The Case of the Roasted Onion

by Bishop, Claudia

  “That was brave,” Madeline said, “and to think I took against the poor boy because he chewed toothpicks.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it again.

  It was quiet, except for the sounds of the sirens in the distance. Brewster McClellan lay staring into the setting sun.

  So we returned to the car and waited for the police to come. I pulled Blackie onto my lap. The ambulance arrived just after the police. Both the medical technicians and the police raced onto the field with no thought for their own safety. In a short space of time, the area was roped off, and the police were crawling all over the clinic roof. After a long while, the police led those people out of the building who had sought refuge there, and everyone returned to the tent. A well-spoken young policeman came up to us and asked us very politely to go give our names and addresses to the “guy with the sergeant’s badge.” So we got out and sat at one of the tables and waited our turn. Blackie alone was unaffected by the atmosphere. She romped at our feet, tail wagging with delight at being out in the fresh air.

  Marina sat with Greg a little apart from everyone else. Stephanie had surfaced. She sat at distance from her mother, staring into space. Someone had draped a blanket around Marina’s shoulders. Sullivan lumbered up and laid a consoling hand on her shoulder. He looked jumpy. And when he sat down, it was behind Marina, so that she was between him and the clinic building. I thought about sneaking up behind him and yelling “Bang!” into his fat red ear.

  Finally Simon Provost arrived. He looked exhausted. He avoided my gaze. He spoke quietly to Marina. She had her face buried in her hands, but she nodded a couple of times.

  “They found the gun,” somebody behind me said. We looked up. Two policemen on the clinic roof waved at the men on the ground. One of them held up a long skinny gun with a scope on it. It was encased in a large plastic bag.

  “I’m going to get you something to eat, sweetie.” Madeline eased herself off the bench. “There’s all that food that’s been set out for the funeral, going to waste.”

  I straightened my shoulders in surprise. It seemed an odd time to eat. “I’m fine, my dear. Would you like me to get you something?”

  “Nope. They have rumaki over there, and I wouldn’t mind a bite of that. Then I want to stretch my legs a bit. Why don’t you walk around with me?”

  Then she leaned over and whispered in my ear.

  I leaned back. “That, my dear, is far better than the plan I had in mind.”

  There is no question in my mind that Madeline is the brain of our family. The woman is brilliant. If I’d had the wit to see what she’d seen . . . well, she had a point. No matter what, we both knew that this particular murder could not have been prevented. It would have happened at some other time, in some other place.

  We each took a piece of the rumaki. I fed mine to Blackie, who wriggled with delight at the unexpected delight. We drew Provost aside and spoke to him. He listened intently for long minutes.

  “Hell,” he said, “I don’t mind looking like a fool. Not my jurisdiction anyhow.” He grabbed a friend from the Canandaigua Police Department and asked him to give him a hand.

  Then we approached Marina and Greg D’Andrea. The puppy took one look at Marina and began to howl in fear. The heartrending sound stilled the tumult in the tent.

  “She remembers, you see,” I said. “Did you use a baseball bat?”

  Provost had stashed the chewed toothpick from the rumaki in the evidence bag. He held it up and said, “Jig’s up, D’Andrea. Found this where you hid on the roof with the rifle.”

  Then, with a facility I truly admired, he and the other policeman pulled their guns and trained them on D’Andrea’s chest, as quick as a flash. D’Andrea put his hands up, his face wary.

  I turned to him. “You’re a scientist,” I said conversationally. “Certainly good enough to pick up where Coughlin left off. And as a scientist you know more than most about trace evidence. The DNA on the toothpick will be proof positive of your presence on the roof.”

  “Marina,” Madeline said. “It was dumber than dumb to get mixed up with a guy like that. As soon as you got married, he’d probably kill you, too.”

  As my wife had predicted, it was Marina who broke.

  Epilogue

  “AT first, I was suspicious because she just flung herself on Brewster’s body,” Madeline said to Lila Gernsback. “They purely hated each other. Why would she all of a sudden risk her own tail to cover up a husband she wanted deader than a doornail anyhow?”

  “Makes sense,” Lila said.

  “And, of course, what Austin had been trying to tell me finally sank in. You know how he likes to start a story from the very beginning . . .”

  “You mean how he blabs on and on and on?”

  “I wouldn’t,” Madeline said with an injured air, “call it blabbing, exactly. But he was in the middle of telling me that McClellan wasn’t the murderer, and I cut him right off.”

  It was the first day of the Earlsdown event. We were assembled in the committee tent, waiting for the opening ceremonies to begin. The day was a brilliant blue. The air was crisp and dry. The show pennants snapped in the breeze, a tuneful accompaniment to the scents and sights of a major horse show.

  My Veterinary Commission had been deployed and the equine entrants had been tested and approved as fit to ride. The Berglands, Lila, Madeline, and I sat at a large round table with drinks in hand. Lincoln, Juno, and Blackie were sprawled at my feet. The air was alive with expectation.

  “I would have been scared out of my mind,” Lila said. She and Allegra had been so busy with the last of Hugo’s interval training that she was starving for news of the arrest. “And then what happened?” She leaned forward. She was wearing some sort of scarlet thing that displayed generous amounts of bosom. Beside me, Victor cleared his throat and leaned forward, too. Thelma scowled at the both of us.

  Madeline was magnificent in a sapphire caftan. Her auburn hair was freshly washed and piled in luxuriant curls on the top of her head. I caught the scent of freesia from her hair. “Well, then, when everyone else was crammed together in that tent worried that the sniper was still out there, Marina and Greg sat right out in the open, with their backs to the roof. Now, I ask you, Lila. Would you sit out in the open with a sniper on the loose?”

  “If it were a male sniper, she would,” Thelma snarled.

  “Of course you wouldn’t,” Madeline continued. “Marina’s not dumb. And she’s not brave. She didn’t even have the gumption to go help her own daughter out of the fix she was in when Beecher dumped her. Austin told me all about it. Why would a woman like that be brave all of a sudden with a husband she didn’t like?”

  “I just can’t believe it,” Lila said. “What a mess. What a mess.”

  “It’s still a mess,” I offered. “The physical evidence is tenuous, at best. The physical evidence has been our problem all along. A good lawyer can make mincemeat of the prosecution.”

  “At least they’ll try to put the pair of them in jail,” Madeline said.

  “I think the toothpick idea was brilliant,” Victor said. The man was in heaven. Between Madeline’s creamy effulgence and Lila’s extraordinary mammary display, he was surrounded by an aesthetic he didn’t find at home. I poked him in the ribs with my finger.

  “What the hell, Austin.”

  “Stop staring at my wife.”

  “I do think the toothpick was brilliant,” he said in a tone of injury.

  “Not all that brilliant,” Thelma said sourly. “Get me another gin and tonic, Victor.”

  “Very well, dear.”

  “Austin says it was the heifer that put him on to her,” Madeline said.

  Lila blinked. “The heifer?”

  I cleared my throat. “Despite the manhandling we put animals through, they generally always forgive us. Unlike human beings. There was more than greed behind Marina’s plan. She hated Brewster for his abuse.”

  “And that rat Sullivan is behind an insurance
scam for killing horses?” Lila’s bosom heaved.

  “We knew that because of the hazelnut,” Madeline said. “It just goes to show that a little tiny nail can bring down the whole shooting match.”

  “I don’t get it about the hazelnut.”

  And she probably never would. We had indeed, returned Jerry Coughlin’s laptop computer to Phillip Sullivan, who had accepted it with a surliness beyond belief. We had left it at that. I’d had my doubts about prosecuting the man for breaking, entering, and attacking my dog after we had broken, entered, and engaged in theft first. Although I would not admit it to Madeline, I doubted that my charter as a Summersville deputy extended that far. Lila must have caught the drift of my thoughts by some telepathic means, because she said, “I couldn’t believe that you proposed that jerk Sullivan as a jump monitor, Maddy. I thought you would have been glad to see the last of him. I sure was. And you never did tell me why you wanted to know where he was staying that night.”

  “I told him volunteering would go a long way toward having folks forgive him for tryin’ to sue the hospital,” Maddy said. “Gave him few tips about how to handle the monitor job, and that was it.”

  “Well, just tell me where he is standing, so I can stay away from him,” Lila groused.

  “The water jump,” Maddy said.

  “I can’t believe that I almost sold him my horse.”

  “No, he’s not a man you want to have in the horse community,” Madeline said.

  Lila drained her iced tea and jumped up. “I’m going to go check on him and Ally. Want to come with me?”

  Madeline nodded. “I’ve got the camcorder. I want to get as much as I can on tape. Thelma, you come with us, too. You don’t want to sit here with these boring men.”

  Thelma blushed. “You really want me to come?” Lila rolled her eyes. Madeline gave her a nudge. “Yeah, yeah, yeah,” Lila said. “You know how to scrub tack?”

  “I’m a very good housekeeper,” Thelma said. “I’d probably be able to learn.”

  Victor and I watched them leave. “About that FieldChek,” Victor said.

  “I know. Unfortunately, the whole of the company now belongs to Phillip Sullivan and Marina McClellan.”

  “Marina may need to sell her shares to pay for her defense,” Victor said thoughtfully. “Sullivan’s a problem, though. The man’s a walking monument to greed.”

  I adjusted my spectacles. “At the moment, FieldChek’s worth is all potential, not actual. And the agreement stipulates quite a cheap buyout. You might be able to pull some university funds together and buy him out.”

  “How’s that?”

  I wished, once again, that I had not been forced to give up my pipe. It adds a certain je ne sais quoi to the summation of a case. “The current cheap buyout was one of the reasons for the timing of the murders. The device was not complete. The partnership agreement would be up for renegotiation upon the divorce. And of course, the couple was out of money.” I smoothed my mustache. “It is a very valuable process, Victor. If it can be made to work.”

  “You don’t need to tell me that. As you say, if it can be made to work.”

  “And it’ll do enormous good in the agricultural community. Imagine being able to test for pregnancy in the barn! It would considerably lower costs. And if the process can be made available to humans . . .” I shook my head at the immensity of the potential.

  “Comparable to getting rid of smallpox.” Victor said, with a considerable degree of self-importance.

  “Hardly that,” I responded, annoyed.

  “Well,” Victor said reluctantly, “I suppose I can make some inquiries about buying the research from Sullivan. You said it’s not complete?”

  “By no means. It requires a substantial investment in continued development. By scientists. It would be an ideal project for one of your young PhD candidates. And who knows if the device can be actually manufactured? There are a lot of ‘ifs’ in the equation at the moment. That’s one of the reasons McClellan was short of investors. It’s a hard idea to sell to those outside the agricultural community.”

  “You know what the money situation is like at the school. And Sullivan’s the kind of creep that’d demand an arm and a leg.”

  “It may be less costly than you think. You remember Faraway?”

  “Of course I do.”

  “There is some evidence—not enough to carry us much further—of insurance fraud. Sullivan was peripheral to that, if not involved directly. At best, he had what is called, I believe, guilty knowledge.”

  Victor grunted in distaste.

  “Precisely. But he needs the resources of the scientific community if the project is to go further. You are good at negotiation, Victor. I would suggest that you confront the man as soon as may be, and see what sort of deal can be struck.”

  “I get all the dirty jobs, Austin.”

  “You are uniquely suited to handle them.”

  Our attention was diverted from what was shaping up to be quite a satisfying squabble by a rumpus at the entry to the tent. Rita Santelli blew in, her digital camera held aloft, her face pink with laughter. I waved at her. She waved back at me, and proceeded to wind her way through the crowd. She stopped at intervals, apparently to display an image on the tiny screen that such devices carry, to anyone within the reach of her arm. She was followed by laughter, and an exodus to the outside.

  “Hey, Austin,” she said. She sat down at the table and sighed happily. “Great day for a horse show.”

  “It is indeed.”

  “What’s all the hoo-ha?” Victor asked.

  Rita looked at the camera and began giggling. “You know, I think I can sell this to the nationals. Look.”

  She thrust the camera at me. I adjusted my spectacles. There, at the water jump, was Phillip Sullivan, naked as the day he was born except for a Speedo bathing suit.

  “Somebody told him the recommended attire for the water jump monitors is always a Speedo bathing suit. Do you see who that is? It’s that awful divorce lawyer, Phillip Sullivan. And he has to stay there all day. Everybody’s going out to look. I told them to take their cameras.”

  “Bombs two and three,” I said.

  AND a final word from Madeline:

  AND that’s how my Austin solved the Case of the Roasted Onion.

  The Earlsdown event was just a fabulous show. Ally and Hugo didn’t take a blue, of course. They’d started working together too late in the day for that. But they came in a respectable twenty-second, and a couple from Poughkeepsie made an offer for Hugo that’ll keep Lila in alfalfa for months. And Austin said that Victor had found a way to get the FieldChek research going at the veterinary school, and that was all right. And Simon Provost brought Austin’s deputy papers to the farm himself, along with an official letter of thanks from the Summersville mayor. It was a shame, as Ally pointed out, that it wasn’t a badge. Maybe I’ll laminate something up for him.

  So we came home to triumph. Ally sat down and talked to us about bringing Harker home to stay with us. So we started to talk about that.

  The only sad thing was that Sunny and Sweetie had been shipped off to Jerry Coughlin Junior’s farm. I’d loved having that little filly hopping around the place. And Jerry Junior decided to call the filly Tracks.

  Some men just don’t have a sentimental bone in their body.

  CLAUDIA BISHOP is the author of fourteen Hemlock Falls mysteries featuring Meg and Sarah Quilliam. She is at work on the second in The Casebooks of Dr. McKenzie series.

  As Mary Stanton, she is the author of eleven novels for middle-grade readers and two adult novels. She divides her time between a farm in upstate New York and a small home in West Palm Beach. She can be reached at claudiabishop.com.

 

 

 
ends