Hen of the Baskervilles

by Donna Andrews

  The young woman pulled something out of her purse and was shaking it in Genette’s face. Genette was visibly having trouble focusing on it, so I leaned around to see what it was. A photograph of a baby, probably a newborn, wearing one of the little yellow knit hats they put on them in the delivery room. “Cranky bishop hats,” Michael and I had called them. I had pictures of Josh and Jamie at that age in identical hats.

  “You’re a killer!” the young woman wailed. “Brett said he was going to tell you yesterday, and look what happened!”

  I glanced around to see two sleek, gray-haired waiters frozen in shock, while the wine judges had all turned around to stare with unabashed fascination.

  “Who the hell are you?” Genette sounded puzzled.

  The young woman burst into tears, turned, and began running away.

  “Madam!” One of the waiters took a few futile steps in pursuit of the young woman, who increased her speed and escaped into the lobby. The other waiter came over to our table.

  “Who was she?” Genette asked. She still sounded more puzzled than upset or angy.

  The waiter frowned at us as if he really wanted to ask the same question.

  “Does madam require any assistance in returning to her room?” he said aloud.

  “I think they’re cutting you off,” I told Genette. “Let me help you.”

  “Bastards.” Genette didn’t sound surprised though. More resigned. “Who was that woman?”

  She asked the same question at least a dozen times in the time it took me to help her out of the restaurant, through the lobby, out the back door, and down a short walkway to her cottage. By the time I dumped her on her bed, the young woman’s words appeared to have finally sunk in. When I reached to pull her shoe off, she kicked me.

  “Why didn’t you tell me he was cheating on me?” she wailed. “After all I did for him!”

  She began spitting out a stream of bitter and increasingly obscene invective against Brett and the unknown young woman, all the while kicking viciously in my general direction. After a few sentences, I realized she was starting to confuse me with the young woman, so I decided to get out while the getting was good.

  “Sleep in your shoes, then,” I said.

  Before leaving, I checked the bathroom, the closet, and the armoire. No chickens, and no telltale signs of recent chicken occupancy. Not that I expected any, but you never knew, and at least I could honestly tell the Bonnevilles I’d tried. I turned the bedside light out, then went to the door. I paused and listened for a few minutes, in case she said anything of interest, like, “Now I’m really glad I killed you, you jerk!” or “And after I stole those bantam chickens you wanted!” But her rant was repetitive and uninteresting, except for the couple of times that she shrieked “I’ll kill him when I get my hands on him!” As if she’d forgotten Brett was already dead.

  I stepped out into the hallway, pulled the door closed, took a deep breath, and called the chief.

  “I have another suspect for you,” I said.

  Chapter 28

  The chief sent out an APB on the unwed mother, and suggested that he would appreciate talking to me when I got back to the fair. Within half an hour I was in the fair office, seated in one of our uncomfortable folding chairs.

  “We’d have a lot better chance of locating this young woman if we had a more specific description,” the chief was saying. “Young and wearing blue jeans and a t-shirt doesn’t help much.”

  I winced.

  “I can’t really tell you much more,” I said.

  “Try,” the chief said.

  “I am trying. But I didn’t really get a good look at her.”

  “You were able to recall a fairly lengthy conversation,” he said. “Are you telling me you weren’t looking at her all that time?”

  “I was looking at her,” I said. “But we were in the very back of the restaurant at the Caerphilly Inn. The part where they put guests when they approve of your wallet but not your wardrobe. The part where the menus ought to be printed in braille. The part—”

  “Understood,” the chief said. “You can’t give me the kind of precise description I could normally count on you for. But any details you can remember would help.”

  I closed my eyes and took several deep breaths. I pretended I was walking into the Caerphilly Inn again. I replayed my conversation with Genette. And then we heard the cry of “Hussy!” and we’d both looked up and saw her. I tried to remember if there was anything memorable about her hair, her eyes, the shape of her face, her mouth, her nose—

  “A ski jump,” I said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “She had a nose like a ski jump,” I said. “Long and sloping and with a little upward swoop at the end. It was very distinctive.”

  “Ski jump,” I heard the chief mutter, as his pen scratched in his notebook. “Anything else?”

  “Shorter than me.”

  Which wasn’t much help, because at five ten, I was taller than most women. The chief refrained from saying so.

  “You were sitting, she was standing,” he said instead. “Can you show me about how far above you her head was?”

  I held up my hand. But then I wobbled it a bit to emphasize that I wasn’t sure how accurate I was being.

  “I’d make that about five foot five inches, give or take. What do you remember about her shape.”

  “Average,” I said.

  He waited in silence while I continued to replay the scene in my head.

  “Hair’s brown, I think. Medium color, medium length, a little on the poufy side. She might have acne.”

  “You don’t know whether you saw acne or not?” His voice held a trace of exasperation.

  “I might not have spotted leprosy in that light, but she wore her hair pulled over her face. She was just peering out from this tangled cave of hair. Some girls do that to hide acne. Then again, some just think it’s cool.”

  I heard the faint skitter of his pen.

  “And she’s probably from Virginia,” I added. “Not that far from here, at a guess.”

  “You could see that?”

  “I could hear it.” I opened my eyes. “Her accent. Not a Tidewater accent. Could be from the mountains. Or a country accent from the Piedmont. Probably not from Caerphilly; it’s a little too heavy. But not that far away.”

  “Would you recognize her if you saw her again?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Probably, if I could hear her talk.”

  “Keep your eyes and ears open, then,” he said. “And if you do recognize her, call me. Don’t confront her.”

  I nodded.

  “I’d like you to work with Horace on doing a composite sketch,” the chief said.

  “Horace is a sketch artist now?” I said. “Cool.”

  “No, but he’s got some kind of software he’d been nagging me for months now to let him try.” This time the exasperation was more than faint. “And this is the first time in months we’ve wanted to find someone and didn’t just have a photograph we could circulate.”

  He stood up and turned to Vern.

  “I’ll be over at the Caerphilly Inn,” he said.

  “The lobby’s better lit,” I said. “Maybe the doorman or the desk clerk got a better look at her.”

  “Find Horace,” the chief told Vern. “And tell him to bring his laptop. We want him to use that crime scene sketch artist program to do a likeness we can use in that APB.”

  “You think she’s a suspect?” Vern asked.

  “For now we’re just considering her a potential witness,” the chief said. “But when Horace finishes his sketch, I want you to take a look at it and have Plunkett do the same. If she’s from around here, odds are one of you will recognize her.”

  But an hour later, after Horace and I had produced our masterpiece, both Vern and Plunkett shook their heads.

  “Looks vaguely familiar,” Vern said. “But I can’t place her.”

  “I think you got the nose wrong.” Plunkett fro
wned and shook his head at our drawing. “Nobody really has a nose like that.”

  But I stood my ground on the nose. I could see it so clearly, emerging from the tangle of hair.

  Or did I only want to believe I could see it because it was really the only distinctive thing about the drawing Horace and I had labored so hard to produce?

  I even called in Rob to take a look at it, on the theory that if a young woman was even moderately attractive—and the unwed mother was, in spite of the odd nose—Rob would have noticed her.

  “Sorry,” he said. “I don’t remember seeing her. But I’ll keep my eyes peeled.”

  “Well, so much for the drawing,” I said to Vern. “On a happier note, I have the signed contract and a check for your cousins.”

  “Fantastic. We owe you one. Want me to take it to them?”

  “That’d be great.” I handed him the manila folder. “You might want to warn them to hold off a little about actually delivering her stuff.”

  “They’re just hauling it back to the office for storage,” he said. “We’re sure as heck going to wait until her check clears before we let any of it out of our hands.”

  “Yes, you said that,” I said. “But that wasn’t what I was thinking of.” I relayed what had just happened at the Caerphilly Inn, though not in as much detail as I’d given the chief.

  “So maybe the contents of Genette’s booth might just have become a lot more interesting to you and the chief,” I suggested. “Maybe she wasn’t as drunk as I thought, and was only pretending not to recognize Brett’s new girlfriend. That would make her a suspect, wouldn’t it?”

  “Genette’s always been a suspect,” Vern said. “Someone gets knocked off, we look first at the significant others—legal or otherwise. So the contents of her booth were already very interesting to us, which is why I closely supervised every single bit of the packing. Me and my digital video camera. Didn’t find anything that seemed relevant to the murder, but the movies will still be useful if she tries to claim we broke anything. And she looks like the type who might.”

  “Agreed,” I said. “And there’s also the fact that she was drunk as a skunk when she signed the contract and the check. I have no idea if that matters.”

  “Could invalidate the contract,” Rob said.

  “Oh, great.” Vern held up the manila folder and shook it. “Does that mean we have to get her to sign this thing all over again?”

  “I’m not a contract specialist,” Rob said. He had, in fact, never actually practiced law, in spite of graduating from the University of Virginia’s prestigious law school and passing the bar exam on his first try. “But I think it’ll be fine if you get her to initial an amended contract tomorrow. If you decided it wasn’t quite as involved as you expected and knocked a couple of hundred off the price, she’d probably sign in a heartbeat. You might want to run that by your own attorney, just to be sure.”

  “Great idea,” Vern said. “Thanks.”

  “Just when I think you didn’t learn anything in law school, you surprise me,” I said.

  “Is that like an apology for telling people I flunked the bar exam?” Rob asked.

  I winced.

  “I never told anyone you flunked the bar exam,” I said. “I probably did tell a few people I wasn’t sure you ever bothered to show up for it, but that’s completely different. And for the record, you have my apology.”

  “But I told you I passed it.” Rob didn’t look angry. More puzzled.

  “Yes, but I thought you only said that to stop all of us from nagging you about when you were going to take it,” I explained. “That’s what I’d have done if I’d finished law school and decided I was never going to practice and taking the bar exam would be a waste of time.”

  “Wow. When you put it that way, it almost sounds like a compliment.” Rob ambled off, looking mollified.

  I sat at my desk in the temporarily empty trailer and pondered what I’d heard from Vern. To my surprise, I realized that I wasn’t disappointed to hear that they hadn’t found incriminating evidence in Genette’s booth.

  Much as I wanted the chief to find some evidence that would clear Molly, I didn’t want them to arrest Genette instead.

  “She didn’t do it,” I muttered to myself.

  I was glad no one heard me and expected me to justify the statement, because I couldn’t have—not in any logical way.

  I pulled out my notebook and was looking to see if there were any urgent tasks that had fallen by the wayside while I was at the inn when my cell phone rang.

  It was Randall.

  “Meg, could you come over to the chicken tent?” he said. “We’ve had another theft.”

  Chapter 29

  Back at the chicken tent, I found Randall introducing the chief to a familiar-looking farmer.

  “Mr. Beamish here tells me his chickens were stolen this afternoon,” Randall said, by way of introduction to me and the chief.

  “This afternoon?” I echoed. “But weren’t there— Oh, no!” I suddenly realized who Mr. Beamish was. “Not the Sumatrans!”

  Mr. Beamish nodded sadly.

  I realized I was feeling this a lot more personally than the theft of the Bonnevilles’ bantams. Perhaps because I didn’t remember actually seeing the missing Orloffs. But I’d seen the Sumatrans. I’d admired the proud elegance of the rooster’s long tail feathers. I’d stroked the hen’s soft feathers. I’d wondered if they would be the parents of the chicks Michael was arranging to buy. The Sumatrans were a lot more real to me.

  “Sumatrans?” the chief said.

  “Black Sumatran chickens,” Mr. Beamish said. “The ones I was showing Meg and her husband earlier today.”

  “Showing you why?” the chief asked me.

  “Michael and I were thinking of raising a few chickens,” I said. “And what better place than the fair to see all the available breeds and talk to the owners to find out what kind would suit us.”

  Which sounded a lot more grown-up than “I had a sudden crazy impulse to own some chickens, and since Michael was feeling guilty about all his serial llama purchases, he seized my impulse and ran with it.”

  “So someone stole the chickens you were thinking of buying?” the chief asked. I had to admit, if it was a coincidence it was a long one.

  “Not the actual chickens,” the farmer said.

  “We were going to buy some chicks,” I added. “From Mr. Beamish’s flock.”

  I suddenly wondered how big a flock he had. They were ornamental chickens, bred for show—would he have that many more at home to make new chicks? Even if he did, he’d almost certainly brought his best chickens to the fair.

  “I’m so sorry,” I said.

  Mr. Beamish nodded sadly.

  “But how did they get stolen in the middle of the afternoon?” the chief asked. “Didn’t anyone notice someone walking out with a pair of chickens under his arm?”

  “People walk out of here with chickens all the time,” Mr. Beamish said. “Every time there’s a chicken judging over at the show ring. Weren’t many people here when it happened, so maybe no one noticed the thief was walking out with someone else’s chickens. Most everyone was over at the show ring watching the competition. Youth division. All the FFV and 4-H kids showing the poultry they’ve raised. Our kids are grown, but I remember how proud they were when they showed their animals, so the wife and I went over to swell the crowd. Most of the other chicken people did the same. Thief must have known that.”

  Mr. Beamish was staring at the empty cage that had so recently held his beautiful Sumatrans. Around us, I could see that just about all the other people in the tent were either watching us out of the corner of their eyes or flat out staring. Just then Vern showed up. He glanced at the chief’s face and didn’t say anything.

  I could guess why the chief looked so thunderous. He always took it personally when any crime occurred in Caerphilly. And it was more than likely that whoever stole the chickens was hoping that the chief wouldn’t have
the resources to mount a full investigation on top of the already ongoing murder case. And that would anger the chief even more, because it was partly true. Investigating the thefts on top of the murder was going to be a stretch. And if you added in the possibility that the killer had also committed the chicken theft, in a deliberate attempt to distract the chief’s forces from the main goal …

  It probably didn’t help the chief’s mood that the black-clad Bonnevilles were lurking nearby like crows hovering over a choice new bit of roadkill, with smug looks on their face as if it didn’t exactly displease them to see someone else suffering as they had.

  “I’ll get Horace over here to do a thorough workup of the crime scene,” the chief said finally. “And we’ll start taking statements from the other occupants of the tent. All of them,” he said, glancing up at Vern.

  “You got it, Chief.” Vern was looking a little stern himself as he gazed around at the dozens of people he was about to interrogate. A few of the nearby chicken owners looked anxious. Vern was giving an excellent impression of a man who had too much prime jail space sitting vacant. He pulled out his cell phone and began calling other deputies to help.

  “Meg,” the chief said. “Can I speak to you a minute?”

  I nodded and followed him out of the tent.

  “Who else knew that you and Michael were taking an interest in these particular chickens?” he asked.

  “Just about anyone in the tent could have known we were taking an interest in chickens in general,” I said. “We weren’t making a big secret of it. Michael spent quite a bit of time interrogating various chicken owners about their birds, to help us figure out what kind to get. And he’d narrowed it down to two birds—the Sumatrans and another breed called Welsummers. You might want to see if anyone is missing any of those. I have no idea how many people knew we had narrowed it down to those two breeds. I suspect Michael didn’t want to make it too obvious in front of all the other chicken owners which breed we were favoring. You think the thief picked the Sumatrans because we were interested in them?”

  “There must be a couple hundred chickens in that tent,” he said. “And the thief picked one of a handful you and Michael were interested in? That’s a devil of a coincidence. And I don’t like coincidences.”