Murder, with Peacocks

by Donna Andrews

  “I’ll bet you’ve given it all to that blond hussy you’re marrying,” Jane went on. I paused. I’d heard Mother called many interesting things—had called her a few myself—but “blond hussy” was a new one, even for Mother.

  “No, no, no! Margaret doesn’t know they’re here—or in the safety deposit box, rather. I told her all Emma’s good things had gone to pay the medical bills that the insurance didn’t cover.”

  “Well, they’ve gone somewhere, haven’t they? The Sheridan console that used to be here, and the Wyeth—”

  “I told you, Jane; it’s all in storage.”

  “We’ll see about that. We’ll see if your fiancée happens to have a Sheridan console like Emma’s.”

  “Please don’t do that. You’ll upset her.”

  “I’ve a mind to go over there right now,” Jane said. Hearing her footsteps coming my way, I whirled and ran pell-mell for home.

  I need to exercise more, I told myself, as I sprawled, panting, on my chair in the kitchen, awaiting the onslaught of Jake and his sister-in-law. I’ll just have to tell them I was doing my exercises, I thought. Oh, sure; Jake will certainly believe that, having seen me semi-comatose in the kitchen a few minutes before. I stood up and did a few jumping jacks to add a note of realism for their arrival. After a few minutes I switched to sit-ups. When five or ten minutes passed with no sign of irate sisters-in-law, I abandoned my charade and went back to the kitchen for more coffee.

  Damn Jake, anyway. At least he’d talked his sister-in-law out of storming over here immediately, but I had a premonition that trouble was still coming. Did Jake really think he had to put his late wife’s possessions in storage to keep them out of Mother’s clutches? And why didn’t he just show them to his sister-in-law? Probably no time; she’d only just arrived a few hours ago. I hoped he did it soon. The way she sounded, I suspected that when she didn’t find her sister’s jewelry and furniture here, she’d accuse Mother of selling them. Which was nonsense. I could see Mother appropriating a piece of jewelry or furniture she thought was about to become hers anyway, and having to be gently but firmly told to give it back. I couldn’t possibly see her selling them.

  Mother arrived back from church just before noon, followed almost immediately by about fifteen or twenty relatives and neighbors, bearing flowers, extra plates and glasses, and more food in amazing quantities. The expected chaos reigned right up until the party began. I was a nervous wreck, expecting Jake’s sister-in-law to arrive any moment shrieking accusations. The fact that she hadn’t shown up yet was no relief; I was sure she was postponing the confrontation till the party, where she’d have a bigger audience. At least that’s what Mother or any of my aunts would have done.

  In retrospect, it seems appropriate that the summer’s first known threats of homicide were uttered during the party preparations—although unlike at least one other local resident, I wasn’t serious. My nerves were shot, and I was only trying to keep Dad and several of the uncles from decimating the buffet before the other guests arrived.

  Mother is fond of remarking that she looks forward to the hour when a party begins because then she can stop working and start having fun. That may be true for her—although Pam and I have noticed that any work she does is purely supervisory. For me, the start of a party only means a change from the tangible, boring, but satisfactory work of cooking, cleaning, and decorating to the unpredictable and far more difficult task of keeping several hundred neighbors and family members from injuring each other or driving me crazy before the end of the evening.

  I almost jumped out of my skin when Mother glided over to me with another woman in tow and said, “Meg, this is our guest of honor—Jane Grover, Jake’s sister-in-law.”

  At first glance, Mrs. Grover seemed harmless. She was a short woman with badly hennaed hair and a loud print dress. She and Mother didn’t look as if they’d had a quarrel. But after a second I realized that her smile looked artificial and her eyes cold.

  “How nice to finally meet you, my dear,” Mrs. Grover said, with a look that somehow seemed to insinuate that she had witnessed my shameless eavesdropping on the porch. “We must talk later.”

  I stammered a greeting and escaped as soon as possible. In the direction of the bar. I watched her and Mother making the rounds of the party. Well, at least they were both on their best behavior.

  The party was in full swing, and I’d already confiscated firecrackers from two small cousins and a golf club from an inebriated uncle when Michael arrived.

  “Didn’t your mother say she was just having a few people over?” he said, incredulously, as he stood at the edge of the sea of guests in our backyard.

  “For Mother, this is a few people,” I said.

  “She doesn’t count family,” Pam said. “At least half of the horde’s family.”

  “The weirder half,” I added.

  “Oh, by the way,” Michael said, holding out a bunch of flowers.

  “Mother will be charmed,” I said. “I’ll lead you to her so you can present them in person. Don’t get in the way of the croquet players,” I warned, giving the flying mallets a wide berth. Michael paused to watch the game.

  “Croquet!” he exclaimed, taking in the spectacle of a dozen middle-aged and elderly aunts in flowery summer dresses and sun hats posing among the wickets. “It’s wonderful! Like something out of a Merchant-Ivory film.”

  “Yes, the croquet clique do tend to dress the part, I’ll give them that,” I said. “But if you’re under the impression that croquet is a genteel, civilized, Waspy way to spend a summer afternoon, don’t look too close—they’ll spoil all your illusions. It’s a blood sport for them.”

  “Really?” Michael said, incredulously. Just then, one aunt hit another’s ball out with a swing that would have been more at home on a golf course than the croquet grounds.

  “Ball!” shrieked all the croquet players, and most of the assembled guests—family, anyway—either dropped to the ground or flung their arms over their heads. The ball landed harmlessly in the swimming pool. Its owner, after a few minutes of waving her mallet around and verbally abusing her rival, stormed over to cajole Eric into diving for her ball.

  Yes, the party was definitely hitting its stride. One of the uncles had taken his favorite perch on the diving board and was enthusiastically conducting a program of chamber music. My niece was lurking near the CD player in the hopes of slipping the 1812 Overture into the program and seeing him fall off the board again. About the usual number of relatives had pretended to think the picnic was a masquerade and had come in costume, including Cousin Horace in his well-used gorilla suit. Eric and Duck were paddling around in the pool, quacking at each other and bobbing for bits of food that the guests threw at them. Mother sat fanning herself with an antique Victorian fan and beaming good will near and far.

  “Oh, thank you, Michael!” she said, as he handed her the bouquet. “Isn’t it nice to have everyone together like this? Though I do wish Jeffrey could have come down for the holiday weekend,” she added, turning to me. “You should have tried harder to convince him, Meg.”

  “Mother, pay attention,” I said. “Jeffrey is history.”

  “Now, Meg.”

  “Jeffrey has been history for months, and I wouldn’t get back together with him if he were the last human male on earth—which would be impossible anyway, because Jeffrey is not human, he is a vaguely humanoid reptile. Please delete Jeffrey from your memory banks. This is a recording.”

  “I still think Jeffrey is a very nice boy,” Mother said.

  “Good riddance to bad rubbish I say,” Dad put in.

  Dad has remarkably sound ideas on what my personal Mr. Right should be like. I should have known something was wrong with Jeffrey when Dad didn’t take to him.

  “Ball!” came the cry again, and we all hit the deck except for Mother, who watched with mild interest as the croquet ball missed her ear by two inches and landed in a bowl of potato salad on the buffet table. This ball appar
ently belonged to Mother’s best friend, Mrs. Fenniman, who firmly believed that you weren’t allowed to touch the ball with anything other than the mallet. Pam and several of the saner cousins hurried to move the rest of the dishes off the table so Mrs. Fenniman could climb up, dig the ball out with the mallet, and thwack it over the heads of the crowd to the croquet field.

  “It’s almost as good as the croquet game with flamingos and hedgehogs in Alice in Wonderland,” Michael said, watching Mrs. Fenniman with morbid fascination.

  “Don’t give them ideas,” I said, noticing absently that since Mrs. Fenniman was dressed in her usual somber colors with a black straw hat precariously attached to the side of her head, her perch made her look even more like a raven than usual. Ravens, flamingos … something tugged at my memory. “Oh, Dad, do you know of anyone who sells or rents peacocks?”

  “Peacocks? Why peacocks?”

  “Samantha wants to have some for her wedding.”

  “Whatever for?” Michael asked.

  “I don’t know; loitering about decoratively, I suppose,” I said, shrugging. “I mean, that’s what peacocks do, isn’t it?”

  “That sounds very nice,” Mother said, thoughtfully. “Very nice indeed.”

  “Well, if you want them, you can have them after Samantha’s finished with them,” I said. “Provided I find some to begin with.”

  “Let’s go ask your mother’s cousin, the one with the farm,” Dad suggested. “He used to have some guinea fowl. Maybe he has an idea where to find peacocks.”

  “Yes, I think that sounds like a lovely idea,” Mother said. “Which reminds me, Michael, about the dining room …”

  “You’re having to spend an awful lot of time on silly details like those peacocks,” Dad said, as we left Michael in Mother’s clutches and strolled through the crowd looking for Mother’s agricultural cousin.

  “Well, if I didn’t, who knows? Maybe Samantha would get ticked off and cancel the wedding,” I said.

  “Would that be such a tragedy?” Dad said, vehemently. “If you ask me, it’ll be a sad day for Rob when he ties the knot with that one. I know you’re working awfully hard to bring this wedding off, Meg, but I hope you won’t be too upset if I succeed in talking him out of it, because I certainly intend to keep trying.”

  I was speechless. I don’t know what startled me more, hearing

  “Whatever you think best,” I said, steering him gently out of Samantha’s range.

  We found the cousin, and, after extracting a promise that he would canvass the neighboring farms for peacocks, I left him and Dad deep in a conversation on the relative merits of various kinds of manure. I went to help Pam with her repairs to the buffet table.

  “Well, at least they’re having a good time,” Pam sniffed, watching the winning team perform a decorous victory dance on the croquet field.

  “I think everyone is,” said Michael. “Anything I can do to help, Meg?”

  “Hold these,” Pam ordered, shoving several platters into his hands. “Mrs. Fenniman has left muddy footprints all over the tablecloth.”

  “Having a wonderful time in their own inimitable fashions,” I said, watching another aunt who was standing at the very end of the backyard on the bluff overlooking the river, flinging the biodegradable garbage to a flock of seagulls while conversing with them in their native tongue. “With the possible exception of Jake,” I added. Jake was standing by himself, a drink clutched in his hand and a nervous expression on his face as he watched the bird-loving aunt.

  “I do feel rather sorry for Jake,” Pam remarked.

  “Jake? Why?” Michael asked.

  “Well,” Pam said, “about a year and a half ago he has to retire from his job up north somewhere and move down here because his wife is sick and needs a quiet place with a better climate. No sooner do they get here than his wife up and dies. And being pretty much at loose ends, before he’s a widower for a year, he falls for Mother.”

  “Who is apt to be every bit as much trouble for the poor man as an invalid,” I said.

  “I don’t see that there’s any reason to feel sorry for him,” Michael protested. Pam and I laughed. “I mean, your mother seems to be a very charming woman, and it’s not as if she’s forcing him to marry her.”

  “Oh, Mother would never think of such a thing,” I said.

  “Well, of course she would if she wanted to,” Pam said. “But God knows, what reason would she have?”

  “But look at him,” I said. “I mean, does he look happy?” We all three turned to look at Jake.

  “No,” Michael said, after a moment. “He looks like a nervous wreck. But prenuptial jitters hit some men that way. I was best man for an old college friend a couple of years ago, and I had to stay up all night with him after the rehearsal dinner to keep him from getting into his van and driving to Montana.”

  “Why Montana?” Pam asked. “Was he from there?”

  “No, he’d never been there or ever wanted to that I could remember. But that night, every time I would think I’d talked some sense into him, he’d jump up and say, ‘Break the news to her, Michael; tell her I’ve gone to Montana to herd sheep.'”

  “But he didn’t go?” Pam asked.

  “No, I got him to the church, and the wedding went off as planned. He’s never mentioned Montana again. Or sheep. Just a monumental case of prenuptial jitters.”

  We contemplated Jake a while longer. When one of the neighbors came up and tapped him on the shoulder, he started so violently I was afraid he’d fall into the pool. Pam shook her head.

  “If he’s got prenuptial jitters already, think how bad he’ll be by August,” she said. “The man could have a coronary.”

  “Good point,” Michael said.

  “Perhaps he’s more nervous than usual with his sister-in-law here,” I remarked. She certainly made me nervous.

  “Does she still count as sister-in-law now that her sister is dead, or is she his ex-sister-in-law?” Pam asked.

  “Late sister-in-law, perhaps?” Michael offered.

  “No,” I said. “She’s not dead, her sister is. Maybe he’s worried about how she will take it.”

  “Afraid she won’t like your mother?” Michael asked.

  “Yes, or won’t approve of their marrying so soon after her sister’s death.”

  “Hmph,” Pam said. “I’m not sure I approve of their marrying so soon.” She tossed off the rest of her drink, gave our repair work an approving nod, and stalked toward the bar.

  “Do I sense that you and your siblings are not entirely happy about your mother’s remarriage?” Michael asked.

  “You could say that,” I said. “I mean, we could never understand why Mother and Dad divorced. They never argued or anything.”

  “Then what happened?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “All of a sudden one day it was Sorry, children, your father and I are getting a divorce. All very amiable; we all joked that Mother got the house and Dad got the garden, except for joint custody of the tomato patch.”

  “And you still have no idea why?”

  “Pam and I have always felt that it was all Mother’s idea, and that she was doing it because of something he did, or didn’t do. Or that she thought he’d done or not done. We thought eventually either he’d figure out what it was and set it straight, or she’d forgive him, or both of them would just get tired of the divorce and get back together. But now … it’s all looking rather permanent.”

  “And you’re not happy about it.”

  “Well, Jake isn’t anyone I would ever have thought of as a possible addition to the family.”

  “No, I can see that,” Michael said. “Compared to your family he seems a little … well, bland.” He cast an involuntary glance at Uncle Horace.

  “He certainly does,” I agreed. “Of course, I can’t say I’ve had much time to get to know him. Maybe he has hidden qualities I haven’t seen yet.” I glanced again at Jake’s rather mousy figure. “Then again, maybe bland is what Mo
ther’s looking for. I mean he’s not likely to startle the guests at a dinner party with graphic descriptions of the symptoms of ptomaine poisoning. Or put a whole truckload of fresh manure on the flower beds just before a garden party for one of her ladies’ clubs. Or drag dead and possibly rabid animals into the house to show to the kids. All of which Dad has done, and more.”

  “Quite a character, your dad,” Michael remarked.

  “Sometimes a little too much so.”

  “He does seem to be rather obsessed with poison, doesn’t he?” Michael said.

  “Ah, I see he’s taken you on the garden tour.”

  “Not exactly, but I overheard enough of what he was telling another guest earlier to get the idea,” Michael said. “Pointing out every toxic item in the landscaping, which seemed to be just about every other plant.”

  “You can never be too careful,” I said. “If the buffet had been disappointing you might have been tempted to nibble on the shrubbery.”

  “But now I know better. I see. Is it a hobby of his, trying to grow every poisonous plant known to man?”

  “Well, when my brother Rob was little, he almost died from eating most of a poinsettia, and Dad got interested in the fact that so many common house and yard plants were poisonous. He’s made a special study of it. After all, it combines two of his major obsessions: medicine and gardening. Three obsessions if you include mystery books; he’s a rabid mystery reader. See, there he is at it again.”

  “Enlightening one of the neighbors, I see.”

  “Actually, that’s Mrs. Grover, the sister-in-law,” I said. Dad was pointing at one of the shrubs and gesticulating enthusiastically. “Hydrangea.” I said absent-mindedly. “Contains cyanide, mostly in the leaves and branches, although I wouldn’t advise sampling the flowers, either.”

  “Charming,” Michael said.

  “That’s mountain laurel next to it. I forget what it has in it, but if Socrates had been a Native American, that’s what they would have fed him instead of hemlock. And then the oleander, which contains a drug similar to digitalis.”