A Crazy Little Thing Called Death (4 page)

Crewe laughed again as he wrapped up the remains of his sandwich in the soiled napkin. “Sounds like a Blackbird, all right! No, sorry, haven’t seen her. Do you need help?”

“No, but I better keep looking before she commits a crime.”

As I turned away, Crewe put a hand on my arm. “Nora, why don’t you come to dinner with me sometime? As long as you don’t mind my usual routine, it could be fun. When I review, I try to take a foursome so I get to taste as much of the menu as possible. Want to tag along? We could get caught up, too. You could bring a date.”

And maybe Lexie. He didn’t say it, but we both knew what he was hoping for. I didn’t detect any sly hints about my love life in his invitation, so maybe he was one of the hermits who hadn’t yet heard of my entanglement with the Mafia prince. But I doubted it. Crewe was better at faking nonchalance than I.

I smiled. “Must I order braised eel or polar-bear brains?”

Apologetic, he said, “Actually, I do all the ordering. It’s the only way I can do my job. But for you, I promise no eels.”

“Sounds like fun. Call me.”

His smile brightened. “I will. And good luck with the niece search.”

I thanked him and left Crewe to dispose of his sandwich without further discovery.

Thinking like a six-year-old, I made an about-face and walked back along the line of parked cars until I reached the area where all the horse trailers were parked.

Here, the fancy parties and beautiful clothes morphed into a very different world. A variety of working trucks and trailers mingled in the mud with polished wooden horse vans as beautiful as yachts. The people who bustled here weren’t sipping champagne, but slinging saddles and talking strategy.

A string of polo ponies, saddled and with their tails tightly braided into bobs, had been tied along a makeshift fence beside the most spectacular of the vans. I saw men in riding gear moving among the horses, so I didn’t linger. The last person I wanted to see was Raphael Braga.

A Jack Russell terrier, the dog of choice among the horsey set, barked at me from the open window of a truck. Nearby, a couple of female grooms—two sweaty, twentyish girls—sat in camp chairs swigging from plastic water bottles, their work finished for the moment. They wore their breeches and boots and dirty sweatshirts comfortably, without affectation.

Behind another trailer, a heavyset older woman in a saggy turtleneck sweater, breeches and Hermès riding boots might have been a billionaire, but today she looked happy to be among her horses. Despite her years, she wielded a shovel full of manure with ease.

At the last vehicle—Emma’s rattletrap pickup and her rusty trailer—the crowd of her young students clustered around a placid Welsh pony. They were combing his tail, brushing his buckskin coat and braiding his mane while one child held his bridle and petted his nose. I didn’t see Lucy among them.

But Emma poked her head out of the trailer, caught my eye and pointed.

At the bottom of the field, the estate’s landscape disintegrated into a woodsy wilderness that was even muddier than the grass above. I slogged through it, glad to have my boots, but already feeling the cold through the rubber.

I came to the stream that splashed over a jumble of rocks. Sure enough, Lucy was there, poking her foil into the water.

Standing over her, holding one of Lucy’s hands to prevent her from falling, was Michael.

As I approached, I heard Lucy say to him, “I don’t like toads. The twins keep them in jars, and I hate the way they look. All dead and yucky.”

Michael murmured something that made Lucy laugh. Then she turned and saw me.

“I’m okay,” she called. “I’m with Mick.”

“She’s with me,” Michael said.

The playful child with blond curls and the pink tutu made a picture standing beside him—a tall and hulking man with a face better suited for a dockyard than a polo match. Neither one of them belonged at today’s posh event. Lucy was a kindergarten delinquent, and Michael had probably been one, too. Now he had more sex appeal than six Main Line lacrosse players. His shoulders were delicious, and he had a walk that was both tight and slouchy and often made me think I should wash out my brain with a bar of soap.

His eyes were very blue and discerning beneath their lazy lids, and he saw something in my face that made his interest sharpen.

Then I saw the stitches in his chin, and my heart gave a thump.

“Michael, what happened? You’re hurt!”

“Stupid accident,” he said, still preventing Lucy from falling as she tilted insistently into the stream. He leaned my way with amusement in his eyes. “Be gentle with me.”

I wrapped one arm around him and instinctively lifted my other hand to touch the wound. It was already swollen and looked angry. “What kind of accident? When?”

Michael avoided my fingertips with a twist of his head. “This morning, driving into town. A tire blew, and I went into a ditch.” He shrugged. “No big deal.”

“I think he hit a porcupine,” Lucy volunteered. She pointed her weapon at his chin. “A doctor sewed his skin with a needle. I bet it hurt.”

“It hurt like hell, in fact. And it’s not going to do my pretty face any favors.”

“Is the rest of you okay? No broken bones?”

“I only hit my head, which didn’t damage anything important.” He smiled. “Forget about it. Lucy wants to see the horses.”

Michael had never come to any of the parties I covered. That he had chosen today made me suddenly uneasy. “Did you come to see the horses, too? Or is something wrong?”

“I came to see you. To bring you your new cell phone.”

He handed the tiny telephone over, and I blushed. “I forgot it again. I’m sorry.”

“You don’t really want to carry it, do you?”

“Yes, of course. Well, I know you think it’s important.”

“Think of it as the quickest way to call 911 when your sisters get into trouble.”

“I just can’t get the hang of getting a new one every few days. Are you sure it’s necessary to switch phones so often?”

“The police want to listen in to everything I say. I don’t think they need to hear what you and I talk about, do you?”

“You have a point. But—all right, mostly I feel as if having a cell phone just makes it okay for people to be late.”

He gave a disbelieving laugh. “What?”

“If people make arrangements to meet me and they have cell phones, they always call to say they’ll be late. But when I don’t have a phone, everyone makes an effort to be on time.”

“Nora, that’s—”

“I’ll take it.” I began to tuck the phone into my handbag. “I know how you feel about constant communication. And you’re right about my sisters. Thank you for getting it for me.”

Gently, he said, “It doesn’t work if you don’t turn it on, Nora.”

“Oh, right. How do I do that again?”

He took the phone back and showed me which button to push. I heard a beep and saw a light blink. Michael handed over the functioning phone, and I accepted it sheepishly.

He said, “The guy collecting tickets wouldn’t take my money. So I parked up the road and walked in.”

“You’re supposed to have an invitation.”

“I don’t think it was my lack of an invitation that kept me out.”

No, probably not. Most people took one look at Michael Abruzzo and figured he was the kind of goodfella who left severed horse heads in people’s beds.

But not me. When we’d returned from our cruise, Michael had officially moved to Blackbird Farm to live with me. He brought most of his clothes and a couple of cartons of personal things that were gradually finding their rightful places in my house. His fishing rods cluttered my back porch, and his collection of surprisingly fine wines took up half the pantry. Along with his possessions, he brought a lot of laughter.

Late at night when I returned from whatever party I was covering, he cooked supper for us, and we ate in the kitchen and spent a few hours entertaining each other before going upstairs to my bed—our bed now. That was the only domestic routine we’d established. As for the rest of his day, he kept his own hours and rarely told me where he went or what he did. I only hoped he abided by the law. He was neat in the bathroom, but the rest of the house had become one big playpen. He sang lustily on the staircase, sometimes knocked me into a sofa for impromptu lovemaking and had already broken the leg off a valuable chair just because he was six feet four inches of impulsive, active man.

Sometimes it felt as if I were civilizing a wild animal. At other times I wondered how I’d ever lived without him.

And yet, there were still things we hadn’t resolved.

“I’m sorry about this morning,” I said, “but Libby’s kids—”

“Forget it. You had your hands full. I should have been more helpful. But those twins? They creep me out. What’s the smell they’ve got going in the basement?”

“Formaldehyde.”

“Jesus. Who are they embalming?”

I smiled. “Don’t worry. The neighbors are all accounted for.”

He absorbed my smile and seemed to relax. “Nice place, this,” he said, casting his gaze along the landscaped property, the many cars parked in the lower field, the throngs of people entertaining among the tents and tables. “It’s somebody’s estate?”

“The Devine family. They’re cousins of mine. My mother’s relatives, distantly.”

“Lots of land, even for this neighborhood,” he noted.

“It’s getting a little run-down. The previous caretaker took much more time keeping up appearances.”

Michael turned and looked across the stream. “What’s behind the big fence?”

“Fence?”

He pointed. “Through the trees there. It’s, like, twenty feet high.”

“I have no idea. Maybe it keeps the deer out.”

“Looks more like a fence to keep things in, not out.”

Michael knew about such fences, of course. As a teenager, he’d gone to jail for stealing motorcycles—a sentence extended for his bad behavior once behind bars. When he’d finally gotten out, he’d spent a few years dabbling in his notorious family’s businesses, but eventually decided he needed to change his ways or risk going back to prison, a fate that seemed more horrible to him as he grew older.

It had been a long struggle for him, but I thought he’d finally turned his back on his criminal inclinations. He was working to disengage himself from the rest of the Abruzzo family.

“I don’t remember a fence,” I said. “Maybe it’s for security.”

He shrugged, accepting my guess. “So what’s this shindig all about? Are your distant cousins raising money for a disease or a music hall?”

“Actually, it’s a memorial service. For Penny Devine.”

He frowned. “That old actress? Sweet Penny Devine?”

“Not so sweet, if the truth be told. In private, Penny was nothing like the characters she played. Before she got into movies, she was famous for pinching her sister black-and-blue and clobbering her brother with his own electric trains. Later, she became a terror in Hollywood. She pushed Dolly Parton into a swimming pool just to show her wet T-shirt to the press.”

“How could anybody be mean to Dolly Parton?”

“Penny Devine.”

“So everybody’s here to pay their respects to an old bitch?”

“Actually, everybody’s here for quite a different reason. Secretly, they’re all hoping Penny shows up for her own funeral.”

Michael frowned. “I don’t—oh, is she the one who kept disappearing? And turning up just in time to get her picture taken?”

“After this last disappearance, she didn’t come back, though. She stayed disappeared, so her family is having her declared legally dead.”

Cocking one eyebrow, he said, “Usually the family keeps hoping their loved ones stay alive. Or is there a reason for all the rush?”

I often thought Michael would make a very good police officer, but when I once voiced that opinion, he had been offended. I said, “They’d rather have her dead, I guess. She shares ownership of a company with her brother and sister. Devine Pharmaceuticals.”

Michael whistled. “Her share of that gold mine must be worth a few shekels.”

“I imagine so, yes.”

“How are they so sure she’s really gone? They have a habeas corpus?”

“Nope.”

Michael surveyed the estate again, as if calculating its worth. I could see his mind working at various angles of the story. He asked, “Did they check her bank records to see if she’s moving money around? Credit cards to make sure she’s not staying at the Paris Ritz maybe?”

I couldn’t stop myself from smiling. “Professional interest?”

“I like to keep up on the latest techniques for disappearing.” Michael slipped his arm around my waist. “Want to run away with me? We could have, whatayacallit, an extended honeymoon?”

Abruptly, Lucy said, “There’s my mom.”

A few hundred yards away, Libby had slogged to a halt in the mud and was now using semaphore to communicate with us. Either that or she was doing an interpretive dance.

“She looks mad,” Lucy said with a sigh. “She doesn’t like you, Mick.”

“I think she’s mad at all of us.” I could read Libby’s body language from any distance. “Better run along, Lucy.”