Murder With Peacocks (18 page)

          Thursday, June 23

  And so for the fourth straight day in a row I  drove in to Be-Stitched. Alone. Without telling  anyone where I was going. Maybe that way I could  finally sneak in my own fitting.

  Michael looked up at the sound of the bell and  I could see him suddenly grow tense. Or  tenser; he hadn't really looked relaxed when I  came in. Great, I thought, we're driving him  crazy too.

  "Yes?" he said, and glanced behind me at the  door. I turned and looked, too. No one was  there. Odd.

  "Which one is it now?" he asked.

  "Which one what?"

  "Which one of them? Your mother, or Eileen, or  Scarlet O'Hara--I mean, Samantha--"

  "Just me. I was supposed to come by for a fitting,  remember?"

  "And no one else found any reason to come  along? Like the last three days? No last-minute  inspirations? No urge to ask how the latest  alterations are coming? No kibitzing?"

  "Just me."

  "Amazing," he muttered. "An absolute  bloody miracle."

  "You're in a good mood."

  "Sorry. We just had an absolutely horrible fitting with another bride. I  had to stand there and be polite while her mother accused  me of everything from incompetence to lunacy, and then  when she started on Mrs. Tranh and the ladies,  I lost my temper. I don't care if the  whole town thinks I'm an idiot on top of  everything else, but I won't have the ladies  blamed for something that's not their fault."

  "I saw them on my way in; let me  guess: the dress was much too small,  particularly in the waist, and according to the mother you must have  messed up the measurements."

  "Are you psychic?" he asked in surprise. 

"No, but I have Mother and the Hollingworth  grapevine."

  "They just left ten minutes ago; don't  tell me the old ... lady was on the phone already  telling everyone about it."

  "No, although I'm sure that's on her afternoon  agenda. But it's been all over the grapevine for  two weeks that her daughter is pregnant, which  could certainly tend to make the measurements you  took a month or two ago obsolete."

  "Wish I was on the grapevine," he  complained. "I had no idea why she was so touchy  about my suggestion that the kid had gained a few  pounds until Mrs. Tranh explained it  to me."

  "I just found out this morning myself. You have to be able  to translate. No one comes right out and says  "So-and-so is getting married because she's  pregnant." They talk about a "sudden"  marriage, with a little pause before the word sudden."

  "So they got married suddenly merely means that  it surprised the hell out of everyone, where as they  got married ... suddenly means at the point of  Daddy's shotgun."

  "Precisely. He died suddenly meant  nobody expected it; he died ... suddenly  means call the medical examiner; it could be  homicide."

  "Do you have a lot of homicide around here?" he  asked.

  "This summer is practically a first. That was just  a hypothetical example."

  "I see."

  "If you listen closely for that little beat, you can  start picking up all sorts of useless information.  Being down here for the summer, I seem to be  regaining all my lost small-town survival skills."

  "Any advice for dealing with the irate mother?" he  asked.

  "Let Mrs. Tranh and the ladies handle it.  Now that they know, I'm sure they can  guesstimate what size she'll be in two weeks."

  "I'm sure they can, but what if her mother starts  bad-mouthing the shop all over town?"

  "Don't worry about it; everyone knows being  abused by that particular grand dame is a normal  rite of passage for the local merchants. Besides,  she and Mother loathe each other, so I'll tell  Mother about it at lunch. By dinner, your side of the  story will be all over town."

  "I'd appreciate that. I'd hate to be  responsible for running Mom's business into the  ground while she's laid up. And speaking of  business," he said, briskly changing tone,  "let's have Mrs. Tranh get your dress."

  Having seen the pictures, I thought I would be  prepared for Samantha's hooped monstrosity.  But I'm sure Michael and Mrs. Tranh were  disappointed at the look on my face when she  came trotting out with the dress and held it up.

  "Oh, dear," I said.

  "I'm crushed." He chuckled. "You'll  break the ladies' hearts."

  "Don't get me wrong. It's lovely.  Lovely fabric. Wonderful workmanship."

  "But not the sort of thing you'd ever think of  wearing."

  "Or inflicting upon an unsuspecting friend."  I walked around and looked at it from another  angle. "Somehow I wasn't expecting the  hoops to be quite so ... enormous."

  "Although my experience is limited to this  summer," Michael said, "I've evolved a  theory that bridesmaids' gowns are generally chosen  either to make the bride look good at her friends'  expense, or to force the friends to prove their devotion  by having their pictures taken in a garment they are  mortally embarrassed to be seen wearing in  public."

  "You've left out inflicting acute physical  torment," I added. "Think of Eileen and her  velvet and these damned corsets."

  "True. When I publish the theory, I'll  put you down as coauthor."

  "Well, let's get this over with," I said, following Mrs. Tranh behind the  dressing-room curtain.

  Several of the ladies had to help me get into the  dress. I made a mental note to ask  Michael if we could hire some of them to help out  on the wedding day. And when we finally got me into the  thing, I realized that in my dismay over the  enormous size of the skirts, I had failed  to notice the correspondingly tiny size of the  bodice.

  "I feel as if I'm falling out of this," I  said, more to myself than anyone else, since  obviously Mrs. Tranh and the other ladies could  not understand me. I twitched the neckline  slightly, and Mrs. Tranh slapped my hand.

  "I don't see why you don't have mirrors  back here," I called out.

  "So you won't be tempted to look until the  ladies are satisfied it's ready," Michael  called back.

  So we won't run away screaming, I added,  silently. The ladies finished their  manipulations, and I was surrounded by their smiling,  bobbing faces. Mrs. Tranh began shooing me  toward the doorway.

  "Well, here goes," I muttered. I  swept aside the curtains, awkwardly  maneuvered my hoops through the doorway, and  planted myself in front of the mirror.

  "Oh, my God," I gasped, and gave the  neckline of the dress a few sharp upward tugs.  "I really am falling out of this."  Surprisingly, the dress wouldn't budge, although  the neckline looked even lower and more precariously  balanced in the mirror than it felt.

  "The effect is historically accurate, I  believe," Michael drawled. He was grinning  hugely, enjoying my embarrassment.

  "Sadist! I don't care if it's required  by law, it's just not gonna work. I can't  possibly walk around like this. Especially in  church. And around drunken relatives."

  "On Samantha and the others, this style gives  to meager endowments a deceptive appearance of  amplitude," Michael said, pedantically.  "However, we may have miscalculated the effects  of this amplification on your ... radically  different physique. Let me talk to the  ladies," he added quickly, and backed away as  if he suspected how close I was to swatting at him.

  He exchanged several rapid sentences with  Mrs. Tranh, punctuated by gales of  giggles from the ladies. Mrs. Tranh and two  of the other seamstresses surrounded me and began  pulling and tweaking at the bodice of the dress,  applying measuring tapes to one or another angle  of me or it and pointing to or even poking my  troublesome endowments. The fact that the tallest of them  still fell short of my shoulder only compounded my  feeling of being huge, awkward, and ungainly.  Michael was carrying on a running dialogue with the  seamstresses. I assumed he must be a very  witty conversationalist in Vietnamese as well  as English; every other sentence of his provoked a  fresh crop of giggles. Or maybe they were just  all enjoying themselves at my expense. Michael  wasn't giggling with the rest, but he couldn't  suppress a huge grin.

  "They think they've got it figured out," he  said at last.

  "Good; does that mean I can take it off? I  feel like Gulliver among the Lilliputians."

  "Sorry," he said, choking back laughter.  "I had a hard time convincing them that anything needed  fixing, and once I did, they kept trying  to talk me into letting them not change it until  Samantha had seen it. They don't like her very  much, and they kept insisting they wanted to see her  face when she saw it."

  "You're right; she'd have a cow. And then she'd  probably put the evil eye on me or  something."

  "That's more or less what I told the  ladies," Michael said. "And they agreed that it  would be a shame, since they like you at least as much as  they dislike Samantha. They're going to fix the  dress so you look beautiful, but in a somewhat  less spectacular manner, and Samantha will have  nothing to complain about. Don't worry," he added,  momentarily serious, "Mrs. Tranh will  manage; she's really very good."

  "Thanks," I said, feeling a little bit  better as I ducked back into the dressing room  to take off the dress. The giggles of the  seamstresses seemed somehow friendlier, as if they were  laughing with me at the ridiculousness of the dress rather than at how I looked at it. Of course he  might have been lying outrageously, but since I  would never know, I decided to think positively.

  Well, I told myself, at least Michael is in a better mood than when I  walked in. For that matter, so was I--at least  until I got home and tried, for what seemed  like the millionth time, to reach the calligrapher.  Surely, by now, she had found the time to finish  addressing Samantha's wretched invitations.

  Dad was also incommunicado. Like the parents  of a small and mischievous child, I had learned  to be most suspicious when Dad was seemingly  quiet and on his best behavior. I was beginning  to regret having let him abscond with  Great-Aunt Sophy.

  After my search of Jake's house, I  deduced that either Dad was planning to steal Emma  Wendell's ashes and leave Great-Aunt Sophy behind in her place, or he wanted to run  some kind of test on Emma Wendell and was using  Great-Aunt Sophy to rehearse. Neither one of  which seemed like a particularly pleasant thing to be  doing. And considering there wasn't much left of either  lady but ashes and a few bits of bone, I  wasn't sure what on earth he thought he was going  to test for, anyway. I decided to drop by and see  him tomorrow.

  I would have tried to call him, but I had to fight  Mother for the phone to call the calligrapher. She was  busy putting the word out about the costume party.  Apparently she and Eileen had decided to hold  it in ten days' time.

  "Before any of us gets too busy," Mother  remarked. Apparently it had escaped her  notice that some of us were already rather busy.

          Friday, June 24

  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 than 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-fiance 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.