Murder With Peacocks

by Murder

  "All three of us did," I said. "At least, Mother wanted a divorce and Dad didn't, and neither did Pam or Rob or I. If that counts as taking Dad's side, then yeah, I took his side. Still do. So it's my theory that Mother's making us all jump through hoops to pay for it."

  "If the question ever comes up, I am firmly on her side in any and all disputes, no matter how ridiculous," Michael said.

  "Good plan," I replied.

  "Unless, of course, you're on the other side."

  "Foolhardy, but I appreciate the thought." It did take most of the afternoon to squelch the costume idea even with Mother, Mrs. Fenniman, and Pam helping out. Somewhere along the way, Mother promised Eileen that we would hold a costume party sometime between now and her wedding. I left them trying to settle on a date and retired to the hammock to fall asleep over chapter three of my mystery.

  Thursday, June 23

  And so for the fourth straight day in a row I drove in to Be-Stitched. Alone. Without telling anyone where I was going. Maybe that way I could finally sneak in my own fitting.

  Michael looked up at the sound of the bell and I could see him suddenly grow tense. Or tenser; he hadn't really looked relaxed when I came in. Great, I thought, we're driving him crazy too.

  "Yes?" he said, and glanced behind me at the door. I turned and looked, too. No one was there. Odd.

  "Which one is it now?" he asked.

  "Which one what?"

  "Which one of them? Your mother, or Eileen, or Scarlet O'Hara--I mean, Samantha--"

  "Just me. I was supposed to come by for a fitting, remember?"

  "And no one else found any reason to come along? Like the last three days? No last-minute inspirations? No urge to ask how the latest alterations are coming? No kibitzing?"

  "Just me."

  "Amazing," he muttered. "An absolute bloody miracle."

  "You're in a good mood."

  "Sorry. We just had an absolutely horrible fitting with another bride. I had to stand there and be polite while her mother accused me of everything from incompetence to lunacy, and then when she started on Mrs. Tranh and the ladies, I lost my temper. I don't care if the whole town thinks I'm an idiot on top of everything else, but I won't have the ladies blamed for something that's not their fault."

  "I saw them on my way in; let me guess: the dress was much too small, particularly in the waist, and according to the mother you must have messed up the measurements."

  "Are you psychic?" he asked in surprise.

  "No, but I have Mother and the Hollingworth grapevine."

  "They just left ten minutes ago; don't tell me the old ... lady was on the phone already telling everyone about it."

  "No, although I'm sure that's on her afternoon agenda. But it's been all over the grapevine for two weeks that her daughter is pregnant, which could certainly tend to make the measurements you took a month or two ago obsolete."

  "Wish I was on the grapevine," he complained. "I had no idea why she was so touchy about my suggestion that the kid had gained a few pounds until Mrs. Tranh explained it to me."

  "I just found out this morning myself. You have to be able to translate. No one comes right out and says "So-and-so is getting married because she's pregnant." They talk about a "sudden" marriage, with a little pause before the word sudden."

  "So they got married suddenly merely means that it surprised the hell out of everyone, where as they got married ... suddenly means at the point of Daddy's shotgun."

  "Precisely. He died suddenly meant nobody expected it; he died ... suddenly means call the medical examiner; it could be homicide."

  "Do you have a lot of homicide around here?" he asked.

  "This summer is practically a first. That was just a hypothetical example."

  "I see."

  "If you listen closely for that little beat, you can start picking up all sorts of useless information. Being down here for the summer, I seem to be regaining all my lost small-town survival skills."

  "Any advice for dealing with the irate mother?" he asked.

  "Let Mrs. Tranh and the ladies handle it. Now that they know, I'm sure they can guesstimate what size she'll be in two weeks."

  "I'm sure they can, but what if her mother starts bad-mouthing the shop all over town?"

  "Don't worry about it; everyone knows being abused by that particular grand dame is a normal rite of passage for the local merchants. Besides, she and Mother loathe each other, so I'll tell Mother about it at lunch. By dinner, your side of the story will be all over town."

  "I'd appreciate that. I'd hate to be responsible for running Mom's business into the ground while she's laid up. And speaking of business," he said, briskly changing tone, "let's have Mrs. Tranh get your dress."

  Having seen the pictures, I thought I would be prepared for Samantha's hooped monstrosity. But I'm sure Michael and Mrs. Tranh were disappointed at the look on my face when she came trotting out with the dress and held it up.

  "Oh, dear," I said.

  "I'm crushed." He chuckled. "You'll break the ladies' hearts."

  "Don't get me wrong. It's lovely. Lovely fabric. Wonderful workmanship."

  "But not the sort of thing you'd ever think of wearing."

  "Or inflicting upon an unsuspecting friend." I walked around and looked at it from another angle. "Somehow I wasn't expecting the hoops to be quite so ... enormous."

  "Although my experience is limited to this summer," Michael said, "I've evolved a theory that bridesmaids' gowns are generally chosen either to make the bride look good at her friends' expense, or to force the friends to prove their devotion by having their pictures taken in a garment they are mortally embarrassed to be seen wearing in public."

  "You've left out inflicting acute physical torment," I added. "Think of Eileen and her velvet and these damned corsets."

  "True. When I publish the theory, I'll put you down as coauthor."

  "Well, let's get this over with," I said, following Mrs. Tranh behind the dressing-room curtain.

  Several of the ladies had to help me get into the dress. I made a mental note to ask Michael if we could hire some of them to help out on the wedding day. And when we finally got me into the thing, I realized that in my dismay over the enormous size of the skirts, I had failed to notice the correspondingly tiny size of the bodice.

  "I feel as if I'm falling out of this," I said, more to myself than anyone else, since obviously Mrs. Tranh and the other ladies could not understand me. I twitched the neckline slightly, and Mrs. Tranh slapped my hand.

  "I don't see why you don't have mirrors back here," I called out.

  "So you won't be tempted to look until the ladies are satisfied it's ready," Michael called back.

  So we won't run away screaming, I added, silently. The ladies finished their manipulations, and I was surrounded by their smiling, bobbing faces. Mrs. Tranh began shooing me toward the doorway.

  "Well, here goes," I muttered. I swept aside the curtains, awkwardly maneuvered my hoops through the doorway, and planted myself in front of the mirror.

  "Oh, my God," I gasped, and gave the neckline of the dress a few sharp upward tugs. "I really am falling out of this." Surprisingly, the dress wouldn't budge, although the neckline looked even lower and more precariously balanced in the mirror than it felt.

  "The effect is historically accurate, I believe," Michael drawled. He was grinning hugely, enjoying my embarrassment.

  "Sadist! I don't care if it's required by law, it's just not gonna work. I can't possibly walk around like this. Especially in church. And around drunken relatives."

  "On Samantha and the others, this style gives to meager endowments a deceptive appearance of amplitude," Michael said, pedantically. "However, we may have miscalculated the effects of this amplification on your ... radically different physique. Let me talk to the ladies," he added quickly, and backed away as if he suspected how close I was to swatting at him.

  He exchanged several rapid sentences with Mrs. Tranh, punctuated by gales of gig
gles from the ladies. Mrs. Tranh and two of the other seamstresses surrounded me and began pulling and tweaking at the bodice of the dress, applying measuring tapes to one or another angle of me or it and pointing to or even poking my troublesome endowments. The fact that the tallest of them still fell short of my shoulder only compounded my feeling of being huge, awkward, and ungainly. Michael was carrying on a running dialogue with the seamstresses. I assumed he must be a very witty conversationalist in Vietnamese as well as English; every other sentence of his provoked a fresh crop of giggles. Or maybe they were just all enjoying themselves at my expense. Michael wasn't giggling with the rest, but he couldn't suppress a huge grin.

  "They think they've got it figured out," he said at last.

  "Good; does that mean I can take it off? I feel like Gulliver among the Lilliputians."

  "Sorry," he said, choking back laughter. "I had a hard time convincing them that anything needed fixing, and once I did, they kept trying to talk me into letting them not change it until Samantha had seen it. They don't like her very much, and they kept insisting they wanted to see her face when she saw it."

  "You're right; she'd have a cow. And then she'd probably put the evil eye on me or something."

  "That's more or less what I told the ladies," Michael said. "And they agreed that it would be a shame, since they like you at least as much as they dislike Samantha. They're going to fix the dress so you look beautiful, but in a somewhat less spectacular manner, and Samantha will have nothing to complain about. Don't worry," he added, momentarily serious, "Mrs. Tranh will manage; she's really very good."

  "Thanks," I said, feeling a little bit better as I ducked back into the dressing room to take off the dress. The giggles of the seamstresses seemed somehow friendlier, as if they were laughing with me at the ridiculousness of the dress rather than at how I looked at it. Of course he might have been lying outrageously, but since I would never know, I decided to think positively.

  Well, I told myself, at least Michael is in a better mood than when I walked in. For that matter, so was I--at least until I got home and tried, for what seemed like the millionth time, to reach the calligrapher. Surely, by now, she had found the time to finish addressing Samantha's wretched invitations.

  Dad was also incommunicado. Like the parents of a small and mischievous child, I had learned to be most suspicious when Dad was seemingly quiet and on his best behavior. I was beginning to regret having let him abscond with Great-Aunt Sophy.

  After my search of Jake's house, I deduced that either Dad was planning to steal Emma Wendell's ashes and leave Great-Aunt Sophy behind in her place, or he wanted to run some kind of test on Emma Wendell and was using Great-Aunt Sophy to rehearse. Neither one of which seemed like a particularly pleasant thing to be doing. And considering there wasn't much left of either lady but ashes and a few bits of bone, I wasn't sure what on earth he thought he was going to test for, anyway. I decided to drop by and see him tomorrow.

  I would have tried to call him, but I had to fight Mother for the phone to call the calligrapher. She was busy putting the word out about the costume party. Apparently she and Eileen had decided to hold it in ten days' time.

  "Before any of us gets too busy," Mother remarked. Apparently it had escaped her notice that some of us were already rather busy.

  Friday, June 24

  I spent the morning phoning tent rental companies and the afternoon tracking down a supplier for the mead that Steven and Eileen had decided was the only appropriate drink to serve at a Renaissance banquet.

  I was tired by the end of the day, but the fact that Steven and Eileen had taken Barry with them to a craft fair in Richmond raised my spirits considerably. I decided to take the weekend off, doing only the most necessary tasks--like continuing to hunt for the errant calligrapher. And keeping an eye on Dad.

  Which was harder than I thought. I tried to hunt him down after dinner, and he was definitely nowhere to be found. Not in our garden, not in his apartment over Pam's garage, not in her garden. So I dropped in on Pam.

  "Pam," I said. "What's Dad been up to recently?"

  "Up to? Why, what should he be up to?"

  "Has he been doing much gardening?"

  "No, come to think of it, he hasn't," she said, looking out at the rather shaggy grass in the backyard. "That's odd."

  "Has he been performing experiments?"

  "What kind of experiments?"

  "You know, chemical ones."

  "How would I know?"

  "Noticed any funny smells? Heard any explosions?"

  "No," Pam said. "And he hasn't been dragging home stray body parts, or putting out a giant lightning rod on the roof, or drinking strange potions and turning bad-tempered and hairy. What do you mean, experiments?"

  "Never mind," I said. "Can I borrow your key to the garage apartment?"

  I wanted to check out Dad's lair. I could always pretend that Pam had asked me to help her clean up.

  There were several hundred books lying about, apparently in active use. Medical books. Criminology texts. Electricians' manuals. Heaps of mysteries. Bound back issues of the Town Crier, the weekly local newspaper, for the past five years. All of them fairly stuffed with multicolored bookmarks. Dad's messy little laboratory looked recently used. His bed didn't. I saw no signs of Great-Aunt Sophy.

  I sat down on the cleanest chair I could find with the old Town Criers and began checking out Dad's bookmarks.

  I found Emma Wendell's obituary, two years ago this month. She'd died in her sleep of heart failure, following a long illness. She'd been quietly cremated and memorialized in a service at the nearby Methodist church. Jake and sister Jane were the only survivors.

  I also reread the articles about what the Town Crier had called the "Ivy League Swindlers"--Samantha's ex-fiance and his friend. It had a list of local residents who had been bilked out of large sums.

  Including, I was surprised to note, Mrs. Fenniman, who was quoted as saying she'd lost a few hundred thousand and was glad they'd been exposed before she'd invested any real money with them. Interesting. I knew Mrs. Fenniman must be well off if she lived in our neighborhood; I'd had no idea she was that well off. And apparently Samantha's father's law firm had been involved as local legal counsel for the Miami-based swindlers--although the articles made it clear they had been duped just as the investors had--in fact, had lost some of their own funds. I noticed only one very distant relative among the list of fleeced locals. Apparently Hollingworth solidarity had kept most of Mother's family using one of the half-dozen relatives who were brokers or investment advisors. Lucky for us.

  Dad had bookmarked all of these articles. He'd also bookmarked Mrs. Fenniman's "Around Town" columns for the summer. I read them, too, but did not find any enlightenment in Mrs. Fenniman's meticulous recountings of who entertained whom, who was engaged to whom, and who had returned from vacationing where.

  I saw an interview with Michael's mother on the opening of Be-Stitched. No picture, alas, and not much personal information. Widow of an army officer. She'd moved to Yorktown from Fort Lauderdale to be nearer her only child, Michael, who was an Associate Professor in the Theater Arts Department of Caerphilly College.

  I was impressed. Caerphilly was a small college with a big reputation located about an hour's drive north. Michael was doing all right.

  As I moved back in time, I saw the occasional reference to people visiting Mrs. Wendell in the hospital or Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Wendell being honored for their generous donation to various local charities. Quite the philanthropist, Jake--or was it Emma? I checked the columns since her death. If Jake was still supporting the local charities he was doing it more quietly.

  Moving still further back, I found a short article welcoming the Wendells to town. Emma Wendell was the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut state supreme court justice. Jake had just retired from Waltham Consultants, a Hartford-based engineering consulting firm where he'd held the post of senior executive administrative partner in the special p
rojects training division. Whatever that might be. A desk jockeying bureaucrat, no doubt; it was hard to picture Jake as an executive. They were overjoyed to be in Yorktown, and hoped that the milder winters would be good for Mrs. Wendell's delicate health.

  Beyond that, Dad had only marked the occasional article. One or two mentioning Mr. Brewster's law firm. One or two about various neighbors and relatives. One about the use of natural plant dyes in colonial times that I presumed he'd marked because he'd found it interesting, not because it had anything to do with the case.

  I didn't feel I'd learned anything in particular. Dad's investigation seemed to have been following the same frustrating dead-end paths as mine.

  I thought of tidying up a bit, then thought better of it and returned the key to Pam.

  On my way home, I ran into Eileen's dad.

  "Meg! Thank goodness!" he said. "I was looking for you."

  "Why, what's wrong?"

  "We've got to do something about these wedding presents!"

  "What about them?"

  "They're all over the house, and people are starting to call to ask if we've gotten them. We need to do something."

  "Why doesn't Eileen do something?"

  A stricken look crossed Professor Donleavy's face.

  "She says she won't have time, and asked me to take care of it. And I have no idea what to do."

  I thought he was overreacting, but I let him drag me back to the house and he was right: the presents were taking over the house. The professor had started piling them in the dining room, and had run out of room. The living room was filling up fast, and some of the larger things were overflowing into the den.

  "I wish Eileen had mentioned this," I said. "This would have been a lot easier to deal with gradually."

  I promised him that I'd come around tomorrow to unpack and inventory the presents. So much for taking the weekend off.

  Saturday, June 25

  I was already in a bad mood when I showed up at the Donleavys' to unpack and inventory the presents. Imagine my dismay when the front door was opened, not by Eileen's father but by Barry.