Swan for the Money (21 page)

Chapter 39

Back inside the barn, I checked my watch as I strolled up to Mrs. Winkleson’s table. Marston was still standing by the tea cart, so I deduced that rose grooming trumped Mrs. Winkle-son’s promise to bring something to the chief “as soon as possible.”

“Okay,” I said. “You get an additional eleven minutes to groom, for a total of twenty-one.”

Not that she needed them. She was already methodically transferring her roses from her own black vases to the standard show ones, with only a few token attempts at grooming.

“I could use a runner here,” one of the rose growers said. Dad leaped to her table.

“And here,” another exhibitor called. Dad was now carrying a vase in each hand, and none of the other runners were in sight, so I went to the second exhibitor’s table and took charge of two vases, each containing a single elegant tea rose.

“That one’s for class 101,” she said. “And this one’s for 124.”

“Right,” I said. I stifled the impulse to point out that the class numbers were clearly marked on the tags attached by rubber bands to the vases. I knew that if the roses were placed in the wrong class, the judges would disqualify them, and clearly she was wound a little more tightly than usual, this close to the deadline. I followed Dad into the show barn and then studied the tags on my two vases before carefully placing them in their proper slots.

Then I took a moment to survey the room. It was filling up with brightly colored blooms. The aroma wasn’t as strong as I’d expected. I’d gathered from talking with Dad over the last few weeks that a lot of the roses being shown had been bred for looks rather than scent. But at least where I was standing, near categories 124 (most fragrant modern rose) and 125 (most fragrant old garden rose or shrub), the air was filled with an intense and surprisingly complex range of scents. I closed my eyes, inhaled deeply and—

“Meg?”

Dad. I opened my eyes.

“Come here,” he said, in a conspiratorial whisper. “I need to show you something.”

I took another deep breath near the most fragrant competitors before following him to the next table, where the Winkle-son prize candidates were arranged in a semicircle around the little black-and-white tag that said “Category 127.”

“Look at that,” he said, pointing to one of the roses.

“Very nice,” I said. And it was. Like most of the entrants, it wasn’t really black but a very dark, velvety red. Still, this one looked at least a shade darker than almost all of the others. I was about to reassure him that yes, his rose was a shoo-in for the Winkleson prize when I realized that the rose in question might not be Dad’s.

The entry tags were folded up so the judges wouldn’t know while judging which grower had entered which rose. I could only read the top few lines, containing the name of the rose variety and the category number. Even in as few words as that, I could tell that this tag wasn’t in Dad’s elegant and unmistakable printing. But then Mother was probably writing the tags. I unfolded the tag on the dark rose and peeked at the exhibitor’s name.

The dark rose was Mrs. Winkleson’s.

As I closed the tag up again, I was struggling to find something reassuring to say that wouldn’t actually be a lie. Unless the judges were blind, odds were good that they might give Mrs. Winkleson the swan. Dad looked around to see if anyone else was nearby before whispering again.

“That’s Matilda,” he said.

“Matilda that you thought had been eaten by deer?”

Dad nodded.

“How can you tell?”

“She’s got it listed as a Black Magic,” he said. “That’s a very popular dark red rose. From Jackson and Perkins. The majority of the roses here are Black Magic. See?”

He pointed out some of the other tags. I inspected them and nodded.

“Yes, most of them are Black Magic,” I said. “But none of them look like this.”

“Precisely,” Dad said. “I’m quite familiar with Black Magic. I’ve used any number of them in my hybridizing program. So either it’s a sport— a chance genetic mutation of the sort rose breeders dream about— or that’s not a Black Magic rose at all. And I’m betting the latter. Look at the shape.”

I studied Mrs. Winkleson’s rose and then the Black Magic roses entered by all the other exhibitors. There was a time when they’d have all looked alike to me, but I must have begun to absorb a few things from all the rose-centric dinner table conversations I’d heard in recent months.

“It’s . . . fluffier,” I said. “As if it had more petals packed into the same space.”

“It does have more petals,” Dad said. “I used some dark red cabbage rose stock in my hybridizing program. And the leaves are different. They’re smaller, and lighter in color. And smell it.”

I bent down to Mrs. Winkleson’s flower and inhaled deeply.

“Now that’s how a rose should smell,” I said. The spurious Black Magic rose had an intense, almost intoxicating fragrance that tickled my memory. I took another deep sniff.

“Cloves and licorice,” I said.

“Good nose. Now smell the others.”

I did so. They all smelled nice, though not nearly as strong. And different. Nice, but no hint of cloves or licorice.

“They have the typical moderate damask scent you’d expect from a Black Magic rose,” Dad said. “Not that one. That’s Matilda. I’d recognize that spicy scent anywhere.”

From what I remembered of Great Aunt Matilda and her seven marriages— or was it eight?— spicy was appropriate.

“Has Mother seen this?” I asked aloud.

“Not yet,” Dad said. “And don’t tell her.”

“No, not while Mrs. Winkleson is still recuperating from the last murder attempt,” I said. “If you’re right, what can we do?”

“I don’t know,” Dad said. “There may be nothing we can do to prevent her from winning the trophy with a stolen rose.”

I studied the competitors again.

“Well, I think that one has a chance,” I said, pointing to a rose at the other end of the semicircle from Mrs. Winkle-son’s.

“That’s Cordelia,” Dad said. “My other candidate. I wasn’t sure whether to enter her or Matilda, until the deer made the decision for me. At least I thought it was deer. Now I’m not so sure.”

“Nice name,” I said. Dad nodded, growing a little misty-eyed. Cordelia was the name of his long-lost mother. Before Dr. Blake had entered our lives, all we’d known about my paternal grandmother was that she’d left Dad as an infant in the fiction section of a Charlottesville library— which, for a family of readers, seemed just as acceptable as the more conventional method of leaving foundlings on the steps of the church. We still didn’t know much about her, but at least we knew her name.

I studied Cordelia and the Matilda rose that Mrs. Winkleson had stolen from several angles. A toss-up. Either one could win, depending on how the light happened to fall at the moment the judges saw them. If anything, Matilda was in slightly fuller bloom, which would give her the edge right now. But by an hour from now, when the judging began, the stolen Matilda might be a little past her prime.

It would be cheating to turn on the heat and hasten the process, I reminded myself.

“Whether we win the prize isn’t the important thing,” Dad was saying. “We have to prevent her from continuing the fraud.”

“How could she?” I asked. “It’s not as if she could keep that one Matilda rose fresh until the next rose show.”

“But it’s not just one rose,” Dad said. “I’m sure she has a bush. Maybe two. Remember, last night’s deer attack— if it was a deer attack— wasn’t the first time something happened to Matilda. I originally had three Matilda seedlings. Early this spring, I thought a deer had completely eaten two of them. It wasn’t the flowers. Both plants were pulled out of the ground and eaten whole. Or so I thought. There was a lot of obvious deer damage to the nearby plants as well. But what if the Matilda seedlings weren’t eaten? What if Mrs. Winkleson stole them?”

“I wouldn’t put it past her,” I said. “But how can we possibly prove it?”

Dad thought for a moment.

“Well, I understand they’re doing some interesting work on rose DNA,” he said. “So far it’s mostly focused on protecting patent rights on new cultivars, and possibly on improving resistance to blackspot disease. But there’s no reason it couldn’t be used forensically. My remaining Matilda bush still has enough leaves that I could sacrifice one. So all we need to do is get something from her so-called Black Magic rose.”

We both stared at the flower in question for some moments.

“We can’t touch it now,” I said. “People would suspect us of trying to sabotage her entry.”

“But you’ll be coming back in before the general public, right?” he said. “To supervise the runners who move the winners to the trophy table. Or at least to make sure they’ve done their job right?”

He pointed to the table where we’d arranged all the various plaques, bowls, loving cups, and other prize items, with the giant black glass swan as its centerpiece, looking rather like Gulliver among the Lilliputians.

“The judges won’t be moving the winners themselves?”

“No, no,” he said. “Judges don’t touch anything. Only the runners. So while that’s happening, you could find a chance to snag a leaf or a petal.”

“I can try,” I said.

“Meanwhile, let’s check the area around her prep table,” he said. “Maybe we can find a few bits of leaf or petal.”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I think she groomed her roses, or had them groomed, up at the house. All she did in the barn was pop them from her vases into the show vases and admire them a little.”

“But there are still the bushes,” Dad said. “You could go take a sample from her rose bushes. You know where her garden is.”

“I’ve been to her garden, once,” I said. “Finding it again’s not going to be simple.”

“You can do it,” Dad said.

“And then there’s getting in. The place is an armed fortress.”

“You can do it,” he repeated.

He was looking at me with such an expression of mingled hope and wistfulness that I gave in.

“I’ll try,” I said. “I can’t promise anything.”

“Thank you!”

“And I can’t even try till the judging starts,” I said. “I have to stick around until then. But once it does start, we’ll have a three- and-a-half-hour window. Find Mrs. Winkleson and keep an eye on her. In fact, keep her in the barns if possible. Call my cell phone if you lose her or if she takes off over the fields. I’d rather not get caught trespassing.”

“No problem!”

I hate it when people say “no problem.” It’s almost always guarantees disaster.

Chapter 40

I returned to the prep barn and strolled up and down the center aisle, glancing at all the exhibitors as I passed. Everyone was racing to finish grooming their roses. All the tables were littered with bits of leaf and petal, tiny brushes, and the Q-tips and bits of sponges they were pulling out of their roses.

Except for Mrs. Winkleson’s table. It was immaculate, and she seemed perfectly calm as she methodically moved her roses from the black glass vases into the clear.

No chance of stealing any rose DNA there. I strolled back up the aisle and sat down at my table.

I could see Dad pacing up and down the aisles between calls for his services as a runner, and I suspected he was keeping a medical eye on several of the most frantic exhibitors, the ones who looked on the verge of a heart attack or possibly a nervous breakdown.

The calls for runners were coming faster and faster, to the point that some of them actually were running. And there were still at least ten times as many roses in the prep barn as there were in the show barn.

“Runner!” someone called.

I glanced around. No one else was leaping to answer the call, so I got up again and carried off another brace of vases.

At 10 A.M. I gave everybody ten minutes’ warning. At 10:10, I called time for everyone but Mrs. Winkleson, and sent Rose Noire and Molly Weston to guard the door and make sure no one snuck in any entries under the wire. All the exhibitors stood around, tidying their workspaces, packing up their tools, and casting hostile glances at Mrs. Winkleson.

At 10:21, I called time on Mrs. Winkleson, and sent runners to take her last few roses into the show barn.

She immediately slumped as if she had been running a marathon. I tried to summon up a little sympathy for her. After all, even if the dose of cyanide the killer had given her hadn’t turned out to be lethal, whatever they’d done at the hospital to treat her poisoning couldn’t have been fun. But I couldn’t help feeling that she was fishing for sympathy.

And coming up empty. None of the other exhibitors came over to compliment her on her entries, swap stories about how much rain damage they’d had to overcome, inquire about her health, or wish her well in the competition. She watched the cheerful hubbub for a few minutes, her face inscrutable.

“Bring the car around, Marston,” she said finally. “I shall go up to the mansion and rest until the judging is over.”

Marston immediately vanished. Mrs. Winkleson sat back in her chair and closed her eyes until Marston returned and helped her out of the barn.

Dad went trotting out after her. Did he mean to catch a ride with her up to the house? No, but I saw him walking briskly up the drive toward it.

As soon as she left, everyone seemed to relax and smile again. Conversations broke out. I strolled up and down the aisles eavesdropping.

“—hate to see her win after some of the tricks she pulled. Did you hear—”

“—and the damned thing was closed up tight as can be, but I just put it outside for an hour and let nature work on it—”

“—I’ve got no use for them. I was just going to pull them up and pitch them, but if you’d like them—”

“—supposed to be resistant to blackspot, and instead it’s more susceptible than all my other roses put together—”

A lot of rose lore and rose world gossip. A few words about Mrs. Winkleson’s dirty tricks. Nothing about the murder or the attempted murder. Or about Mr. Darby’s apparent arrest for cattle rustling.

“Meg, dear,” Mother said. “I’m having a picnic brunch brought in. You’d think Mrs. Winkleson would have arranged that. It’s only common courtesy. But. . . .”

Here she shrugged and smiled, as if acknowledging the irony of using courtesy in the same sentence with Mrs. Winkleson’s name.

A pair of delivery men in the uniform of one of Caerphilly’s swankier catering services appeared in the doorway carrying stacks of boxes. The exhibitors pitched in to clear space, and within minutes the prep tables were covered with long square plates full of bacon, sausage, hash browns, grits, biscuits, gravy, scrambled eggs, doughnuts, croissants, yogurt, and a dozen kinds of fresh fruit.

I grabbed a croissant in passing and went to check on the judges. Mrs. Winkleson had set up a brunch for them in the area set aside as their lounge, the otherwise off-limits horse barn. But since her bounty had consisted of a dozen stale supermarket doughnuts and a small pot of weak coffee, all six of them were standing around looking cross and discontented.

I cringed. I should have checked on their accommodations before.

“The show is ready for you,” I told them. They filed out, followed by Rose Noire and Molly, who were going to be acting as runners during the judging.

“For heaven’s sake, let’s bring them some plates from Mother’s brunch,” I whispered to Rose Noire. “If I were them I’d disqualify every rose in the show after that miserable excuse for a breakfast.”

In the prep barn the caterers were now unloading smoked salmon, caviar, and champagne, and setting up a small omelet-cooking station.

“Who’s paying for this anyway?” someone said at my elbow.

It was Theobald Winkleson, the unhappy nephew. I hadn’t seen him at all while Mrs. Winkleson was here, but apparently he’d been watching from somewhere nearby.

“Don’t worry,” I said. “It’s not costing your aunt a penny.”

He frowned as if he wasn’t sure he believed me and began loading up a plate.

Rose Noire and I borrowed Marston’s silver cart, snagged a little of everything, and wheeled it into the show barn. When I left, Rose Noire was pouring champagne and the judges were starting their work with smiles on their faces.

Time for me to carry out my promise to Dad.

I detoured into the horse barn with a large trash can, on the pretext of cleaning up the judges’ largely untouched coffee and doughnuts. When the barn was spotless again, I left the trash-can just inside the front door. Then I snagged one of the heavy black horse blankets and slipped out the back door.

I was halfway across the goat pasture when I heard shrieks from the show barn. What now? Cyanide in the champagne? Marguerite returning for dessert?

I flung the horse blanket over the fence and ran through the goat barn to the front door of the cow barn. I slid the door open a few inches and peeked in.

Rose Noire and the judges were huddled at this end, attempting to hide behind the silver serving cart.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

No one spoke, but several of them lifted trembling fingers and pointed toward the other end of the barn.

I sighed, and slid the door open another foot, so I could stick my head inside.

One of the black swans was standing at the other end of the barn by the prize table with its wings spread out to their full width. As I watched, it flapped its wings and uttered a harsh cry.

On the prize table, the black glass swan remained mute and motionless, but its wings were held in almost the same position as the live swan’s.

Damn. By accident or design, my friend, the glassmaker, had modeled his nearly life-sized glass sculpture on what a real swan looked like when it was about to pick a fight with another of its species.

The real swan flapped its wings again, and I could hear a faint tinkle of breaking glass as one of the more fragile trophies fell over.

“Help!” Rose Noire whispered.

“Why don’t you all come outside while I deal with this?” I suggested, hauling the door open wide. The judges scurried out, knocking over the silver cart in their haste.

The swan hardly noticed.

“Someone has to protect the roses,” Rose Noire whispered. She continued crouching behind the fallen cart.

For some reason, I found myself remembering how hard I’d tried to get the garden club to hold its show downtown in the high school gym, or in one of the college buildings.

“Oh, no,” everyone had said. “That would be so boring.”

Right now, I’d have loved boring.

I looked around at the crowd outside the barn and spotted a familiar figure. Horace, again wearing his tattered gorilla suit.

“Horace,” I said. “Come help me rescue Rose Noire.”

He might have hesitated under other circumstances, but Horace had a longstanding crush on Rose Noire— who was, as I kept explaining to non-family members, only his fourth cousin once removed, so it wasn’t really unsuitable at all.

“Can I help too?” Sammy asked. He also had a crush on Rose Noire.

“Go to the other end of the barn and open the door there,” I said to Sammy. “The one that leads out into the pasture.”

Sammy nodded and raced off around the corner of the barn. Horace shuffled over to the door and peeked in.

“What do you want me to do?” he asked.

“Help me scare off the swan,” I said. I grabbed a pitchfork that was standing near the barn door. “When we go in, beat your chest and roar.”

Horace looked terrified, but he nodded, and followed me into the barn.

The swan was still flapping its wings at its glass rival.

“Come on,” I said. I held the pitchfork in front of me and began slowly marching down the center of the barn. Horace shuffled along beside me. When we got within ten feet of it, the swan turned and focused on us.

“Uh-oh,” Horace said.

“Don’t say uh-oh,” I said, shaking the pitchfork in what I hoped was a menacing manner. “Roar and beat your chest!”

“Rrrrr,” Horace said. He was doing okay in the chest beating department, but his roaring sounded more like a kitten’s purr.

“No,” I said. “Roar! Like this!”

I uttered several loud roars. I probably sounded more like a lion or an angry bear than a gorilla, but it sounded plenty menacing to me. Horace, encouraged, beat his chest with greater conviction, but left the roaring to me.

The swan continued to flap its wings for a few seconds, but then it began edging toward the now open back door.

“We’ve got it on the run!” I said, between roars. “Keep it up!”

Horace and I continued to advance toward the swan, with me roaring and shaking the pitchfork while Horace alternately waved his arms and beat his chest with them. The swan broke and ran for the door. I heard a small gasp from Sammy, and he leaped inside the door and flattened himself against the wall.

“Good riddance,” I said, as Horace and I watched the swan make its retreat across the pasture and into the woods. “Sammy, bring the judges back in.”

“I think I may faint,” Horace said.

“Take deep breaths,” I said. He sat down and followed my advice.

The swan had knocked over several dozen roses on the tables closest to the prize table. I picked up the ones that had merely fallen and put them back on the table, and counted how many broken vases needed to be replaced.

“Oh, Horace!” Rose Noire exclaimed. “That was wonderful!”

I knew Horace was beaming inside his gorilla head. Sammy, standing nearby, looked forlorn.

“And good job with the door, Sammy,” I said. “Can you fetch three large and two small vases?”

“Right!” Sammy said, and scurried off.

Only one trophy seemed broken, a fragile glass trinket of some sort. We’d find something else to give the winner. Maybe I could get my glassmaker friend to melt the fragments into something even nicer.

I oversaw swapping out the broken vases for new ones, and made sure the right tags were attached to the new vases. I considered calling the exhibitors in to spruce up their entries, and decided that if we waited for that, the judges would probably lose their nerve and leave. Rose Noire swept up the broken glass and Horace and Sammy went to replace the spilled food. The judges shuffled back in, looking anxious.

“Okay,” I said to Rose Noire. “I’m off again. Hold the fort till I get back. And keep the doors closed in case the swan finds reinforcements and comes back to get even.”

Since my route lay in the same direction the swan had taken, I was a little on edge about taking off over the fields. I considered commandeering the pitchfork, but Horace still had it, and was striding up and down the courtyard looking bold and purposeful. The judges might find that reassuring. Sammy had to settle for a mere push broom as his weapon, but he was doing his part, too. I grabbed the horse blanket and set off, looking warily to either side.

By now, I almost knew how to get to Mrs. Winkleson’s detention camp for roses: across the goat pasture, now fortunately devoid of both hungry goats and combative swans, over the fence into the field beyond. The woods around Mr. Darby’s cottage were on my left. I followed the treeline until I spotted the chain link fence.

I slipped into the woods to look around and listen carefully. I didn’t see or hear anything. I ventured out again, and crept up to the rose garden, keeping to the edge of the woods as long as I could.

The gate was shut and locked. I checked the padlock to be sure. I’d brought Dad’s lockpicking tools, just in case they came in handy, but when I saw that it was a very high-tech Medeco I didn’t even bother getting the tools out. According to the genial retired burglar who’d taught Dad a few of his professional skills— just for fun on Dad’s part, since he was an avid mystery reader and adored Donald Westlake’s burglar books— no lock was unpickable, but Medecos came close enough that I didn’t see any reason for me to waste my time on them. So much for plan A, picking the lock. I was expecting to use plan B anyway.

I tied the horse blanket around my shoulders and began climbing up the chain link fence. The horse blanket was for draping over the razor wire at the top, so I wouldn’t get cut to ribbons. I hadn’t quite figured out what to do if the razor wire turned out to be electrified.

Fortunately it wasn’t, and the horse blanket cushion worked. I climbed part of the way down and then jumped, landing lightly beside the first row of roses.

I pulled out the makeshift DNA collection kit I’d assembled from materials available in the prep barn, including a small pair of pruning shears, a box of plastic zipper Baggies, and a black waterproof marker. I drew a quick map of the red rose of them on the first Baggie. The garden contained twenty-three of them in three rows of eight with one empty space near the end of the farthest row, presumably where one bush had died. Then I numbered the bushes on the map and began bagging my specimens, cutting the smallest possible leaf from each bush, numbering the Baggie to match the bush’s place on my map, and adding the name or number of the rose from the tags.