Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos ml-3

by Donna Andrews

  "We had managed to puzzle tibat much out, Ms. Langslow," the deputy said. He was still staring at me with that irritating expression on his face. More of a sneer than a smile, really. Or was it a leer? "What difference does it make to you?" he added.

  "It's my booth," I said. "I work here. It matters."

  He was still staring at me. I suspected it was a technique he'd read about somewhere for breaking down suspects. Well, two can play that game, I decided. I put my hands on my hips and stared back, equally unblinking. We stared at each other for what seemed like minutes on end, and for some reason I found myself imagining a nature documentary, with a voice-over by Marlin Perkins, explaining that this was a common behavior pattern in primates seeking to establish dominance or pecking order or whatever they're always going on about in nature documentaries.

  Apparently I got to be alpha gorilla this time. The deputy suddenly glanced down at his watch and exhibited the behavior of a primate who badly wanted to be somewhere – anywhere – else.

  "Sorry," he said, with a somewhat less-broad version of the snide smile. "I've got a lot to do today."

  "So have I," I said. "And I can't start any of it until you let me have my booth back. I don't suppose you have any idea when you're going to be finished here?"

  "We'll let you know," he said, looking smug.

  "Yeah, right," I muttered, and turned to leave.

  "Ms. Langslow," he called.

  I looked back over my shoulder.

  "I appreciate you bringing your brother over. But now I'd appreciate it if you'd refrain from interfering in my case."

  I bit back a sarcastic comment.

  "Your dad thinks we're a bunch of bumbling nitwits who need your amateur detective skills to solve all our really important cases."

  "I already told you, my dad's a mystery buff," I said. "He loves reading all those books where mild-mannered librarians solve crimes and catch ruthless killers."

  "And you don't?"

  "Dad's retired," I said. "I work for a living; I don't have time for all that."

  "So you're not poking around trying to solve the case?"

  I turned and gave him my version of the look Mother always turned on my brother and me when we pulled really stupid, beans-up-the-nose stunts.

  "Right now, I'm just killing time, waiting till you finish whatever the hell you're doing in my booth, so I can open up and do my job. About the only thing I can think of to do with myself in the meantime is walk around talking to people, and I'd be astonished if anyone around here wants to talk about anything right now other than the murder. So if that counts as poking around, then yes, I've been poking around, and I'll probably continue poking around. The minute you let me back in my booth, I won't have time to poke around."

  He stood there, frowning, for a moment.

  "We'll let you know when we're finished," he said, finally.

  I found Eileen, delegated the job of replenishing my cash supply to her, and went off to talk to a few people.

  I stopped for a minute to watch one of my nieces marching around the town square with the fife-and-drum corps which was rehearsing "The World Turned Upside Down," the tune Cornwallis's musicians had played for the surrender ceremony. Did Cornwallis himself have enough sense of humor to choose that tune, I wondered? Or was it the musicians' in-joke? Either way, it perfectly described my mood as I headed for Faulk's booth to begin my forbidden poking around. Faulk looked like hell.

  "What happened to you?" I asked, seeing Faulk's bruised face.

  "You should know, you were there," he said. "Although the late and unlamented Mr. Benson's nosebleed was so dramatic, I suppose I shouldn't be too surprised that no one remembers me falling down face first on a set of andirons."

  "Ouch," I said. "I do remember, actually. I bet Monty found it fascinating, though."

  "Monty," Faulk growled. "The man's not quite an idiot, but he's working on it."

  "Please tell me you have an alibi for the time of the murder."

  "I wish," he said. "I can't even tell you exactly where I was, and mere sure as hell wasn't anyone to give me an alibi. Did you know there's a lake over there, beyond those trees?"

  "A pond, actually," I said. "Wormley Pond. What about it?"

  "I fell in it," he said. "I was so mad I didn't look where I was going when I left the party. I just took off walking, and eventually I fell into the lake – "

  "Pond."

  "Whatever. Although I think any body of water deep enough for me to almost drown in deserves to be called a lake. Anyway, when I pulled myself out, I realized I had no idea where I was, and I was standing at this intersection of three dirt roads. I took one, and after about an hour and a half, I came out on Route 17, and I figured out where I was. Took another hour or so to walk back to the camp by way of the highway."

  "If you fell in where I think you did, either of the other dirt roads would have brought you back here within fifteen or twenty minutes."

  "You have no idea how much better that makes me feel," he said. "Tad came in a little after I did. Said he went down to the river by himself with his laptop and played Doom until his battery ran low, then came back."

  "Sounds normal for Tad," I said, trying to ignore the sinking feeling in my stomach. What possible reason could Tad have for concealing the fact that he had an alibi – unless he had some reason for not wanting Faulk to know about the alibi.

  "Yeah, very normal for Tad," he said. "Monty doesn't believe it, though."

  I shrugged, wondering how recently Faulk had talked to Monty.

  "What were you and Tad arguing about, then?" I asked.

  "Don't tell me the whole camp heard us. I was trying to keep it down."

  "Michael and I were passing by."

  Faulk sighed.

  "We were both accusing the other of acting like an idiot about Benson, giving him stuff he could use for the lawsuit," he said. "Wish we'd known he was dead already. We could have stopped worrying about the lawsuit and started worrying about getting arrested for murder."

  "Maybe it won't come to that," I said.

  "Maybe," he said. "But I wouldn't count on it. And even if we don't, the papers will probably have a field day, chewing over all the suspects."

  "And there goes your attempt to keep a low profile till your father gets used to things."

  "It's okay," Faulk said. "He'll disown me, but he's already done that about once a year for the past two decades. He'll get over it when all this dies down."

  "I wish I believed that was going to happen sometime soon," I said. "The police don't seem to be making much progress. All I've seen them do is loiter around my booth."

  "And search everyone else's booth," Faulk said. "They seemed to spend a lot more time in mine than any of the other booths nearby, too. Wish I thought that was a good sign."

  I couldn't think of anything encouraging to say about that, so I simply said good-bye and left. Maybe I should have told him about Tad's alibi, but I didn't have the heart. Maybe I was jumping to conclusions. Just because Tad was with someone other than Faulk at the time of the murder, there didn't have to be anything shady about it, right? Or maybe Faulk already knew about it and was concealing it. Why? To save face? What were he and Tad really arguing about last night? And how much did I really believe Tad's alibi, anyway?

  Since I still couldn't get into my booth, I took a quick stroll through the fair, trying to spot anachronisms and force the owners to hide them before the Town Watch levied more of the stiff fines that I still had to talk Mrs. Waterston out of charging. The watchmen had begun posting everyone's cumulative fine totals on a board beside the stocks, and after glancing at the totals, I could see why morale in the craft fair was spiraling downward so rapidly.

  Halfway through my patrol, I found Michael sitting in Dad's medical tent, along with the sheriff. They were watching Dad do his colonial medicine demonstration for a pair of tourists with a small boy in tow. I could tell the tourists were a little unnerved by Dad's blood-stained
leather aproix.

  "Of course, in those days far more men died of disease, particularly dysentery, than were killed in battle," Dad was saying.

  "What's dysentery?" the small boy asked. Fortunately, Dad had turned to greet me and didn't hear the question.

  "Good morrow, Mistress Langslow," Dad said, bowing deeply. "Do you need a tonic today? A physic, perhaps?"

  "I need my booth back," I said, slumping onto one of the bales of straw he'd set out as seats. "Preferably before the end of the fair; I'd like to at least break even."

  "Perhaps you need to be bled," Dad said, picking up a jar of leeches from the rough-hewn table that housed his medical exhibits.

  "No thanks, Dad," I said. He was kidding, of course. At least I hoped he was.

  "What are those?" the little boy asked.

  "Leeches," Dad said. "Bloodsucking leeches," he added – which was redundant, of course, but showed his keen grasp of the way to a ten-year-old boy's heart.

  "Real leeches?" the boy asked.

  "Of course."

  "Ooh, gross!" the boy said, in awestruck tones.

  "Would you like to hold one?" Dad asked.

  "Cool! Yes!"

  "Justin, no," his mother said.

  "It's perfectly harmless, madam," Dad said. "They're perfectly fresh leeches. We keep the used ones separate." – "Used ones?" the boy's father echoed, his eyes following Dad's gesture to the jar of used leeches sitting on the table. Business had been brisk, apparently; there were over a dozen used leeches in the jar. I wonder if Dad had convinced anyone other than himself to feed them.

  "Once they've taken blood from one patient, you can't reuse them on another, for hygienic reasons," Dad explained.

  "Of course, they didn't know about microbes in colonial times, but nowadays physicians are very careful to follow proper procedure when using leeches."

  "Nowadays?" the boy's father repeated. "You don't mean to tell me you still use leeches down here?"

  "Yes, of course!" Dad said, warming to his subject. "They've discovered a host of medicinal uses for them. They're very useful in cases of impaired venous circulation – with plastic and reconstructive surgery, for example, or cases where limbs have been reattached."

  "I see," the man said, glancing involuntarily at the bed of sawdust on the ground beside Dad's authentic period operating table, complete with an authentic period saw and what appeared to be an arm in desperate need of reattaching.

  "Of course, even in colonial times, they'd have kept the used leeches separate," Dad continued. "If you put a well-fed leech back in with a batch of hungry ones, they'd cannibalize it for the blood it contained."

  "Cool!" said the small boy, digging in his feet to resist his parents' increasingly less-subtle efforts to guide him out of the tent.

  "Let's get one out, shall we?" Dad said, taking up a small pair of tongs.

  "Fascinating," Michael said, watching so closely that his nose almost touched the jar from which Dad was selecting a leech. "For some reason I always thought they were small and round, instead of long and skinny."

  "Well, they're fatter after they're fed," Dad said, as he extracted one slimy brown worm and turned, with a flourish, to perform his demonstration. Alas, at the sight of the leech, the father snatched up his son, and he and his wife ran out of the tent. We could hear the boy's wails of outrage fading in the distance.

  "How odd," Dad said. He looked at the leech, squirming in his tongs, sighed, and placed it back in the jar. He looked rather disappointed. As did Michael and the sheriff.

  I tried to imagine what wild tales the tourists would take back home with them, about the mad doctor of Yorktown and his cannibal leeches. Ah, well. Just as long as no one complained to Mrs. Waterston. And at least it wasn't an anachronism.

  Michael came over to join me on the bale of hay.

  "I thought you'd be up to your eyeballs in customers by now," he said, putting an arm around me. "Decided to sneak away for a minute?"

  "Everyone else is up to their eyeballs in customers," I said. "All I have is a booth full of police and unsold iron. I have no idea what they're still doing. They've had all night to search the place."

  "Sorry," Michael said, and began massaging my shoulders. Which, though I hadn't yet noticed it, were already knotted with tension, despite the early hour. I still wasn't sure I liked it when someone else knew how I felt before I did.

  "Are the cactus spines still bothering you?" he asked.

  "Shhh," I whispered. "Don't say that in front of Dad. I'll explain later."

  "Damn fool way to conduct an investigation," Dad was saying. "No offense," he said to the sheriff, who nodded to indicate that none was taken. "But that deputy of yours wouldn't know a suspect if one came up and shot him."

  "Now, James," the sheriff began.

  "We've gone over this half a dozen times already," Michael said. "How can you possibly be a suspect when you have three witnesses to confirm your alibi?"

  "Well, maybe Dad doesn't want an alibi just yet," I said.

  "Maybe he wants to be a suspect for a while, and be saved from the gallows at the last minute by a surprise witness."

  I could tell from the wistful expression on Dad's face that this was exactly what he wanted.

  "Gallows? We don't have execution by hanging in Virginia," the sheriff pointed out. "Only electrocution and lethal injection."

  "I was speaking metaphorically," I said. "What is Dad's alibi, anyway?"

  "He was standing in the middle of the party, talking to the same three people from the time you had that little disagreement with Mr. Benson to the time we got the word that he was dead," Michael said. "There's no way he could have slipped away from the party, stabbed Benson, and slipped back without those three witnesses noticing."

  "So who are the witnesses?" I asked.

  "First, one of your aunts," Michael said. "Phoebe, the birdwatcher."

  "She's no use as a witness," Dad said. "She never pays attention to anything but birds. Now if you wanted an alibi for a spotted owl – "

  "And your Uncle Stanley, the judge," Michael continued.

  "He's getting along, Stanley is," Dad said. "His memory could be starting to go, you know."

  "Yes, he's only a year or two younger than you are, isn't he?" I said.

  "And me," Michael finished.

  Dad sighed. He wasn't about to say anything negative about Michael. He was Michael's biggest fan. I could tell, though, that he was disappointed in Michael for spoiling all his fun.

  "Are you sure you were with him every second of that time?" I asked. "You didn't leave to go to the bathroom or the bar or anything?"

  "You went to fetch us drinks," Dad said, brightening. "I remember that now."

  "We were standing right beside the bar," Michael said, giving me an exasperated look. "I seem to remember that we kept right on talking while I was waiting for our drinks."

  "Yes, but you would have been distracted by your interaction with the bartender," I said.

  "Not that districted," Michael said.

  "Tell you what," I said. "We could reenact it later. Scare up Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Stanley, run through the whole thing, see if there's any possibility that Dad could have gotten away with it."

  "Perfect!" Dad said, beaming. "I'm sure when we run through it you'll realize how flimsy my alibi is."

  "We'll see," Michael said. He was obviously still convinced of Dad's alibi, but somewhat mollified by the word "reenact" and the dramatic possibilities it suggested.

  "Meanwhile, I hate to change the subject, but I have a question," I said, turning to the sheriff.

  "I can't tell you what's going on with the investigation," he said, nervously.

  "This has nothing to do with the investigation," I said. "At least I hope it doesn't. What does Wesley Hatcher have on you that he thinks would swing the election if he published it?"

  The sheriff flinched.

  "That's… that's personal," he said, finally.

  "Well,
I assumed it was personal," I said. "I couldn't imagine anything job-related he could possibly hold over you."

  "Thank you, Meg," he said, patting my hand. "Thank you for that vote of confidence."

  I decided it would spoil the good impression I'd made if I explained that I knew it couldn't possibly be job-related because the whole county knew he never did any police work at all if he could help it.

  "Okay, so it's personal," I said instead. "What is it? We'd like to help you, but we can't if we don't know what's wrong."

  "That young man had evidence of an unfortunate… lapse in judgment I made a while back," the sheriff said. "Nothing illegal, nothing unethical or immoral. Just… well, stupid. Something stupid I did that would look bad if folks found out about it. He's been trying to hold it over my head, trying to get me to tell him something he could use in a story."

  "What did he want to know?"

  "I don't think he had anything in particular in mind," the sheriff said. " 'Something juicy,' that's all he said. I told him I didn't know anything juicy, and I wouldn't tell him if I did. Of course, now he wants all the details about the murder.

  That's why I'm staying so far from the investigation. I can't tell him what I don't know."

  "Of course, he may not believe you."

  "Well, if he doesn't, I'll just have to live with that. I'll just have to tell him to – to – "

  "Publish and be damned!" I suggested.

  "Yes, that's the ticket," the sheriff said. "You have such a way with words. Only… do you think it's all right to say 'damn' with the election and everything?"

  "Mrs. Fenniman says much worse," I said.

  "That's true," he said. "But she's not actually carrying the burden of public office. I'll say 'publish and be darned,' just to keep on the safe side."

  Just then Cousin Horace stuck his head through the flap of the tent.