Meadowlark

by Sheila Simonson

  Meadowlark

  A Lark Dodge Mystery

  By

  Sheila Simonson

  Uncial Press Aloha, Oregon

  2013

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and events described herein are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locations, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-60174-165-3

  Meadowlark

  Copyright © 2013 by Sheila Simonson

  Cover design

  Copyright © 2013 by Judith B. Glad

  Previously published by St. Martins Press, 1992;

  Worldwide Libraries, 1997

  All rights reserved. Except for use in review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means now known or hereafter invented, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher.

  Warning: The unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this copyrighted work is illegal. Criminal copyright infringement, including infringement without monetary gain, is investigated by the FBI and is punishable by up to five (5) years in federal prison and a fine of $250,000.

  Published by Uncial Press,

  an imprint of GCT, Inc.

  Visit us at http://www.uncialpress.com

  For my son, Eric, with love.

  Prologue

  Western Meadowlark

  (Sturnella neglecta)

  Orioles (Icteridae)

  Description: 8 1/2"-11"(22-28 cm). Robin-sized. Mottled brown above, bright yellow below, with V-shaped black bib; top of head has black-and-white stripes. Sexes look alike. Yellow on throat extends farther onto cheek (malar area) than in Eastern Meadowlark; mottled back and tail are lighter brown than Eastern. White tail margins are prominent in flight, and tail flicks open and shut when bird is walking.

  Voice: This popular bird has a large repertoire of songs very different from the Eastern Meadowlark. It may utter its loud, melodious flute-like phrases one at a time or repeatedly. The male sings even when migrating or wintering, and at the height of the breeding season may rise in air while singing hip, hip, hurrah! boys; three cheers; oh, yes, I am a pretty little bird; or utah's a pretty place. Call notes include a harsh chuck. Its bright colors, fearless behavior, abundance, and above all its loud, cheerful song make the Western Meadowlark perhaps the most popular of western birds.

  Meadowlarks are shaped like starlings. In flight they keep their wings stiff, typically fluttering them a few times and then sailing.

  Source: Miklos D.F. Udvardy, The Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Western Region, New York: Knopf, 1987.

  Chapter 1

  I had my new bookstore going before Christmas. That surprised me. I recycled the name, Larkspur Books, from my place in California. I also recycled the capital, almost a windfall, from the advantageous sale of the other store.

  It was strange the way the money rolled over. The pleasant couple who bought the old store had sold a home in L.A. just before the bottom dropped out of that real estate market, so they weren't haggling. I recouped my family's original investment with a tidy profit and we moved north. Because my husband, Jay, had also sold his house for very good bucks, I hadn't had to touch "my" money to buy our house in Shoalwater. So there was all that cash sitting in the bank, attracting IRS agents like mako sharks around a dying tuna. In the nick of time, the Robinson Building came up for sale.

  The Robinson Building was a narrow, two story Victorian property, brick-fronted and loaded with atmosphere. Wonder of wonders, it had new wiring and plumbing. It sat smack on the main street of Kayport, which was then gentrifying by fits and starts. Because the decline of fishing on the Columbia River had thrown the local business scene into disarray, the price was right. More than right--a steal.

  I called my parents. They flew out and fell in love with the fin de siècle charm of the old riverport as I had hoped they would. They were ready to invest. They suggested we buy the building, and lease out the smaller of the two commercial spaces and the two apartments overhead to cover the mortgage payments. That left me a large area for my bookstore, rent free.

  The woman who ran the doodad shop in the smaller space wanted to stay and the used furniture business in the other half had died the year before, so there was nothing to slow me down. Thanks to remodeling experiences with our house in Shoalwater, I knew which carpenters and electricians to call and which not. October is downtime for builders in a beach town. We had the interior fitted and a dedicated line run in for my computer by Thanksgiving--only two thousand dollars over and two weeks later than what the contractor promised. A miracle.

  I held a reception in the spruced-up shop on Thanksgiving weekend for Jay's colleagues at the community college. Everyone seemed enthusiastic about having a real bookstore in town. Apart from two used paperback outfits and the college bookstore, which specialized in textbooks and sweatshirts, I had no competition on the Peninsula. I liked that.

  My stock began coming in that week. My friend and neighbor, Bonnie Bell, helped me inventory and shelve books. Out of sheer exuberance, I held another reception the next weekend, a tea, with a tantalizing display of books but nothing for sale yet, for grade- and high school teachers and librarians.

  Some book dealers think of librarians as the natural enemy. I don't. Apart from being nice people, librarians create a huge appetite for books, especially hardcovers. I've known patrons to develop a passion for a given author at the public library, then move over to collecting hardcover first editions. True, many people use libraries because they can't afford to buy books or don't have the space to shelve them. If they can't afford hardcover prices, killing the libraries isn't going to change that. I like libraries.

  So I had a tea for the teachers and librarians, two men and eighteen women, and I was able to announce my Grand Opening, ten days before Christmas. Just right for desperate last-minute shoppers. Also my mother was coming. My guests at the tea were mildly interested in that, and the reporter for the Shoalwater Gazette even picked up on it as worthy of mention in the Calendar of Coming Events. I didn't care a lot whether the local paper carried the story. I was aiming higher--or, rather, farther.

  My mother, Mary Wandworth Dailey, is a major minor poet. The Borden Press had just brought out her Collected Poems, and Ma decided she would do her first West Coast signing, not in LA or San Francisco or Seattle or at Powell's in Portland, but at little old Larkspur Books. Between us, we conveyed this fact to the Seattle, Portland, and Astoria newspapers. Since Ma was set to do a short course at a prestigious Portland liberal arts college in January, the Portland press gave us space. One local TV station even sent out a camera crew and interviewed me standing in front of my spiffy display window. For Ma's signing I pulled out all the stops, even the weather cooperated, and we had quite a large turn-out, as signings of poetry collections go.

  About halfway through the evening, a chic woman with a cap of gleaming mahogany hair and intense brown eyes came up to me. I was standing with Bonnie trying to decide whether the canapés were going to last the evening. The woman caught Bonnie in mid-sentence. I gave the stranger an automatic smile.

  She waited until Bonnie drew breath, then thrust a square, beringed hand at me. "You're Lark Dodge."

  I admitted I was.

  "I'm Bianca Fiedler. You know my husband. He teaches at the college."

  I drew a blank.

  "Keith McDonald."

  "Uh, yes. I've met Dr. McDonald." McDonald, then head of the English Department, had led the opposition to Jay's police training program. He and my husband were not friends and McDonald had not showed up at the first
soirée.

  She said, "Keith couldn't make it tonight but I came anyway. I wanted to meet you."

  "It's a pleasure."

  She was ignoring Bonnie, the intense eyes boring into mine. "I need you. I've set up a writers' workshop for the first week in March and I'd like you to help me run it."

  I cleared my throat to utter a polite refusal but she continued, "I believe you plan to close the store for six weeks."

  "February first to March fifteenth," I conceded. She must have seen the TV segment. I had told the interviewer I was going to enjoy this store, not enslave myself to it. It would be closed Mondays and Tuesdays, and for six weeks every year, like one of the successful upscale restaurants in Kayport. The Peninsula was touristless by February and didn't revive until the schools let out for spring break.

  "...so you'll be free," she was saying. "And it's a worthy cause."

  My feeling about worthy causes is that they are indeed worthy, and can blot up your life, especially in a small town.

  "The Environment." She pronounced the word with reverent exactness. My eyes began to glaze over and I glanced at Bonnie to see if she was going to rescue me. She was staring at Ms. Fiedler, poker-faced. No help there.

  "I really don't think..."

  "I'm bringing in first class speakers." She named two nationally known science writers. "And the students are all journalists and magazine writers. We have to educate the public..."

  Memory stirred. Some joke about Old McDonald. Didn't McDonald and his wife run an organic farm? "Meadowlark Farm," I said.

  "Yes." She gave a brisk nod, like a bird after a juicy bug. "It'll be at the farm. I'm opening a study center. Everything's set up, but I do need a coordinator for the event because that's tilth time, you know."

  "Tilth?"

  "Soil preparation. I want somebody literate and well-organized. I've been watching you set this operation up and I'm impressed."

  "I'm not a writer," I protested. The woman's intense focus was flattering because I was the object. It was also very rude to Bonnie, and I needed to turn my attention to my other guests.

  I said, "It sounds interesting, Ms. Fiedler. Why don't you call me at home tomorrow... No, Tuesday. My parents leave tomorrow. We can talk it over Tuesday. Have you met my friend, Bonnie Bell? Bonnie's a novelist." An unpublished novelist. "Bonnie, Bianca Fiedler."

  Bonnie said hello and Fiedler gave her a brief smile and nod then homed in on me again. "I'll pay you a thousand for five days of workshop and the opening day--reception, general mingling. I'll do the paperwork. Okay?"

  "I'll think about it. Nice to meet you." I went off to rescue my mother from the Poet Laureate of Shoalwater County. Several people, books in hand, were waiting for Ma to sign them. Jay and Tom Lindquist, also our neighbor, were working the crowd under my father's experienced eye. Bonnie headed for the caterers' station in the back room. Fiedler melted into a clump of chattering guests.

  That was my first encounter with the owner of Meadowlark Farm.

  Later that evening, when Jay had taken my parents home for a drink before bed, Tom and Bonnie and I started the inevitable clean-up.

  Bonnie said, "Guess who offered Lark a job?"

  Tom was hauling an armload of folding chairs to the back room. "Hillary Clinton?"

  She grinned. "Bianca Fiedler."

  He shifted the load. "The same job she offered me?" Tom was a novelist, too. Unlike Bonnie, he was published.

  I was stuffing napkins and other food debris into a plastic garbage sack. The caterers had taken their glassware and china and left me with the junk. "She wants me to coordinate a writers' workshop. I take it you turned her down."

  "Flat. The book's due the end of March." Tom was finishing his third novel and what with one thing and another was running behind schedule. He chunked the chairs into the back room and returned, dusting off his hands. "Don't tell me you suckered?"

  "I told her to call me later. 'Suckered?'"

  "It's a tax write-off."

  "Oh." A worthy cause indeed.

  Bonnie was straightening the poetry shelves. "You know who she is, don't you?"

  "Keith McDonald's wife."

  Bonnie chortled.

  Tom shoved at his forelock, which was inclined to droop. "There are those who say he is Bianca Fiedler's husband."

  Bonnie clucked her tongue. "Men are so catty. She's Eli Fiedler's long lost heir, Lark. Don't tell me you missed out on that story. It set Hollywood by the ears, I can tell you." Bonnie was raised in Santa Monica and regarded the film industry as her turf.

  I had dim recollections of a tabloid sensation several years back. "Eli's son was into drugs so Fiedler left the bulk of his estate to a daughter living in a commune... Holy cow, the farm?"

  Tom said, "She's Maria Canelli's daughter, as well as Fiedler's, so little Bianca wasn't exactly a barefoot flower child."

  "She has Canelli's red hair." I didn't know much about Maria Canelli except that she hit the screen around the time Sophia Loren showed up. Unlike Loren, Canelli had disappeared before I got around to watching films.

  Eli Fiedler was among the first generation of directors to break away from the studios and set up as an independent producer-director. He was much married. He had also made two of my favorite films, but the bulk of his fortune had come, after a series of flops, from the sale of videotape rights to his creations. He had been shrewd enough to recognize the importance of that market, and he had cashed in not only on the two hits but on the box office flops, too, some of which made pretty good movies on the small screen.

  Tom was watching me. "Are you going to do it?"

  I said, "If Bonnie would mind the shop I might."

  Bonnie restored the last copy of The Collected Poems of Mary Wandworth Dailey to the poetry shelf. "You'll be closed."

  "Yes, but I'll have stock coming in."

  She cocked her blond head to one side, considering. "You're on, but I want a daily bulletin."

  That was easy. I had this tendency to tell Bonnie everything anyway.

  "What about your novel?" Tom's tone was stern. He and Bonnie may or may not have become one another's all at that point, but he was definitely mentoring her career.

  She said airily, "No problem. It's coming in huge hunks. I'll be done with the first draft by then."

  He looked skeptical but raised no further objections.

  I wasn't sure I was going to take the job on and told them so.

  Tuesday Bianca Fiedler showed up on my doorstep in Shoalwater at ten in the morning. The store was closed. There I was in sweats with my fences down.

  She peered up at me intently from the intense brown eyes. "Have you thought it over? I brought a brochure."

  "Good heavens, come in." I led her through the hall past our redecorated living room and unregenerate dining room to the kitchen, all cream and yellow tile, and offered her a cup of coffee.

  When she ascertained that it was freshly ground she accepted. She sat in my nook and looked around her. "I like this house. It reminds me of the place Keith and I rented in Eugene while he was doing his doctorate."

  I sat and stirred creamer into my cup. "He's a folklorist, isn't he?"

  "Folktales and ballads." She seemed oblivious to my lack of enthusiasm for her husband, perhaps because she sounded less than enthusiastic herself.

  "I understand he's also a guitarist."

  Bianca snorted, "Not really. Keith has a great voice for ballads, and back then a good folk singer could get by with four chords and a Dobro. Times have changed, but Keith hasn't--much. He does strum away at the twelve-string now, but it's the same old song." Her mouth gave a wry twist.

  I hoped I was not going to be treated to a husband-bashing. I didn't know her well enough for that.

  After a long sip, she shrugged and took another tack. "My mother decided to underwrite her grandchildren when Fiona was born. Keith and I moved out of the commune and into the Eugene house. He went to work on the doctorate, and I took business classes be
tween gestations."

  I raised an eyebrow, indicating, I hoped, polite interest.

  She gave a sudden, thoroughly disarming smile. "We'd bought the whole hippy scene, you know--somewhat after the fact. It was the Seventies by then. I got interested in organic farming on the commune. College was just an interruption. I was raised in a hotel."

  Both my eyebrows went up.

  The smile softened. "My stepfather owned and managed the Bonne Chance in San Francisco." The Bonne Chance was a small, exceedingly expensive San Francisco hotel, very classy then and now. I nodded and got up to freshen her coffee.

  She held out her cup. "I was a city kid, but I loved plants--flowers and potted trees and fresh veggies. Papa--that's what I always called my stepfather--virtually invented California cuisine when he called in Carlo Forte to run the hotel restaurant. That was exciting to watch, and I heard all about the problems Carlo had getting good produce. He used to take me with him when he dealt with the market-gardeners. I was supposed to be his daughter." She sighed. "Poor dear Carlo. He died of AIDS seven years ago, one of the first. He was a sweet man. Between Carlo and Papa I never missed my father. So it was a shock when Eli Fiedler left me all that money."

  I said, "You hadn't had any contact?"

  Bianca shrugged again. "Not much. He made a settlement when he divorced Mama, of course, and he sent checks on my birthday, but I'd seen him maybe half a dozen times when he died. He never met my kids."

  That was sad. I was still trying to have a child. My gynecologist said women athletes sometimes have problems conceiving, but I'd given up basketball five years before, so I wasn't sure I bought the diagnosis. "How many children do you have?"

  "Three." Bianca made a rueful face. "'Children.' Fee is twenty-two--that's Fiona, our first. The twins are twenty and coming home from Pepperdine next week. So they're not exactly babies. I was twenty when Fee was born and too damned young to be a mother. Anyway, five years ago my father left me most of his money. It's a hairy responsibility."