The Readaholics and the Falcon Fiasco (13 page)

B
rooke tried to soothe me. Scared by the threat and by the fact that someone had been to my house to deliver it, I’d dashed out, not even grabbing my purse, and driven straight to Brooke’s. We sat in her kitchen, the only room in her house that wasn’t formal and expensive and intimidating. Well, it was expensive—acres of granite, appliances with foreign names I couldn’t pronounce, and extras like warming drawers and a second oven and a walk-in wine cooler—but it was homey, too, with red brick around the stove and floral cushions on the chairs. We sat at the table in her breakfast nook, which looked out on a backyard so
designed
that it looked like it’d been imported rock by rock and plant by plant from the Denver Botanic Gardens.

Troy stood at the stove in running gear, reheating last night’s stew for lunch, while Brooke fetched me a glass of cranberry juice.

“Drink,” she said when I started to talk.

The glass chittered against my teeth as I drank.
The sugar washing into my system made me feel more stable. “Thanks.” I swiped my mouth with the back of my hand.

“Is it girl stuff?” Troy asked. “Do you want me to go away?” Tall and slender, he had slightly droopy posture and seemed younger than thirty-two. His pleasant, open face and light brown hair, which waved around his ears, could have gotten him cast in any high school movie as the hot girl’s loyal guy friend who would turn out to be her true love.

“Not girl stuff,” I said, shoving the threatening note across the table to Brooke. Troy came to peer over her shoulder.

Brooke read it and looked up, puzzled. “It sounds vaguely nasty, but I don’t get it. ‘Buzzing’? ‘Sting’?”

I explained about the mysterious beehive and the Boy Scout picnic fiasco.

“So now you think someone put the beehive there on purpose?” Troy asked. He returned to the stove and ladled rich-smelling stew into three bowls, inserted a spoon into each one, and set them on the table.

I began to eat automatically, not realizing until the first savory bite hit my tongue how hungry I was. “That’s exactly what I think. Furthermore, I found a tennis ball not far from the hive.”

This revelation only confused them further.

“I think someone was hiding in the woods and threw the tennis ball at the hive to agitate the bees.” The thought had come to me on the ride over here, when the tennis ball rolled off the passenger seat
and under the gas pedal. “Someone deliberately pissed off those bees, hoping they’d ruin the picnic. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Brooke and Troy exchanged a glance.

“Exactly why would someone do that, honey?” Brooke asked.

They didn’t know about Ivy’s house being vandalized or the coded ledger page. I quickly filled them in, ending with how I’d dropped the ledger page at the police station Friday evening and talked to Flavia after the funeral. “Someone’s trying to scare me away from looking into Ivy’s murder,” I announced, scraping my spoon against the bowl to get the last of the gravy.

“How would they even know?” Troy asked. “I mean, who have you discussed it with?”

That was a darn fine question. I sat up straighter and thought about it. “Well, all the Readaholics. And Ham Donner knows I was at his sister’s house Friday. Maybe Kirsten at her office, because I took the tea canister. And the police know, obviously.” The shortness of the list made me uncomfortable. “And I suppose any of those people could have told other people.”

Troy nodded, unconvinced. “I think you’re paranoid, Amy-Faye.” Picking up our bowls, he carried them to the sink and ran water into them.

I could hear Maud’s voice saying,
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.

Brooke watched her husband. “Remember, your mother’s coming by later to talk about the gala.”

“I forgot.” Making a face, Troy transferred the bowls to the dishwasher, sponged up a spot of
stew on the range top, scrubbed out the sink, and folded a dish towel precisely, talking while he worked. “Isn’t it more likely someone at the picnic wrote this note, maybe as a prank? Or maybe it was an angry parent—pissed off because little Johnny or Janet got stung—who wanted to scare you a little bit.”

“I don’t see how the line about ‘mind your own beeswax’ fits in that scenario,” I said. “Someone’s telling me to butt out—of something—or else. The only ‘something’ I can think of is Ivy’s murder.”

An impatient look flitted across Troy’s face. “Come on, Amy-Faye. It’s probably not even a murder—the police said she committed suicide. You’re just bored and upset about Elvaston getting married—”

Brooke’s guilty look told me she’d discussed it with him.

“—and looking for attention. You need to get out of here for a bit, get a fresh outlook. Take a little vacation, say, a long weekend in Denver. Brooke could go with you. You could do the spa thing”—he mimed painting his nails—“and do some shopping.”

Brooke looked from her husband to me, half-embarrassed (presumably because he’d called me an attention hound) and half-hopeful. “It’d be fun. We could—”

I rose, hurt and angry. “I don’t think so. I am not acting out because Doug’s getting married. I am not making any of this up. It may turn out that Ivy wasn’t murdered, but I owe it to her to make a serious effort to find out, bees and threats and
skeptics”—I included both of them in my angry look—“be damned.” I stalked toward the front door.

“Amy-Faye—” Brooke started to follow me.

“Thanks for the stew,” I said, closing the door oh so gently and dignifiedly behind me.

*   *   *

I drove off and parked around the corner to pound on the steering wheel. Troy and I had never been best buddies—I’d thought he was stuck-up and snotty in high school, and the way he knuckled under to his parents on every important issue since he and Brooke got married drove me batty—but I’d thought he respected me, a little, and my friendship with Brooke, and I’d always respected their relationship. Saying I was making stuff up about Ivy because I craved attention, implying that Doug getting married had caused me so much stress I needed a vacation—
Ooh!
I banged the steering wheel one more time, took a deep breath, and resumed driving.

I drove for a couple of blocks before realizing I didn’t have a destination in mind. I was a little bit nervous about going home, although obviously I’d have to do so eventually. I could go to Maud’s. She’d believe me about the note—she’d be
eager
to believe me, and immediately start spinning conspiracy theories to account for it. I wasn’t in the mood. Should I take it to the police? It was a threat, after all. I shook my head. No. I wasn’t going to run the risk that the police would think as Troy did, that I was some sort of unbalanced woman, looking for attention. I’d already been to
the police station twice in the last forty-eight hours; I wasn’t going back.

I realized that while I was thinking, the van had steered itself toward my parents’ house, a rambling two-story on the east end of Heaven, and I remembered my new resolution from the memorial service to connect with my folks this weekend. The house had flaking gray paint, an overgrown yard with apple trees, and a detached two-car garage. Neither Mom nor Dad was much for home maintenance. Mom thought of it as man’s work, and Dad was so engrossed in trying to solve unsolvable mathematical equations that he wouldn’t notice if a meteor hurtled into his study, never mind if the driveway was more green than black due to the weeds growing through cracks in the asphalt. I pulled into the sprouting driveway with a feeling of relief. At least being with them would take my mind off my troubles.

Not bothering to knock, I opened the screen door and let it slap shut behind me. The noise called to mind my mother’s constant reminders of “Don’t let the screen door bang” from my childhood.

“Hey, guys, it’s just me,” I called. The air smelled faintly of books from the shelves lining every wall—and I mean
every
wall—and more strongly of corned beef and cabbage in the slow cooker. I decided I would stay for dinner.

“Out here, dear.”

As if I didn’t know where my mother was. In the summer, she spent approximately 90 percent of her waking hours at the patio table in the
backyard, stack of books in a chair beside her, and a laptop and a bag of corn chips on the table. In the winter, she had the same setup in a small craft room off the kitchen. She’d been a librarian for years, and a voracious reader, and when online sites for booklovers popped up eight or ten years ago, she’d begun posting book reviews . . . by the thousands. She was both revered and feared in book circles and had been interviewed by national publications and even CNN about her reviewing.

I cut through the kitchen and out the sliding glass doors to the patio, where Mom sat in a webbed chair whose seat bowed ominously. She had naturally curly hair that she still wore almost shoulder length. Sheena at Sheena’s Hair Jungle was responsible for dying it back to its original chestnut every month or so. She had a complexion like a magnolia, the envy of every woman north of forty in the entire town, which she attributed to her religious use of sunscreen and the hats she’d worn from childhood on. Today’s was floral cotton with a floppy brim. Her eyes were hazel, like mine, and she had a wide mouth that was always slicked with bright lipstick. When my sisters and I were little, she used to let us pick out colors for her at the drugstore: Cherries Jubilation, Coral Splash, Neony Peony. She’d always had a tendency to put on weight and she’d ballooned since retiring from the library. Dad and I were seriously worried about her health. We were not alone—Mom worried about it, too, but since her worrying took the form of researching every new skin rash or cough and determining she had black lung
disease or leprosy, she wasn’t doing much about her real health problem: obesity and its nasty side effects. She was the reason I watched my weight so carefully.

“Hi, Mom.” I kissed her soft cheek as she typed at the keyboard, and moved a stack of category romances so I could sit. “Writing a good review or a bad one?”

“Actually”—she looked up—“I noticed a red spot on my calf this morning when I got out of the shower. I’m trying to determine if it’s Chagas or maybe Lyme disease. Do you think it looks like a bull’s-eye?” She bent with an effort to pull up the hem of her cotton skirt.

I peered at her calf but could see nothing more than a reddened patch of dried skin. Knowing it was useless to downplay her concerns, I said, “Look, I’ve got a welt, too.” I lifted my hair so she could see the bee sting.

“Oh, Amy-Faye. I hope it’s not contagious.”

I laughed. “It’s a bee sting, Mom. Not to worry.”

“It’s my job to worry about all you kids,” she said, finally shutting down the computer and giving me her full attention. Worry clouded her eyes. “Have you talked to your brother lately? He’s fussing about the pub not opening on time—something about inspections? And I think he and Gordon have quarreled again, although he didn’t say anything.”

Gordon was Derek’s business partner, a venture capitalist in his fifties who had financed restaurants, nightclubs, and bars in Texas and Colorado. He and Derek frequently argued because Gordon
thought his investment gave him the right to make all the important decisions and my brother, the creative force and brewmaster behind the venture, disagreed. Frequently. Loudly. When he was mad, he called Gordon “Gekko” after the
Wall Street
character played by Michael Douglas.

“I’ll call Derek,” I said, “or maybe stop by. I’ve got some questions for him about the opening-night party, anyway.”

“Thank you, dear,” Mom said. “You’re such a comfort.” Her gaze strayed to the pile of books.

“The Readaholics just finished
The Maltese Falcon
,” I said.

That got her attention. “Brilliant book. The way Hammett made it seem as if the book was about the falcon, when all along it’s about Spade and his relationships, his failings, his character. The falcon is just a device. What did Hitchcock—I think it was Hitchcock—call it? A MacGuffin. No, the heart of the novel is Spade. It gives me chills every time I read his soliloquy about how when a man’s partner dies he’s supposed to do something about it.” She shivered. “Ooh.”

I looked at her, struck.
When a man’s partner dies, he’s supposed to do something about it.
Ivy wasn’t my partner, but she was my friend and I suspected the principle applied. I felt better, suddenly, less worried about whether Troy or the police thought I was a headline-grabbing nutcase, and more sure that I was doing the right thing by looking into Ivy’s death. Somehow, whether she meant to or not, my mom always made me feel better. I hugged her. “Thanks, Mom.”

She beamed. “You’re staying for dinner, aren’t you? Go and bother your father until dinnertime. I’ve got to finish this book.” She picked up the top book on her stack and turned to a bookmark at the halfway point. I laughed, kissed her again, and went to bother my father, as directed.

He was standing in front of the whiteboard in his study, making incomprehensible notations, and I snuck up and hugged him from behind. He started, and the marker fell to the floor.

“Amy-Faye!” He swept me into a bear hug, which was easy for him to do since he was roughly the size of a grizzly. He looked more like a mountain man than a mathematician, with his broad shoulders, bushy beard, now mostly gray except for a few reddish streaks, and lumberjack shirts. He squeezed me again and released me.

“Any progress?” I nodded toward the whiteboard.

He rocked his hand. “Maybe a little. We’ll see where it leads.”

He knew better than to go into more detail with me. It was a great disappointment to him that none of his children had inherited his mathematical abilities, not as related to abstractions and theories. I was orderly and logical, but numbers meant nothing to me. I could comprehend my accounts receivable and payables, but that was about it. My sister Natalie played competitive chess and was a grand master or some such but had refused to take any math classes past geometry. Derek could calculate any equation having to do with brewing beer at lightning speed in his
head, but theoretical mathematics left him cold. Ditto for my other two sisters.