Murder at the Puppy Fest

by Laurien Berenson

  I could easily imagine why not. Caroline didn’t seem like the kind of woman who would want anything to do with a quiet life.

  “Fred came next,” she continued. “He’s the oldest son.”

  “So he told me,” I said.

  “I’m not surprised. He never lets anyone forget it. It bugs the living daylights out of him that he’s not the oldest child, period.”

  “Is he married?” I hadn’t seen any sign of a female inhabitant at his home, but I figured I should ask anyway.

  “No, never.” Caroline looked perplexed. “And it’s not like he hasn’t had plenty of chances. But whenever a relationship started to get serious, he would find some reason to decide it wasn’t working. Fred’s approaching fifty now so I guess it’s not going to happen. It seems like he never met someone who could live up to his standards.”

  I tried to feel sorry for Fred and failed utterly.

  “He mentioned a brother?” I said.

  “That would be Ron, Wendy’s last child. Ron and Fred are only one year apart in age. You’d think that they would get along, but the two of them have always fought like cats and dogs. I’m not sure what started it, but they’ve been that way as long as I’ve known them. Ron is married to Karen and they have twin daughters.”

  “Ashley and Megan? I met them at the Puppy Fest.”

  “Those two.” Caroline sighed. “Karen lets them run wild. She says it’s a good thing to let them learn how to think for themselves and make their own decisions. At their age, I think it’s bull hockey.”

  “How old are they?”

  “Eighteen, one year older than Trace. Megan will be going to college in the fall. Ashley is taking a gap year. What that really means is that she didn’t keep her grades high enough to get into a decent college. When the kids were younger, all four cousins were great friends. But I’ve put a stop to that. I want my boys to grow up knowing what’s expected of them and taking responsibility for their actions.”

  Based on Will’s comments at Puppy Fest and my own experience with Caroline’s sons earlier, her efforts didn’t appear to be entirely successful.

  “So Wendy had three children,” I said. “And your mother, Maria, had two. I’m beginning to think I need a scorecard to keep all this straight. Who comes next?”

  “That would be Clarissa. I was six when my father married her. He was forty, which seemed ancient to me. I thought Leo was entirely too old to be thinking about getting married again.” Caroline frowned briefly. “Up until then, I’d always been the youngest. I was Daddy’s girl. It never even crossed my mind that he would start a new family and leave the rest of us behind.”

  “That must have been traumatic for you.”

  “It was. And the situation was exacerbated by my mother, who was outraged when my father asked her for a divorce. She responded by making everything incredibly difficult for everyone involved. I went from being a happy child with two parents and four siblings living on an estate in Greenwich, to getting dumped in a little house in Darien with just Libby and my mother. Libby coped with the change much better than I did. I was bereft.”

  “Did you see your father often after that?”

  “When he wasn’t busy.” The careless shrug that accompanied the comment didn’t succeed in mitigating its sting. “My parents had joint custody. So even though we had moved out of Leo’s house, Libby and I still spent a lot of time there. But of course it wasn’t the same. My father was totally wrapped up in Clarissa then. And in hardly any time at all, three more children came along.”

  Caroline paused. Her expression was wry. “I’m not good at sharing. Even all these years later, I still think of Clarissa’s kids as interlopers.”

  “Jane was the oldest,” I said. Fred had told me that.

  “Right. Then Joe was born a year later. Graham followed two years after that.”

  “That’s only eight,” I pointed out. “Somebody’s missing.”

  Caroline nodded. “That’s Annette. There was a five-year gap between her and Graham. I was fifteen when she was born. Nothing could have interested me less than yet another baby. It was clear that my father and Clarissa were having problems by then. If I had to guess, I’d say that she was conceived to save their marriage.”

  “I assume it didn’t work?”

  “Maybe for a little while.” Caroline sounded disinterested in her stepmother’s marital difficulties. “But eventually Daddy and Clarissa divorced anyway. After that, he said he would never marry again.”

  “Now I have the family straight,” I said. “Tell me more about Fred.”

  “You’re probably wondering why I went off on such a tangent, but I wanted you to understand the context,” Caroline said. “A family the size of mine generates lots of squabbling, and plenty of competition. All of us kids were constantly vying for Daddy’s attention. We each tried to stake out our own little piece of turf—you know, come up with some individual thing that we were good at and that made us feel important.”

  Caroline’s childhood was years in the past. Still, the mere thought of growing up in a household with that much rivalry and dissension made me want to reach over and give her a hug.

  “What was your specialty?” I asked curiously.

  Caroline’s lips twisted. She spread her arms out wide, then ran her hands up and down, indicating the length of her body. “Can’t you tell? I was the pretty one, the girly girl. The child who always looked perfect and never did anything that wasn’t expected of her.”

  “That sounds stifling.”

  Caroline shook her head. “You don’t have to feel sorry for me. I could have had it worse. At least, in my case, the raw material was there. All I had to do was make the most of it. Things were harder for Fred. As the oldest boy in the family, he thought of himself as Leo’s heir. So it was only natural that he would try to copy everything Daddy did. Fred positioned himself as the smart one in the family.”

  “That was a problem?”

  “Don’t get me wrong—it’s not like Fred is dumb or anything. In a normal family, he’d have stood out like a shining beacon of intelligence. But in Leo Brody’s family, nothing was ever normal, you know?”

  I nodded.

  “The whole world saw my father from the outside. He was Leo Brody, Noted Entrepreneur and Philanthropist. Some people looked up to him. Others envied him. Plenty hoped to emulate his success. They all felt like they knew him—and that they knew what it meant to live in Leo Brody’s world.”

  “I’m sure that world looked very different from the inside,” I said.

  “It’s not like I’m going to complain about the way we grew up. Even with our ups and downs, we all knew we had a pretty cushy life. One thing the nine of us had in common—maybe the only thing aside from our father—was that we all knew he was a hard act to follow. Kids want to make their parents proud of their achievements, you know? But how could we do that when our father had not only already done everything, but also succeeded at all of it in a very public way?”

  “It sounds as though you put a lot of pressure on yourselves.”

  “Wherever the pressure came from, all I know is that it was always there. It was like a constant drumbeat in the background of our lives pushing us to try harder, to do better, to excel at everything we did.”

  Caroline braced her hands on the arms of her chair and stood. Her seat probably wasn’t any more comfortable than mine was. She stepped over to the nearest pane of glass and stared out at the trees.

  “As you can probably guess, the three divorces didn’t help. When you’re a child, you think the fact that your father left must be your fault. That if you’d behaved better or gotten higher grades in school, maybe he wouldn’t have gone off to start a new family. Because it’s obvious that who you are wasn’t good enough to make him want to stay.”

  “Now that you’re an adult, you must know that isn’t true,” I said slowly.

  “Yeah, sure.” Caroline glanced at me over her shoulder. “But you can file
that bit of learning under ‘too little too late.’”

  I pegged Caroline’s age as being pretty close to mine. If my math was right, her parents had been divorced for more than thirty years. That seemed like an awfully long time to be carrying around so much resentment.

  “Are you close to your mother now?” I asked.

  “My mother is no longer alive.” Caroline had turned away from me again and was once more facing the window. I wished I could see her expressions as we spoke. “She died when I was in college. Her death was very sudden. She was only in her late forties, but she had a massive stroke.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “It was a huge shock at the time. But that was years ago. I don’t dwell on what happened.”

  It sounded as though she’d gotten over her mother’s death more easily than her parents’ divorce. Maybe it was just me, but I thought she had her priorities backwards.

  “Enough about me,” Caroline said briskly. “You asked about Fred. With each new wife and every new child that was added to the family, he saw the slice of Daddy’s attention that was directed toward him diminish. That drove him even harder to excel, to make an impression. Fred was always good in school, but by the time he got to high school, he wouldn’t settle for being anything but the best. Daddy went to Princeton.”

  “Good school,” I commented.

  Caroline turned around. Now that we were no longer talking about her, the conversation flowed more easily. She came back and perched on the arm of her chair, still managing to sit with her knees together and her legs primly crossed at the ankles. The position looked like a habit left over from a convent upbringing.

  “Fred went to Lawrenceville. That’s in New Jersey.”

  I nodded.

  “The rest of us were happy going to school in Connecticut, but Fred wanted to do everything he could to follow in our father’s footsteps.”

  “So he must have gone to Princeton, too.”

  “That was the plan, but it didn’t happen. In fact, Fred didn’t even graduate from Lawrenceville. During his junior year, he was accused of cheating on an exam. He denied it, of course, but the evidence against him was pretty damning. Fred was asked to leave the school. Even Leo Brody’s influence—and believe me it was brought to bear—couldn’t fix things. I’m sure that’s why Fred wants so badly to believe that our father’s death was an accident.”

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “What does one thing have to do with the other?”

  “Nothing that takes place in Leo Brody’s family happens under the radar. Being thrown out of school was a huge disgrace for Fred. The newspapers had a field day with the story. Imagine seeing stories with headlines like ‘Brody’s Son Falls Flat’ and ‘Even Daddy’s Money Can’t Save You’ written about yourself.”

  I winced in sympathy and Caroline nodded.

  “Everything about it was awful. No surprise, the episode left a lasting impression on Fred. I know for a fact that he would do anything to avoid being subjected to that kind of public embarrassment again. There’s no way he’d allow there to be a scandal over Leo Brody’s death if he could prevent it.”

  “But what if he’s wrong?” I asked.

  “I think Fred would find that easier to live with than the other alternative of seeing his family dragged through the mud.”

  “How do you feel about that?”

  Caroline’s tongue moistened her lips before she spoke. “Despite the impression he might have given you, my brother doesn’t speak for me. To be perfectly honest, I don’t know what to believe about my father’s death. I’m sure you’ve been told that he wasn’t a careless man. Daddy would never have eaten something unless he was sure about where it had come from.” She paused, then added, “Or sure of the person who gave it to him.”

  “Like maybe someone inside your family.”

  Caroline didn’t acknowledge my comment. Instead she said, “Do you remember that old TV show, The Brady Bunch?”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, that wasn’t my family. Not even close.” Caroline snorted delicately. “The press sometimes thought it was clever to refer to us as The Brody Bunch, but we never blended that smoothly. Even so, it’s nearly impossible for me to believe that somebody I grew up with might have wished our father harm.”

  I nodded. I could see that. “Do you have any other ideas?”

  “Frankly, I try not to think about it.”

  “But if you did?”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Have you met Becca Montague? That woman’s a snake. I wouldn’t believe a word she said about anything. I told the detective he should check her out and he said he would, but then nothing ever came of it.” Her fingers twisted together in her lap. “It doesn’t seem right that we’re not going to get any answers.”

  “Libby feels the same way. That’s why she enlisted my help,” I said.

  “On one level, I hate what Libby asked you to do. But on another . . .” Caroline shrugged helplessly. “If you think your poking around can help us figure out what happened, you have my blessing.”

  This time when she rose to her feet, she looked ready to escort me out.

  “I know you were at Puppy Fest,” I said as we walked to the door together. “I saw you kissing puppies in the salon. Where did you go after that?”

  Caroline was no dope. She saw immediately where I was heading.

  “You want to know where I was when my father died.”

  “Yes. I didn’t see you in the ballroom during the game.”

  “That’s because I was gone by then. I’d already done my bit. There was no reason for me to hang around any longer. I didn’t even hear the news until an hour later. Nobody thought to call me.”

  She opened the glass door, and I passed through the doorway. I paused just outside. “So how did you find out about your father’s death?”

  “It was a reporter who reached me first. He was looking for a scoop. I thought he was lying and I hung up on him. But then I confirmed the news online.”

  Not The Brady Bunch indeed, I thought.

  Chapter 16

  My visit with Caroline had been relatively quick. When I arrived home, Sam and Kevin were still at the Y. In their absence the Poodle Posse—including its honorary new member, Bud—made a great welcoming committee.

  As usual, Tar and Augie pushed their way to the front of the pack when I came through the door. The three bitches hung back in a more dignified manner. It was easy to read the expressions on the their faces. Boys. Always in such a hurry when there’s nowhere to go.

  I tossed my purse on the side table and squatted down to say hello. The Poodles crowded around me, tails wagging in unison. Smaller than the rest, Bud made a bid for attention by standing on his hind legs and jumping up and down like a demented ballet dancer. When I still didn’t get to him fast enough, he began to bark with each leap.

  That drew a reproachful glare from Faith. Chastened, Bud immediately dropped down to all fours. I reached over and scooped him up into my arms.

  That did the trick. The little dog parted his lips in a doggy grin and his stubby tail began to wiggle back and forth.

  “Into the kitchen,” I said. “Biscuits for everyone.”

  All right, I admit it. I’m a soft touch. You would be too if you lived with the best dogs in the world.

  I carried half a dozen peanut butter biscuits outside to the deck and passed them around. The dogs scattered to different corners of the patio, lay down, and began to chew. I sank into a wicker chair with a plump cushion on its seat. Compared to Caroline’s furniture, this was bliss.

  Ten days had passed since Davey and I had brought Bud home. To everybody’s relief, the attempts we’d made to find his previous owners had brought no response. Over the weekend, Bud had had another bath. His nails were trimmed and his ears cleaned. The sores around his neck were healing nicely. He’d already put on a pound or two, and his coat was beginning to acquire a healthy sheen.

  In every way, the little dog was
doing his best to fit into our family seamlessly. With Davey teaching and Kevin supervising, Bud had also begun to acquire a repertoire of tricks. So far he could jump through a hoop, sit up on his haunches and beg, and balance a biscuit on his nose.

  I didn’t care what anybody said. Bud was here to stay.

  On the drive back from Greenwich, it had occurred to me that I’d never asked Libby about the disposition of Leo Brody’s will. I pulled out my phone and gave her a call.

  After half a dozen rings, Libby picked up. “Who is this?” she snapped.

  “Melanie Travis.”

  “Oh.” Her tone softened slightly. “Okay.”

  “Who were you expecting?”

  “Some vulture from the press or a celebrity news show. It’s incredible how insensitive people are. Ever since word got out that my father died from eating cookies, comedians are making jokes and reporters are spinning cautionary tales about peanut allergies. Everyone wants to capitalize on the event.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “That must be hard for you.”

  “I don’t even bother to say ‘no comment’ anymore. I just hang up the phone. That gets rid of them. So . . . what have you found out?”

  “Not a whole lot yet. I’m just getting started. You’re going to have to be patient.”

  “Patience isn’t my strong suit.”

  I could have guessed that. “In the meantime, I was wondering about your father’s will.”

  “What about it?”

  “Has it been read yet?”

  “Of course. We met with the lawyers last week.”

  “And?”

  Libby was supposed to be on my side, but she wasn’t making this easy. Surely she could guess what I wanted to know.

  “You expect me to give you specifics?” Her tone conveyed enough outrage to make me lift the phone away from my ear.

  “Libby, I’m not a member of the press trying to pry into your secrets. You asked me to look into what happened.”

  “What does that have to do with Leo Brody’s will?”