Murder With Peacocks Read online

  Sunday, June 5

  Attendance at Grace Episcopal was unusually high the next morning, almost rivaling Christmas and Easter. I went with Mother largely to keep her in line. She was trying to plan an elaborate funeral for Mrs. Grover; I wanted to get Reverend Pugh to contact Mrs. Grover's clergyman or friends back home to make arrangements. I wondered if, knowing Mother, he could be persuaded to utter a small white lie and tell Mother that Mrs. Grover wanted to be cremated quietly, with no service or other fuss. Preferably back in Fort Lauderdale.

  Reverend Pugh correctly deduced that Mrs. Grover's death was the reason for the high attendance and preached a very moving sermon on the general theme "Even in the midst of life we are in death." At least I suppose it was moving for those who were able to hear it. I was sitting in the back, where Mrs. Fenniman and the other professional town gossips were busily updating each other on new developments in "the case."

  I fled home immediately after the service, but my hopes of getting anything done were dashed by an unusually large infestation of visiting relatives.

  Monday, June 6

  Even on Monday, accomplishing anything was an uphill battle. No one wanted to talk about weddings; everyone wanted to hear about Mrs. Grover. I stopped by the Brewsters' house after lunchtime to give Samantha some photographers' samples.

  Of course, since my arms were completely full, no one answered when I knocked. I juggled the books with one arm and let myself into the kitchen.

  "Anyone home?" I called, poking my head into the family room. I interrupted Samantha in the midst of a phone call.

  "I'll have to call you back later," she said, and hung up in a distinctly furtive manner. How odd; furtive wasn't usually Samantha's style at all.

  "Coordinating your alibi with your co-conspirators?" I teased. To my surprise, she jumped.

  "Alibi! What do you mean alibi?" she snapped.

  "Where were you on the afternoon of May 31 when the late Mrs. Grover disappeared?" I said, melodramatically.

  "I don't think that's the least bit funny. The poor woman is dead."

  "I'm sorry. I don't think it's particularly funny either; I've just had it up to here with people putting on their lugubrious faces and wanting to hear all about it."

  "Who wants to hear all about it?" Samantha asked. "Hasn't everyone around here heard enough already?"

  "Yes, but all day, everyone with whom I've tried to discuss menus, flowers, photo packages, and tuxedo sizes has wanted to hear all about Mrs. Grover before doing any business."

  "That's so tacky," she sniffed.

  "Yes, but in a small town, one can't afford to offend the limited number of vendors available," I pointed out. "So I give them a thrill by telling them the inside scoop, and with any luck I can turn it to our advantage."

  "Well, that's sensible, I suppose," Samantha said, absently. I gave her the photographers' books and beat a retreat.

  She seemed to want to be left alone, which was highly unusual. Normally she'd have wanted to interrogate me on my progress and natter on for hours about her latest inspirations. Perhaps I had been too hard on her, I thought, as I strolled home. Perhaps she had really been affected by Mrs. Grover's death. I doubted she could have gotten to know Mrs. Grover well enough to be mourning her personally, but perhaps the death had momentarily jarred her out of her monumental self-absorption. A sobering reminder of mortality in the midst of celebration and plans for the future and all that. Maybe that was why she had seemed so furtive; perhaps she was embarrassed to have her frivolous preoccupation with finger bowls and flower arrangements compared with the grief suffered by Mrs. Grover's loved ones. Whoever they might be.

  Then again, perhaps Samantha's touchiness on the subject of the murder was due to irritation about the attention it was drawing away from her wedding. And as for behaving furtively, she was probably up to something. Coming up with some new complication--another one of those "small details that really make the occasion"--as well as making mountains of work for me. Doubtless she'd unveil her new plan, whatever it was, as soon as she was sure she'd figured out how it could cause the maximum amount of trouble for me.

  I spent the afternoon fretting alternately about what Samantha was up to and what the sheriff was up to, becoming so preoccupied that I actually misspelled several relatives' names on their invitations and had to rewrite them.

  "Meg," Dad said that evening, "I'm having a hard time convincing the sheriff how extremely unlikely it was for Mrs. Grover to have fallen from the bluff without sustaining a more serious injury. Could you help me for a while tomorrow?"

  "Why not?" I said, rashly. If I couldn't forget about the murder long enough to address a few envelopes properly, I might as well help Dad out and perhaps get it out of my system. And of course my brother, Rob, who was supposed to be studying for the bar exam, was up for anything that didn't involve sitting indoors with his law books, so Dad succeeded in recruiting him as well.

  Tuesday, June 7

  I was getting ready to throw an impossibly heavy sandbag off the bluff the next morning when Michael came along walking Spike.

  "What are you doing?" Michael said. "Helping Dad help the sheriff with his investigation."

  "Ready!" Dad called up from the beach. I took a deep breath and then grappled with the sandbag.

  "Here, let me help you with that," Michael said, looking for somewhere to tie Spike's leash.

  "No, no!" I said. "That would spoil the test."

  "Test? What test? That thing must weigh a ton."

  "A hundred and five pounds, actually," I puffed. "Stand clear." I wrestled the bag as close to the edge of the bluff as I dared, gave it a desperate heave over the side, and fell back panting. I heard the bag crashing through the brush on the way down. "One more to go," I said, as I collapsed onto the ground by the last sandbag.

  "I assume this has something to do with the murder?" Michael said, sitting down on the grass beside me. "Was that all she weighed, a hundred and five pounds?"

  "Was that all? You try lugging one of these," I said. "Actually, a hundred and two, according to the medical examiner, but Dad decided to add three pounds for clothes. We're doing some testing for the sheriff."

  "Ready!" Dad called again.

  "Testing what?" Michael asked. "And why do you have to throw them?"

  "If you want to throw some next, that would be fine with Dad. And great with me, I'm done in, and Rob's beat, too, and we both want to keep Dad from doing too much of the throwing. He's very fit but he's not invulnerable. But seeing how much strength it would have taken to have thrown her over is one of the things we're testing. I'm pretty damned strong for a woman, and it's about as much as I can do to drag them to the edge and shove them over. Here goes."

  I slung the bag over the side, but this bag didn't go as far and stuck in the bushes. "Damn," I said, and grabbed up the garden rake. I shoved at the bag until it finally toppled over and went crashing down the side.

  "All gone!" I shouted over the side.

  "You said how much strength it would take was one of the things you were finding out," Michael said. "What else is this intended to discover?"

  "All sorts of grisly things. Could the underbrush or the water break Mrs. Grover's fall enough to result in the relatively minimal injuries she sustained?"

  "And could it?"

  "Not bloody likely. And how much noise a hundred-and-five-pound object makes when landing, on sand and in the water, and how far away you can hear the noise, and the answers are less than you think, and not with the riding lawn mower running."

  "Was it running?"

  "Much of the time, yes. And whether there's any possibility she could merely have tripped and fallen over."

  "Somehow I doubt that."

  "Yes, it's so unlikely that we can pretty much discard it, no matter where you try it. Similarly, it's highly unlikely that anyone could have shoved her over. It very much looks as if the only way she could have gone over under her own steam would be if she took a runni
ng broad jump at the edge. And even then she'd have to be pretty athletic for a fifty-five-year-old."

  "Aren't you afraid of destroying evidence?" Michael asked.

  "They've been all over this stretch of the cliff, and found nothing," I replied. "No sign of one-hundred-five-pound weights having crashed through the brush, no scraps of clothing, no stray objects. At least none that could reasonably be assumed to have fallen off Mrs. Grover. That's another thing Dad wants to prove, how unlikely it would be for Mrs. Grover to have fallen over the cliff without leaving any traces on her or the cliff."

  "How do you know this is where she went over?" Michael asked. "I thought she was found a little further downstream than this."

  "We're trying it at all the likely places along the bluff. All upstream from where she was found, of course. Next he's planning to do some tide and current tests to see if it would be plausible for a dead body dumped in the river to wash up where hers was found."

  "Using what?" Michael asked, dubiously. "I mean, sandbags obviously won't cut it."

  "Rob and I are trying to convince him just to use a whole bunch of floats instead of actual dead bodies. Of animals, of course," I added, hastily, seeing the look on Michael's face. "He's been talking to meatpacking houses."

  "Lovely," Michael said, just as Dad and Rob came puffing up the ladder. I hoped Michael wouldn't laugh when he saw that Rob was carrying a camcorder.

  "Michael!" Dad said, enthusiastically, as he flung himself down by us, mopping his face with his handkerchief. "Glad to see you; we could certainly use your help!"

  "So Meg was telling me."

  "Oh, Meg, how about some lemonade or iced tea?" Dad said. "Or a beer. Anything cold."

  "Meg's been playing stevedore," Michael said. "How about if I fetch the refreshments?"

  "Good idea." Dad approved. "And when you get back I'll tell you what you can do."

  I don't know whether Rob's videotapes and the meticulous notes Dad had been taking impressed Michael with the value of our efforts or whether he allowed himself to be recruited for the entertainment value. There are people in town who gladly help Dad out with his most hare-brained projects and then dine out on the stories for months afterwards. Or maybe it was the camcorder. Michael was an actor; perhaps the ham in him couldn't resist the chance to be in front of a camera. Whatever the reason, for the next couple of hours Michael joined in energetically as we shoveled sand into the bags, dragged them up from the beach with a winch the next-door neighbors had installed to haul their boat up to their driveway, weighed them, and then heaved them down again while Dad scribbled more pages of notes.

  Jake came over to watch briefly at one point, and Dad tried to enlist his help, but as I pointed out, it was his sister-in-law's demise we were trying to reenact, so he could hardly be blamed for feeling a little squeamish about the prospect.

  It's always entertaining to watch a couple of men who've been bit by the macho competitive bug and are earnestly trying to outdo each other at something relatively pointless, like heaving giant sandbags over cliffs. Once he got the hang of it, Michael proved to be slightly better at sandbag-heaving than Rob, and so it was Michael who got to demonstrate for the sheriff when he came out that evening.

  The sheriff couldn't help smiling at Dad's enthusiasm, but I could tell Dad was beginning to convince him.

  "So you see, I think we've pretty clearly established that Mrs. Grover did not fall from the cliff accidentally," Dad pontificated over lemonade on the porch after our demonstration. "There was nothing on the cliffside to indicate the passage of a falling object the size of a body."

  "There is now," Michael said.

  "Don't worry, young man," the sheriff said. "We searched it pretty thoroughly for a couple days. Nothing to be found."

  "No traces of leaves or dirt on her body," Dad went on, relentlessly. "And, as you can see from the effect on the sandbags, it is highly unlikely that she could have fallen, either postmortem or antemortem, without significantly greater injury. I postulate that she was taken to the beach, probably by the Donleavys' path, possibly by the neighbors' backyard staircase."

  "Or by boat," Rob suggested.

  "Yes, it's possible," Dad conceded, frowning. "Of course it's unlikely. Unless someone risked discovery by bringing her by boat from quite a distance. They'd have been just as noticeable carrying her down to a boat anywhere near here as they would simply carrying her down to the beach to dump her body. But you're right; we can't overlook the possibility of a boat."

  He looked very depressed. Doubtless the possibility of a boat either contradicted his pet theory or, more likely, emphasized how difficult it would be to catch the culprit. I felt sorry for him.

  "Call the Coast Guard," I said. "Maybe they're still staking out suspicious inlets for potential drug runners."

  The commandant of the local Coast Guard station was convinced that his colleagues had made landing in Florida too risky for the Colombian cocaine merchants. He thought a small, unassuming town like Yorktown would be the perfect base for a major drug smuggling ring. So far his intense surveillance of the local waterways had not produced any stray smugglers. However, fishing out of season and poaching from other people's crab pots had fallen to an all-time low.

  "Yes, it was the Coast Guard who arrested young Scotty Ballister and your cousin," Dad said, happily. In addition to being caught crab poaching, which wasn't actually illegal but hadn't won them any friends, the two of them had been arrested for possession of marijuana--the closest the commandant had actually come to a drug raid. But although the baggie of grass had inconveniently floated long enough for the Coast Guard to fish it out, the prosecutor's office couldn't prove that Scotty or the cousin had tossed it overboard--at least, not after Scotty's father the attorney had finished with them. Rumor had it the Coast Guard were patrolling the beaches of our neighborhood intensively, in the hope of catching Scotty and the cousin redhanded.

  Dad trotted off to call the commandant. "Excellent thinking, Meg!" he reported a few minutes later. "There were no craft other than the Coast Guard cutters anywhere near the beach any night this week. They'd had an alert, and have been putting on extra patrols." Translation: they were, indeed, still lurking off the shores of our neighborhood, hoping to catch Scotty and my cousin. "It looks as if our criminal must have delivered the body by land after all."

  "Unless she got there on her own," the sheriff added, shaking his head.

  "I'm just glad I didn't somehow overlook seeing someone shove her over," I said. "That idea really bothered me."

  "Of course there's the question of whether she was killed there, or moved there after her death," Dad continued. "And if she wasn't killed there, whether she was put there for a reason, such as to cast suspicion on someone, or merely because it was the most convenient place in the neighborhood to dispose of a corpse."

  "And regardless of where she was killed, where was she all morning?" I put in.

  "Good point," Dad replied. "How come no one saw her either walking or being carried down to the beach?"

  "And for that matter, has anyone remembered searching the beach that day we were all looking for her?" I asked. No one, alas, had; so the question of whether she was on the beach on June 1 or put there sometime later remained unanswered.

  "We're going to start the current tests tomorrow, to see how far it's feasible for her to have drifted before she was found," Dad said, turning back to the sheriff. "Did you bring the tide tables?"

  Wednesday, June 8

  Dad spent most of Wednesday preparing his tide and current tests. In the morning, he cruised upriver for several miles, noting every place where someone could have dropped a body into the river. Rob weaseled out, pretending to study. So since Dad's mechanical ineptness is particularly pronounced with outboard motors, I ended up as pilot, with Eric as crew. Eric could have run the boat himself, but it took both of us to fish Dad out whenever he got carried away and fell in.

  Thursday, June 9

  "Eileen
still hasn't shown up," I reported by phone to Michael Thursday afternoon. "I've begun to wonder if she and Steven might have eloped after all."

  "Well, just bring her in as soon as you can."

  "Roger."

  "Or maybe you'd like to come in and do some preselecting for her, eliminating things that you know wouldn't work for her body type and so forth."

  "Sounds like a good idea. I'm rather stuck out here today, but maybe I should do that as soon as I'm free."

  "I could bring some of the books out to the house for you now," he offered, eagerly. Evidently he was more anxious about the deadline than he was letting on.

  "Thanks, but I'm not at the house right now."

  "Where are you, then?" he asked. "They need to get their phone checked, wherever you are; this is a lousy connection."

  "I'm in a rowboat in the middle of the river. I'm using Samantha's cell phone." There was a pause so long I thought we'd been disconnected.

  "I know I'm going to regret asking, but why are you in a rowboat in the middle of the river?"

  "Dad's driving up and down the bank, releasing flocks of numbered milk jugs at intervals. To test the speed and direction of the current and narrow down the sites where Mrs. Grover's body could have been dumped into the water."

  "That'll take forever, won't it?" he asked. "After all, she was missing for several days before we found her."

  "Yes, but she couldn't have been in the water for more than a few hours. Trust me on that. If you want to know why, ask Dad, although I advise not doing it just before dinner."

  "I'll take your word for it. So you're out helping your Dad release bottles?"

  "No, he and Rob are doing that, and keeping a log of exactly where each one was released. I'm out here to record my observations. Scientifically."

  "And what have you observed, so far? Scientifically speaking."

  "That there are getting to be a truly remarkable number of milk jugs bobbing around out here, but unless they start showing a great deal more enthusiasm, none of them are going to make it to the beach anytime this century. Most of them don't seem to be going anywhere at all. Except for the ones the sheriff is dropping into the current in the middle of the river. They're travelling rather briskly, but they're not coming anywhere near the beach."