Hen of the Baskervilles

by Donna Andrews

  With that she wafted off to the other end of the tent.

  “I heard that.” It was Dorcas, the winemaker whose booth was so near Genette’s. “And she’s right. None of us would ever kill someone by poisoning their wine, and we wouldn’t kill her in your mother’s pavilion.”

  “I’d use some other kind of poison,” suggested the winemaker whose booth Mother and Michael had been improving. “I doubt if there’s a vineyard in the state that doesn’t have some kind of nasty fungicides lying around. Probably on a back shelf, because the stuff’s been outlawed, and we haven’t figured out how to dispose of it safely and legally. Why not dust a little on her fried dough?”

  “Fried dough now?” Josh suggested.

  “Fried dough soon,” I said.

  “Have some raisins,” Dorcas said, offering a bowlful. “Organic,” she added to me.

  That proved a popular suggestion. Both boys grabbed handfuls and began devouring the raisins.

  “Could we kill her with her own speakers?” Dorcas said. “Tie her up, put her in a soundproof room with them, turn up the volume, and see if sound can kill.”

  “It doesn’t.” The other winemaker shook his head. “Just makes you crazy, and she’s already that. But yeah, you could use the speakers. Just drop one on her. But not here. Do it at that fair she’s putting on next month.”

  “What fair?” I asked.

  “I can’t do it at her fair,” Dorcas said. “Because there’s no way I’m going to her trashy event. Here.” She handed me a mustard-yellow flyer. “I only took one because I thought maybe you folks would like to know about it.”

  The flyer was for something called the “Virginia Agricultural Exposition,” “a statewide celebration of the agricultural riches of the Old Dominion.” It was hard to read and not very professional looking, which probably meant that she’d used the same so-called cutting edge graphic designer who’d done her wine labels and her booth.

  Interesting that at the bottom of the flyer was Brett Riordan’s name and contact information. And he was listed as the chairman of the Virginia Agricultural Exposition Committee.

  I was willing to bet that the real head of the committee was Genette. And that if there was anyone other than her and Brett on the committee, they were her tame minions.

  “What about a corkscrew?” Dorcas was saying. “One of those big old wrought-iron antique ones that nobody uses anymore except to hang on the wall and look pretty.”

  “If we’re talking antique tools, how about a scythe or a sickle?” the other winemaker suggested. “Doing it with a corkscrew is a lot more work.”

  “Good thing we know they’re not serious,” Michael said, in an undertone.

  “Do we?”

  He shrugged.

  “It’s the ones who aren’t venting and getting it out of their systems that I’d be worried about,” he said. “Well, now that I’ve taken care of your mother’s chores, the boys and I should be running along. If you need us, we’ll be staffing the llama exhibit.”

  “What about the children’s concert?” I asked.

  “Already over,” he said.

  “Over?” I looked at my watch. “Oh, no. Were the boys too disappointed that I didn’t make it?”

  “Old MacDonald had a farm,” Jamie sang.

  “The ants go marching one by one.” Josh countered.

  “They were at first,” Michael said over the increasing din of the dueling songs. “But I told them that Mayor Randall had left you in charge of the whole fair. They were very impressed. Now, whenever they want something to be different, they say, ‘Mommy fix soon.’”

  “Fix now,” Jamie corrected.

  “So what changes do they want?”

  “Free cotton candy,” Josh suggested

  “And more frequent pig races.” Michael gave me a quick kiss and strolled off.

  I stared at the flyer again.

  “Meg, dear.”

  Mother had returned.

  “She’s still not there.” I couldn’t recall the last time I’d seen Mother so impatient.

  “She’ll be back,” I said. “Meanwhile there’s something else I wanted to show you. Have you seen this?” I held up the flyer.

  “Virginia Agricultural Exposition,” Mother read. “How nice. I’ve never been that fond of the whole Un-fair name. Whoever thought of this name—”

  “Genette,” I said.

  “—was at least making an effort to come up with an elegant name,” Mother said. “Not, of course a successful effort—too pretentious, but…”

  She shrugged.

  “Nice recovery.” I handed her the flyer and she studied it. “Nothing that much wrong with the name, but apparently she’s going around trying to convince everyone who’s here to come to her fair instead.”

  “Actually, it lists Brett Riordan as the contact person,” Mother pointed out.

  “But it’s being held at her winery, and you can bet it’s being done with her money,” I said.

  “Then she’s wasting her money.” Another winemaker had come up behind us and was studying the flyer over our shoulders with a slight frown on his face.

  “You don’t think people will come?” I asked. “There’s going to be a competition. Aren’t ribbons and medals good advertising?”

  “She doesn’t actually say who will be judging the competition,” the winemaker said. “What if we all show up and she has some flunky judge the competition and award her a lot of the medals?”

  “Can she do that?” I asked. “Who judges wine competitions, anyway?” I was looking at Mother. I’d given her free rein to organize all the wine events. I suddenly found myself worried that she’d just recruited a trio of relatives who liked wine.

  “Some competitions use judges certified by a group like the American Wine Society,” the winemaker said. “They go through a three-year training program, and they’d better know a lot about wine going in.”

  “That’s who we’re using, dear,” Mother said. “We have three very prestigious nationally known judges.”

  “An impressive set of judges.” The winemaker was nodding his approval.

  I reminded myself never to doubt Mother on what she considered the important things in life, like wine, gourmet food, and interior decoration.

  “That’s why I insisted that we put our judges up at the Caerphilly Inn,” Mother said.

  “It was the quality of your judges that convinced a lot of us to come,” the winemaker said. “We realized you were serious about making this a good event.”

  I nodded and filed this away to use the next time Randall complained about the expense of the judges’ hotel rooms.

  “Some events just recruit from the industry, the trade, and the press,” the winemaker went on. “People who make wine, sell wine, or write about it. That’s okay, too, as long as nobody’s judging anything in which they have a financial interest. But absent any information on who’s doing the judging, there’s nothing to prevent Genette from rigging the contest in her favor. And nobody wants to help her pull off a scam like that.”

  “You really think she’d do something that obvious?” I asked.

  “She already has.” He indicated her booth with a nod of his head. “See the banner?”

  Strung above her booth was a bubblegum-pink and mustard-yellow banner proclaiming that she was selling “award-winning wines!”

  “The only awards we know of that she’s won are a couple of fourth-place medals at her county fair,” he said. “And that was in categories where there were only four entries. She claims to have won a first place at a competition held by the Shenandoah Oenophilic Society, but none of us have ever heard of it, so we think it’s bogus.”

  Just then Genette walked in.

  “She’s back,” I murmured.

  “Excellent,” Mother said. “I have decided it would be better to catch her actually committing an infraction. It shouldn’t take long.”

  As we watched, Genette flicked a few specks of dust off
her counter, cast a venomous glance at the booth to her left, which was crowded with chattering tasters and customers, and then hastily rearranged her face into a smile when two couples stopped in front of her booth. She sashayed out from behind the counter and began batting her eyes at the two men, to the visible distaste of the two women.

  “Getting back to your question,” the winemaker said. “No. Do not expect to see a fabulous wine pavilion at the Virginia Agricultural Exposition.”

  He nodded and returned to his booth, which was not festooned with gaudy banners advertising the awards his winery had won. He did have them listed on relatively small plaques attached to the front of the booth. They filled five of the plaques, and there wasn’t much room left on the sixth.

  “He makes nice wines,” Mother said. “Very nice indeed.”

  I hoped by now the winemakers had figured out that Mother’s “very nice indeed” was equivalent to most people’s “fabulous.”

  “Special occasion wines,” she added.

  Which meant they were not only fabulously good, but also fabulously priced.

  “But that’s not why I called you,” Mother said. “He’s back.”

  “Who?”

  “Remember that man I told you about? The suspicious one?”

  Had Mother reported a suspicious person earlier today? I didn’t actually remember, but in the wake of the thefts and vandalism, she’d have been in a very small minority if she hadn’t reported at least one suspicious person.

  “Remind me what he was doing that was suspicious.”

  “Precisely what he’s doing now,” Mother said. “Standing over there, staring fixedly at the wine tent.”

  She led me to the entrance and we stepped outside, as if to have a private conversation.

  “Don’t stare,” she said. “He’s right over there beside that bank of trash cans.”

  “Wearing the navy-blue windbreaker. I see him.”

  “He’s been there on and off all day.”

  “I’ll check him out.” I wouldn’t have called him suspicious. Morose, maybe. But if he was making the exhibitors nervous, I’d check him out.

  “Thank you, dear.” Mother strode back into the tent.

  I checked my watch and then set off toward the trash cans in a matter-of-fact manner, looking not at them but at the tent beyond them. But I could see the lurker out of the corner of my eye.

  Then an enormous overalls-clad figure stepped between me and my target.

  “Are you the fair director?” he asked. “I need to talk to you.”

  Chapter 13

  I tried to keep the lurker in view, but the man in overalls was at least six feet six, almost as wide, and completely blocked my view of him.

  “I’m the assistant director,” I said. “What can I do for you?”

  “I just heard about the problems,” he said.

  “Problems?” As I talked, I shaded my eyes and edged slightly to one side, as if the glare made it uncomfortable to look up at him.

  “All these thefts,” he said. “I need to make sure my Romeldales are safe.”

  I found myself wishing, for at least the tenth time since the fair had started, that farmers would at least try to remember that the rest of us weren’t necessarily that familiar with all the heritage breeds. Would it kill him to say “Romeldale chickens” or “Romeldale goats” or “Romeldale apples”?

  “We’re taking every precaution to make sure that all the exhibits are safe,” I said. “I’ve been inspecting all the buildings this morning, and apart from the three initial incidents, we’ve had no other reports of any kind of theft or vandalism—not so much as a pea in the produce tent.”

  “My wife’s in the craft barn—she spins the fleeces into wool and exhibits the skeins—and she heard about that poor woman whose quilt was vandalized.”

  Aha. If Romeldales had fleeces, odds were they were sheep.

  “We’ve got extra security there as well. And—are your Romeldales in the main sheep barn?”

  He nodded. Sheep, then.

  “My husband and I are there ourselves,” I said. “We’re camping out with our llamas, and helping our next-door neighbor keep an eye on his Lincolns.”

  To anyone else, I would have said Lincoln sheep, but someone who kept one heritage sheep breed had probably heard of the others—and if he hadn’t, he could get a taste of how confused the rest of us were at all the heritage breed name-dropping.

  “We’re going to have volunteer patrols out tonight, and they’ll be organized out of our end of the sheep barn,” I went on. “So while I wouldn’t brag about it to the cow or pig people, the sheep will get a little bit of extra protection.”

  He departed, much calmer. But by the time I’d finished reassuring him, the morose man in the blue windbreaker had disappeared.

  I turned and headed for the show office, but I ran into Randall halfway there.

  “Mother’s dealing with Genette,” I said. “Have you seen this?”

  I handed Randall Shiffley the flyer for the Virginia Agricultural Exposition. He frowned thunderously.

  “No,” he said. “But I’ve heard about it. That Brett Riordan fellow has been handing them out to all the exhibitors.”

  “Do you think it’s a threat?” I asked “To the Un-fair, I mean.”

  He pondered a moment, then shook his head. It wasn’t a “no” kind of shake, more like “who knows?”

  “Doesn’t look like one to me,” he said. “But I might be too close to the whole thing. I don’t think it’s going over that big with the farmers. Riordan doesn’t know beans about farming. Someone asked him if the events at his fair were going to be FFV-endorsed and he didn’t even know it stood for Future Farmers of Virginia. But I understand he’s connected to the wine community. If the winemakers come in big on his event, it could be trouble for us.”

  “His only connection is that he’s dating a winemaker that every other winemaker in the state hates,” I said. “So the smart money says the winemakers will be staying away in droves.”

  “Let’s hope it turns out that way.”

  “I think it will,” I said. “Remember how Mother convinced us we needed to get the best possible wine judges and put them up in the Caerphilly Inn?”

  “I hope it was worth it,” he said.

  “It will be.” I explained the winemakers’ distrust of Genette’s intentions, and Mother’s decision to recruit nationally known judges.

  “How do the official state fair’s wine judges measure up to ours?” Randall asked.

  “They might be as good, but they can’t possibly be better.”

  “Great,” he said. “Well, I’m off to pick up that country singer.”

  “Now?” I looked at my watch. “I thought she wasn’t performing until this evening.”

  “Taking her over to the college to do a radio interview,” Randall said. “Apparently she’s a little cranky about being in a town without a Starbucks, and I’m going to see if having the mayor himself as a chauffeur impresses her much. You’re in charge.”

  He ambled off, head swiveling to check out every detail as he passed.

  No doubt some emergency would crop up as soon as he left, but in the meantime, I decided to drop by the poultry barns to see how things were going there. Earlier, the mood had been tense and anxious in all three barns, but I was hoping now that the fair had begun and admiring visitors were thronging the tents, things would have calmed down.

  And that seemed to be the case in the duck barn. People were feeding and grooming their own ducks, inspecting each other’s ducks, and trading bits of duck-related advice and gossip.

  “—don’t take his word for it—he wouldn’t know a Buff Orpington from a Muscovy—”

  “—you need to adjust their feed—they need a lot more protein when they’re laying—”

  “—I always use a broody hen—I just don’t think you give the poor ducklings a proper start when you stick the eggs under an incubator—”

  “�
�she’s going to let me know when she starts selling some of the ducklings—”

  “—sounds as if you need to worm them—”

  “—yes, but the eggs are supposed to be that color in a Cayuga—”

  I had to admit that the variety of ducks in the barn was an eye opener to someone who’d grown up knowing only fuzzy yellow ducklings and fluffy white ducks. There were plenty of ordinary white domestic ducks, but also beige ducks, brown ducks, black ducks, iridescent beetle-green ducks, blue-and-white ducks, and ducks whose color I would have described as “brown tweed,” although I doubted that was the official term.

  I paused to admire a display of ducklings that was a popular attraction for the children attending the fair. The ducklings seemed to be having a great time, swimming around in a little pool, climbing out, waddling up a long, shallow ramp, and then sliding down a slide to land in the pool again with a plop.

  “I should bring my kids to watch this,” I said to a woman leading a little girl not much older than Josh and Jamie.

  “Only if you want to have them nag you for the next year about getting their own ducklings,” she said.

  “We could keep them in our tub,” the little girl said. “They’d like it in our tub.”

  The woman rolled her eyes. She had a point. Did I really want to take care of ducks on top of five llamas, two toddlers, two dogs, and a husband?

  But they were cute. Maybe I could talk Dad into getting some ducks.

  The goose and turkey barn was also—well, not exactly calm. If you stood in the middle of the tent, you could hear a deafening chorus of honking from one end and frenzied gobbling from the other. But the human inhabitants were busy and cheerful, if a little too ready to brag about their charges.

  I heard several goose owners asserting that their birds weren’t ill-tempered and noisy and didn’t produce copious amounts of manure, while nearby other goose fanciers were touting their geese as expert sentinels and extolling the lush state their lawns could achieve when fertilized by geese.

  The heritage breed turkey fanciers all seemed inordinately proud of the fact that their birds were all capable of breeding without artificial insemination. Or maybe they were just relieved.