DAD DROPPED BY THE NEXT MORNING WITH FRESH FRUIT. HE WAS looking much better, smiling and humming to himself. Obsession obviously suited him.
“Oh, by the way, I’m going to borrow Great-Aunt Sophy,” he said, trotting into the living room.
“You’re going to what?” I said, following him.
“Borrow Great-Aunt Sophy.”
“I wouldn’t if I were you; Mother is very fond of that vase,” I said, watching nervously as Dad lifted down the very fragile antique Chinese urn that held Great-Aunt Sophy’s ashes.
“Oh, not the vase, just her. I’m sure she wouldn’t mind.”
“What makes you think Mother won’t mind?”
“I meant Sophy,” Dad said, carrying the vase out into the kitchen. “We won’t tell your mother.”
“I know I won’t,” I muttered. “Here, let me take that.” Dad had tucked the vase carelessly under his arm and was rummaging through the kitchen cabinets. “What are you looking for?”
“Something to put her in.”
I found him an extra-large empty plastic butter tub, and he transferred Great-Aunt Sophy’s ashes to it. Although ashes seemed rather a misnomer. I’d never seen anyone’s ashes before and wondered if Great-Aunt Sophy’s were typical; there seemed to be quite a lot of large chunks of what I presumed were bone. After Dad finished
the transfer, I cleaned his fingerprints off the vase and put it back, being careful to position it precisely in the little dust-free ring it had come from. I still didn’t know what he was going to do with Great-Aunt Sophy. I assumed he’d tell me when he couldn’t hold it in any longer. He trotted off with the butter tub in one hand, whistling “Loch Lomond.”
I decided that vendors and peacock farmers were not apt to call on a Sunday and went over to Pam’s at noon for dinner. Pam had air-conditioning.
“What on earth is your father up to?” Mother asked as we were sitting down.
“What do you mean, up to?” I asked, startled. Had some neighbor told her about Dad’s visit earlier that morning? Could Dad have revealed to someone what he was carrying around in the plastic butter tub?
“He went down to the Town Crier office yesterday, and even though it was almost closing time, he insisted they drag out a whole lot of back issues.”
“Back issues from the summer before last? While he was in Scotland?”
“Why, yes. How ever did you know that?”
“Just a wild guess,” I said, feeling rather pleased with myself for putting together the clues. Dad was obviously pursuing the theory that Mrs. Grover’s murder had something to do with something that had happened while he was away. Though what Great-Aunt Sophy, who had been quietly reposing in Mother’s living room for three or four years, could possibly have to do with current events was beyond me. I couldn’t think of anything odd that had happened that summer. No deaths other than people who were definitely sick or definitely old.
Or definitely both, like Jake’s late wife.
How very odd.
Could Dad possibly suspect Jake of killing his wife? And if so,
what could it possibly have to do with Mrs. Grover’s death, for which Jake, at least, had a complete alibi?
Perhaps he suspected someone else of killing the late Mrs. Wendell. Someone who also had a motive for killing Mrs. Grover? And of course, if someone was knocking off the women in Jake’s life, Dad would certainly want to do something about it, in case Mother were at risk.
At least I assumed he did. I toyed briefly with the notion of Dad going off the deep end and trying to frame Jake for his late wife’s murder so he could get Mother back. And then disposing of Mrs. Grover when she found out his plot.
Or Mother, knocking off Mrs. Wendell in order to get her hands on Jake, and then doing away with the suspicious Mrs. Grover who called her a blond hussy and tried to stop the marriage.
I sighed. Dad couldn’t possibly carry off such a scheme; he’d have been visibly bursting with enthusiasm and would have dropped what he thought were indecipherable hints to all and sundry. Mother would never have done anything that required that much effort; she’d have tried to enlist someone else to do it for her.
No, I couldn’t see either parent as a murderer. But then, I was a biased witness. For that matter, like most children, I had a hard time seeing my parents as sexual beings, despite the evidence of Pam, Rob, and myself. Perhaps I was missing all the telltale signs of a passionate geriatric love triangle being played out in front of my nose.
I glanced over at suspect number one. She was looking at me with a faint frown of genuine concern on her face.
“Are you all right, Meg?” she asked.
“A little tired,” I lied. “The weather, I’m sure.”
“Perhaps you should stay here this afternoon, where it’s cooler. Jake and I are going over to have tea with Mrs. Fenniman, so you’ll have some quiet. Or you could come with us; Mrs. Fenniman’s air-conditioning is working.”
I was touched by her concern, but realized in that instant that I had other plans for the afternoon.
“No, I have a few things to do.” With Jake and Mother safely out of the way, I was going to play detective. After all, if Dad could do it, why not me?
I waited until Mother and Jake took off. Then I grabbed an unfamiliar-looking dish—one that I could plausibly claim I had mistaken for something of Jake’s—and trotted over to his house. Quite openly; just one neighbor returning another’s pie plate.
I knocked, in case someone was there. Then I reached out, heart pounding, to open the door.
Which was locked. Unheard of. People in Yorktown don’t lock their doors.
Searching Jake’s house was going to be a little harder than I thought. I wandered around to the back door, calling “yoo-hoo” very quietly. The back door was locked, too.
But he’d left the window by the back door open.
I had pried open the screen and was halfway in the window when I heard a voice behind me.
“Lost your key?”
I started, hitting my head on the window frame, and turned to find Michael behind me. Holding Spike’s leash.
“I know what this looks like,” I began, turning to look over my shoulder and lifting the tips of my sneakers out of Spike’s reach.
“To me, it looks very much as if you’ve been reading too many of the same books your dad has. And why Jake? Isn’t he the one local who’s not a suspect? Or is this only one in a series of clandestine searches?”
“He’s not a suspect, but he has a whole roomful of the victim’s stuff. I want to see Mrs. Grover’s stuff.”
“Surely the sheriff took any important evidence?”
“The sheriff wouldn’t know important evidence if it walked into his office and introduced itself. Look, either call the cops or
go away; I’m getting very uncomfortable hanging half-in and half-out of this window.”
“I have a better idea,” Michael said. “I’ll give you a cover story. Here.” He picked up Spike and, before the little beast could react, tossed him over my leg into the house. Spike shook himself, looked around, and then ran out of sight, growling all the way.
“You were helping me retrieve Spike,” Michael said, offering me a leg up and then jumping nimbly in after me. “Don’t ask how he got into Mr. Wendell’s house. The place obviously needs to be vermin-proofed.”
Now that I’d succeeded in getting in, I felt temporarily disoriented. I had a whole house to search, and I had no idea what I was looking for.
Of course there wasn’t that much to search. It was a rather bare house. There seemed to be even less furniture and fewer decorations than the last time I’d seen it, just after Mrs. Grover disappeared. I reached under the sink and fortunately found a pair of kitchen gloves.
“Here,” I said, handing them to Michael. “You wear these. I brought my own.”
“So where do we start?” he asked, following me from the kitchen into the living room.
“I’ll look in the guest room,” I said, more decisively than I felt. “You search his desk.”
“What am I looking for?”
“How should I know? Discrepancies. Anomalies. The missing will. Blunt objects still bearing telltale traces of hair and blood. We’re working blind here.”
Michael chuckled and sat down at Jake’s desk. He began deftly rummaging through the desk, whistling “Secret Agent Man” almost inaudibly.
“Smart aleck,” I said, and went into the guest room.
It wasn’t a complete loss. I continued to be amazed at the
number of small, portable valuables Mrs. Grover had appropriated while at Jake’s. I did find an envelope containing two thousand dollars in cash, mostly in hundreds. Perhaps evidence of a blackmail scheme, although it must have been a penny-ante one if this was all she had collected. Still, perhaps she had been stopped before she’d hit her stride. Then again, perhaps she just didn’t believe in traveler’s checks. And I found nothing else of interest. No diary with a last entry announcing her intent to meet X on the bluff before dawn. No list of suspects’ names with payoff amounts jotted beside them. No incriminating letters or photos. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Well, one thing out of the ordinary. I found the late Emma Wendell. What remained of her, anyway. I opened a rather nondescript box marked Emma, expecting to find another piece of silver or china bric-a-brac and found something greatly resembling Great-Aunt Sophy, only slightly less lumpy.
“Yuck!” I said, rather loudly. Michael was at my side in an instant.
“What is it?” he asked eagerly.
“The first Mrs. Wendell.”
“I see,” he said, showing no inclination to do so. “Is this significant?”
“Not that I know of.” Although it began to give me ideas about why Dad had borrowed Great-Aunt Sophy.
“Let’s leave her in peace, then. What else have you found?”
I showed him the cash, which he agreed was poor pickings for a blackmailer. He showed me his findings. Sales receipts, complete with the date and time, that tended to confirm Jake’s alibi rather thoroughly. A bank book and other papers showing that Jake was in no danger of starving no matter how many valuable little knickknacks the late Jane Grover had purloined. An envelope marked Jane containing a key to a self-storage unit and a neatly itemized list of oriental rugs, antique furniture, and other objects
that were certainly more than knickknacks. Another envelope marked Safety Deposit containing a key and an impressive itemized list of jewelry. I made a mental note to suggest that the sheriff see who inherited Mrs. Grover’s estate. A framed certificate of appreciation on the occasion of Jake’s retirement from Waltham Consultants, Inc., whatever that was. Neat stacks of promptly paid bills and perfectly balanced bank books.
“Commendably businesslike,” Michael said.
“But not very illuminating,” I said. I stood up and looked around. “Something’s missing here.”
“Like any sign that the man has a personality.” Michael had wandered over to the shelves on either side of the fireplace. They were largely empty, except for a few pieces of bric-a-brac that were presumably either too large for Mrs. Grover to hide or too cheap for her to bother with. There were maybe two dozen books, all paperback copies of recent best-sellers.
“Doesn’t he have any more books?” Michael asked.
“Good question.”
We looked. Not in the guest room. Not in the bedroom, which looked more lived in than the rest of the house but still depressingly tidy. Not in the dining room or the upstairs bath or the kitchen. Not in the basement, where Spike lay in wait for us under the water heater, growling. Not in the attic.
“Depressing,” I said. “Irrelevant, but depressing.”
Just then we heard a car go by, and peering out, I saw it was Jake’s.
“We’d better leave; Jake may drop Mother off and come back soon,” I said.
We lured Spike out from under the furnace and left the way we came.
“That was a bust,” Michael said.
“Well, we do have corroboration for his alibi.”
“I thought we had that already.”
“The sheriff had it,” I said. “Now that I’ve seen it myself, I believe it.”
And, as I admitted to myself before falling asleep that night, I was more than a little hoping to find some evidence against Jake because deep down I just didn’t like him. How much of that was justifiable and how much due to my resentment that he was taking Dad’s place, I didn’t know. But I had to admit, I’d found nothing against him, other than further confirmation that he was a bland, boring cipher.
I pondered the other, more viable suspects. I could certainly find the opportunity to sneak into Samantha’s room … Barry’s van … even Michael’s mother’s house, although if I were seriously considering him a suspect, I had already made a big mistake by letting him find out I was snooping. Two big mistakes if you counted letting him paw through Jake’s things. It all seemed rather pointless.
“I give up,” I told myself. “Let Dad do the detecting. I have three weddings to organize.”