It's Murder, My Son (A Mac Faraday Mystery) (2 page)

“Your ancestors founded Spencer back in the 1800s,” Ed explained. “They were millionaires by the 1920s when the electric company put in the dam and built the lake. After that, Spencer became a resort town. One of the most luxurious hotels in the country is the Spencer Inn. Robin’s grandfather had built it and passed it down to her, but she preferred murder to business.” The attorney sighed with a smile. “Robin wasn’t interested in anything that didn’t involve a dead body.”

“Now I know where I get it,” Mac replied.

“Lunch is ready,” Archie stepped in from the deck to announce.

Claiming he couldn’t stay due to an appointment in the city, Ed handed Mac two sets of keys before speeding away in his Jaguar.

“Hungry?” Archie had prepared salmon and salad.

The smell of mesquite filled the air. Mac noticed a fire in the outdoor stone fireplace that took up a corner of the deck. She had cooked the fish on a grill over the open flames.

As if to answer her, Gnarly jumped up to snatch the salmon from one of the plates. Archie turned around in time to see him gulping it down. “Gnarly! Bad dog!” Done with his meal, the dog sniffed along the edge of the table to see if it held anything else worth stealing. “Stop it!” She swatted the dog’s rump. “Go lay down.”

After backing up a single step, Gnarly sat with his eyes trained on the table.

“He’s a bad dog,” she said. “But he’s really very loveable.” She patted Gnarly on the top of his head. She offered Mac her lunch, which he continued to decline until she offered to split it.

On his way to the table, he stopped at the deck railing to take in the view.

Boulders lined the shoreline of Spencer Point. At the very tip of the peninsula, the boulders had been lined up to support a wooden walkway leading to a gazebo housing a hot tub set in the lake. Trees along the lake provided privacy without cutting off the view.

A path off one end of the deck led to Archie’s log cottage tucked into the corner of the property. Surrounded by a floral garden, it resembled a grown-up version of a little girl’s playhouse.

“Beautiful,” Mac breathed.

“Robin loved this place. She had traveled all over the world, but she thought this was the most beautiful place of all. She wanted you to enjoy it the way she did.” When Archie turned to lead him to the table, he caught a whiff of her scent. She smelled like the roses in the garden.

Offering him the seat facing the lake, she sat across from him. “I thought that since we’re going to be living here together, the least I could do was welcome you with a nice lunch.” She smiled. “From here on out, you’re on your own when it comes to cooking.”

“I was afraid of that.” Mac sipped the water. “I’m a rotten cook. I’ve been living on take out since my wife and I split up.”

“That stuff can kill you. You might want to consider hiring a housekeeper and cook. Robin didn’t have one because she liked doing that stuff for herself. She had a cleaning lady come in once a week, but that was it as far as household staff. Last summer, the cleaning lady got married and moved to Maine. Robin never got around to replacing her. As big as this house is, you’ll need a housekeeper.”

“How much do housekeepers cost?” he asked.

Her laughter reminded him that with the two hundred and seventy million dollars Robin Spencer had left him, he could easily pay the going rate for any maid service. In an effort to take the attention away from his goof, he asked her, “What kind of name is Archie for a girl?”

“Archie is what Robin called me. My real name is R. C. Monday.”

“R. C. Monday?” Mac asked. “What does R. C. stand for?”

“Nothing,” she answered quickly. “Robin loved it. She said I was her Archie. Everyone else took up on it and that’s what they call me. Do you remember Nero Wolfe?”

“Who’s Nero Wolfe?”

Her smile dropped. She blinked at him in disbelief. “Nero Wolfe. The Fat Man. His mysteries are a classic.”

Again, Mac’s cheeks felt warm. “I’m afraid I’m not up on murder mysteries. Most of the reading I’ve done is to study murder cases and forensics. Only in the last month, since I found out that Robin Spencer was my mother, have I been reading her books. It takes a long time to read eighty-seven books, five plays, and watch twenty-eight movies based on her books.”

“Plus, her journal,” Archie said.

“You know about her journal?”

“Robin and I were close. She was like a mother to me,” she said in a soft voice.

“Since you know about it, then would I be correct in assuming that you knew about me before all this happened?”

“I’m the one who found you for her. It took me less than three weeks.” One corner of her lip curled up. “But I have to admit that it was Robin’s idea to meet you by calling your police department with a story about basing her new detective on Georgetown’s top homicide detective. Once she was alone with you, it was a cinch for her to collect your DNA to confirm that you were her son.”

Mac shook his head at the cleverness of it all.

Five years earlier, he had felt honored when his supervisor had chosen him to meet Robin Spencer at the Four Seasons to answer questions for her book research. The celebrated author’s cutting wit had caught him off guard. They had lunched on burgers and eaten ice cream for dessert. Before he knew it, the afternoon was over and Robin had invited him to have dinner with her as well. Claiming to want to know everything in order to create a realistic character, she had interviewed him about his childhood and family. The next day, she had sent him a basket of fruit and a thank you card.

Ed Willingham had told Mac that Robin took the spoon he had used to eat his ice cream to a private lab to compare his DNA to hers to determine if he was her son. At the time, the thought had never occurred to him that he had spent the day with the birth mother who had given him up for adoption over four decades earlier.

Archie interrupted his thoughts by saying, “I know all about you.” She fed her last bite of salmon to Gnarly, who wolfed it down without tasting it.

Mac enjoyed her playful nature. “What exactly do you know?”

“You had the best arrest record in DC, but that didn’t matter much after Freddie Gibbons Jr. flew off into the sunset on his daddy’s private jet. After that, no one looked good and you were made the scapegoat.”

Mac lost his appetite.

She leaned across the table in his direction. “Who do you think gave Frederick Gibbons the heads up that the grand jury was about to indict his little boy of being the Rock Creek Park serial rapist?” she whispered as if someone else was on the deck to overhear their discussion.

“Didn’t matter who gave Gibbons the heads up. According to my boss, it was my fault that he got away,” he said, even though he knew the fault didn’t belong to him.

“Do you mean Harold Fitzwater?”

That startled him. She even knew the name of his supervisor in Georgetown.

“Don’t you think Stephen Maguire handling the indictment was a conflict of interest?” she asked. “They were fraternity brothers and roommates at George Washington University.”

“You’re kidding.”

She nodded her head. “Less than a month after Freddie Gibbons escaped to Switzerland, Frederick Gibbons Senior made your boss’s home mortgage disappear.”

“Fitzwater criticized me for not being a team player.” Mac gritted his teeth while recalling, “He kept telling me to look elsewhere for suspects. He and Steve were protecting Gibbons all along.” He wondered how he had missed finding out that the assistant district attorney prosecuting the monster who had terrorized Rock Creek Park for months was close friends with the rapist’s father. “How did you know?”

Archie answered, “I looked into the players’ backgrounds and found that they had both graduated from George Washington University with degrees in political science. They were the same age. So I figured they had to know each other. A check on their previous known addresses proved that they had once been roommates.”

“I’m impressed,” Mac said. “Now tell me what you know about Patrick O’Callaghan.”

For an instant, her face went blank. Then her eyes widened and her mouth opened to utter a gasp. “Pat? Chief O’Callaghan? Why do you want to know about him?”

“I heard the name.”

“Where? You read about him in Robin’s journal.”

“She did mention him.”

“He—He was your father?” She gasped again. “I should have known. You look just like him.”

Mac responded with, “Should have known? I thought you said Robin was like a mother to you. She told you about me and she told you about the journal, but she never told you who my father was?”

“I never asked. I figured if she wanted me to know that she would have told me.”

Mac sat forward in his chair. “Judging by your reaction, I take it that you knew my father.”

“I can’t believe I didn’t see it. Robin was devastated when he died. I knew they were close—” She made a noise deep in her throat. “Duh! She even told me that they dated when they were in high school. It was after Pat got sick that she told me about you and asked me to find you. Now, I know why. She wanted me to find you for him.”

“She said in her journal that she told him all about me. He died seven months after I had met her at the Four Seasons.” He asked her, “What was he like?”

Archie smiled broadly. “Oh, he was fabulous. Pat O’Callaghan is a legend on Deep Creek Lake. Imagine John Wayne and Matt Dillon wrapped up into one. The police chief Spencer has now is a boob. Pat and Robin made such a good team. I knew she loved him. I guess that’s why she never got married after her husband died in Vietnam.”

“Pat wanted to marry her when she got pregnant, but her parents refused to let her marry a policeman,” Mac explained. “They thought she would end up being a widow. So, they shipped her off to college, where she married an army officer who died and left her a widow anyway.”

“Why didn’t she come back for Pat?”

Mac cleared his throat. “She did, but by then it was too late. He had gotten married.”

“To Violet,” she said. “Pat would never have left Violet, even though he loved Robin. He was very loyal. Did she tell you in her journal about…?”

“My brother. Do you know him?”

“David’s a good friend of mine,” Archie said. “After his father died, he and I started working together to help Robin on her cases.”

“Her cases?” Mac asked.

She explained, “Robin was a homebody. She liked her writing and her gardening. She hired me to do her research. I would research on the Internet or go interview people for her. I’d come back with the information and she would write her books. Then, I would edit them. Every now and then, a real case would come up that Robin would take a personal interest in. When that would happen life would get exciting.” She grinned.

Uttering a whine, the German shepherd inched toward Mac’s plate, which contained one bite of salmon. Archie fed him a crouton from her plate. “She acquired Gnarly while working her last case.”

“Gnarly?” Mac reached out to pat the dog’s head. Previously, he had concluded that Gnarly appeared so large to him because the dog had been standing over him. In the less threatening setting, Mac could see that he was indeed one of the largest German shepherds he had ever seen.

“It means extreme, and that’s Gnarly all right. He can be really good, or he can be really bad,” Archie said. “The woman next door was murdered Valentine’s Day weekend and her husband didn’t want him, so Robin bought him.”

“Murdered? Next door?” Mac pushed his plate aside. “Have the police arrested her killer yet?”

“No, Robin was looking into the case when she passed away. I told her to go see a doctor because she had such a bad headache for like four days. She thought it was a migraine. If I’d had any idea that it was an aneurysm…” She looked down at her plate.