I SPENT THE MORNING PHONING TENT RENTAL COMPANIES AND THE afternoon tracking down a supplier for the mead that Steven and Eileen had decided was the only appropriate drink to serve at a Renaissance banquet.
I was tired by the end of the day, but the fact that Steven and Eileen had taken Barry with them to a craft fair in Richmond raised my spirits considerably. I decided to take the weekend off, doing only the most necessary tasks—like continuing to hunt for the errant calligrapher. And keeping an eye on Dad.
Which was harder that I thought. I tried to hunt him down after dinner, and he was definitely nowhere to be found. Not in our garden, not in his apartment over Pam’s garage, not in her garden. So I dropped in on Pam.
“Pam,” I said. “What’s Dad been up to recently?”
“Up to? Why, what should he be up to?”
“Has he been doing much gardening?”
“No, come to think of it, he hasn’t,” she said, looking out at the rather shaggy grass in the backyard. “That’s odd.”
“Has he been performing experiments?”
“What kind of experiments?”
“You know, chemical ones.”
“How would I know?”
“Noticed any funny smells? Heard any explosions?”
“No,” Pam said. “And he hasn’t been dragging home stray body parts, or putting out a giant lightning rod on the roof, or drinking strange potions and turning bad-tempered and hairy. What do you mean, experiments?”
“Never mind,” I said. “Can I borrow your key to the garage apartment?”
I wanted to check out Dad’s lair. I could always pretend that Pam had asked me to help her clean up.
There were several hundred books lying about, apparently in active use. Medical books. Criminology texts. Electricians’ manuals. Heaps of mysteries. Bound back issues of the Town Crier, the weekly local newspaper, for the past five years. All of them fairly stuffed with multicolored bookmarks. Dad’s messy little laboratory looked recently used. His bed didn’t. I saw no signs of Great-Aunt Sophy.
I sat down on the cleanest chair I could find with the old Town Criers and began checking out Dad’s bookmarks.
I found Emma Wendell’s obituary, two years ago this month. She’d died in her sleep of heart failure, following a long illness. She’d been quietly cremated and memorialized in a service at the nearby Methodist church. Jake and sister Jane were the only survivors.
I also reread the articles about what the Town Crier had called the “Ivy League Swindlers”—Samantha’s ex-fiancé and his friend. It had a list of local residents who had been bilked out of large sums. Including, I was surprised to note, Mrs. Fenniman, who was quoted as saying she’d lost a few hundred thousand and was glad they’d been exposed before she’d invested any real money with them. Interesting. I knew Mrs. Fenniman must be well off if she lived in our neighborhood; I’d had no idea she was that well off. And apparently Samantha’s father’s law firm had been involved as local legal counsel for the Miami-based swindlers—although the articles made it clear they had been duped just as the investors
had—in fact, had lost some of their own funds. I noticed only one very distant relative among the list of fleeced locals. Apparently Hollingworth solidarity had kept most of Mother’s family using one of the half-dozen relatives who were brokers or investment advisors. Lucky for us.
Dad had bookmarked all of these articles. He’d also bookmarked Mrs. Fenniman’s “Around Town” columns for the summer. I read them, too, but did not find any enlightenment in Mrs. Fenniman’s meticulous recountings of who entertained whom, who was engaged to whom, and who had returned from vacationing where.
I saw an interview with Michael’s mother on the opening of Be-Stitched. No picture, alas, and not much personal information. Widow of an army officer. She’d moved to Yorktown from Fort Lauderdale to be nearer her only child, Michael, who was an Associate Professor in the Theater Arts Department of Caerphilly College.
I was impressed. Caerphilly was a small college with a big reputation located about an hour’s drive north. Michael was doing all right.
As I moved back in time, I saw the occasional reference to people visiting Mrs. Wendell in the hospital or Mr. and Mrs. Jacob Wendell being honored for their generous donation to various local charities. Quite the philanthropist, Jake—or was it Emma? I checked the columns since her death. If Jake was still supporting the local charities he was doing it more quietly.
Moving still further back, I found a short article welcoming the Wendells to town. Emma Wendell was the daughter of a wealthy Connecticut state supreme court justice. Jake had just retired from Waltham Consultants, a Hartford-based engineering consulting firm where he’d held the post of senior executive administrative partner in the special projects training division. Whatever that might be. A desk jockeying bureaucrat, no doubt; it was hard to
picture Jake as an executive. They were overjoyed to be in Yorktown, and hoped that the milder winters would be good for Mrs. Wendell’s delicate health.
Beyond that, Dad had only marked the occasional article. One or two mentioning Mr. Brewster’s law firm. One or two about various neighbors and relatives. One about the use of natural plant dyes in colonial times that I presumed he’d marked because he’d found it interesting, not because it had anything to do with the case.
I didn’t feel I’d learned anything in particular. Dad’s investigation seemed to have been following the same frustrating dead-end paths as mine.
I thought of tidying up a bit, then thought better of it and returned the key to Pam.
On my way home, I ran into Eileen’s dad.
“Meg! Thank goodness!” he said. “I was looking for you.”
“Why, what’s wrong?”
“We’ve got to do something about these wedding presents!”
“What about them?”
“They’re all over the house, and people are starting to call to ask if we’ve gotten them. We need to do something.”
“Why doesn’t Eileen do something?”
A stricken look crossed Professor Donleavy’s face.
“She says she won’t have time, and asked me to take care of it. And I have no idea what to do.”
I thought he was overreacting, but I let him drag me back to the house and he was right: the presents were taking over the house. The professor had started piling them in the dining room, and had run out of room. The living room was filling up fast, and some of the larger things were overflowing into the den.
“I wish Eileen had mentioned this,” I said. “This would have been a lot easier to deal with gradually.”
I promised him that I’d come around tomorrow to unpack and inventory the presents. So much for taking the weekend off.