Swan for the Money

by Donna Andrews

  “How dare you! You have no right to—”

  “How dare I? How dare you try to sabotage the other competitors by calling them up and lying to them—”

  “I wasn’t lying—”

  “Telling them that the rose show was restricted to only black and white roses when either that hadn’t yet been voted on or, worse, had already been voted down by the committee? I call that lying, and I think some of the competitors affected would be within their rights to file a protest in any category where they weren’t able to exhibit a rose because of your calls!”

  “It’s my house,” she said. “And my barns—”

  “But it’s not your rose show,” I said. Okay, by now I was raising my voice. Quite a lot. From hanging around with Michael, I’d picked up a few things he tried to teach his drama students, like pointers about speaking from the diaphragm to project my voice without straining or sounding shrill. Everyone in the room was unabashedly staring, and if I tried a little harder, people in the next county would be able to hear. Mrs. Winkleson flinched. Clearly she wasn’t used to people responding in kind when she shouted at them. She looked as if she wanted to back away, but she stood her ground and bit savagely into a crab puff instead.

  “You knew when you agreed to let the garden club hold the show here that people would be bringing flowers that didn’t fit your silly black and white color scheme,” I said. “If you couldn’t live with that, you should have told the garden club to find some other venue.”

  “I still could,” she said, through the remnants of the crab puff. She raised her glass and took a healthy slug of its contents to wash the hors d’oeuvre down. “And what’s more—”

  Her eyes suddenly bugged out, and she dropped her plate and glass to clutch at her throat.

  “What’s wrong?” I asked.

  “Does she need the Heimlich maneuver?” someone asked.

  “Ois!” Mrs. Winkleson gasped, just before she fell to the floor and began writhing in agony.

  “What does she mean, ‘Ois’?” someone asked.

  “She means poison,” I said. “Dad!”

  Chapter 30

  I turned around to find Dad, but he was already falling onto his knees beside Mrs. Winkleson.

  “Call an ambulance,” he said.

  “We have one already,” I said. “For Dr. Smoot. Rob! Go fetch the EMTs! Last time I looked they were out front, stuffing themselves on hors d’oeuvres.”

  Rob, who had turned a delicate shade of green while watching Mrs. Winkleson’s collapse, hurried out.

  “And my bag,” Dad called. “It’s in my car.”

  “I’ll get it,” Mother said.

  “Let me help,” Dr. Smoot said. He threw aside his black cape and joined Dad. I wasn’t sure how much help he could be with only one working arm, but he got points for trying.

  Mrs. Winkleson vomited. People began backing away, widening the circle that had formed around her. Chief Burke stepped out of the crowd, notebook already in hand.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  “Poisoning’s my guess,” Dad said.

  “Is Horace here?” Chief Burke asked.

  “Right here, chief.” Horace appeared at the chief’s side, already pulling on gloves. Like Dad and his medical bag, Horace was seldom without the tools of his trade as a crime scene technician.

  “Bag her glass,” the chief said, pointing to Mrs. Winkleson’s fallen old fashioned glass. “And the food, too.”

  “Can do, chief,” Horace said.

  I backed away to let the experts do their job. Both sets. Dad and Dr. Smoot were soon joined by the two EMTs, one of them hastily stuffing a last crab croquette into his mouth. Chief Burke, assisted by Horace and Sammy, bagged the food, glass, and plate Mrs. Winkleson had dropped and cordoned off the bar. A few people protested about the bar closing until they heard the sound of Mrs. Winkleson vomiting again, and then one by one people began peering at their glasses and sidling over to tables and sideboards to put them down.

  “Looks like she ate quite a few of those crab puffs,” Horace remarked. Since the only way he could have known that was if the crab puffs were once again visible, I deduced he was bagging the vomit for evidence. Better him than me.

  Chief Burke came over to me.

  “Can you stop the food service?” he asked. “And stay in the kitchen to keep the caterers and staff there till I can get some more officers here to help process the scene?”

  “Roger,” I said. I gathered I wasn’t quite the prime suspect. I looked around for help.

  “No thank you, dear,” Mother was saying to one of the waiters. “They were lovely, but I think I’ve had enough.”

  “Yes,” I said, strolling over to them. “I think everyone’s had enough crab puffs for now. Chief Burke wants them and all the wait staff in the kitchen. Can you help?”

  “Of course, dear,” she said. She sailed off to gather the rest of the waiters. It wasn’t hard to spot them. People were beginning to back away from the hors d’oeuvre trays as if they were radioactive. I led the puzzled waiter toward the kitchen. Our path went by the fallen Mrs. Winkleson, and I caught bits of the conversation between Dad, Dr. Smoot, and the EMTs.

  “—the telltale bitter almond scent,” Dr. Smoot was saying.

  “I don’t have the gene to smell it,” one of the EMTs said. “But if you have—”

  “Yes, definitely,” Dad said. “Margaret, you weren’t serving crab almondine, were you?”

  “No, dear,” Mother said. “If you smell almonds, don’t blame my poor crab croquettes.”

  “It’s very strong,” Dr. Smoot said.

  “I’ll take your word for it. Oxygen, then?”

  “Stat.”

  “Cyanide,” I said, nodding.

  “What’s that?” the waiter asked.

  “She was probably poisoned with cyanide,” I explained. “It smells like almonds. I gather they suspect the hors d’oeuvres.”

  The waiter looked askance at his tray, and held it a little farther from his body.

  I held the kitchen door open for him, and then stepped into the room myself. I blinked in surprise for a moment. The room was about the size of my high school auditorium, and looked about the way the auditorium had looked when decorated for a Halloween dance. Of course Mrs. Winkleson would continue her color scheme into the kitchen, but since it permitted white as well as black, why on earth had she felt it necessary to have black painted walls, black tile floors, black cabinets with black granite tops, and gleaming black appliances? I more than half expected to see Grandma Addams stirring a bubbling cauldron in the corner while Morticia looked on approvingly.

  But now was not the time to gape at the latest evidence of Mrs. Winkleson’s lunacy.

  “Everyone stop what you’re doing, and take a seat,” I said, projecting from the diaphragm again. “Police orders.”

  “What do you mean, stop what we’re doing?” A woman in a Caerphilly Catering uniform strode over and planted herself in my path, hands on hips. “If we don’t keep the hors d’oeuvres moving—”

  “There’s been a poisoning,” I said.

  “Oh, my.” Her mouth dropped open and she pressed her hands to either side of it, in a fair imitation of Edvard Munch’s The Scream.

  Silence fell over the whole room— at least until someone at the far end of the kitchen dropped a tray full of champagne glasses. The noise seemed to snap the head caterer out of her shock.

  “You’re not accusing us of doing it,” she said. “I won’t stand for—”

  “Don’t worry,” Mother said, appearing in the doorway. “I’m sure no one here has any such idea.”

  “And I know Chief Burke wants to do everything by the book to make sure no one who’s innocent falls under suspicion,” I said. “So everyone please stop doing whatever you’re doing and wait until he gets here.”

  Marston appeared in the doorway with a folding chair under each arm.

  “Splendid,” Mother said. “Just put
them there in the middle of the floor, away from the food preparation areas.”

  “Of course, madam.”

  Marston was followed by the pair of male servants I’d seen hauling the glass swan to its display niche, each carrying a pair of folding chairs. They set their chairs in a row in the huge open area in the middle of the kitchen. A couple of the waiters plopped down there. Marston and his staff continued to haul in folding chairs from some unseen stash and set them up in rows, and the caterers and house hold staff took seats as each batch of chairs arrived. Then the guests began streaming in from the living room. Marston and his crew continued to fetch chairs until we were all seated, facing the door to the foyer, like the audience waiting for a play to begin in a somewhat unconventional theater.

  Marston and the two manservants took seats in the front row. I joined them. Mother stood looking over the group with a look of distress on her face. Everybody looked anxious, uncomfortable, or downright scared. This was not supposed to happen at parties for which Mother was responsible.

  “Now then,” she said, in her most cheerful tone. “Who’s up for charades?”

  It was going to be a long night.

  I slipped out to have a word with the chief. He was standing in the archway, watching whatever was going on in the living room.

  “We’ll get to you as soon as we can,” he said. “We’re short staffed.”

  “No problem,” I said. “I just wanted to suggest, since you’re short staffed, that maybe I could make myself useful. Make you a list of all the witnesses sitting around in the kitchen, get their names and addresses.”

  “And interrogate them a little while you’re at it?”

  “In front of all the other witnesses?” I said. “That would be pretty stupid.”

  He thought about it for a moment.

  “Do it, then,” he said.

  “One other suggestion,” I said. “The rose growers all have to get up before dawn to prep their roses, as I’m sure Minerva would remind you if she were here. Maybe if you interviewed them first?”

  He frowned.

  “I’m sure the fact that so many of the rose growers are prominent citizens with a tendency to whine at the town council when offended carries no weight with you. But keep in mind, the caterers will get paid overtime for the time they spend waiting.”

  “Mrs. Winkleson’s staff ought to as well,” he said. “Though I doubt if they know that. Good idea; I’ll get rid of the rose growers first. Right now, why don’t you bring me up to speed on what you’ve been doing in the last few hours.”

  Chapter 31

  Bringing the chief up to speed on my last few hours took a while. I made sure he knew about Dr. Smoot’s run-in with the swan and my fear that the acting medical examiner might be less than impartial when it came to determining the manner and means of death. And I shared the various bits of information I’d overhead during the party, including what Mr. Darby had revealed about Sandy Sechrest’s frequent presence on the farm in the weeks leading up to the rose show. Though I didn’t reveal Mr. Darby as the source; I just lumped the information in with everything else I’d heard while eavesdropping.

  “Thank you,” he said at last. “You can leave if you like.”

  “After I get you that list of witnesses,” I said. “After all, this wretched rose show is my responsibility. I don’t feel comfortable leaving until I’m sure things are going well.”

  Back in the kitchen, Mother had found eight volunteers willing to play charades. Or maybe some of them were draftees. One of them, the lady in pink, was sashaying up and down, clutching an invisible garment around her. Her teammate was Rob— definitely a draftee. Rob loathed charades, no doubt because he was strangely inept at them.

  “Model?” Rob said. “Catwalk? Designer?”

  The pink lady stopped in front of Rob and stroked the wrist of her invisible sleeve.

  “Furry,” I murmured.

  “Cufflink?” Rob guessed. “Wristwatch?”

  The pink lady stroked the whole sleeve.

  “Carpal tunnel syndrome?”

  I took out my notebook and began making my list of witnesses.

  I deliberately started at the far back corner, where Theobald Winkleson was sitting. I couldn’t ask him any of the questions I was really curious about, like where he had gone after the chief had questioned him and why he was here in the first place, but I got a chance to study him at close range and form a highly unfavorable opinion. He hardly bothered to meet my eyes, so busy was he inventorying the contents of the kitchen, tightening his lips and narrowing his eyes whenever he spotted anything particularly extravagant or outrageous.

  By the time I finished with Theobald, Rob’s time to guess the pink lady’s charade was almost up.

  “The sound and the furry,” he was saying, over and over again. “The sound and the furry. The sound and the furry.”

  “Time!” Mother called at last.

  “Fury, you . . . you . . . oh!” exclaimed the lady in pink, doing a very authentic interpretation of the word, now that her time was up. “The Sound and the Fury!”

  “Oh, of course,” Rob said. “Sorry.”

  Another charades team took the floor. I went on with my name and address gathering.

  As I suspected, the catering staff consisted mainly of starving grad students. Most of Mrs. Winkleson’s house hold staff did not speak English well— if at all— and I was only able to get their information thanks to translating help from Marston, who apparently spoke Spanish, French, and some form of pigeon Chinese in addition to his native Russian. His real name was Vladislav Konstantinovich Rozhdestvensky, which probably explained why Mrs. Winkleson preferred to call him Marston.

  I finished my list and tried to think of something else to keep me busy, lest Mother recruit me to replace Rob on charade duty, but in the nick of time the chief sent Horace in to begin processing the kitchen and Sammy to move us out into the already processed living room. Chief Burke began interviewing witnesses, and apparently he decided my suggestion was a wise one. He started with the rose growers, while the rest of us were told to stay in the living room and wait our turns.

  To my relief, Mother did not suggest resuming the game of charades. Instead, she and Marston put their heads together, and then, after they had a short conference with the chief, Marston brought back vacuums, dust racks, and other cleaning supplies and the maids began cleaning the room.

  Fine by me. I was relieved that the noise of the vacuums discouraged general conversation.

  The caterers pitched in, gathering their dishes and equipment.

  “If anyone would like a doggie bag, we’d be happy to pack one,” the catering supervisor said. Curiously, no one was particularly interested, not even in leftover crab croquettes, so her staff begged some black plastic garbage bags from Marston and began disposing of the suspect victuals.

  A few guests pitched in to help with the cleanup effort, but most arranged themselves on the uncomfortable chairs and sofas and waited.

  Three of the rose growers approached me.

  “Do you think she’s going to make it?” one of them asked.

  Did I look like a doctor? Or a fortune teller?

  “I think she has a good chance,” I said aloud. “Dad seemed quite optimistic when they left.”

  “Oh,” one woman said. They all looked at each other and sighed.

  “I suppose we should keep working on the programs, then,” a second woman said. “You’ll let us know if you hear anything to the contrary?”

  The three of them pulled up chairs next to a small gilt table at one side of the room, pulled stacks of programs and black pens out of their purses and tote bags, and resumed inking blots to cover up the printer’s error. After a while they filched an unopened bottle of champagne from the bar, and by the time they’d finished it, they seemed to be enjoying their task a great deal more, though I doubted we’d be able to use much of their handiwork.

  “Meg?” It was my cousin Rose Noire, res
plendent in a dress that looked like several hundred black chiffon scarves thrown randomly over her body and then sprayed with silver glitter. “I have a question. Do you think it would be okay for me to substitute for Mrs. Sechrest?”

  She held her head high, like Sidney Carton on his way to the guillotine.

  “Substitute for her how?” I asked.

  “I understand she had all her miniature roses ready to bring over for the show,” Rose Noire said. “I could groom them. Your mother and a couple of the other exhibitors are willing to coach me. Then we could enter them in the show in her name. So she could compete one last time in the shows she loved. And it would be sort of a . . . a ‘take that!’ to the murderer.”

  Not Sidney Carton. More like Joan of Arc on her way to the bonfire.

  “It’s fine with me,” I said. “But I have no idea if it’s against the ARS rules. Why don’t you ask one of the more knowledgeable rose growers? Try her.”

  I pointed out Molly Weston, and Rose Noire sailed over to confer with her, leaving a small trail of glitter in her wake.

  I gathered from Molly’s expression that she also thought it a very good idea for Rose Noire to fill in for Mrs. Sechrest. I left them to it.

  I found myself keeping an eye on Theobald. He was roaming around the room, inspecting the décor and finding it no more to his liking than the kitchen was, if his frowns and grimaces were anything to go by. I could see his point. However perfectly adapted the house was to Mrs. Winkleson’s tastes, if I were one of her heirs, I’d be less than enchanted at the thought of inheriting such a white elephant. Or should that be black elephant? Auctioning off the furniture would be possible, though I doubted it would bring in anything near what she’d spent on it, but the house itself, with its black marble floors and fireplaces and black-painted woodwork, was going to be a huge liability. They’d need to spend thousands of dollars to make the décor more normal before they could hope to put it on the market.

  Of course, if Theobald turned out to be the one who’d killed Mrs. Sechrest and fed his aunt the cyanide, selling the house would probably become brother Reginald’s problem.