Killer WASPs

by Amy Korman

  “He’s fine here,” I said, trying for a lighthearted tone while I choked back a sob.

  “I said, bring that fat mutt.”

  I let Waffles out the door, shakily closed and locked the door behind us, then led my trusting hound to her Range Rover. Waffles even wagged at Mariellen when I opened the backseat to the roomy truck, looking around desperately for anyone to flag down on the normally busy street. Of course, there wasn’t a soul in sight.

  Why, today of all days, couldn’t Bootsie be out walking Lancaster Avenue, sticking her nose into the café, the hardware store, the post office, and the bakery, hoping to catch a cheating spouse or hear about a drunken escapade at a party, as per her custom? Why wasn’t Holly heading back from Booty Camp, or Joe and Sophie at the paint store a few doors down, debating fifty shades of beige? But there was absolutely no one out on the street at the moment. Even the elderly lady who runs the liquor store, who’s almost always outside puffing on a Parliament, had disappeared.

  “You drive,” Mariellen told me, handing me the keys to her large black Mercedes, her gun aimed firmly at Waffles. My hand trembled as I climbed into the driver’s seat and inserted the key into the ignition. Mariellen gestured for Hugh to sit shotgun, and she, Jimmy, and Waffles got into the backseat. A tear rolled down my cheek.

  “What in the name of Johnnie Walker are you up to, Mariellen?” complained Jimmy as he buckled his seat belt—­an unnecessary precaution, probably, since we all seemed as good as dead. “If you’ve gotten yourself into trouble, we should go discuss it with the police. And maybe a good headshrinker.”

  “We’ll discuss it at my house,” she said. “Head toward Sanderson, then take a right on Camellia Lane.”

  Mariellen’s estate was only minutes away, in the opposite direction of Sophie Shields’s house. Shady Camellia Lane is one of the prettiest roads in Bryn Mawr, but I didn’t notice its namesake flowers in bloom as I shakily steered the large car into her driveway per Mariellen’s instructions. Her property had no gates, just a small black mailbox set in a bank of irises and lilies. The driveway was lined with oak trees, and the sense of privacy would have been idyllic under different circumstances.

  The driveway wound back from Camellia Lane, and as we rounded a curve and the house came into view, even in my panic I couldn’t help noticing that Mariellen’s stone farmhouse oozed good taste. Dogwoods bloomed along the walkway to her dark green front door, and flower boxes filled with hot-­pink petunias were mounted on each front window. I guess elegance and insanity aren’t mutually exclusive.

  Behind her house was a paddock, and then a barn, painted pristine white, with none of the mud and muck you normally see outside a horse barn. The grass was as lush as that of a golf course, and the pathways were beautifully raked and maintained. To its right was a large pond, covering at least three acres, upon which a pair of geese was swimming; in front of the pond, a gravel lane led off into the woods. “That lane leads over to Lilly’s house,” Mariellen informed us. “The house I bought for her and her husband.” She shot me a significant look as I pulled up and parked to the right of her house.

  Mariellen had it made. She lived in one of the most beautiful houses I’d ever seen, inherited along with a large trust fund, making her one extremely lucky woman. She had a devoted daughter, and a schedule filled with cocktail parties, golf, and a beloved horse. Her life appeared to be as flawless as her pearls. How could anyone who lived in such a gorgeous setting be so mean? Even if the rest of Philadelphia was being developed and modernized, she had carved out an island of farmland that seemed frozen in time. She was completely isolated in bucolic perfection.

  A whinny pierced the birdsong humming all around us as we climbed out of the car at Mariellen’s direction, the gun aimed steadily at me. I saw Norman’s tall brown head sticking out of his stall, looking around to see what was up.

  “Mummy will bring you your alfalfa soon, darling!” cried Mariellen to the horse, who neighed back at her. Waffles sniffed and spied Norman, started wagging, and whined excitedly.

  “Inside, please,” said Mariellen frostily.

  MARIELLEN’S FOYER WAS painted lime green, and had ornate old woodwork that was exceptionally lovely. In orderly lines along the front hallway hung a dozen pretty framed floral prints by Pierre-­Joseph Redouté. A graceful staircase was directly in front of us, and then the hallway led back to a sunroom painted pale yellow and filled with orchids in full bloom. For the house of a psychotic country clubber, this was all very beautiful.

  Also, as Bootsie had reported, there was toile and monograms out the yin-­yang. On the antique console table in the hall sat lime-­green lamps with monogrammed M shades, a silver tray embossed with double Ms, and M-­monogrammed cocktail napkins. Flanking the console were two side chairs covered with a riot of green toile, depicting French milkmaids, cows, horses, and birds; the dining room, visible to our right, featured monograms everywhere, including the seats of the dining chairs. I began to feel a twinge of migraine in my left eye. Everything was in perfect order, of course, but the mind boggled at the varying patterns.

  “We’ll sit in the library,” Mariellen announced, opening a door off the lime hallway into a pink and white library in which the theme seemed to be horses. Straight ahead was a lovely fireplace, and on either side of it were old-­fashioned Dutch doors. The top halves of the horizontally-­divided doors were open, with banks of buoyant rosebushes visible beyond them, and then a fenced paddock filled with jade grass. At the right was a pink-­toile-­covered window seat, and on the walls were several large old English paintings of Norman look-­alikes depicted standing in Cotswold meadows. There were silver-­framed photos of Norman himself on the glossy antique tables, looking quite regal as he was awarded ribbons at local horse shows, and a few pictures of Lilly were scattered around, too (though she got less play than the horse, I noticed).

  However, on the mantel was a wedding picture taken just outside this very house, and I didn’t need to look twice to realize who the ­couple was. I gulped and vowed to not look at this picture of Lilly and John, turning my attention instead to the coffee table, which featured monogrammed items including coasters, decanters, and glass bowls. The sofas were, naturally, pink toile. My eye began to twitch.

  The twitch got worse when I noticed that as Hugh sat nervously in a pink wing chair and Jimmy leaned against a farm door, Waffles was eyeing the plump sofas with a look I knew all too well: The expression in his eyes foretold a flying sofa leap at any second, which I thought might mean instant shooting with Mariellen’s pistol. I grabbed his collar and held tight while I stroked his ears, and tried to keep him from drooling on the pink needlepoint rug embroidered with Norman-­style horses.

  “Let’s get down to brass tacks, Mariellen,” Jimmy said impatiently as he looked around the room for a bar. His eye landed on a table over by the window with more decanters on it, and he made a beeline for it and poured himself a stiff Scotch. Mariellen kept the gun trained on him, and seated herself, ramrod straight, on the chair that was a twin to Hugh’s.

  “You’re the one who banged Shields in the head. Is that what you’re saying?” Jimmy asked her, plunking himself down on the window seat as he swigged his drink.

  “Of course I did,” Mariellen said primly. “See the empty spots on my bookshelves?” She pointed to shelves at our left. “That’s where my acorn bookends used to be. I had four of the bookends—­two of my own, two from my good-­for-­nothing former husband, who also went to Bryn Mawr Prep, before he married me and then bolted for some dusty hill town in South America—­and I gave them away to the church charity sale last fall. Eula Morris was working at the charity sale that day.

  “I knew Eula would remember that I’d given four bookends, since she’s such a busybody,” Mariellen continued, pleased with herself. “If anyone ever suspects me—­which they won’t—­I could simply tell them to check with Eula and she’d confirm that I’d given away all four acorns months before Mr. Shields was hit.<
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  “But during the church sale, while Eula was inside trying to hit up Honey for money to restore the stage at the symphony,” Mariellen told us, “I quietly put one bookend back in the trunk of my car. Then, while I was manning the lemonade stand, two horrible hippie women came by in a van that reeked of marijuana, and bought the other three.”

  Annie and Jenny, I thought to myself, who couldn’t remember where they’d gotten the bookends. They must have been high, and forgotten attending the church sale where they’d bought the acorns. Not that it mattered now. It was ironic that I’d ended up with Mariellen’s acorns, but I didn’t think this was a good time to bring that up.

  “I saved the fourth bookend just for Mr. Shields,” Mariellen said, pleased. “A man like that needs to be literally hit in the head with something to understand it. And I thought the acorn was a fitting symbol of what this area used to be: tasteful and modest.”

  Honestly, her house with its vast paddocks, barn, and ornate decorating wasn’t all that modest, but I kept this to myself.

  “So I set up a fake meeting for Mr. Shields and Honey ten days ago,” she continued, crossing her slim legs as a light breeze blew in through the picturesque farm doors. “I knew he’d be positively chomping at the bit to buy some of Sanderson’s acreage. When Honey dropped me off here at home after that disgusting party at the old firehouse, I simply slipped the bookend in my saddlebag, jumped on Norman, and rode over to Sanderson to meet Mr. Shields. Takes me a matter of minutes to ride there, as you know; it’s just through the woods. A beautiful trail runs over that way. I tied Norman to a tree just past the barn and out of sight of the house, and then walked over and hit the despicable man right on his head. He was knocking so hard on the front door and cursing a blue streak about no one answering, that he never heard me coming.”

  Jimmy, Hugh, and I exchanged glances, with Hugh approximating the terrified, bulging eyes I once saw on a Pomeranian that Waffles once tried to befriend at the pet store over in Haverford. Jimmy put up a better front of bravado, and honestly didn’t seem scared.

  “Did Honey help you hide Shields after he was knocked out?” he asked. “How the hell did you move that big fat man into the bushes?”

  “I didn’t,” Mariellen informed him, lighting a Virginia Slim.

  “As a matter of fact, I left him right there on Honey’s front doorstep. I took the bookend and went out to the pasture, where I tossed the bookend into a briar patch. Naturally, since I wear riding gloves, there weren’t any fingerprints on the bookend.” She paused and took an elegant puff on her cigarette. “Then the oddest thing happened. I was at least a quarter of a mile away, and just getting ready to ride Norman home, when two men came walking down Honey’s driveway. I could just see them in the light over Honey’s front door; they wore horrible leather jackets and jeans, and they grabbed Barclay by the feet and dragged him away from the house.” She shrugged. “I didn’t wait to see what happened after that.”

  “What are the chances!” hooted Jimmy, leaning back on the window seat cushions. “It must have been those mafia guys who’ve been looking for Shields. You got the job started for them, Mariellen.” For someone who might be killed at any second, Jimmy seemed totally at ease. The only logical conclusion I could make was that Mariellen was intent on permanently silencing all of us, because why else would she be telling us all this? Hugh, on the other hand, appeared to be catatonic with fear, which was closer to my own state of mind. Maybe Jimmy thought Mariellen wouldn’t really shoot him.

  Personally, I really did think she’d shoot me.

  “And when the chef fell at the symphony party—­you pushed him off Sophie Shields’s balcony?” I asked.

  “Easily,” said Mariellen proudly, twisting her pearls. “When that dreadful Sophie was showing us around the house, which I knew she’d be dying to do, I lingered behind in the kitchen for a few minutes and saw that there was a large pantry closet I could easily conceal myself in. Later, when the cooks all took a cigarette break and Honey was in the powder room—­she takes forever in the bathroom, honestly—­I simply slipped into the pantry, waited till the chef was outside on the landing, and gave him a good hard shove.”

  I was kind of impressed by this. Mariellen didn’t screw around.

  “If ­people still had the gumption we had back in the 1960s, we’d all be a lot better off!” Mariellen added. “That was a time when this area was serene and unspoiled. It’s all been downhill from there, and in my own small way, I’ve been trying to stem the tide.”

  Mariellen had taken nostalgia to a psychotic level, I realized. In a strange way, I could understand her longing for the past, if not the extreme measures she’d taken toward trying to preserve it. We all mourn for things that are lost, of course, but hopefully we can put the losses in perspective. I always felt sad when I’d see one of the quirky old shops along Lancaster Avenue close, like the place that only sold antique trains, and then the musty old Irish sweater place, because they reminded me of my childhood. But truthfully, I’d never set foot in either of the shops. It was indeed awful to see chainsaws cutting down Bryn Mawr’s ancient towering trees to make room for house upon new house, but change is inevitable, and, on a more positive note, if nothing ever changed, no one would have invented Starbucks. In her quest to maintain a bygone way of life, Mariellen had, to put it in clinical terms, gone cuckoo.

  “And by the way, John, my son-­in-­law, is going to be a member of this family till the day he dies,” Mariellen said to me. “Now, hand me that dog’s leash.”

  Another tear trickled down my cheek as Waffles wagged, confused, and I clutched his collar more tightly.

  “What are you going to do with him?” I whispered.

  “I’m going to march all four of you over to the pond, and I think you can figure out what comes next,” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in an Hermès ashtray. “My pond is enormous, and very deep, and the koi fish and trout will gobble up your corpses in no time. I’m a member of one of the oldest families in Bryn Mawr, darling. The police would never dare question me, let alone even consider me as a suspect, or think to look anywhere on my property for your sad selves. If anyone saw us get into my car—­which they didn’t—­I’ll say I dropped you all at the club, and no one will doubt a word I say.

  “So let’s all get up and start walking, shall we?”

  I’ve always had a strange antipathy toward koi fish, with their huge mouths and chubby fish bodies. I felt like I’d gone into a coma of fear, when we suddenly heard a familiar whinny outside, accompanied by the clip-­clop of hooves on the slate pathway just outside the library.

  Norman stuck his long, gleaming, brown neck in through the open top of the farm door and neighed at Mariellen inquisitively, while Waffles woofed at the horse.

  “Norman, how did you get out of your stall?” Mariellen asked the horse, irritated.

  “Who is this horse, Mr. Ed?” demanded Jimmy.

  “I let Norman out, Mummy,” we heard a girly voice call out from some twenty yards away, just behind Norman in the sunshine. “I came back from early from Greenwich, and thought I’d turn him out in the paddock and come say hi to you. Do you have friends over? And was that a dog I heard in there?”

  Lilly!

  Lilly’s beautiful face appeared next to Norman’s, and she peered into the pink library. Her eyes widened in shock as she took in the scene around her. “Mummy! And the Best brothers? Why do you all look so serious . . . and, Mummy, what are you doing holding that gun?”

  Chapter 21

  “I CAN’T BELIEVE I’m saying this, but thank goodness for Lilly Merriwether,” I told Holly and Joe that night at Holly’s house.

  It was a warm night with candles lit on the patio and drinks flowing, but even with a sweater on and chubby, snuggly Waffles next to me on Holly’s enormous chaise longue, I was still shivering. “If she hadn’t shown up with Norman, Waffles and I and the Bests would be fish food right now,” I told them.

  “There’d p
robably be nothing left of you. Your bones would be picked as clean as a Thanksgiving turkey,” agreed Joe. “I had a client once whose terrier fell into her koi pond, and whoosh—­before she could grab the dog, it was a feeding frenzy! The fish gobbled the pooch alive in like fifteen seconds.”

  “That’s disgusting!” Holly told him, frowning. “And very insensitive.”

  “Sorry,” said Joe, looking apologetic. “I just could never get that image out of my mind. You and the dog would probably be the ones the fish would eat first,” he added to me, reflecting on this with some interest, “since the Bests are really old and wouldn’t taste all that good. Too stringy. The dog would probably the best meal of the four of you, to be honest.” He eyed Waffles approvingly.

  I was about to beg him to change the subject when my cell phone rang. Bootsie, for about the seventy-­fifth time that night. I’d taken her first six calls, and then was too tired to talk to her anymore. I hit ignore, figuring that Bootsie would probably just show up at Holly’s soon anyway.

  The past five hours had been beyond exhausting. Thankfully, when Lilly Merriwether saw her mother pointing a gun at the four of us, she had calmly taken in the situation, then walked into her mother’s library and convinced Mariellen to give her the weapon. Mariellen was so crazy (literally) about Lilly that it took her daughter less than a minute to convince Mariellen that what she was doing “wasn’t a very good idea,” as Lilly told her.

  Mariellen was led upstairs to take an aspirin and lie down, and Lilly hadn’t objected when Jimmy had immediately called the police. Within twenty minutes of Officer Walt’s arrival, it had been decided that Mariellen needed to be hospitalized, rather than spend time in a jail cell while awaiting a hearing with a judge; Walt and Lilly had driven Mariellen over to the hospital, where she was currently under psychiatric care.

  It turned out that Lilly had already had her suspicions about her mother’s mental health, but had been feeling helpless as to what to do about them.