire story.”

  “Best idea you’ve had. Then we’ll file a complaint.”

  I couldn’t reach Tip or his father all that day. Through several phone conversations, Phillipa and I were still arguing about whether I should file a complaint regarding the icy step when the next incident occurred.

  Someone opened the gate to Heather’s dog yard just at dusk, letting her several mutts in residence, who were outdoors for their last pee, escape for a wild romp on the main roads. She and Dick and Captain Jack had to race around trying to round them up before they were run over in the gathering darkness. In the past, Heather has sometimes had as many as a dozen resident canines
, but, fortunately, marriage to Dick has restrained her largesse. Still, it was a difficult and scary business.

  Not surprisingly, one of the new greyhounds, aptly named Flashdance, outdistanced all pursuers and got spooked by on-coming headlights on Route 3A. Seeing this gray ghost-animal motionless as marble in the road, the driver had slammed on his brakes, swerved, and hit a tree head-on. The driver appeared to get out of the crumpled mess rather well, suffering only a gash on his forehead requiring ten stitches and that ubiquitous neck injury known as whiplash. But as soon as he got out of Emergency and into a private room, he was in touch with a lawyer.

  “And guess who!” Heather demanded. It was the next morning, still freezing cold, so all the dogs were now safely tucked up in their comfortable kennels, housed in what once was the mansion’s triple garage. Deidre and I had driven over to hear all the details and commiserate.

  “Well, I can guess. That Pryde person you wanted to foist onto me, right?”

  “Heidi Pryde Craig, in the flesh, called me first thing this morning, said she was representing Timmy Finch. Finch, wouldn’t you know. He’s practically her cousin, or will be if Iggy Pryde of the pig farm ever marries Wanda of the produce-stand Finches. Of course I turned Craig right over to my attorney, Bartholomew Bangs. Deep pockets, that’s what I am to her, I don’t doubt.”

  The robust aroma of Captain Jack’s coffee preceded him into the living room. Then the jaunty houseman himself appeared, carrying a large tray bearing the blue enameled pot, thick white mugs, and a stack of biscuits. Riding in style on his shoulder was the green parrot. Gone were the days of dainty Limoge cups and sterling-silver service at the Devlins’.

  “Call me Ishmael! Wok! Wok!” the parrot croaked.

  We chatted with the captain about last night’s near disaster and admired Ish, whose beady eyes were fixed on the biscuits. He fluttered a wing experimentally. “Belay that, you rascal,” the captain said.

  “Where are all the doggies?” Deidre wondered.

  “Tucked up in their kennels, miss. Still cold enough to freeze flying fish. Got a pot of ginger jam there. Give it a try on them biscuits.” The captain strode away whistling, taking the frustrated bird with him.

  “We didn’t know if you were bringing the little Ryans,” Heather said. “Couldn’t have them run down by a herd of housebound dogs.”

  “M&Ms is still at our house playing with their new toys. I wonder why no one ever thought of making kennels for kiddies? Well, I suppose playpens—”

  “How is Bangs? Pretty staunch, is he, in the face of personal injury predators?” I asked. The coffee was as heartening as always, and the biscuits were drenched in sweet butter. I was beginning to feel rather buoyed up.

  “The firm of Borer, Buckley, and Bangs has been rescuing the Morgan family for generations. High-principled but crafty old gentlemen. Never take a case on contingency. I think Bart Bangs may be more than a match for Craig,” Heather said. “But what a needless mess this is! How could Jean Craig be so mean as to endanger the lives of innocent dogs!”

  “Dirty tricks, her specialty,” Deidre said. “Evil little woman.”

  “Childish,” I said.

  Suddenly, I felt my brain go click, click, click like a slot machine turning up the winning combination. Sometimes the clairvoyant moment comes right out of my mouth without passing through my brain. “Childish! It’s not Jean. That last vision—Well, I don’t think I read it right. I should have seen the truth right then. It must be the son, Leonardo—Lee.”

  “But he’s just a child,” Heather protested. “Fifteen? Sixteen? Puerile tricks, maybe, but the person we’re after for the poisonings has to be able to whip up a batch of brownies laced with hemlock foraged from the wild. That requires some notably grown-up skills. Not to mention grown-up malevolence.”

  “When Deidre was nosing around at the school, her friend Millie, in the office, mentioned earlier ‘scrapes’ Lee had been in, that his teachers had been eager to have the matters cleared up because the boy is such a charming lad.”

  “Phil and I met Lee once in passing. Passing in the true sense—he could hardly wait to grab his mother’s car keys and take off for some audition—the failed Midsummer thing. Jean declared he’d be ‘a perfect Puck,’” I said. “But now I have a yen to encounter Lee again, preferably by himself, take his measure, see what my sixth sense tells me.”

  “How about another lunch with Millie?” Deidre suggested. “I could do that.”

  “Yes, we need to know more about those earlier episodes, the ones that were covered up. And also which courses he’s taking,” I said. But that would only be a background check. A strategy was forming in my mind to get closer, a plan I wasn’t ready as yet to share.

  “His curriculum? Poison 101, you mean?” Heather refilled our cups.

  “Maybe not that, but how about Cooking 101? When Phil’s show was hit by the poisoner, the audience, as I recall, included a bevy of students from a high school cooking class and their instructor, Miss Synge.”

  “I didn’t know that!” Heather said. “It’s plausible. But hadn’t we better call Phil and Fiona, maybe set up a serious protective shield before Lee or Jean or whoever does even more deadly damage?”

  Great minds…I was already punching in Phillipa’s number on my speed dial.

  “Yes,” Phillipa replied at once, “but have everyone meet here, Cass. I can’t leave my chutney—it’s just reached the delicate stage of thickening.”

  Although Fiona was in the last throes of getting her cottage child-ready, she, too, agreed immediately. “I wouldn’t want any of this nastiness to touch my darling.”

  I looked at Deidre questioningly. “If I don’t get back, what can M&Ms do?” Deidre said. “She’ll have to stay until Will or I turn up. They’ll be all right. And besides, I want to be there when you tell Phil and Fiona that you’re fingering the kid now.”

  We piled into our cars and drove to Phillipa’s house to rev up our psychic posse.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  “But we’ve been looking at Jean all this time!” Phillipa waved a wooden spoon in protest. Her kitchen was filled with the heady, spicy aroma of slow-thickening chutney. She’d served us her frothy, cinnamon-scented cappuccino, so I was now on caffeine overload. Actually I felt good—powerful, like Wonder Woman after the twirl that changed her into a superheroine.

  Fiona leaned her round chin on her plump hand, her expression thoughtful. Only one pencil was stuck in her coronet of braids; this must be one of her calmer days. “Yes, we were looking at, when we should have been looking through, the mother to the son.”

  “What kind of banishing can we attempt against a child, though?” Deidre wondered. “I’m a tad uncomfortable with that. A lot of kids do mean things until they’re taught differently. Just the other day, I caught Bobby trying to stuff Salty and Peppy into doll bonnets.”

  “Poor little pups. I’m not sure children should be trusted with helpless dogs. What did you do?” Heather asked.

  “Oh, come off it, Heather. Children and dogs share some of the purest love that life has to offer.” Deidre shook her mop of blond curls in protest. “I sat him down for a talk about the feelings that animals have, how they’re real and not toys, that he’d hurt and embarrassed them. Soon he was crying and telling the doggies that he was so sorry.”

  “Because Bobby has a real little conscience,” Fiona said. “Whoever poisoned Lydia Craig and the Luckey sisters has no conscience at all.”

  “I wonder if that’s something you’re born with…or without,” Deidre said.

  “Sociopath!” Phillipa banged her spoon on the chutney pot’s edge for emphasis. “Dee, when you have another go at your gossipy friend in the Assumption office…No, she won’t know.”

  “Know what?” I asked.

  “‘Nurture or nature,’” Fiona said. “Phil wants to know what happened to Lee when he was an infant, long before he began to accumulate school records. The ‘nurture’ proponents think this p
articular problem begins in infancy. The failure to form a loving bond with the parent results in an unattached child. The ‘nature’ people, on the other hand, call the youngster a ‘bad seed.’ It’s all in the genes to them. And then there are the superstitious folk who believe such a child is a changeling, exotic and charming, but without human feeling because of being other.”

  “Your pixie connection, Cass,” Deidre suggested. “You’ve been trying to tell yourself to look for a faery child.”

  “I am not superstitious,” I complained. “I don’t even believe in the supernatural. Everything that happens, even the weird stuff, has a perfectly natural explanation. Somewhere.”

  “No, of course you’re not superstitious,” Fiona defended me. “You were being haunted by an archetype. The image of a small, dark, youthful prankster from the faery world. When you figured out why this image kept appearing in your mind, you solved the puzzle.”

  “As you told me I would.”

  “I try never to say ‘I told you so,’” Fiona said. Phillipa’s black cat, Zelda, padded into the kitchen and jumped into Fiona’s lap. Fiona scratched her softly behind the ears, silver bangles tinkling.

  “Let’s not forget that film favorite, Possession by the Devil,” Heather said. “Nothing that a rigorous exorcism can’t cure, so they say. Preferably with a priest that looks like Richard Burton.”

  “Listen up, friends—this is an easy decision. Don’t focus on the criminal’s age. Let’s just bind and banish whoever it is. In a nice white way, of course,” Phillipa said.