Murder With Peacocks (27 page)

  That got his attention. He listened intently as  I gave him a dramatic account of everything  I'd witnessed while skulking about the  neighborhood.

  "How odd," he muttered, when I was  finished.

  "My words exactly."

  "This doesn't add up at all," he said.  He wandered off, looking very puzzled.

  "Well, don't bother telling me anything,"  I said to his departing back. "It's not as if  I've contributed anything to this investigation."

  He didn't seem to hear me. The hell with  it. Let Dad detect; I had to go over to the  Donleavys' to keep Steven and Eileen from  getting up to anything. Like changing the theme of the  wedding at the last minute.

  Like everyone else in town, I kept looking  over my shoulder, watching for sinister figures  lurking in the shadows. And seeing them; although so far  all the reports of prowlers had turned out to be  plainclothes state police scouting the  neighborhood.

          Friday, July 15

  Michael and the ladies managed to get Eric's  outfit ready for Friday evening's wedding  rehearsal. We'd decided to hold it in partial  costume, so everyone could get used to some of the  unusual gear they'd be wearing. The  bridesmaids adapted easily to the trains, but  it took a while for the men to learn to walk without  tripping over the swords.

  "What do you think?" Michael asked, as we  surveyed the bridal party.

  "I think most of these men ought to have known better  than to agree to wear tights. And arming them was  another mistake," I added watching two of the  ushers draw their supposedly ornamental swords  and strike what I'm sure they thought were dashing  fencing poses.

  "Let's go and straighten them out," Michael  said. "The same thing happens whenever we do a  period play with weapons. Everyone starts thinking  he's Zorro."

  "Oh, give it a few minutes," I said, as  one overzealous usher narrowly missed skewering the  beastly Barry in a particularly painful place.  "Maybe his aim will improve."

  I glanced at Michael, who was leaning  elegantly against a tree trunk and watching the  ushers' antics with lofty amusement. I sternly  suppressed the distracting mental picture of how much better he would look in tights than  any of the ushers.

  Or, for that matter, in the elaborate  Renaissance priest's costume he'd modeled for  us in the shop. Like Michael, Father Pete was  inspired by the costume to do a little swashing and  buckling. Unfortunately, aside from his height,  he bore no resemblance at all to Michael.  He was only a little on the pudgy side, but his  round, fair, freckled face, and thinning sandy  hair looking distinctly incongruous atop the  elegant sophistication of his costume. Ah,  well.

  The rehearsal went about as well as could be  expected, which meant it fell slightly short of  being an unmitigated disaster.

  "A bad dress rehearsal makes a good  performance," Michael remarked to anyone who  fretted.

  "It damn well better," I muttered through  gritted teeth. Having Barry hovering over me  was not helping my mood. Or having to listen  to Eric gloating over the payment he was getting for  his bit part as ring bearer.

  "Aunt Meg is taking me and all my friends  to ride the roller coaster!" Eric informed Barry.  Not for the first time.

  "Not all of your friends," I said. "One. And  only if you behave yourself during the wedding and the  reception."

  "Right!" Eric said, and trotted off, no doubt  to be sure I couldn't actually catch him doing    anything that constituted not behaving.

  "I think that's great," Barry said, and then in  an apparent non sequitur, added, "I want  a large family myself."

  "How nice for you," I said. "Personally, I  prefer being an aunt. You can take your nieces  and nephews out and have fun with them and then dump them  back on their parents when they're tired and  hungry and cranky."

  Barry blinked a couple of times and then wandered  off.

  "You don't really feel that way about kids,"  Michael said, over my shoulder.

  "No, as a general rule, I like children," I  said. "But I'm sure I could make an  exception for any offspring of Barry's."

  We ran through the proceedings a second time with  slightly better results. I decided to leave well enough alone.

  "Okay, everyone, you can leave now," I said.  "But be back here at eleven tomorrow. No  exceptions."

  "You'd make a great stage manager,"  Michael remarked.

  "Or a drill sergeant," I replied. "I  think everything we can control is under control."

  "As long as we don't have a thunderstorm we'll  be okay," Eileen's father said, frowning at the  sky.

  As if in answer, the sky rumbled.  "Uh-oh," Michael said.

  "Red sky at morning, sailors take  warning," Mrs. Fenniman chanted. "Red sky  at night, sailor's delight."

  "Was there a red sky tonight?" Michael asked. 

  "Who had time to look?" I said.

  "Meg, we're not going to have a thunderstorm, are  we?" Eileen asked. As if there were something I  could do about it if we were.

  "Not according to the weatherman," I said. "Not according  to all three of the local weathermen."

  "Weatherpeople, Meg," Mother corrected.  "Channel Thirteen has a weather lady."

  "Whatever," I said. "All the weatherpeople  say sunny skies tomorrow, thank goodness."

  "But what if they're wrong this time?" Eileen  wailed. "It would absolutely spoil everything  if we had a thunderstorm!" Then why did you  dimwits shoot down every backup plan I  suggested, I said to myself, and then immediately felt  guilty.

  "Don't worry," I said. "They'd be able  to tell us if it were going to rain cats and dogs  all day. If it's only scattered thundershowers,  all it can do is delay us slightly. And that's  no problem. I mean, nobody's going to kick us  out of your yard if we run late. Your cousin the  priest isn't going anywhere. The guests are there  for the duration. It'll be fine."

  "Oh, I just know it's going to rain," she  moaned. And repeated, several times, while the  rest of us were exchanging farewells. In fact, as  I walked down the driveway with Dad and  Michael, the last thing I heard was Eileen,  plaintively wailing, "Oh, I just know the  rain's going to spoil everything." Followed by my  mother, in her most encouraging maternal tones,  saying, "Don't worry, dear; if it does, Meg will think of something."

  "Please, let it be nice and sunny tomorrow,"  I muttered.

         Saturday, July 16.

          Eileen's wedding day.

  One should be careful what one wishes for, as Mother  always says. Eileen's wedding day did, indeed,  dawn nice and sunny. Nice was over by nine  o'clock, when the temperature hit 90 degrees and  continued climbing. But it certainly was still sunny.  By two o'clock, when the ceremony was supposed  to begin, it would be absolutely hellish.

  "Oh, for a thunderstorm." I sighed, fighting the  temptation to look at the thermometer again. What  difference did it make if the temperature had  broken into triple digits or was still hovering at  99? It's not the heat, it's the humidity, and we  had more than enough of that.

  "I'm afraid the air-conditioning's busted,"  Mr. Donleavy apologized. For about the  fifty-seventh time. As if I thought his air  conditioner normally shrieked like a banshee while  emitting a tiny thread of air not appreciably  cooler than the air outside. "And with Price still  in the hospital ..."

  "It's okay," I said, as graciously as I  could manage. "Not your fault."

  One good thing about the heat, it tended to keep the  members of the wedding party under control. Virtually  comatose, in fact. No clowning about with the swords  today. The men lounged around in the kitchen with their  doublets off, or at least unbuttoned, waiting  for the first guests to show. And resentfully swilling  quarts of iced tea. Eileen's elderly aunt  had caught two of them with beer cans earlier and was  now sitting in a corner, sternly enforcing  sobriety. I wondered if so much iced tea was  a good idea. If all these tights-clad men  waited to hit the bathroom at the last possible  moment before the wedding started, they'd find out why  women's trips to the john take so much longer.  I thought of warning them, but it was too hot to bother.  Let them learn the hard way.

  Two of Be-Stitched's seamstresses were  perched in another corner, waiting to make  repairs or adjustments as needed. Michael had  another two stationed upstairs to help stuff the  women into our velvet when the time came. All four beamed and nodded whenever they caught  sight of me. Nice to know I was such a hit with  Michael's ladies.

  Inside the house, the cloying smell of the  patchouli incense Eileen was burning for luck  warred for dominance with the smell of damp, sweaty  humans. If you walked outside, the reek of  citronella smoke hit you like a wall, from the  dozens of mosquito repellent candles Dad was  lighting throughout the yard.

  "Everything under control?" Michael asked when  I ran into him at the iced tea pitcher.

  "So far," I said. "Just so I can say I  told you so to someone, I hereby predict  Eileen's last attack of prenuptial  jitters will occur between one-forty and  one-forty-five."

  "How can you be sure it will be the last attack?"  Michael asked.

  "After about two-thirty, they'll be  postnuptial jitters, which makes them Steven's  problem, not mine."

  "Good point," he replied. "Any  predictions on how many heatstroke cases  we'll have?"

  "I'm trying not to think about it. I'm worried  about Professor Donleavy in that velvet  tent."

  To spare Eileen's father the indignity of  tights, we had clad him in a long, voluminous  royal blue velvet robe that would have been  suitable wear for a wealthy, middle-aged  Renaissance man. He took it surprisingly  well. He was a professor, after all. Perhaps  having to march in academic robes in the graduation  ceremonies every year made the costume seem  less ridiculous to him than it might to most men.  Or perhaps after thirty-four years, he'd given  up arguing with Eileen. At any rate, he was  pacing up and down in the front hall, his  elaborate Renaissance footgear looking very  odd with the Bermuda shorts and William and Mary  T-shirt he was wearing. He didn't argue for a  second when we decided to wait till the last  possible minute to put the velvet gown on him.

  Father Pete was the only person already in full  costume. If vanity was still a deadly sin, he'd  have a busy time in his next confession. We'd had  trouble prying him out of costume the night before, and  today, long before anyone else could even look at their gear, he was completely togged out in  the black velvet gown with gold and lace  trimming that had looked so spectacular on  Michael. He'd spent the last two hours  strolling around the house striking poses and checking  his appearance surreptitiously in any handy  reflective surface. His only concession to the  heat was to mop his forehead occasionally with a  lace-trimmed handkerchief that he'd probably  filched from a bridesmaid.

  "Am I doing all right?" he asked me, in  passing. "Looking authentic and all?"

  "You look fabulous," I lied. Actually,  he looked rather like Elmer Fudd in drag, but he  was entering into the spirit of the thing so enthusiastically that I  didn't have the heart to say anything else.

  At one-twenty-five, Eric ran in, with Duck in his wake, to report that the first car was  approaching. I sent him out to put Duck in her  pen for the afternoon. I shooed the ushers out to earn their  keep. There was the anticipated logjam in the  bathroom. I waved a signal to the  musicians. Gentle harmonies began wafting  up from the garden, the sound of the lutes and recorders  drowned out occasionally by faint rolls of thunder. I  peered out at the first guests in amazement. What  on earth had possessed them to show up here  thirty-five minutes before the ceremony when they  could be riding around with their air-conditioning on, or  at least their windows open? Ah, well, it was their  funeral. Though not, I hoped, literally.  Inside, the tension level ratcheted up  significantly. Although giving Eileen away  only required one line, Professor Donleavy was obviously getting stagefright. I  could hear him muttering, "I do. I do," with every  possible variation in tone and inflection. Father  Pete was humming along with the music and  improvising a stately dance. I trudged  upstairs to check events in the women's dressing  rooms.

  The bridesmaids donned their gowns and then  sat around with their skirts up over their knees,  fanning themselves or rubbing ice cubes wrapped in  dish towels over any accessible skin. Good thing  this crew was heavily into the natural look;  makeup would have been running down our faces in  sweaty streaks in five minutes.

  Mrs. Tranh and the ladies were coaxing us all  into the remaining bits of our outfits. Michael, looking annoyingly cool and comfortable in a  loose-fitting white shirt and off-white pants,  supervised and translated.

  "Oh, God, I'm not sure I want to do  this," Eileen said, ripping her velvet  headpiece off.

  "Well, let's not spoil the show," I said,  rescuing the headpiece before she could ruin it and  catching her hands to keep her from removing her gown.  I glanced at a bedside alarm clock:  one-forty-five on the dot. "After it's all  over, if you decide it's been a mistake, we  can get it annulled and send back the presents.  Right now we need to get downstairs and  into position."

  "How can you be so calm about this when I may be  making the biggest mistake of my life!"

  I wanted to say, "Because it's your life, not  mine," but I didn't think it would go over that  well. Eileen went on in much the same vein for the  rest of the time it took to replace her headpiece  and put the finishing touches to her outfit. Mrs.  Tranh and the ladies seemed to grasp what was  going on, despite the language barrier, and  made sympathetic noises while ruthlessly forcing  her into the remaining bits of clothing. Always nice  to see real professionals in action.

  Ten minutes to go. We dragged Eileen, still  babbling, downstairs and out the side door to where we  had curtained off a makeshift foyer with a    moss-green velvet curtain. I peeped out through  a small tear in the fabric and saw that the only  empty spots on the lawn appeared to be the  places where the guests had rearranged the folding  chairs to avoid unusually large mud puddles.  I tried to tune out the chaos around me, including  the seamstress trying to make my damp puffed  sleeves look a little less limp. I  concentrated on keeping Eileen calm and  recognizing our cue. Which wasn't as easy as it  usually was in weddings. Nothing ordinary like "Here  Comes the Bride" would do for Eileen, of course.  She'd chosen a stately pavane to accompany  our muddy procession down the makeshift aisle.  Unfortunately, she was the only one who knew it  well enough to tell when the musicians began playing  it. Every time they started a new piece of music,  at least one bridesmaid would look panicked and  hiss, "Isn't that it?" It all sounded  twittery and slightly flat to me, and I was as clueless as the rest of them, but I began  calmly asking Eileen the name of each tune.  Having to search her memory and come up with a name  seemed to bring her temporarily back to sanity.  We had been through "Pastime with Good Company,"  "La Mourisque," "Jouyssance Vous  Donneray," and a lute solo of "My Lady  Carey's Dompe" when finally she replied "Oh, that's Le Bon Vouloir!" She  looked panic-stricken. Must be our cue.