“Honey.” Patricia’s gaze flickered upward. “I keep records of everything. Here.” She slipped some papers from a sleeve. “Alberta Kennedy. December twenty-third. Wedding at St. Michael’s, reception at the Greenwich Country Club. Is that the one?”
“That’s it,” I said, amazed. “We didn’t realize Sara had gotten that far—”
“Daffodils, narcissi, and jonquils for the bridal bouquet,” Patricia read. She picked up a pair of glasses that hung around her neck and rested them on her nose. “Not too big, she said, nothing flashy. Two floral arrangements for the altar—yellow tulips, if possible. In December, no less. I was going to check on that, and Sara was going to get back to me. We still had the centerpieces for the reception to talk about.”
“Um.” I cleared my throat softly. “That’s actually why I’m here. Sara, the woman who was planning Bertie’s wedding, won’t be getting back to you. She died over the weekend.”
Patricia’s hand dropped. Her fingers opened and the pages scattered across the counter. “Oh, I’m so sorry. That poor girl, I just talked to her. She seemed like such a nice person. What happened?”
“There was a fire in her home in New Canaan. Maybe you read about it in the paper?”
“I saw the headlines. But I never realized who it was, poor thing. You just never know when your time is up, do you?” She busied herself gathering the papers into a tidy heap. “And when I spoke to her last week, she sounded so happy, so upbeat. What a sad, sad—”
For a moment I thought I’d misheard her. I held up a hand to stop the flow of words. “I’m sorry, what did you say?”
“Well, you know we’d only met that one time when she stopped in, but she seemed like a sweet girl. And last week on the phone she was so cheerful. I guess it’s a kindness, really, that she had no idea what was to come.”
“I think you’re mistaken,” I said slowly. “Sara wasn’t talking to anyone on the phone last week. She disappeared the weekend before.”
Patricia looked confused. She pushed up her glasses and consulted her notes again. “I wouldn’t be mistaken about a thing like that. My memory isn’t as strong as it used to be, and in my business I can’t afford to get details wrong. That’s why I write everything down. Here it is; see for yourself.”
I looked down to the place on the top page that her finger indicated.
“It’s right there in black and white,” Patricia said firmly. “Sara Bentley called me on Wednesday, November tenth. She’d gotten the price list I’d sent her and she okayed some of the flowers we’d spoken about. I don’t know anything about a disappearance, but that was her I was talking to, all right.”
16
My fingers gripped the edge of the counter as I stared down at Patricia’s meticulous records. So Sara had been alive and well last week. Well enough to contact a stranger about plans for Bertie’s wedding, apparently, but not enough to call Bertie herself, who’d been frantic with worry over her friend’s whereabouts.
“Do you have any idea where Sara called you from?”
“Home, I guess. Or maybe her office, since it was during business hours?”
“Sara didn’t work in an office.” I was thinking aloud as much as offering an explanation. “And she wasn’t at home either. None of her friends had been able to get in touch with her all week.”
“Sorry.” Patricia shrugged. “I wouldn’t have any idea about that. The only thing we talked about were the flowers for the wedding.”
Too bad. “What about the price list? When did you mail that to Sara?”
“Oh, I didn’t mail it. Sara said she had a fax. That’s why I figured she was probably in an office somewhere.”
I didn’t remember seeing a fax machine in Sara’s cottage. “Do you have the number you sent it to?”
Patricia flipped to another sheet. “Right here, with her address and phone number. She gave it to me the first time we spoke.”
The address Sara had listed was her home in New Canaan. The phone number had a New Canaan exchange. But the number for the fax began with a 914 area code: Westchester County.
I stared at the number for a minute, thinking about what to do next. Sara had been missing for most of a week, only to turn up dead. I wanted to know where she’d been in the interim.
“You have a fax machine here, right?”
Patricia nodded.
“Do you mind if I send something?”
“I guess not.” She produced a pen and a clean sheet of paper, and watched me write out a message.
To whoever receives this fax, please contact me as soon as possible. I am looking for information about my friend, Sara Bentley. I’d be grateful for any assistance you can offer.
I added my name and phone number at the bottom, then walked around the counter and followed Patricia to a small office. The fax machine was on a shelf, beside a desk. I punched out the number and watched the transmission go through. A confirmation slip printed out and fell into the tray.
“Do you think that’ll help?” Patricia asked.
“I don’t know,” I said.
I hoped it couldn’t hurt.
When we got home, I got Davey settled at the kitchen table with his homework, then went down to the basement and opened up Faith’s portable grooming table. Now that the Poodle had finished her championship, I’d found myself slacking off on the all-important coat care that had taken up so much of my time over the past two years.
As long as Faith’s points were in order, it wouldn’t matter. The minute I received notification from the American Kennel Club, I planned to put a five-blade on my clipper and run it over her entire body. On the other hand, if anyone’s championship could go unconfirmed, it was probably my dog’s. Just in case, it was time I paid Faith’s coat some much-needed attention.
I’d just hopped the Poodle up on the table when the phone rang.
“I’ll get it!” Davey sang out from upstairs.
Talking on the telephone is one of his favorite pastimes, and since my son doesn’t get many phone calls, he often tries to snag mine. Unwary callers may find themselves entertaining him for fifteen minutes or more. On the plus side, he’s great at taking care of those pesky telemarketers.
This time I gave him five minutes, left Faith lying on the table, and walked up to the top of the steps. “Who is it?” I asked, poking my head out through the doorway.
As usual, Davey was chatting away, his body wriggling with animation as he recounted in minute detail the events of his school day. I had to ask the question twice.
Finally, he turned in his seat, carefully covering the bottom half of the receiver with his hand as he’d seen me do. “Aunt Peg. I’m telling her about social studies.”
“Does she want to talk to me?”
“I don’t know.” As if the thought had never even occurred to him. “I’ll ask her.”
This involved another several minutes of discussion on both their parts. By the time the issue had been resolved, I was back in the basement brushing again.
It takes two hands to tease mats out of a neglected coat. When Davey called down that Aunt Peg wanted to speak to me, I reached over and put her on the speaker phone. The fact that we had an extension in the basement at all was a symptom of how much of my life I’d been devoting to Poodle hair.
“What happened to you?” I asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I expected to hear from you last night.”
“I’ve been busy,” Aunt Peg said huffily. “Am I supposed to check in with you every day?”
Well, now that she mentioned it . . . yes.
“Did you visit Grant and Delilah?”
“Twice,” Peg said with satisfaction. “I was there yesterday and today.”
Faith flinched as my comb caught in a snarl of hair. I patted her rump reassuringly and began to gently work the knot apart, starting at the outer edge and working in. “How’d you manage that?”
“You’re not the only one in the family who can thi
nk on her feet. As a matter of fact, I think I find myself rather well suited for this detecting business.”
Heaven forbid.
“When I arrived on Sunday afternoon, as you might expect, there was quite a lot going on. Family and friends stopping by to offer support. Some sort of specialized police and fire unit combing through what remained of the cottage. Even the local press was there. Delilah was harried, to say the least.”
“Not grief stricken?” Fingers still busy, I had to pull the comb out of my mouth to ask.
There was a moment of silence on the line.
“Everyone handles loss differently,” Aunt Peg said finally. “But no, Delilah didn’t seem to be overwhelmed by grief. Indeed, if anything, she was behaving like the ringmaster of a rather unwieldy circus.
“Which doesn’t mean she wasn’t in pain,” Peg was quick to point out. “Perhaps taking charge like that was her way of controlling her emotions until she could deal with them in private. Grant, on the other hand, never came downstairs at all. Delilah apologized for his absence and said their doctor had given him a sedative.”
“So much for gender stereotypes.”
“Delilah’s a very strong woman. Make no mistake about that. I know for a fact that she rides roughshod over both the kennel clubs she belongs to, and some would say she’s done the same to each of her husbands.”
“Not to mention her daughter.” I told her about the conversation I’d had with Josh.
“I can’t say I’m surprised,” Peg said at the end. “Delilah always has been driven. She’s the sort of person who knows what she wants and goes after it, and she can’t understand how others can lack her determination. After that episode with Sara in Junior Showmanship, there were plenty of people who felt that she’d been pushing the girl much too hard.”
“That dog wasn’t poisoned, by the way.” I gave a final comb-through to the mat I’d been working on and moved to the next. “Only given a laxative so it couldn’t compete at Westminster. I got the facts from the other junior handler, who’s now grown up, married, and living in Greenwich.”
“You see?” said Aunt Peg. “That’s what happens when you listen to gossip. Everybody adds a little bit to the story and pretty soon the whole thing gets blown all out of proportion.”
Taking the high road, I neglected to mention that it was she, not I, who’d supplied the errant details in the first place.
“How did you manage to finagle another invitation back to the Warings’?” I asked instead. “And what did you find out while you were there?”
“The first part was easy.” Aunt Peg sounded smug. “I simply told Delilah that I needed her help. Drawing on the length, if not the strength, of our friendship, I led her to believe that I was nervous about my upcoming judging debut and asked if she had any advice to pull me through.”
“I didn’t know Delilah was a judge.”
“That’s because she seldom takes assignments. Delilah would much rather breed and exhibit. Then, too, judging often involves a fair amount of travel. At one time, she didn’t seem to mind, but once she married Grant she decided she’d rather stay home. Delilah’s been approved for most of the herding breeds for more than a decade. Of course she was happy to give me a few pointers, and I was happy to offer to come back today when things would have calmed down.”
Good old Aunt Peg. She didn’t miss a trick.
I tapped Faith’s flank and she leaned up, then rolled over onto her other side. Once again I parted the hair down the middle of her back. “And?”
“For starters, the fire in the cottage was set deliberately. There’s no question about that.”
“Do the police have any leads?”
“Not that they’ve told Delilah about, but she’s quite sure they’re mounting a very thorough investigation.”
“What about . . .” I stopped, sighed, then plunged on. There was simply no delicate way to put this. “What about the body? Do they know for sure that it was Sara?”
“Not yet. At least not by this afternoon. The authorities need Sara’s dental records, and for some reason there’s been a delay in procuring them. All I know is that it’s the kind of bureaucratic screw-up that left Delilah screaming into the phone about the incompetence of hired help. I’m told things should be sorted out by tomorrow.
“One thing they do know for sure,” Aunt Peg continued. “The fire was the cause of death. So your theory that Sara may have been killed earlier in the week seems to have been wrong.”
“As it happens, I found that out for myself today.”
“Really? How?”
I brought her up to date on my visit to Pansy’s Flowers. “Patricia’s absolutely sure she spoke with Sara last Wednesday. They had a perfectly normal conversation about the arrangements for Bertie’s wedding.”
“How very odd,” Peg mused. “So despite Bertie’s concerns, Sara seems to have been fine last week if you overlook the fact that she’d left behind dog and cell phone and disappeared.”
“Apparently so.” I exchanged my pin brush for a slicker and moved on to Faith’s bracelets. “But I may have a lead on where she was staying. Patricia faxed Sara a price list earlier in the week, and she knew Sara had received it because they talked about the details on the phone. The fax went to a phone number in Westchester with an Armonk exchange.” I’d come up with that last piece by dialing information and asking.
“The police could find out whose number that is.”
“I know. I’m going to drop by New Canaan and tell them about it tomorrow after school. In the meantime, I used Patricia’s fax machine to send a message to the same number, asking whoever received it to contact me to talk about Sara.”
“You did what?”
I figured she’d heard me, so I kept right on brushing. Time, tide, and Poodle hair wait for no man. Or something like that.
“Melanie, dear girl, what were you thinking?”
“Simple. That I might put myself in touch with someone who knew where Sara’d been for the last week.”
“Did it ever occur to you that you may have faxed your name to a murderer?”
My hands stilled. “Uhh . . . no.”
Her windy sigh reverberated through the phone line. “Not only that, but by using his fax number, you told him you were hot on his trail.”
“But I’m not.”
“Precisely the problem,” Aunt Peg said sternly. “Isn’t it?”
17
I didn’t get a lot of sleep on Monday night.
The third time I got up and went prowling around the house, checking the locks on windows and doors and flipping on the outside lights to scan the yard, Faith slipped down off Davey’s bed and came to keep me company. Together we padded through the quiet rooms. As always, the comfort and support her presence offered made me feel much better.
We ended up on the living-room couch: me reading Harry Potter and drinking hot chocolate; Faith resting her muzzle on my knee and snoring softly. I must have begun to doze around dawn. By the time Davey came tearing down the steps in his pajamas at seven-thirty looking for Faith, I’d managed to sleep through my own alarm, which, once awake, I could hear buzzing in my bedroom upstairs.
Oops.
I put Faith outside, told Davey to choose his own clothes, unwrapped a couple of Pop-Tarts, threw them in the microwave, and called it breakfast. My shower took two minutes; I brushed my teeth even faster. Davey made the bus, but just barely. His outfit was eye-catching: sweater, sweatpants, socks, and turtleneck, all in varying shades of his favorite color, red. Good thing his teacher had a sense of humor.
Of course, I missed the first bell at Howard Academy. Luckily, Russell Hanover wasn’t around to witness my transgression. The headmaster seemed to have a sixth sense about things like that. The few times he’d caught me running late were memorable enough for me not to want to make a habit of it.
Still, I knew I was probably doomed to spend the day playing catch-up. Then Bertie appeared unexpectedly during third period
and undid all the rest of my plans, too.
When she arrived, a fifth-grader named Sydney Kelly and I were busy outlining a book report. A hellion on the soccer field, Sydney expended more energy lacing her sneakers than she devoted to her school work. Her father was a Wall Street wizard who contributed often and generously to the Howard Academy endowment fund.
Though our esteemed headmaster claimed not to be influenced by such considerations, Mr. Hanover was quite sure that all Sydney needed was a little special attention to bring her grades up to speed. As you can probably tell, what special needs tutor means in the public school sector and what it connotes in the rarefied world of Greenwich private academies are often two entirely different things.
The distinction was probably lost on Bertie, who came bursting into my classroom as though a pack of Bloodhounds was on her trail. I looked up as the door flew open.
“I have to talk to you!”
“Now?”
“Now’s good,” Sydney offered.
What kid doesn’t like to see her studies interrupted?
I stood up from the table, pointing the fifth-grader firmly back toward the book we’d been scanning. Sure, like that was going to work.
“Bertie, what are you doing here? Why didn’t the office call me?”
“What office?” Obviously the checkin procedure had been lost on my sister-in-law-to-be. “I parked in the lot and came in through the back door. I’ve been sticking my head in every classroom I came to.”
I closed my eyes briefly, trying not to envision how much chaos that must have caused. When I opened them again, Bertie was still standing there. She was beginning to look impatient.
“Bertie, I’m in the middle of a session right now.”
“I can wait,” Sydney said helpfully.
I jabbed my finger down on the page. The child didn’t even glance at it. Why would she, when the show we were putting on was so much better?
“It’s important,” said Bertie.
Once Bitten (A Melanie Travis Mystery) Page 13
