Murder With Peacocks

"Call off your dogs," I said.

"Mrrow!" said the kitten, and extended a head to be scratched.

"I knew I'd never seen him act like that before," said the Doberman's handler, with disgust.

"It's from Mrs. Thornhill," I told

Dad and Michael, who still looked shaken as they approached.

"Mrs. Thornhill?"

"The tipsy calligrapher. I suddenly recognized the handwriting."

I explained about Mrs. Thornhill and the invitations, to the great amusement of the deputies and firefighters. We were all bursting with the nervous laughter of people who have been badly scared. Some of the deputies began suggesting names like Boomer and Dynamite for the kitten. I refrained from telling them that the kitten would be going home to Mrs. Thornhill as soon as possible.

We did, however, decide that from now on we wouldn't open any wedding presents until we'd had them tested. Except for Eileen's, of course; no one would have any reason to harm her. The sheriff went off to discuss the arrangements with the Doberman's handler.

"So who are these people, anyway?" I overheard the trooper ask. "The local mob or something?"

I let the sheriff defend the family honor. I went off to intercept Mother and warn her that her yard was once more filled with police and firefighters. Warning her didn't seem to help much; she was still decoratively distraught and her recovery seemed to require that Jake take her and several of the aunts out to an expensive restaurant for Sunday dinner. On the bright side, while the chaos was at its height, I did manage to convince her to postpone her tea for the bridesmaids until the following weekend. And before I called all the bridesmaids to cancel, while I was sure she and Jake were still out of the way, I went down to Jake's house for another spot of burglary.

"Here," I said, sotto voce to Dad that evening. "I've got the goods."

"Great-Aunt Sophy?" he asked, looking into the bag.

"No, Emma Wendell. I pulled the switch this afternoon."

"That's splendid," he said, peering more intently into the bag. "This will be a great help."

"If it makes you happy," I said, as Dad trotted off, bag in hand.

We had a violent thunderstorm that night. The power went out just as we were about to fix dinner. The kitten, whom I hadn't gotten around to returning, turned out to be terrified by lightning. It was not a relaxing night.

Monday, July 4

Unfortunately, the thunderstorm that took out the power Sunday night failed to cool down the air. By nine o'clock Monday morning, the day of Samantha's bridal shower, the power was still out. The temperature was pushing ninety and still rising. Tempers were wearing thin all over the neighborhood, but particularly at the Brewster house. Those of us trying to help out in the kitchen spent most of the afternoon bickering over which foods were going to be safe to eat by the time the guests arrived and which contained ingredients like mayonnaise and were not to be trusted. As time passed and the mercury soared, the list got shorter, the trash cans got fuller, and we began to wonder if canceling would be a good idea.

Then, by a stroke of luck--possibly a bad stroke, although we didn't realize it at the time--the power came back on at five in the afternoon and we didn't have to cancel after all. In the hour before the first guests arrived, we ran the air conditioners full blast and changed the atmosphere from an oven to a mere steambath by the time things got underway. Mother sent Rob and Jake to the store to bring back an assortment of cheese, chips, crackers, and luncheon meats to replace the foods lost to the heatwave, and Pam, whose end of the neighborhood got back power a little sooner than ours, endeared herself to everybody by showing up with several huge bowls of fresh onion dip and salsa. I suspected that Dad must still be crouched in Jake's dogwood tree; for it was nearly the first time all summer we actually served party food that Dad hadn't picked over in advance. Which meant, of course, that there was so much food we'd probably end up calling him in to help get rid of it afterwards.

Once the shower got underway, I suppressed my mutinous wish that we'd cancelled after all. Watching Samantha unwrap and wave about frothy bits of lingerie ranked very low on my list of ways I'd like to spend one of the hottest days of the summer. I envied Mother, who had pleaded a headache and gone home already. Looking at

Samantha's carefully matched set of bridesmaids depressed me. They were all there: Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer, Kimberly, Tiffany, Heather, Melissa, and Blair.

I'd made a little rhyme of it to help me remember all the names, and was working on matching them to faces.

I was in a lousy mood, but I was the only one, and as far as I could see, the shower was going fine until Samantha vomited into the onion dip.

One minute she was chatting and laughing with Kimberly and Jennifer II, and then, suddenly, she bent over and puked right onto the dip platter. Conversation, naturally, screeched to a halt.

"Oh, dear," she said, faintly, putting her hand to her mouth. And then she turned and fled upstairs. I was still staring after her, wondering if I should go and see if she was all right, when suddenly I heard more retching. In stereo. Kimberly on my right, and one of Samantha's college friends on my left, were also throwing up.

It was the beginning of a mass exodus as, one after another, the guests either threw up and ran out or turned pale and walked unsteadily to the door. I considered going after them and rejected the idea. I'm not much of a nurse. And my stomach was beginning to feel a bit queasy. I hoped it was my imagination. I went out to the kitchen, told the housekeeper and Mrs. Brewster what was going on. The housekeeper fainted. Mrs. Brewster dialed 911. Good move. I began gathering paper towels and spray cleaner to mop up the living room as my penance for not going to the aid of the patients.

Just as I was beginning to think that perhaps luck--or my finicky eating habits--had been on my side and that I wasn't going to be sick, I felt the first faint tremors.

You'd think that in a house with seven bathrooms you could find a toilet to puke in when you wanted one, but after trying the hall powder room door--locked, with audible retching sounds emerging--I passed by the kitchen and saw three guests fighting for room at the sink while another was lying on the floor with her head propped over the dog's waterbowl. That's it, I told myself. I'm going home while I still can.

It wasn't easy. My head was beginning to ache badly, and even though it was twilight, the light hurt my eyes. I made it up the Brewsters' driveway and almost to the end of the next yard when the dizziness got so bad I had to stop and clutch the fence to stay upright. A horrible cramp went through my stomach, and I felt a sudden, uncharacteristic urge to strangle whichever of the Labs was barking just inside the fence.

"Meg?" I opened one eye to see Michael, with Spike in tow. Spike was trying to claw his way through the fence to get at the Labs. Serve him right if he succeeded, I thought.

"Meg, are you all right?" I shook my head, then wished I hadn't.

"Samantha's poisoned us all," I gasped. "At the shower. Food poisoning."

"For God's sake, why didn't you stay there if you're sick."

"No place to be sick," I muttered. "Can't even squeeze into a john. Everyone's having hysterics. Going home to be sick in peace." I began to lever myself off the fence and toward home.

"Hang on a minute, damn it! Let me set Spike loose and I'll help you. He can find his own way home." He caught up with me before I'd gone two steps, and picked me up remarkably easily, considering that I'm neither short nor skinny.

"What if I throw up on you?" I protested feebly.

"It'll wash out."

I shut up so he could save his breath for carrying me. Mother, Dad, Jake, and Mrs. Fenniman were sitting on the porch chatting when he staggered up with me.

"Someone should get over to the Brewsters' house right away," Michael ordered. "Apparently all the guests are dropping like flies from food poisoning. Don't worry, I'll take care of Meg."

All four of them took off immediately. Even, wonder of wonders, Mother. Dad had his ever-ready black bag, so I figured I could stop worrying about the others. Michael carried me upstairs, correctly figured out from my feeble gestures which bathroom I wanted and deposited me there just in time.

It was a long night. About the time I thought I had finished throwing up, some of the neighbors began setting off their fireworks, and for some reason that set me off again. Maybe it wasn't the neighbors' fault; maybe I was destined to get the dry heaves at about that point anyway, but the light hurt my eyes, the noise made my headache worse, and I wasn't in the mood for celebrating anything.

I think Dad came by once or twice to check on me. Michael stuck it out to the end, holding my head when I threw up, and then always ready with a glass of water, a clean washcloth, or a cold compress. It's a good thing it's Michael seeing you puking, I told myself, and not Mr. Right. I couldn't bear to think of Mr. Right, whoever he might turn out to be, seeing me heave my guts up seventeen times in succession. It was embarrassing enough having Michael see it.

Tuesday, July 5

I spent the next day in bed, as did most of the rest of the guests at the shower. I was one of the lucky ones; some of the other guests had also had diarrhea and convulsions. Dad had to send some of the worst cases off to the hospital. To Mrs. Brewster's complete mortification, the local paper ran a story about the incident, making it sound a great deal more hilarious than any of us in attendance thought it had been. I slept a lot. Mother and Eileen were too worried about me to mention any of the thousand tasks that weren't getting done, and Samantha was in the hospital. What a pity I spent most of this unexpected respite sleeping. And playing with the kitten, since no one had found the time to take him back to Mrs. Thornhill.

Wednesday, July 6

Perhaps the worst thing about being sick in bed is that everyone knows exactly where to find you. Barry attempted to smother me with attention. Dad shooed him out as often as possible, along with various neighborhood ladies who dropped by to report how bravely poor Samantha was holding up and how she was still doing everything she could to keep the wedding plans moving. Since the only thing I could discover she'd done was call me up three or four times to issue new orders and complain about the things I hadn't felt well enough to get done, a certain lack of cordiality tended to creep into these conversations.

But Dad liked Michael, or at least found him entertaining, and so didn't shoo him away as he did with most of the people who came to visit. In fact, Michael made me feel much better by reporting that he had convinced Mother that the blue fabric still in hiding at Pam's was the perfect thing for the living room, if only it could be found. He brushed away my repeated grateful thanks--about the fabric and his nursing services--and regaled me with the outrageous antics of the various bridal parties who'd been in and out of the shop all week. I was actually in a reasonably good mood when Dad dropped by with news that only he would have considered cheering for a recovering invalid.

"It wasn't food poisoning, you know," he said, with enthusiasm.

"Then what was it?" I asked. "Surely we weren't all simultaneously overcome with the force of Samantha's personality? After all, she was a victim, too."

Michael sniggered, but Dad, full of his news, ignored my sarcasm.

"Some sort of vegetable alkaloid in the salsa," he said.

"How does that differ from food poisoning?" I asked.

"It wasn't something that ought to have been in the salsa to begin with," Dad explained. "Probably something in the amaryllis family. I've had the residue sent to the ME in Richmond, but we may not be able to tell much more. It was out in the heat rather a long time before anyone thought to preserve it."

"How remiss of me," I said. "Poor Pam! She must be frantic; it was her secret recipe for the salsa, after all."

"The sheriff and I have both questioned Pam about the salsa, and it's hard to see how she could have done it by accident," Dad said. "The dishes she used to prepare it were still in her kitchen and showed no traces of poison, so it must have been added after she put it in the two serving bowls. And none of the kids admit to having played any tricks with it, and I believe them. There's just one thing that bothers me."

"Just one?" Michael muttered.

"The rigged fuse box was probably directed at me," Dad said. "But these last two incidents--the bomb and the poisoned salsa--they were directed at you, Meg."

"Not necessarily," I said. "The bomb, yes; but the salsa was probably aimed at you."

"I wasn't even invited to the shower," Dad protested.

"Yes, but the killer could have guessed you'd show up to nibble on the food before the party started," I said. "Everyone in town knows to fix more food than they need for a party, to feed the nibblers. And you're king of the nibblers."

"That's ridiculous," Dad said, but his face had turned a bright red that suggested he saw the truth, even if he wouldn't admit it.

"It's a good thing you were busy elsewhere all day," I went on. "If two bowls of salsa split among twenty people did all that damage, imagine what it would have done to you if you'd scarfed down a whole bowl the way you usually do with salsa. The only reason we had two bowls of the stuff is that you usually finish off one before the guests get to it, so Pam always makes one for you and one that she hopes you won't find."

"Oh, well," Dad said, looking shaken and not bothering to protest. "Good point, I suppose. Anyway, there's no way Pam could have accidentally introduced a potentially fatal dosage of a highly toxic vegetable alkaloid into the salsa."

"That's a relief."

"The question is, who tampered with the salsa after Pam finished with it?"

"And why? Was it aimed at you, or Meg, or just at causing maximum death and injury?" Michael put in.

"Dad, you've got to be careful," I said. "We all do."

"Right. No nibbling." Michael said.

"Yes, we should all be very careful indeed," Dad said. And with that, he patted my hand and trotted away, no doubt to confer with the sheriff and the ME.

"Why the hell hasn't your sheriff done something?" Michael asked, with irritation. "Called in the FBI or something."

"Well, up until the bomb, I don't think anyone was that worried," I said. "The sheriff still seemed to think the fuse box incident and Mrs. Grover's death could have been accidents. And after all, when it comes to homicides, Dad has rather a history of crying wolf."

"I wasn't sure I believed him myself, before," Michael said. "But after this weekend, I'm sold. Whatever you and your dad have been doing with your detecting, you've definitely scared somebody. And that somebody's after you."

I closed my eyes briefly and shuddered at the idea of a cold-blooded killer stalking my occasionally demented but thoroughly lovable Dad. I didn't want to believe it. And I hadn't even begun to sort out how I felt about joining Dad on the killer's most wanted list. Why me? Had I found out something vital? If I had, it was news to me.

"I really don't need this," I said. "I have enough on my mind without this. These damned weddings are enough to worry about, without having a homicidal maniac on the loose."

"Yes, life in Yorktown is getting very complicated," Michael said. "Don't walk on the bluffs, don't play with fuse boxes, don't open any packages, and don't eat the salsa. Anyway, you look tired; I'll let you sleep. I think I'll go home and start harassing some law enforcement agencies to take action."

"Good idea."

"Anything I can do for you on my way out?"

"Yes," I said, handing him a bag. "Take this herb tea and ask Dad to take a look at it to see if it's safe to drink."

"You think someone is trying to poison you again?" he asked, holding the bag as if it contained another ticking bomb.

"Not deliberately, but I've learned to distrust Eileen's home remedies. And take these damned lilies of the valley away, too. Give them to Mrs. Tranh and the ladies if you like."

"Are they poisonous too?" he joked.

"Actually, yes. Highly toxic. Warn them not to eat them. Even the water they've been soaking in could kill you."

"I can see why you don't want them around." "I don't want them around because they're from Barry," I said, rather peevishly. "I thought he was safely off at a craft fair with Steven and Eileen for the weekend, but he showed up here instead. I'd be tempted to feed him the damn flowers and be done with him if I thought there was any chance they could decide on a new best man in time. But come July Sixteenth, Barry had better watch out."

"Until they catch whoever spiked the salsa, all of us better watch out," Michael said gravely. "Be careful."

Thursday, July 7

Fortunately for my peace of mind, it wasn't until Thursday afternoon that I was reminded of what was in store for me over the weekend. Undeterred by the dramatic events at the shower, the Brewsters were going full steam ahead with plans for a weekend house party for a number of Samantha's and Rob's friends. Actually, mostly Samantha's friends. Rob was being firmly but gently detached from any of his circle of friends of whom Samantha did not approve. Which generally meant the interesting ones, as far as I could see.

The house party had seemed like such a good idea when Mrs. Brewster first suggested it. I'm not, as a rule, a keen party goer, and spending the evening in a roomful of Samantha's friends was on a par with visiting one of the lower circles of hell. But I had been having difficulty getting some members of the wedding party to come in for final fittings. It occurred to me as soon as the party was suggested that it would be just the thing to lure any holdouts into town where they could be fitted and, if necessary, read the riot act while I had them in my clutches. So Samantha and her mother had planned a fun-filled weekend of parties and picnics, and I had suggested that they pay overtime to have Michael's ladies on standby all weekend.

But I'd completely forgotten about the whole wretched thing until Mother glided into my room early Thursday morning. Considerably earlier than I had been intending to wake up.

"I think you should plan on getting up today," she said. "You need to start getting your strength back." She was probably right. I sighed.

"Pammy is fixing us a nice breakfast," she continued. I was touched.

"And after breakfast you can both help me plan a new menu for the tea party I'm giving for Samantha and her little friends on Sunday."

I pulled the covers back over my head and refused to budge until noon. Which only meant that we did the menu-planning after lunch.

"Meg, I'm beginning to think that blue fabric has been stolen," Mother said that evening. "We should go down tomorrow and see if they can order some more."

"Why don't you let me look for it first," I said. Great; now I had to find a way to lure Mother out of the house, sneak down to Pam's, lug the fabric back, and hide it someplace where Mother could be convinced she hadn't already looked. I didn't feel up to it. I collared Dad and Michael after dinner and asked them if they would take care of it.

"Of course," Dad said, patting my hand.

"Provided you'll vouch for us if we're caught," Michael added.

"I'll keep Mother well out of the way," I said.

"I wasn't thinking of your mother," Michael said. "I was thinking of how the neighbors will react when they see the two of us sneaking about with wrapped parcels about the size and shape of human bodies."

"We won't sneak," Dad said. "You can get away with almost anything as long as you act as if you have a perfect right to be doing whatever you're doing."

"Perhaps that's how our murderer got away with it," I said.

"I should think that even around here it would be a little hard to shove someone over the bluffs without exciting comment from the neighbors," Michael objected.

"Not if they thought shoving that particular someone was the reasonable thing to do," I said, testily, spotting Samantha heading down the driveway.

"And besides," Dad protested, "I thought I'd made that clear: she couldn't possibly have been shoved over the cliff."

"True, but what about Meg's theory that she was walking on the beach when a stone hit her on the head?" Michael replied.

They ambled off to Pam's house, cheerfully debating their various theories about Mrs. Grover's death. I eluded Samantha and went to help Mother prepare for her Sunday afternoon tea. By dint of looking wan and pale--I'd had a lot of practice over the past several days--I managed to talk her out of having me cook all kinds of complicated goodies. We drove down to three of the local bakeries and placed orders with each for a supply of their specialties.

Driving home, I wondered if placing the order several days ahead of time was such a good idea. Plenty of time for anyone to find out, duplicate one of the pastries we were serving, and prepare a doctored batch. I'd have to pick them up myself. And then hide them until the party. Perhaps there was some way I could mark them so I'd know they were the ones I'd picked up. And then if I saw someone lifting a pastry without the telltale mark, I could dash it from her hands ...

You're just being silly, I told myself. At least I hoped I was. Then again, if I were one of the out-of-town bridesmaids who'd lived through last weekend, I wouldn't be that quick to eat the local cuisine. Or open any packages.

Or come to Yorktown at all, for that matter.

Friday, July 8

I spent most of the day supervising the cleaning crew Mother hired to get ready for Sunday's tea. And then trying to keep Dad from tracking in garden debris. And cleaning up after the kitten, whom I really would have to return before everyone got too attached to him. And sorting out wedding presents. The sheriff's office had been very cooperative about testing all the packages before we opened them, but they had failed to grasp the importance of keeping the cards with the presents. In some cases I had to figure out not only who sent the present but also whether it was for Mother or Samantha. I made a note to stay and supervise their inspection of the next batch.

Despite all this, I was ready early for the Brewsters' party, largely because Mother was out for the evening and I could dress without any nuptial or decorating interruptions. I went over to see if the Brewsters needed any help. When I walked in, I wasn't surprised to find Dad and Reverend Pugh parked by the buffet, discussing orchids. They had finished off a huge bowl of shrimp cocktail and were starting in on the bean dip.

"I thought we'd all agreed to avoid nibbling," I said with some irritation. Dad froze, holding a stick of celery loaded with bean dip. The reverend shoveled in another mouthful. Well, if it hadn't already killed him, one more bite wouldn't hurt.

"After last weekend's poisoning, you know," Dad said, putting down the celery--which had already lost its load of bean dip to his lapel.

"Oh," Reverend Pugh said, reluctantly moving away from the bean dip.

"You promised," I said, fixing Dad with a stern glare.

"I suppose it's all right for someone else to be poisoned instead of me," Dad said, indignantly. "I suppose I should have let Pugh eat some of it and waited to see if he keeled over."

From the way the rector was eyeing the ham croquettes, I expected he was about to volunteer to put his life on the line again for the good of the party.

"I suppose that's why Mrs. Brewster asked us to guard the food," he said, brightly.

"Guard, not devour," I said. The two nibblers made a quick retreat. I concentrated on figuring out which neighbor would either have some shrimp around or be able to get some in time to replace what they'd eaten before Mrs. Brewster noticed.

I shouldn't have bothered. With the exception of a few dozen oldsters like Dad and the Pughs, who left early, most of the crowd wasn't seriously interested in food. In fact, most of Samantha's friends focused on getting drunk as rapidly as possible and crawling off somewhere private with the most presentable person of the opposite sex they could get their hands on. Not only did I have to dodge the ever-present Scotty, but apparently not all of Samantha's male friends went for the bleached blond anorexic type. By the time the third keg was being opened, I dodged a particularly persistent (and intoxicated) suitor by literally crawling out a bathroom window.

As I turned up the driveway toward home, I heard a shout.

"Meg! Wait up!" It was Michael. I waited for him to catch up with me.

"I'm surprised," he said. "Not even midnight and you're home from the party. I thought you were supposed to be a night owl."

"Oh, not you, too. Officially I'm still a little under the weather from the poisoning. Unofficially, Samantha's friends can be a real drag. Where's Spike? Lost again?"

"At home, as far as I know. I dropped by on the chance either you or your mother would be here. She said you had found the jacquard and I should come by to pick it up. What is jacquard, and what am I supposed to do with it when I've got it? I presume it's something to do with the shop?"

"Jacquard? Oh, I suppose she means those five bolts of blue fabric you and Dad retrieved from Pam's. I think I shoved them in my closet; hang on and I'll haul them down. Mother must still be out at her cousins'," I added, seeing that the house was dark.

"I can do the hauling if you show me where they are," Michael offered.

"Ordinarily, my stubborn independent nature would compel me to insist on doing it myself. But after a week like this one, I'll even let people open doors for me."

"I gather the other bridesmaids are fully recovered from the shower, then?" Michael asked, as we climbed the stairs.

"Mostly recovered," I said. "Of course, most of them aren't worrying about saving any energy for the second party tomorrow night, Mother's tea on Sunday, and whatever nonsense we're going to have to go through with the fittings tomorrow," I added.

As we walked into my room, Michael and I were both startled to see the closet door fly open. Scotty jumped out, holding half a dozen bedraggled roses and wearing nothing but a tipsy grin.

"Meg, baby," he cried, opening his arms wide. Then he saw Michael. The smile faded slowly, and after a few moments, it occurred to him to use the roses in place of a fig leaf.

"I could leave if you like," Michael said, with one eyebrow raised.

"If you do, I'll kill you," I told him. "Scotty, what on earth are you--never mind, stupid question. Those are from Mother's rose bushes, aren't they?"

"Yes," he said, the smile returning.

"She'll be very upset when she finds out they've been cut," I said. "She was saving them for her wedding."

"Oh." His face fell again, and he clutched the roses nervously, as if he expected me to demand that he hand them over.

"You'd better apologize to her."

"Okay."

"Tomorrow," Michael put in.

"Right," Scotty said.

"I think you should leave now," I said.

Scotty slouched out. Michael watched carefully until the screen door slammed downstairs, then shook his head.Hope those roses don't have thorns," he remarked. I giggled at that.

"It would serve him right if they do. That's the material, those bolts he was standing on. I hope the mud washes out." Michael hoisted the bolts and turned to leave. "Hang on a second and I'll get the doors for you," I told him. "I want to have a vase full of water handy just in case."

"In case he brings back the roses?"

"God, no! I'd throw them back in his ... face. In case he starts singing under my window."

"Does he do that often?" Michael asked, peering over the bolts at me.

"He's never done it to me before. But it's what he usually does when someone he's interested in tells him to get lost. He fixated on Eileen when we were in high school, and it became a regular nightly routine for a while. Her father tried to set the dogs on him, but all dogs like Scotty."

"No doubt he makes them feel superior."

"There, you see?" From down in the backyard, we could hear Scotty launching into an off-key version of "Hey, Baby."

"Scotty!" I yelled out the window, waving the vase. "If you don't shut up this minute I'll throw this!"

"Is he dressed?" Michael asked, peering over my shoulder.

"Unfortunately not. Scotty! I mean it!" Scotty continued to bray, so I threw the contents of the vase at him.

"Good shot," Michael observed. "But it doesn't seem to be working. Try this," he said, fishing a small plastic squeeze bottle out of his shirt pocket and handing it to me. I aimed it at Scotty and was pleased to see that when the contents of the bottle hit him, he stopped in midverse, looked up at me reproachfully for a few moments, then sighed and stumbled off.

"Ick, what was that?" I asked, wrinkling my nose at the rank smell rising from the bottle.

"I have no idea," Michael said. "Some esoteric brew Mrs. Tranh concocts for Mom. It's supposed to repel dogs. The idea is to squirt it at any larger dogs who fight back when Spike picks on them."

"Well, it did the trick," I said, handing back the bottle. "At least for now. Oh, please let this be a temporary aberration! First Steven's Neanderthal brother and now this. I just can't deal with Scotty on top of everything else. If one more oaf comes near me ..." I said, shaking my head and leading the way to the stairs.

"Define oaf," Michael said, moving away slightly.

"The way I feel at the moment ... any member of the male sex."

"No exceptions?" he asked, plaintively. "Dad. He's totally bonkers, but he's not an oaf."

"Agreed," Michael said.

"Rob ... I think."

"You think? Your own brother and you're not sure?"

"His taste in women is highly questionable," I said.

"No argument there. Anyone else?"

"Michael, if you're fishing for compliments, I'll grant you provisional exemption from oafhood on the grounds that you helped rescue me from Scotty, and have refrained from asking what I could possibly have done to encourage him to leap out of the closet at me like that."

"Like you said before, somehow I don't think Scotty needs much encouragement."

"The wrong men never do."

"What about the right ones?"

"I'll let you know if I ever meet one," I said.

"Speaking of which, have you ever considered--" Michael began, and then was drowned out by a frightful commotion in the yard. Scotty, still unclad, suddenly burst through the azalea patch and streaked across our yard, closely pursued by all three of the Labradors from next door.

"That's odd," I said, "the Labs usually like Scotty." Spike popped out of the azalea patch, barking fiercely, and disappeared in the direction Scotty and the Labs had taken.

"Oh, God," Michael said. "It must be Mom's dog repellent. Though why a dog repellent should make dogs chase him I have no idea. I suppose I should go see if he needs help." I wasn't sure whether he meant Scotty or Spike, but I didn't feel much like helping either of them, so after watching Michael lope off in the general direction of the furor, I went to bed. After making a note in my indispensable notebook to borrow the so-called dog repellent from Michael before the next time Barry showed up.

Tired as I was, I had a hard time tuning out the barking noises, steadily increasing in volume and variety, that seemed to come first from one end of the neighborhood and then the other.

Saturday, July 9

Having gone to bed before midnight, I was up by eight and feeling virtuous about it. I joined Mother for breakfast on the porch, and felt suitably rewarded when Dad dropped by with fresh blueberries and Michael with fresh bagels.

"We certainly had a lively time around here last night," Mother remarked over her second cup of tea. Michael and I both started. I had thought Mother safely out of the way during Scotty's unconventional visit, the ensuing mad dash around the neighborhood, and the countywide canine convocation that had reportedly dragged the sheriff and the normally underworked dogcatcher out of their beds at 3:00 A.m. Michael had a suspiciously innocent look on his face.

"Could you hear the party all the way down at Pam's?" I asked.

"Oh, no, dear," Mother said. "But I think some of Samantha's friends must have gotten just a little too exuberant."

"Most of them were totally sloshed, if that's what you mean," I said. "But that's nothing new."

"Yes, but it really is too bad about the side yard," Mother said.

"What about the side yard?" I said. Had Scotty and the pack returned to our yard after I dropped off?

"So very thoughtless," she continued. "And not at all what one would expect from well-brought-up young people."

"What, Mother?" I asked, beginning to suspect it would be easier to get an answer from the side yard.

"Someone has torn up some of your father's nice flowers. You know, dear," she said, turning to Dad, "those nice purple spiky ones."

"Purple spiky flowers?" Dad and I said in unison, looking at each other with dawning horror.

"Oh, no!" I gasped, and Dad exclaimed "Oh, my God!" as we simultaneously jumped up and ran out to the side yard. Mother and Michael followed, more slowly.

"I'm sorry, dear," Mother said, looking puzzled. "I had no idea you'd be that upset about it."

"They were fine when I watered them yesterday afternoon," Dad said.

"A lot of the damage is trampling," I said, as Dad and I crouched over the flower bed.

"Yes, but I don't think all the plants are here," Dad said. "I think some of them are missing. What do you think?"

"I think a lot of them are missing," I said. "Whoever did this did a lot of trampling to cover it up--or maybe someone else came along and trampled it afterwards--but there are definitely a lot of plants missing, too."

"Does it really make that much of a difference whether the vandals dragged them off or not?" Michael asked. "They look pretty well ruined to me; you couldn't replant them or anything in that condition, could you? And are they really that valuable?"

"It's not that they're valuable," Dad said. "They're poisonous."

"Why does that not surprise me, in your garden?" Michael said, with a sigh. "What are they, anyway?"

"Foxglove," I said. "Which means that if it wasn't just vandalism--"

"Which I don't believe for a minute," Dad fumed, shaking a fist full of limp foxglove stalks.

"Then someone--"

"Someone who's up to no good--" Dad put in.

"Has just laid in a large enough supply of digitalis to knock off an elephant."

"Several elephants," Dad added. "This is very serious."

"Digitalis!" Michael exclaimed.

"Is it dangerous, dear?" Mother asked.

"Meg and her friends might very well have died if that salsa had contained digitalis," Dad said.

"It felt as if we were going to anyway," I said.

"I do hate to criticize, dear," Mother began. "But we wouldn't have this little problem if you wouldn't insist on growing all these dangerous plants." She looked over her shoulder with a faint shudder, as if half expecting to find a giant Venus flytrap sneaking up on her.

"I'd better call the sheriff," Dad said, trotting off with Mother trailing behind him, gracefully wringing her hands.

"You know," Michael said, as we watched them leave, "your mother's right. Your dad's garden is rather a dangerous thing to have around."

"Nonsense," I said, automatically parroting the Langslow party line. "I'm sure more people die in car accidents every year than from eating poisonous plants." But I must admit that I said it with less conviction than usual. Somewhere, probably very nearby, someone could be concocting a deadly potion out of Dad's plants. I had no idea how one would actually do this, but that didn't ward off the vivid visions of a determined poisoner bent over a black kettle on his--or her--stove, distilling digitalis from Dad's beautiful little purple flowers. Probably highly inaccurate, but I couldn't shake the picture.

"Let's go and find out what you would do with foxglove to make it into a poison," I said, starting for the door.

"You're not serious."

"Deadly serious. The more we know about how the poison is made, the better we can watch for signs that anyone we know is up to no good."

Dad gave us a highly technical lesson on the chemistry of digitalis. He was partial to the idea of our plant thief distilling the foxglove leaves to extract the poison, but it sounded to me as if almost any way you could get the plant into someone's system would be highly effective. Michael and I were both in a depressed state when we headed off to the day's tasks--the shop for him, and for me, frog-marching wedding participants into the shop to be fitted. Samantha and her friends spent their day racketing up and down the river on speedboats, so I spent most of mine dashing up and down the river in Dad's not very speedy boat, capturing recalcitrant ushers and bridesmaids and ferrying them back to shore and hauling their wet, bedraggled, beer-bloated carcasses into Be-Stitched.

"No offense," Michael said, toward the end of the day, "But your brother has highly questionable taste in friends."

"On the contrary. Rob has excellent taste in friends. These are Samantha's friends."

"That would account for it," Michael said. "I have to keep telling myself that it would do no good to throttle them; we'd only have to detain and outfit a new set."

"Let's hope our foxglove bandit isn't targeting them too. I'm not sure I could take another day like this."

Samantha was having another party that night. I passed. I stayed home. I did my laundry, balanced my checkbook, and cleaned the bathrooms. I had a lot more fun than I'd had Friday night.

Sunday, July 10

By the next day, everyone in the neighborhood-- probably everyone in the county--knew about the theft of Dad's foxglove plants. Dozens of people called up wanting to know what foxglove looked like. Five of the more notable local hypochondriacs dropped by to be examined for symptoms of digitalis poisoning. The leading local miser, an elderly uncle of Mother's who had a heart problem, dropped by to insist that Dad give him instructions for making his own digitalis, so he could "cut out the middleman and stop lining the pockets of the big drug companies." He went off mad because Dad tried to talk him out of it, and it was weeks before we were really convinced he wasn't going to experiment on himself. I don't know if our family was typical--I suspect that for once it was--but we spent the greater portion of an otherwise lovely Sunday dinner discussing digitalis. The more squeamish souls, like Rob and Jake, ate sparingly.

The whole neighborhood also knew the details of Scotty's misadventure. Apparently the next-door neighbors had seen his unclad form leaving our yard. I had been forced, in self-defense, to reveal the whole story, calling Michael as a witness.

"Sorry to drag you into this," I said, after the seventeenth time he'd been forced to produce the little squeeze bottle for inspection and say that no, he had no idea what was in it, but he'd be sure to ask his mother the next time he called her.

"It gives me great pleasure to defend your honor against this rank calumny," he said, with a sweeping bow.

"Hang my honor. It's my taste and my sanity you're defending. And possibly Scotty's life; if I see him around here anytime soon, I'll probably rip up the remaining foxgloves and shove them down his throat."

"Don't exaggerate, Meg," Mother said.

"I'm sure you wouldn't do that," Barry chirped up.

I looked around the porch at the assembled family and friends. They were all smiling and nodding as if they thought Scotty's behavior were the most amusing thing in the world. Except for Michael, who looked as exasperated as I felt. And Jake, who was cringing back in the shadows at the edge of the porch as if he were afraid I would confuse him with Scotty.

Just then--speak of the devil--Scotty appeared around the corner of the porch.

"Hi," he said cheerfully, waving at me. I could hear muffled titters from several places on the porch. Scotty had the good grace to look embarrassed.

"I came to apologize," he said, still looking at me. I crossed my arms and glowered at him.

"That's all right, Scotty," Mother said, graciously. "Just be more careful in future."

Careful? I gave her an exasperated look. So, I noticed, did Samantha. Obviously Scotty's fitness for usherhood was seriously in question.

"I saw the oddest thing last night," Scotty went on. He glanced at Dad, who had his nose buried in the Merck manual, and then back at me.

"Really? You too?" I said, coldly. More titters from somewhere on the porch.

"Saw? Or hallucinated?" Samantha said, even more coldly. Scotty looked startled.

"No, saw," he said. "I wanted to tell you, Meg."

"Some other time," I said, losing patience. I went back to the kitchen and took my irritation out on some greasy pots and pans. Michael followed shortly afterward.

"Need some help?" he asked. I handed him a soap pad and a particularly awful pot. He tackled it energetically. "Aren't you curious what the odd thing was?" Michael asked.

"Not particularly, but tell me anyway."

"He didn't say," Michael replied.

"He left after you did."

"Probably nothing important."

"And you're not the least bit curious?" I sighed.

"I suppose I ought to go find out what it is," I said. "After all, I suppose it is possible that he saw the foxglove bandit and wasn't too drunk to remember who it was."

But by the time I got back outside, Scotty was long gone. I'd tackle him later.

Eileen and Steven arrived late that night from their last craft fair before the wedding. They called up to invite me to go to dinner with them the next day. I agreed to meet them at Eileen's house at five o'clock the next evening. I had plans for them.

Monday, July 11

Mother, Pam, and I spent the morning helping Dad pick out a new gray suit for Rob's wedding. He'd ruined his last gray suit a few weeks ago, shinnying up a pine tree to look at a buzzard's nest. We planned to hide this one until the day of the wedding. Then I spent the afternoon ferrying back another enormous pile of inspected wedding presents from the sheriff's office and inventorying them.

Steven and Eileen were a little surprised when I showed up at Professor Donleavy's house at five sharp, bearing a bag of sandwiches and a large stack of their notecards.

"I thought we were going to take you out to dinner," Steven said.

"Our treat," Eileen added.

"I thought of something that will be an even bigger treat for me," I said. "You're going to write thank-you notes for your presents."

They turned a little pale, but once they realized I had already gotten a list of donors and gifts all organized for them--or perhaps once they realized there was no escaping--they gave in and cheerfully sat around writing notes.

I stood over them, doling out the index cards on which I'd written the name and address of each donor and what they'd given, then taking back the finished notes, proofing them, addressing them, and sealing them.

It was slow work, much like forcing restless children to do homework.

"What's an ee-perg-nay?" Steven would ask.

"A what?"

"Every-people-every-rather-go-not-every," Steven said.

"Oh, epergne," I said, correcting his pronunciation. "Eileen's aunt Louise sent it."

"Yes, I see, but what is it?"

"What do you care?" I said. "Just thank her for it."

"How can I thank her if I don't know what it is?"

"It's that giant silver compartmented bowl on a pedestal."

"Oh, that thing," he said, frowning. "What on earth will we ever do with it?"

"You serve fruit or desserts in it."

"You've got to be kidding," he said.

"Then stuff it in the attic, unless you want to trip over it the rest of your lives," I said. "Just tell her you'll think of her whenever you use it."

"Well, that's honest," he said.

"Do you think there's a market for these if I did them in clay?" Eileen said, holding up a set of silver placecard holders.

"An exceedingly small one," I said. "Who cares? Just write."

"Another silver tray?" Steven said. "How many does this make."

"You have twelve in all," I said. "Don't worry, you can return them."

We finished up around midnight, and I turned down their offer to see me home. They looked as if they'd rather be alone, anyway. I was cutting through their yard to the street when I saw a familiar figure.

Jake. Carrying a box that looked suspiciously like the one I'd found in Mrs. Grover's room. The box that he probably did not suspect now contained Mother's great-aunt Sophy rather than his late wife.

How odd. Jake was taking the path to the beach. I lurked in the bushes until he'd passed. Then I put down the box of thank-you notes and quietly followed him. It wasn't hard; I had been using that path since I was a small child and knew every stone. I could follow it very silently. Jake was trying to sneak, but having a hard time. Every few steps he'd trip over a root or stone and swear quietly.

He finally made his way down to the beach, although I could tell he was going to have some bruises in the morning. I did some more lurking in the shrubbery a little way up the path. He went out to the end of the Donleavys' dock. He peered up and down the shore. Then, evidently thinking no one was watching, he opened the box and flung the ashes out. Without any particular ceremony, as far as I could see. I felt a pang of guilt.

Great-Aunt Sophy deserved better.

Jake then ripped the cardboard box into a dozen or so pieces and flung those into the river. He watched for a few minutes--waiting for the pieces to sink, no doubt--then turned and headed back for shore.

I scampered back up the path. By the time Jake arrived at the street, I was back to skulking in the roadside bushes. I watched as he nonchalantly strolled down the street that led to his house.

I couldn't wait to tell Dad about this, although I knew it would have to wait till morning. Dad went to bed early, and it was already twelve-thirty. Closer to one by the time I found where I'd left the thank-you notes.

As I was approaching Samantha's house, I noticed a car waiting at the end of their driveway. Skulking was getting to be habit-forming; I slipped into the bushes and watched. After a few minutes, I saw a figure slipping out of the car. Samantha. She shut the door, being careful not to slam it, and tiptoed down the driveway. The car started up and drove off. Perhaps the driver simply forgot, but I noticed that the headlights stayed off until it was well out of sight.

Curiouser and curiouser, as Lewis Carroll would say. I could sympathize if Rob and Samantha had decided to sneak away from the neighborhood to get some privacy. The cloak-and-dagger antics were a bit over the top, but perhaps Rob was growing into the family penchant for theatrics. But I really didn't think that had been Rob's car. It was smaller than Rob's battered gray Honda, and ran a lot more quietly. It wasn't Samantha's red MG either, that much I could tell. And it had headed away from our house, not toward it. Anyway, Rob was supposed to have gone with a friend to the bar exam review course.

I extracted myself with difficulty from the Brewsters' holly bushes and continued on home, very thoughtful. When I reached our driveway, I confirmed that Rob's car was still there. Odd. What was Samantha up to?

Just as I was entering the front door, I heard a car again. Another car, older and noisier than the one that had dropped Samantha off. It paused at the end of our driveway, a door slammed, and then it drove off.

I heard careful footsteps coming up the driveway. I waited inside the front door until I heard the footsteps just outside, then I turned on the porch light and flung open the door. There was Rob, blinking against the sudden glare, with a pile of books and papers under his arm. Law books. How odd; why would he feel the need to sneak in after a bar exam review session?

"Hi, Meg," he said, with studied casualness. And then he jumped as the kitten climbed his trouser leg. The pile slipped, papers flew everywhere, and a small box fell to the floor, where it popped open, spilling out a clutter of lead figures and brightly colored four-, six-, ten-, and twenty-sided dice.

"Role-playing games?" I asked. He winced. "I thought you were studying for the bar exam. What are you doing playing games?"

"But I'm not playing," he protested. "A classmate and I have invented a game. We're calling it Kill All the Lawyers. Or possibly Lawyers from Hell. I thought of it during finals, and we've been working on it all summer. We're running a test session now. Everyone loves it, and we think we can market it to one of the big game companies."

"Rob," I began. And then gave up. If he wasn't worried about what Samantha would do if she caught him inventing games instead of studying for the bar, I certainly wasn't worried.

Maybe it would be the best thing.

But if Rob was sneaking out to play Lawyers from Hell, where had Samantha been? And with whom? And why had Jake suddenly decided to scatter his wife's ashes?

I would have to have a talk with Dad tomorrow.

Tuesday, July 12

"Have you decided what you're going to wear for Rob and Samantha's wedding?" I asked Mother over breakfast. Besides getting out another large batch of Mother's last-minute additional invitations, my day's to-do list included taking her in to Be-Stitched to let Michael and Mrs. Tranh talk her into something if she hadn't yet made a decision. Otherwise Michael's ladies would still be sewing when Rob and Samantha's grandchildren got married.

"Not exactly, dear," Mother said. "I was thinking of that suit with the lace-trimmed jacket."

"Mother. It's white. You can't wear white to a wedding unless you're the bride."

"Yes, dear, I know. I wasn't thinking of doing that." The hell she wasn't. "But I was thinking I could dye it a nice pastel. Or perhaps Michael's ladies could make something just like it in a pastel."

"Excellent idea. You've always looked great in that suit, and it's so unusual that there's no way Mrs. Brewster will have anything even similar. Pink would look great."

"Ye-es. In a nice raw silk, I think."

"Let's go down to Be-Stitched and talk to them this morning."

"After lunch, dear. Mrs. Fenniman and I are going to visit your aunt Phoebe this morning. Would you like to come?"

"Love to, but I still have some invitations to do," I lied. The last time we'd visited Aunt Phoebe, I'd gotten ill listening to her descriptions of operations--hers and other people's. Or possibly from drinking her truly vile homemade dandelion wine.

After seeing Mother and Mrs. Fenniman off I took my stack of notepaper and Mother's instructions and settled down under my favorite shade tree on the lawn. When I heard the riding lawn mower start up, I ran over to talk to Dad, but for once he'd let someone else use his favorite toy. Scotty Ballister was merrily cruising up and down the front lawn on the mower. I returned to my lawn chair, keeping a weather eye open for Dad so I could tell him about all the night's adventures.

I had paused over a note to a cousin who lived in Santa Monica. I was lost in a reverie of a trip to California several years ago, when I'd spent hours on the beach watching the surf with no responsibilities hanging over my head. I was relaxed, at peace--all right, I was nearly asleep--when Michael's voice jolted me awake.

"I'll join you if I may," he said, setting up a lawn chair next to mine. "I came to drop off some fabric samples for your mother, but she's not here."

"She'll be back for lunch," I said, jerking upright. "I don't suppose you'd be interested in addressing a few envelopes while you're here?"

"Sure," he said, obligingly taking a stack and a pen. "I thought the invitations were all out by now."

"Mother thought of a few more intimate friends and immediate family members."

"The more the merrier."

"That's easy for you to say," I shouted over the lawn mower as Scotty came round the corner on the lawn mower. "They're not your family."

Michael said something in reply, but I couldn't hear him for the lawn mower.

"Sorry, I missed that," I said, when Scotty was far enough off.

"It figures."

"What figures?" I asked. Scotty cruised by, slightly closer.

"I thought your dad never let anyone else ride the mower," Michael shouted.

"He usually doesn't," I shouted back. "Especially not Scotty."

We gave up on conversation and worked away quietly--except for the buzz of the lawn mower, but by this time I had gotten so used to it that it seemed just another pleasant part of a sunny summer afternoon. Scotty was working his way steadily toward us, driving a more or less straight line back and forth, rattling quickly down the slope to the bushes at the edge of the bluff and then grinding slowly uphill again to the pine trees at the other side of the yard. As he got closer, he would slow down each time he drove past us to wave or wink.

"At least he's dressed today," Michael remarked. "I only hope he's reasonably sober."

"Dad wouldn't have let him on the mower if he weren't. I'm more worried about whether he'll be sober for the wedding. Or so hung over from the party the night before that he can't walk down the aisle straight."

"That's right; he's in one of the weddings, isn't he?" Michael asked.

"Samantha's. Usher," I said. "His father's a partner in Mr. Brewster's firm."

"Must be an important partner," Michael remarked. "I can't imagine why else Samantha would put up with him."

"He's rumored to be reasonably presentable when properly clothed," I said. Michael chuckled.

"I suppose we should move and let him get this part of the lawn," I said finally, beginning to gather up my envelopes and lists, while keeping an eye on Scotty, who had once more narrowly avoided hitting the trees when he turned at the top of the yard and was heading downhill toward us again.

"Give it one more pass," Michael said, putting down his stack and stretching luxuriously. I did the same.

"I have an idea," Michael said. "Let's go--"

But just then he saw my look of surprise and turned to see Scotty careen past us at full speed, waving his arms and legs wildly, and then crash through the bushes to drive straight off the bluff.

"What the hell--" Michael began. We heard the lawn mower, still running, ripping through the underbrush on the way down, and then a wet, gurgling noise as the motor choked and died.

"I'll go down and see if he's all right," Michael said, running in the direction of the ladder in the neighbors' yard. "You go dial 911."

"Dialing 911 is getting to be a habit around here," I muttered as I raced to the house.

Scotty was not all right at all. I could tell that much from the top of the bluff. His unwilling dive had ended on a large rock at the foot of the bluff.

"You don't want to go down there," Michael said, appearing at the top of the ladder looking very shaken. "You don't want anyone going down there. I think we should post a guard at each end of the beach to keep people away. And for what it's worth, I'm sorry I ever doubted your dad; he's right, there's no way Mrs. Grover fell over that cliff."

I called some neighbors to arrange guard details, and then we waited. The rescue squad showed up too late to help poor Scotty. They were followed shortly by the sheriff and Dad. The sheriff and Dad seemed to find our description of Scotty's last wild ride highly interesting.

"Waving both arms and both legs, you say?" the sheriff asked. For about the thirteenth time.

"That's right," I said. Michael nodded.

"You're sure," the sheriff persisted.

"Absolutely," I said.

"That's certainly what it looked like," Michael said.

"Then I think we'd better have a look at that lawn mower when they fish it up," The sheriff said. "Those things have a dead-man switch on 'em. No way it could just keep going without his foot on the pedal ..."

"Unless it was tampered with," Dad finished. They both looked grim and headed off in the direction of the bluff.

Needless to say, we did not make it in to Be-Stitched that afternoon. The lawn mower was examined, and the sheriff hauled it away to be examined some more.

"And just think, we still have the foxglove to look forward to," Michael said that evening.

Wednesday, July 13

Nothing improves someone's character in the public mind like dying suddenly and young. The same people who last week criticized Scotty's family for not kicking him out to earn his own living were now remarking what a waste it was and what potential Scotty had. Potential for what they didn't say.

We were treated to another up-close-and-personal look at our local law enforcement officials in action. I was not impressed. If I were still a registered voter in York County, I'd be looking for a new candidate for sheriff come the next election. I'd even vote for Mrs. Fenniman, the only opposition candidate who'd come forward so far.

The state police were a lot more impressive, but either the law or the unwritten code of the old boys network seemed to keep them from getting too involved without the sheriff's consent. And the sheriff definitely wanted to squelch any talk of murder.

"First Mrs. Grover and now Scotty," Mother said, "and that nice Mr. Price, too."

"Mr. Price wasn't killed, Mother," I said.

"It was a near thing. What if there's a murderer among us?"

"I grant you, we've had a run of unfortunate accidents this summer," the sheriff said, cautiously. "But it's a long stretch from there to murder."

"You know, I really do think it most odd of Mrs. Waterston to just go off like that. So suddenly, and right at the beginning of the wedding season," Mother said.

"Mother! She didn't just go off, she broke her leg while visiting her sister and she's staying there till she recuperates," I explained to the sheriff.

"But it was very odd of her to just go off to visit her sister at the last minute and abandon her clients."

"She didn't go off at the last minute; she went off in May."

"Well, that was the last minute for all the June weddings, dear."

"Yes, but anyone with any sense picked out her dress months ago. And she didn't just abandon you. She left Michael to take care of things."

"Yes, he does seem to have taken hold and settled right in."

For a paranoid moment I wondered if Mother was evolving a theory that Michael was the murderer. Perhaps she was about to suggest that Michael's mother was not down in Florida with a broken leg, but dead somewhere. That he planned to worm his way into our confidence, then announce that his dear mother had died of complications, and take over her business. Perhaps he wasn't even her son. And Mrs. Grover and Scotty had been killed and Mr. Price nearly killed because they somehow discovered his secret. For a few moments, I found myself seriously considering Michael as a cold-blooded killer. And rejecting the idea outright.

"Mother," I said, "what on earth are you suggesting?"

"I think," she said, leaning closer to the sheriff and me, "that Mrs. Waterston may have had a Premonition."

"A premonition," the sheriff repeated. "A Premonition of Danger," Mother elaborated.

"Ah," the sheriff said, nodding sagely. I have often wondered if he ever realizes how much being Mother's cousin has contributed to his success as an elected official. After five decades of dealing with Mother, he can listen with a perfectly straight face to almost any inanity uttered by a constituent.

"I don't want to worry your mother," he said to me as I showed him out. "We can't be one hundred percent sure, but there is something real strange about Scotty's death. You keep an eye on your folks, you hear?"

Did the man think I was an idiot? I intended to keep a very close eye on my parents, particularly Dad. Scotty had been killed riding a lawn mower that everyone in the neighborhood knew Dad almost never let anyone else use. Scotty had died, but I would bet anything Dad was the intended victim.

And I remembered the night Scotty had dropped by to apologize to me. He'd said something about seeing something odd. And I'd cut him off. I mentally kicked myself. Scotty had probably seen something that would have solved Mrs. Grover's murder and the other strange incidents. And had been mistakenly killed instead of Dad before he could reveal it.

Then again, what if the murderer had heard Scotty say that and deliberately killed him? Even if the odd thing Scotty saw had nothing to do with the murder, what if the killer's guilty mind jumped to that conclusion? In which case the killer might have been aiming at Scotty after all, and not Dad.

I thought of mentioning it to Dad, but decided not to. Whatever Scotty had seen, it was gone for good now. Reminding Dad that we'd had a chance to hear it and failed would only frustrate him further.

And of course, there was the depressing task of recruiting a suitable usher to replace Scotty. After much discussion of the candidates, Samantha dragged in Rob to rubberstamp her choice: someone named Ian who, although apparently not a close personal friend of either of the principals, was tall, dark, and handsome enough to please the bridesmaids and well connected enough to suit Samantha and her mother.

Thursday, July 14

The next casualty--not, fortunately, a fatality--was from Eileen's wedding party.

"Oh, Meg, my nephew Brian has the measles!" she wailed.

"Well, so much for a ring bearer," I said.

"Oh, Meg, we have to have a ring bearer," Eileen said. "The costume is so darling, and I don't want poor Caitlin to have to walk down the aisle alone." Caitlin, I suspected, would rather prefer to have the limelight all to herself, but I doubted Eileen would see this.

"Don't you have any other little boy cousins?" I asked.

"There's little Petey, but he's only two."

"No way. What about Eric? I think he'll fit the costume."

"Oh, that would be perfect, Meg!" Eileen enthused, and hung up reassured.

Now all I had to do was talk Eric into it. I ended up having to promise to take him and several of his friends to ride the roller coasters at the nearest amusement park as a bribe. Dad was so touched by this show of auntly devotion that he offered to foot the bill. No one else volunteered a damned thing.

"By the way, Dad," I said, "one more thing."

"I have to run, Meg," he said. "I have to talk to the medical examiner."

"Fine. I'll tell you later about Jake scattering Great-Aunt Sophy in the river, and Samantha sneaking out of her house late at night with someone other than Rob, and what Rob's been doing instead of studying for the bar exam."

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.

"I'll get Eric and Caitlin going." I grabbed Eric with my left hand and Caitlin with my right.

"Slow and steady," I stage-whispered, "just like we rehearsed it."

Caitlin looked excited but not nervous. Good. Eric looked bored and only marginally cooperative.

"Roller coasters," I hissed at him. He assumed a look of pained innocence and exaggerated cooperativeness. I mentally crossed my fingers and gave both kids a gentle shove.

I peeked as they slipped through the curtains and set out down the makeshift aisle. They were more or less in time with the music, and I could hear oohs and aahs and exclamations of "Oh, aren't they precious?" Father Pete appeared behind the altar, beaming with enthusiasm. I turned to check that the first pair of bridesmaids were ready. I was beginning to relax when I heard the first titters. I whirled back to my peephole. At first I couldn't see anything wrong. Eric and Caitlin were doing splendidly. Then I realized that Duck had escaped from her cage somehow, and was waddling sedately down the aisle behind Eric.

"Oh, God," I moaned, turning away from my peephole. Michael took my place.

"At least she's in step with the music," he remarked. I reclaimed my peephole and saw that Eric and Caitlin had reached the altar.

"First pair, on three," I hissed. "One, two, three."

I marshaled the other two bridesmaids out and took my bouquet. Mr. Donleavy was being buttoned into his robe. Eileen looked shell-shocked.

"Send her out in another--" I began. "I know, I know," Michael said. "I'm a showbiz veteran, remember? Go!"

I stepped out on cue and marched down the aisle, head high, shoulders squared, trying hard to ignore the little trickles of sweat running down my neck, back, and legs.

Eileen looked radiant as she walked down the aisle. At least I hoped it was radiant. It could very easily have been early warning signs of heat stroke. But when I saw the looks on her face and Steven's as she reached the altar, I suddenly felt, at least for the moment, that all was right with the world and everything I'd gone through all summer was infinitely worthwhile. I stood there for a few minutes, beaming sappily as they began taking their vows, until I caught a glimpse of Barry, beaming just as sappily at me. I came down to earth with a thud.

Fortunately, just then something happened to distract me from my sudden, almost irresistible urge to throw something at Barry. Duck, who had been sitting sedately at Eric's feet, suddenly rose and began walking toward the center of the aisle, quacking loudly. When she reached the absolute center of Eileen's train, she sat down and continued to look around and emit an occasional quack. I debated whether to leave her alone or not, and decided I'd better get her off the train before she laid an egg or answered any other calls of nature. In as dignified manner as possible, I tucked my flowers under one arm, walked out, picked Duck up, and returned to my place. There were titters from the audience, and Father Pete was overcome with a fit of coughing. Duck seemed to calm down after that, but I held her bill closed for the rest of the ceremony, just in case.

The minister pronounced Steven and Eileen husband and wife, and we began exiting to the triumphant strains of a royal fanfare. When Barry tried to take my arm, I handed him Duck instead. Duck didn't appear to like it any more than he did.

We marched into the side yard and formed a receiving line. Although they could just as easily have circumnavigated the house, most of the guests played by the rules and ran the gauntlet before going to the backyard for champagne and hors d'oeuvres. Unfortunately, this kept us standing around for rather a long time under the inadequate shade of a flower-trimmed bower. I found myself silently cheering whenever someone sneaked out of the line.

The Renaissance banquet, once we finally got to sit down for it, was much admired, especially the spit-roasted pigs. Eileen did manage to set her veil on fire with one of the votive candles decorating the head table, but Steven put it out immediately with a tankard of mead. Only a few of the die-hards joined in the period dancing, but the tumblers, jugglers, and acrobats were a great hit.

I was increasingly glad that I had talked Eileen and Steven out of some of their more bizarre ideas of Renaissance authenticity. The dancing bear, for instance, would have been a bit too much. Although I wasn't entirely sure that the substitute was much of an improvement--Cousin Horace, risking heat stroke in his moth-eaten gorilla suit, which he'd ineptly altered in the vague hope of making it look bearlike. Ah, well. Horace had fun, anyway. After dinner, the rest of the program was largely the usual agenda, in costume. There was much to be said for the usual agenda. The guests knew it, and could carry on without a lot of instructions. Already guests were beginning to coagulate for the bouquet and garter throwing. Then we would have changing into going away clothes and pelting the departing van with organic birdseed. Followed by the utter collapse of the maid of honor. My responsibilities for the day would be over and I could swill down a couple more glasses of champagne. Maybe a couple of bottles.

Eileen had chosen to throw her bouquet from the Donleavys front stoop, which was gussied up to look like yet another bower. All the unmarried women were being chivvied into a semicircle at the base of the stoop. I took a safe place at the outskirts, hoping the lucky recipient of the bouquet would be a perfect stranger with no reason even to invite me to her wedding, much less recruit me as a participant.

Eileen teased the crowd with a few fake throws. "Come on, Meg," someone behind me said, "you'll never catch it like that."

I was turning to explain that catching it was the last thing on my mind, when something struck me violently on the side of the head. I was actually somewhat stunned for a few seconds, and then people began hugging me and clapping me on the back, and I realized that without even trying I had caught the bouquet. In my hair.

In fact, the thing had become inextricably tangled with my hair and the intricate floral headpiece that Mrs. Tranh and the ladies had anchored in place with about a million hairpins. Everyone seemed to find this hilarious except me; I had to hold onto the damned thing tightly to keep my hair from being torn out by the roots. Steven headed up to the stoop to remove the garter from Eileen's leg and fling it to the crowd. I was not about to sit still for having the garter put on my leg with a basketball-sized shrub stuck to my head. I fled inside to untangle myself. They would just have to wait till I was finished; if they got impatient, someone could come and help me, dammit. I found a hand mirror in the hall powder room and went out to the kitchen, where by resting my head on the kitchen table and propping the hand mirror against a vinegar cruet I could free up both hands and still see what I was doing.

What I was doing was going nowhere fast. In fact, I was making it worse, and the last few shreds of my patience evaporated. I heard gales of laughter outside. Steven must be really hamming up the garter bit. I rummaged through the kitchen cabinet drawers--one-handed--until I found a pair of scissors, and was reaching up to hack off the bouquet, hair and all, when I felt someone grab my wrist. I shrieked.

"Now, now," Michael said. "Let's not be hasty. You have two more weddings coming up; you'd regret doing that in the morning."

"Right now I just want to get the damned thing out of my hair," I said, close to tears.

"Sit down and I'll do it," he said, pulling up a chair and easing me into it with one deft motion as he began the tedious business of untangling the bouquet. "However did you manage this?"

"I didn't, Eileen did. I always thought you were supposed to give the bouquet a gentle toss and let fate decide who caught it. Eileen must have hurled the thing at my head with the speed and accuracy of a Cy Young award winner." Just then I saw Eileen and a couple of the bridesmaids flit by on their way upstairs. "Damn, I'm supposed to be helping her change!"

"I'm not sure that's either possible or necessary," Michael said. "Like all the local inhabitants, Eileen is an original; you don't want to tamper with that."

"Very funny," I said--all right, snapped. "Change her clothes, I mean, of course. God only knows what she'll do in the state she's in."

"Don't worry, Mrs. Tranh will take care of it. Though that does mean you're stuck with me to untangle this thing. Are you sure you wouldn't rather just wear this as a trophy till it grows out?"

"Just hack a chunk out," I said, reaching again for the scissors. "I can wear a flower or a bow over the spot in the other two weddings."

"Leave those alone," Michael ordered, slapping my hand away from the scissors. "I was only joking; I've almost got it." Sure enough, in another few minutes my hair and the bouquet parted company.

"I'm sorry," Michael said, as he saw me rubbing the spot. "I was trying not to yank out quite so much hair by the roots."

"Don't feel bad; I think most of the yanking happened when the thing landed. Besides, it's not the hair, it's the thorns on the roses that really hurt. Well, at least there's one consolation."

"What's that?" Michael asked, while rummaging through the debris on the kitchen counters.

"I seem to have missed the damned garter throwing ceremony."

"If it's any consolation, there wasn't one."

"What do you mean, there wasn't one? We have a garter; I know because I had to exchange the red one Steven bought for the pink one Eileen wanted."

"When Steven went to take the garter off Eileen's leg, they realized they'd never put it on her leg. The beastly Barry left it in his trunk, and can't find his car keys. Ah! Champagne?" he said, unearthing a full bottle that had somehow been left in the kitchen and brandishing it triumphantly.

"I give up," I said, holding out my hand for the glass. "After all the trouble we went through picking out the perfect garter, and they give it to that Neanderthal Barry for safekeeping."

I stretched out with my feet up on a second kitchen chair and sipped. However inadequate the air-conditioning was, it was better than outdoors. I was just beginning to feel relaxed when, speaking of the devil, Barry bounded in with all the grace of a half-grown Saint Bernard.

"Look what I've got!" He dangled the garter from his finger and leered in what I suppose he thought was a charming manner.

"It's you, Barry," I said. "Wear it in good health."

"You know what I get to do with it!"

"Get lost, Barry," I said, holding out my glass for more champagne.

"Ah, come on," he said, reaching for my leg. I grabbed the scissors and feinted at his hand with the point. He froze.

"Barry, if you lay one hand on my leg, I will stuff that garter down your throat and then cut it into shreds. I am not in a good mood, and besides, I know damn well that you didn't catch that thing, you just finally found your car keys. Now run along."

Barry did, though not without looking back reproachfully at me a few times. When the screen door slammed behind him, I sighed.

"I'm so glad he's gone, but now I feel as guilty as if I kicked a puppy."

"He'll live," Michael said. "I think."

"Why do I always end up using weapons on Barry?" I wondered.

"Seems perfectly sensible to me."

"Oh, God, I am so tired of Eileen and Steven throwing Barry at me. Why don't they see that he's just not my type."

"What is?" Michael said.

"What is what?"

"What is your type?"

"I don't know. Probably nonexistent; it's too depressing to think about."

"Come on," he said, "I'll make it easy. Tell me some of the ways in which Barry falls short of the mark. What would you have to do to Barry to make him even remotely resemble your type?" Bizarre, I thought; was Michael catching the local mania for matchmaking? I certainly hoped not.

"He'd have to be smarter," I said. "More articulate. Dare I say intellectual? With a better sense of humor. Not always so politically correct. And physically ... I don't know; I prefer lean, muscular men to that beefy jock type. It's weird, whenever I try to tell Eileen why Barry doesn't appeal to me, she thinks I'm trying to knock Steven. I'm not; I think Steven's very nice, and they're a great couple. But Steven isn't my type, and the beastly Barry even less so."

"I can see that. Although he's not actually an ogre, he certainly doesn't strike me as your type. On the other hand--"

"Only this commendation I can afford him," I said, paraphrasing some lines from Much Ado About Nothing, "that were he other than he is, he were unhandsome; and being no other but as he is, I do not like him."

Michael laughed and struck a pose. ""Rich she shall be, that's certain,"" he quoted back. ""Wise, or I'll none; virtuous, or I'll never cheapen her; fair, or I'll never look on her; mild, or come not near me; noble, or not I for an angel; of good discourse, an excellent musician, and her hair shall be of what color it please God,"" he finished with a flourish, using some strands of my hair he'd removed from the bouquet as a prop.

"Who's that?" said Jake, who had come in while Michael was speaking and was looking confused. Which was more or less his usual state as far as I could see.

""You are a villain!"" Michael declaimed in yet another speech from Much Ado. He grabbed the scissors and struck up a fencing position. ""I jest not: I will make it good how you dare, and when you dare. Do me right, or I will protest your cowardice. You have killed a sweet lady, and her death shall fall heavy on you. Let me hear from you!""

Jake turned pale and began backing out of the room. "Is everyone here completely crazy?" he asked.

"He's just quoting me some lines from a Shakespeare play he appeared in, Mr. Wendell," I said, soothingly. To no avail. Jake reached the door and fled.

"That man's damned lucky to have an ironclad alibi," Michael remarked. "Have you ever seen anyone so hysterical?"

"For two cents I'd frame him for either murder, just to have him out from underfoot," I said. "And what's more, he's too big."

"Too big! He's shorter than you are, and I doubt if he weighs more than one hundred fifty pounds. Too big for what?"

"Too big for me to toss over the bluff," I grumbled. "We've already proven I can barely handle one hundred five pounds."

Michael gave me an odd look, but Eric's arrival cut off whatever answer he might have made.

"I did good, Aunt Meg, huh?" Eric said, grabbing my arm and swinging on it.

"You were a marvel."

"So we're going, right?" he demanded.

"You've got it."

"When?"

"We can't do it tomorrow; there's Samantha's party. And I may not feel like getting up early Monday. I thought Tuesday."

"Great! I'll go call Timmy and A.j. and Berke!"

"Timmy and A.j. and Berke? I thought--never mind," I said, closing my eyes and holding out my champagne glass. "How much worse can four of them be?"

"Four of what?" Michael asked, filling my glass.

"I had to bribe Eric to get him to take Brian's place. I'm taking him and, apparently, three other eight-year-old boys to ride the roller coasters."

"Roller coasters?"

"Yes, at whatever's the nearest huge amusement park," I said, with a shudder. "I hate riding roller coasters."

"Can't somebody else actually ride with them?" "Strangely enough everyone else in the family is completely tied up all next week," I said. "Rob's taking the bar exam, but most of them seem to be going to the dentist. Isn't that odd? You'd think toothaches were contagious. Dad has offered to pay for the trip, though. I suppose that's something."

"Not enough. Did you say Tuesday?"

"Yes. Why? Do I have a fitting or something?"

"No," he said. "There's nothing important going on at the shop Tuesday. I'll go with you."

I opened my eyes and stared at him. "You must be mad. Or you've had too much of that," I said, pointing to the champagne. "We're talking about four eight-year-olds, here."

"Yes, and if you take them all by yourself, you'll be outnumbered four to one. If I go, we'll only be outnumbered two to one. Better odds."

"You're mad," I repeated. "Stark, raving mad."

"Oh, come on, it'll be fun," he said.

"You have a very warped idea of fun, then."

"Consider it part of Be-Stitched's superior customer service," he said. "We not only make your gown, we make sure you stay alive and sane enough to wear it."

Sunday, July 17

I slept late. The only thing I actually had to do was help Professor Donleavy cope with the cleanup crew he'd hired. And pack a few things to return to rental places. And log in a few more gifts. And field all the phone calls from people who'd lost things at the party. And find a box that would hold all the things Eileen had forgotten and called home already to ask that we ship to her. Well, maybe it wasn't going to be such a quiet day after all. Thank goodness Michael had arranged for the ladies to capture all the costumes at the end of the party and was having them cleaned and returned to their owners. I spent most of the day over at the Donleavys'. Professor Donleavy was pathetically grateful for everything I was doing.

Nice to see that somebody was.

"Meg, where have you been?" Dad said, when I strolled up the driveway. "I needed you to help out with the investigation."

"What do you want me to do?" I said, trying to feign an interest in his detective work that I was too tired to feel at the moment.

"It's too late now. But--"

"Besides, I need you to help me," Mother said. "I was looking for you hours ago. Michael brought the new drapes and the recovered furniture. We're rearranging the living room."

Michael and Rob were in the living room, leaning wearily against the couch, looking very sweaty and disheveled. They'd obviously been shoving around the newly upholstered furniture for quite a while. It's not fair, I thought, as Michael flashed me a tired smile. No one that sweaty and disheveled should be allowed to look that gorgeous.

"Now, I want Meg to take a look at the different arrangements we've tried," Mother said.

Rob and Michael both became a little wild-eyed. They looked at me, obviously hoping for rescue.

"What's wrong with this arrangement?" I said. "It's fine."

"Yes, but ..."

Mother described her alternate arrangements. I improvised compelling reasons why none of them would work. Rob and Michael watched us, heads moving back and forth with the fanatic intensity of spectators at Wimbledon. I finally convinced Mother to leave the living room alone. Michael and Rob began to look a little cheerful.

"Now about the dining room," she said. Rob and Michael slumped back into despondency.

"We can't possibly do the dining room at night," I said. "It's no good even trying until we see what it looks like in daylight."

"Can't we just--"

"Tomorrow, Mother," I said, firmly.

"I suppose," she said, with a disappointed look. Rob fled. Michael looked as if he were thinking of it. Mother wandered around the dining room twitching the new curtains and flicking invisible dust off the furniture. Dad dashed in.

"Meg, can you--" Dad began.

"Tomorrow."

He looked disappointed, but left. Not without a few reproachful backward glances. I slumped back on the couch, closed my eyes, and sighed.

"Having a bad day?" Michael asked. I felt the couch shift slightly as he sat down beside me.

"It wasn't particularly bad until I got home. I'm sorry; I can't help them tonight. I'm beat."

"Not your fault," he said.

"Of course it is. I'm supposed to be Wonder Woman. I'm supposed to be able to leap tall buildings with a single bound." I paused. "Actually, I think the real problem is that I'm supposed to be here. Back in the hometown. Like Pam. Available when they need me. And I can't do that."

"Yes, we never are quite what our parents want us to be, are we?" Michael said. With perhaps a little bitterness? I had a sudden sharp mental image of a frail little gray-haired lady, peering over her bifocals at Michael with a look of mild reproach in cornflower blue eyes whose beauty was only slightly dimmed by age. Like Barry Fitzgerald's tiny Irish mother tottering down the aisle in Going My Way.

"How is your mother?" I asked, to change the subject. He sighed. I frowned in dismay. Perhaps this was a tactless subject. Perhaps his mother was not doing well.

"Fine, just ... fine. The bandages are off, and she's actually showing her face in the dining room already."

"Bandages? Don't you mean cast?"

"No." He paused for a few moments. "Don't you dare repeat this."

"Cross my heart."

"She didn't break her leg. Or her arm."

"No?"

"She had ... a face-lift. That's why she couldn't come back here to recuperate. She's checked into a hotel in Atlanta and she's not going to come back until all the bandages and stitches and swelling are gone, and if anyone says anything about her looking different, she'll claim she went on a diet while she was convalescing. Not that she ever needs a diet, thanks to all the aerobics and iron-pumping. Next to Mom, Jane Fonda is a couch potato."

"Oh." A face-lift. My mental picture of sweet, kindly, gray-haired little Mrs. Waterston was undergoing radical revision.

"Don't tell anyone," he warned. "She'd kill me if she knew I'd told anyone."

"Don't worry; I'm not into gossip." Mother and Mrs. Fenniman, on the other hand, would have it all over the county within twenty-four hours of her return. Nothing I could do about that. "I'm the oddball around here; I like secrets as much as anyone, but prefer keeping them to myself and snickering at people who aren't in the know."

"I can certainly relate to that," he said. "But sometimes ... well, there's a big difference between simply not telling a secret and having to run around lying and pretending to cover it up. This summer I've gotten very tired of pretending. In fact--"

Just then we heard a blood-curdling shriek. We both jumped up and ran out of the study and toward the front door, the direction from which the shriek seemed to have come. Other family and friends were peering over the upstairs banister and popping out of doorways all up and down the hall, although I didn't see any of them venturing down to help us. Michael grabbed my grandfather's knobby old walking stick from the umbrella stand in the front hall. I flung open the front door and peered out to see--

A small, nondescript man in overalls and a John Deere cap standing on the front steps holding a much-creased piece of paper and frowning at us.

"Is this the Langslow house?" he asked.

"Yes," I said, rather tentatively. He looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn't quite place him.

"About time," he growled, turning on his heel and walking down the steps to the driveway, where a large, battered truck, like a small moving van, was parked. "I'd like to have a word or two with whoever drew up this map," he said over his shoulder, shaking the piece of paper vaguely in our direction. "Been driving around the county with these damn things for hours now."

"What damn things?" Michael asked, still keeping the walking stick handy.

Instead of answering, the man flung open the back door of the truck and banged the side a couple of times with his fist. A chorus of unearthly shrieks rang out and then half a dozen shapes exploded from the back of the truck and scattered across the lawn, still shrieking.

"Ah," I said. "I see the peacocks have arrived."

Mr. Dibbit, the owner of the peacocks, gave Dad, Michael, and me a brief rundown on peacock care while the rest of the family ran off into the night to hunt them down. Mr. Dibbit assured us this was unnecessary; they'd find someplace to roost tonight and would show up for breakfast when they got hungry enough. Or if they didn't, we wouldn't have any problem finding them; you could hear them for miles. Or follow the droppings. I sensed that Mr. Dibbit was not a peacock owner by choice, or at least was no longer a proud and happy one. I began to suspect he was secretly hoping we would manage to lose or do in his peacock flock so he could be rid of it. He unloaded a couple of sacks of what he called peacock feed-- actually Purina Turkey Chow, I noticed.

He told us just to treat them like any other big bird. And then he drove off into the night--rather hurriedly. Or perhaps he was still miffed about the map. Mother had drawn a beautiful map, elegantly lettered, with many little sketches of the houses and gardens in the area. But since she'd left out or misnamed most of the critical streets and drawn most of the rest out of scale or perpendicular to the way they really ran, I could well understand Mr. Dibbit's frustration.

Dad and Michael began lugging the peacock chow into the garage. I was not a bit surprised to see Dad sampling it, but I hadn't realized how much he was influencing Michael. Men. At least Michael had the grace to look sheepish when I caught him nibbling. I went upstairs to change. The rest of the family could amuse themselves chivvying the peacocks through the neighborhood or devouring the poor birds' breakfast. The peacocks had arrived, taking care of one more of what Samantha called "those little details that really make an occasion." I was filled with a sense of accomplishment, and I planned to get all dressed up and go to Samantha's party.

Why I bothered I have no idea. Within half an hour of my arrival I was wondering how soon I could sneak out. As usual, most of the people at the party were Samantha's friends, not Rob's. I wondered if Rob realized how much his life was going to change after the wedding. And not for the better if it meant hanging out with this crowd.

By one in the morning, I was through. I was running out of ways to dodge Dougie, the particularly persistent unwanted suitor I'd ditched at Samantha's last party. I decided to leave. But I didn't want to have him follow me home, so I decided to hide out upstairs for a little while, in the hope that he'd think I was gone. Then I would go back down and sneak out.

I didn't want to stumble into a bedroom that might be occupied, so I headed for Mr. Brewster's library at the end of the hall. Luck was with me; the door was open, and I was able to duck inside before anyone else appeared in the hall.

Just as I was breathing a sigh of relief, I heard a noise behind me. I whirled about and saw a couple half reclining on the library sofa. Rob, and one of the bridesmaids. She was wearing a tight, red strapless dress, although there was a great deal more of her out of the dress than in it at the moment. I tried to remember her name, but after several glasses of wine it was impossible. Not one of the Jennifers, anyway. Rob looked somewhat disheveled as well, but instead of the angry stare the woman in red was giving me, Rob's flushed face showed mostly embarrassment with, I was pleased to note, perhaps a hint of relief. I decided that he needed rescuing, and that the best way to do it was to ignore whatever they had been up to.

"Oh, good, there you are, Rob," I said, walking over to the sofa. "Samantha was looking for you for something." Rob jumped to his feet and began putting his clothes to rights. I helped him by retying his tie as I continued. "I think they want to take some pictures. With the peacocks, if they're still awake." What a stupid thing to say, I told myself, but it was the first thing that came to mind. Actually I hoped they didn't want Rob for anything else tonight; as I drew his arm through mine and began leading him to the door, I realized that he was stumbling and lurching badly. Rob never did have much of a head for drink. I was babbling something inane about peacocks and wondering how on earth I was going to get him downstairs, when I ran into Michael at the landing.

"Help me with Rob," I hissed, glancing back at the door of the study. Sure enough, the vamp was standing in the door, looking daggers at me and trying to stuff herself back into the bodice of the dress. Michael took in the situation and immediately propped up Rob from the other side.

"We need to get him downstairs and back home," I said.

"Maybe you'd better zip his fly up before we take him back out in public. I'll hold him steady while you do." I did, made a few more futile efforts to make him look presentable, and then we more or less carried him down the stairs. Fortunately there were only a few people to stare as we lugged him out the front door.

Our luck held at first; the fresh air seemed to revive Rob a little, so he wasn't a dead weight on the walk home. But getting up the porch steps took a lot out of him, and he passed out in the front hall.

"Allow me," Michael said, and he heaved Rob up in a fireman's carry and hauled him up to his room, with me running ahead to show the way. Michael deposited his burden on the bed. After I pulled off Rob's shoes and loosened his tie, I decided to call it quits.

"Thanks," I told Michael. "Once again, I don't know what we'd have done without you. You seem to be making a career out of hauling incapacitated Langslows home."

"You're welcome. I only wish we could get some aspirin in him. I learned in my misspent youth that a couple of aspirin the night before does more than a dozen the morning after. But I don't think he'd thank us for waking him up to feed them to him."

"He should thank us for getting him out of there. I don't know what I would have done if you hadn't happened to come along."

"I didn't just happen to come along. I saw you go upstairs, and I remembered that you'd seemed to be trying to lose that Doug character, and I thought I'd tag along in case he followed you."

"And what if I'd been heading for a rendezvous with him?" I teased.

"I would have been frightfully embarrassed. But somehow I can't see you slipping upstairs for a rendezvous with Dougie."

"No, actually he was waiting for me in the gazebo."

I'd never actually seen anyone do a double take in real life.

"He was what?"

"Waiting for me in the gazebo."

"You agreed to meet him in the gazebo?"

"No, but about the seventeenth time he asked me if we could go somewhere more private, I told him to be in the gazebo in fifteen minutes. If he chose to believe I was planning on showing up there, that's his problem."

"Why not just tell him to get lost?" Michael asked.

"I did. Several dozen times. The man just won't take drop dead for an answer."

"I'm relieved," Michael said. "I didn't think he was your type. In fact, I was wondering--"

Just then Rob stirred, rolled over on his back, smiled seraphically, and spoke.

"Kill the lawyers," he said. "Kill all the lawyers." Then he began snoring loudly. Michael and I tiptoed out of the room.

"Did he say what I thought he said?" Michael asked.

"Yes. Kill All the Lawyers," I said. "It's a role-playing game. Also known as Lawyers from Hell."

"I've never heard of it."

"That's because Rob and a friend have been inventing it this summer."

"That's great!"

"While they should have been studying for the bar exam."

"Oh," Michael said. "How do you think Samantha will like that?"

"Not at all, but then after tonight, it may be irrelevant. If anyone tells her what Rob's been up to."

"True. Let me know as soon as you know what happens. Not that I'm trying to be nosy--"

"But if Samantha cancels another wedding you'd like to know immediately. Before the Brewsters stick your mom with another set of unused dresses. I understand."

He chuckled and went off. I went to bed wondering how Samantha would react if she found out about Rob. And how he would feel about it. If she threw his behavior in his face, should I bring up her clandestine expedition of the other night?

No. Stay out of it. It's his life; let him ruin it himself. Then again, he'd been awfully subdued recently. Maybe this was more than just prenuptial jitters. I'd never been able to figure out what he saw in Samantha. And they weren't billing and cooing much anymore. Maybe, subconsciously, he wanted out.

Monday, July 18

Among her many failings, Samantha was not only a morning person but an intolerant and inconsiderate one. At least Eileen saved most of her crises for the afternoon. And she would never have awakened me at dawn the morning after a party. All right, it was eight o'clock, but I'd been up until well past one, looking after Rob. And Mother--the traitor--let her in and insisted I get up and talk to her. I found the two brides calmly sipping tea when I stumbled downstairs to the kitchen.

"Meg," Samantha said. "See if you can locate Michael Waterston. We need to schedule a fitting for Ashley. Today if possible, and if not, first thing tomorrow."

"Ashley?" I said groggily. "I didn't know we had an Ashley." Samantha looked at me as if I were feebleminded. I counted them off on my fingers: "Jennifer, Jennifer, Jennifer, Kimberly, Tiffany, Heather, Melissa, and Blair. I'm right; we don't have an Ashley." I nodded triumphantly, turned to the refrigerator, and began rooting around for a diet soda to wash down my aspirin. It was already too hot for coffee.

"Heather will be unable to participate," Samantha said, in a brittle tone. "Ashley has very graciously agreed to take her place."

"That's rather inconsiderate of her," I grumbled. "Heather, I mean, not Ashley. Dropping out at the last minute like this. What happened? She was at the party last night, wasn't she?"

"Yes, I think so," Samantha said, tight-lipped. Suddenly, memory returned. Heather. Of course. The she-beast in the red dress.

"I'm sure she was," I said. "Wearing that rather tacky strapless red dress."

"Yes," Samantha said, with a thin, satisfied smile. "It was rather tacky, wasn't it?" And I very much doubt if she meant the dress. Ah, well; I hadn't really expected Rob's little encounter with the Lady in Red to go unnoticed.

"Do you think Ashley's approximately the same size as Heather?"

"Oh, yes," Samantha said, very businesslike. "Heather and Tiffany are exactly the same size, and Ashley was Tiffany's roommate in school and they always used to share all their clothes. So the dress should only need minor alterations."

I was impressed. Not eight hours after the event and Samantha had already rounded up not only a replacement bridesmaid but one in a convenient size. And I bet Ashley was a blonde, too.

"Leave it to me," I said.

Samantha gave me Ashley's number and promised me that Ashley could be down at Be-Stitched on half an hour's notice. I strode out of the kitchen, leaving the two of them chatting away. When I was out of sight, I grabbed a lawn chair and Dad's wide-brimmed gardening hat and went down to the end of the driveway, where I plunked myself down in the lawn chair with the hat over my face and fell asleep.

Actually, I only intended to sit and think until Michael and Spike came along on their usual morning walk, but the next thing I knew my shoulder was being shaken and I heard Michael's voice. "Meg! Are you all right?"

"Morning," I said, "I thought you'd be coming along soon."

"And you were lying in wait for me. I am immensely flattered. And if you'll only tell me it has absolutely nothing to do with nuptial attire, my happiness will be complete."

"Sink back into the depths of despair, then," I said, getting up and falling into step beside them. "We need to schedule a fitting for a new bridesmaid. Samantha has decided to dispose of her predecessor."

"Not another suspicious death," he said, only half joking.

"No, just a summary dismissal. I suppose it was too much to hope for that Samantha wouldn't hear about last night's escapade."

"At least it's the bridesmaid who's dismissed, not Rob. She wouldn't be casting another bridesmaid if she intended calling off the wedding."

"I'm not sure that would be a tragedy," I muttered. "And anyway, I hope he's not too hungover to do some heavy groveling today."

"Wonder what she said to Heather?"

"I'm impressed; you actually remembered her name. I have a hard time telling them all apart sober, and last night after a couple of drinks I'll be damned if I could remember which one she was."

"I have reason to," Michael said, "I had a run-in with her myself. She's as subtle as a pit bull, and about as appealing. As a matter of fact, it was because of Heather that--oh, damn!"

Spike had slipped his leash again and was running merrily toward the peacock flock in the side yard. We chased him for a while, but it was too hot.

"I give up," Michael said, as we collapsed, panting, on the lawn. "He's too small to do them any real damage; he'll come home when he's tired of chasing them."

It was a long day, and I was dead tired when I got home. Replacing one indistinguishable blond bimbo with another shouldn't be this difficult, should it? Of course, I'd also had to play wise older sister to a depressed, guilt-ridden and very hungover Rob. And deal with Samantha, who was treating me with a watered-down version of the same icy, condescending calm she was using with Rob. Had everyone forgotten, by the way, that Rob was going to be taking his first day of bar exams tomorrow? It would be a miracle if he passed after all this.

A thoroughly rotten day. I stopped to rest for a moment on the porch steps.

The peacocks were crossing the lawn. Actually, I suppose I should say the peafowl, since we had three peacocks and six peahens. I watched with satisfaction. Many things had gone wrong this summer, and many more probably would. I was sure to be blamed for most of them, and some of them would actually be my fault. But the peafowl situation was shaping up nicely. They had settled in. We had found that we could lead them from one yard to another with a small trail of food and more or less keep them in place by putting a supply out. Establishing them in the Brewsters' yard for Samantha's wedding and then reestablishing them in our yard for Mother's would not be a problem. I leaned against the railing and smiled contentedly. Then my contentment was shattered by a voice from the porch.

"I don't suppose you could find some different peacocks," Mother said.

"Different peacocks? I had a hard enough time finding these. What's wrong with them?"

"Only three of them have tails," Mother pointed out.

"That's because only three of them are peacocks, Mother. The rest are peahens."

"Well what do we need them for?" Mother asked. "They don't add anything to the impression. They're not very attractive."

"Maybe not to you, but apparently they are to the peacocks. If we didn't have them around, the peacocks would sulk and wouldn't spread their tails. You know how men are."

Mother digested that in silence. "Besides, one of them's shedding," she said.

"Shedding?"

She pointed. One of the peacocks--the smallest--was beginning to look a little bedraggled.

"I think it's called molting. Either that or he lost a fight with one of the bigger peacocks." Or perhaps Spike had been chewing on him.

"It's not very attractive," Mother said. "What if they all do that?"

"Then we call Mr. Dibbit and get our money back. If you don't like them, we can take them back after Samantha's wedding."

Mother pondered.

"We'll see how they look by then," she said finally, and swept off.

I looked at the peafowl again. were the other two peacocks showing signs of molting? Would they start shrieking during the ceremony? It would probably be a good idea to keep them out of the Brewsters' yard until the day before the ceremony. To minimize the number of droppings on the lawn. That way the guests would only be stepping in fresh peacock droppings. I saw a slight movement in the shrubbery. A small, furry white face peeked out. The kitten was stalking the peafowl. Should I go out and rescue him? Or was it the peafowl who needed rescuing?

The kitten attacked. The peafowl scattered in all directions, shrieking. Mother slammed the front door closed. I sighed. So much for things going right.

Tuesday, July 19

Eric woke me up shortly after dawn to remind me that we were going to the amusement park and ask me if I thought it would rain. I restrained the impulse to throttle him and sent him down to watch the Weather Channel. The weather, alas, was clear, and the other small boys would arrive at seven. So much for sleeping late.

By the time Michael strolled up, looking disgustingly alert for a professed night person, I was inventorying the stuff I'd packed--snacks and games to keep the small monsters happy while getting there, sunblock, dry clothes for everyone in case we went on any water rides too close to closing time, the inhaler A.j.'s mother had provided in case his asthma acted up, a large assortment of Band-Aids, aspirin for the headache I suspected I'd have by the end of the day, and several dozen other critical items.

Hannibal crossed the Alps with less baggage.

"Dad should be by any minute with his car," I said.

"How big is his car?" Michael asked, eyeing our charges.

"It's a great big Buick battleship; we can stuff them all in the backseat."

Eric and his friends were running about shooting each other with imaginary guns and competing to see who could achieve the noisiest and most prolonged demise, and I was watching them with satisfaction.

"Rather a lively bunch, aren't they," Michael said, continuing to watch them.

Aha, I thought. Second thoughts already. Well, he wasn't drafted.

"I egged them on. The more energy we bleed off now, the less hellish the drive will be."

"Good plan. You did bring the stun gun, I hope?"

"It's all packed."

"By the way," he said, "have you seen Spike? He never came home yesterday."

"No, not since we lost him chasing the peacocks."

"Maybe I should ask someone to keep an eye out for him," Michael said. "Feed him when he shows up."

"I'm sure Dad would do it; we'll ask him." Just then I saw Dad's car turn into the driveway.

To my surprise, instead of slowing down as he approached the house, Dad began blowing his horn at us. We jumped aside as he whizzed by at nearly forty miles per hour and, instead of following the curve of the driveway back out to the street, plunged full steam ahead across the yard, sending the peacocks running for their lives in all directions. He lost some speed going through the grape arbor, then plowed through the hedge that separated our yard from the one next door and came to a halt when he ran into a stack of half-rotten hay bales left over from when the neighbors used to have a pony.

"Something must have happened to him," I said, dropping my carryall to run to the scene.

"Grandpa!" Eric shouted. "You wrecked your car!"

The car was, indeed, something of a mess, but once we'd gotten him out from under the hay, Dad was unharmed. In fact, he was positively beaming with exhilaration.

"Grandpa, why did you wreck your car?" Eric asked as we hauled Dad out. Good question. The approaching next-door neighbors would soon be asking similar questions about their hedge and haystack. The peacocks had disappeared but were shrieking with such gusto that I was sure the entire neighborhood would be showing up soon to complain.

"Call the sheriff," were Dad's first words. "I think someone's tampered with my brakes."

Pam, who had come running out when she heard the commotion, ran back in to call. Eric and his friends looked solemn.

"Grandpa, what's tampered?" Eric asked. His grandpa, however, was crawling under the car. As was Michael. I didn't know about Michael, but I knew perfectly well Dad was incapable of doing anything underneath a car but cover himself with grease. Fascinating the way even the most mechanically inept males feel obliged to involve themselves with any malfunctioning machine in their immediate vicinity. And usually, at least in Dad's case, making things worse. The small boys were crouching down and preparing to join their elders.

"Tampered means Grandpa thinks somebody messed around with the car to make it crash," I said. "So all of you stay away from that car until Grandpa and Michael are sure it's safe." They were ignoring me. The lure of male bonding beneath an automobile was too strong. Then Michael's voice emerged sepulchrally from beneath the car.

"Anyone who does come under here will be left behind!"

The herd backed up to a respectful distance. About then the sheriff turned up. Dad and Michael emerged from beneath the car for a conference with him. The sheriff crawled under the car, popped out long enough to ask Pam to call a tow truck, and then disappeared again, followed by Dad. And then one or two deputies.

"You seem very calm about this," Michael remarked, as we watched the growing number of feet sticking out from under various parts of the car.

"I'll postpone my hysterics until later," I said, feeling a little shakier than I'd like to admit. "I think it's important that we stay calm and avoid traumatizing the children."

"Are we going soon, Aunt Meg?" Eric asked. The children didn't seem particularly traumatized. The excitement of the car wreck was evidently fading. There was a growing herd of small boys swarming over the haybales and getting in the deputies' way. I made a mental note to make sure only four of them came with us to the amusement park.

"Yes, let's maintain a facade of normality," Michael said. "I'll get Mom's station wagon. They'd kill each other stuffed in the back of your Toyota, and my car's a two-seater."

By the time we got the boys loaded into the station wagon and drove off, Dad was recounting his wild ride through the yard for the third time, to a spellbound audience of deputies. The sheriff was down at my sister Pam's house, interviewing any neighbors who might have seen someone tampering with the car. The cousin who ran the local plant nursery and gardening service was working up an estimate for replacing the damaged portions of the hedge for the neighbors' insurance agent, who happened to be another cousin. A wonderful day in the neighborhood.

Although I'm sure Eric and his little friends would disagree, I found our trip to ride the roller coasters blissfully uneventful--at least compared to how the day began. Oh, I was exhausted by the end of it, of course, and was trying hard to hide a tendency to jump at loud noises. But no new bodies were discovered. Apart from the sort of mayhem that small boys routinely inflict on each other, no one tried to murder anyone. Only one of the kids threw up. And the only new item added to my list of things to do was "Hit Dad up for reimbursement."

"Where do they get the energy?" I asked, as we watched them careening around in the bumper cars for the fifth or sixth time. "I don't want to sound like a stick in the mud, but I just can't keep up with them."

"Oh, don't worry," Michael said. "They don't think of you as a stick in the mud. I overheard A.j. telling Eric how great it was that his aunt Meg wasn't scared to go on the big rides like most girls."

"I'm flattered. Even if A.j. is a little male chauvinist pig."

"And Eric told A.j. that his aunt Meg wasn't scared of anything."

"I wish that was true." I sighed.

"You're worrying about your Dad," Michael observed.

Eric and the horde bounded up demanding food just then, cutting off my answer. Which would have been that I was worried about all of us. If someone was trying to kill my Dad, he--or she--might already have killed at least one innocent bystander in the process by tampering with Dad's lawn mower. Michael and the four little boys and I might have just missed becoming victims ourselves.

Michael brought up the subject again on the way home, after a glance to make sure that Eric and his friends were curled up asleep in the back of the station wagon.

"Wonder if they've had time to find out anything about your dad's car?" he said quietly. "Brake line cut, or brake fluid drained, or whatever."

"Did it look suspicious to you?" I asked.

"I'm not exactly a master mechanic," he admitted. "Your dad seemed to find something of interest."

"Dad's no master mechanic either. In fact, anything he might possibly know about how car brakes work would pretty much have to have come from a detective story. But I'd be willing to bet that either they find the brakes had been tampered with or at least that they can't rule out sabotage."

Michael nodded.

"I'm going to have to give Mom a hard time when this summer is all over," he said. "I distinctly remember her telling me this was a quiet, peaceful little town where nothing ever happened."

"Until we got our own serial killer."

"If that's the right name for it."

"True. Serial killer does seem to imply some sort of random, sick, purposelessness, and I get the feeling there is a very rational purpose to everything that's gone on this summer, if only we knew what it was."

"So what do we know?" Michael asked. "I mean really know--"

"As opposed to Dad's highly imaginative speculations?" I asked.

"Right."

"Not much," I admitted. "On the day after Memorial Day, a visitor from out of town either was killed or died in a freak accident. And while she managed to alienate a significant portion of the county before her death, the only person who would seem to have known her well enough to want to do her in has a cast-iron alibi."

"Is it so cast-iron?" Michael asked. "I mean, apart from the alibi, Jake's so perfect for it."

"If it were just Mother giving him his alibi, I'd say no. Not because I think she'd lie, but because she's too spacey."

"What a thing to say about your own mother," Michael said.

"Do you disagree?"

He shrugged.

"But anyway," I continued, "Since they spent the entire day billing and cooing in front of half a dozen waiters and salesclerks, the sheriff can say with complete confidence that Jake couldn't have been within twenty miles of the neighborhood for hours before or after the time Mrs. Grover died."

"Hard to argue with that." Michael sighed. "Pity. There's something about Jake that gets on my nerves. He's so aggressively banal. I'd love to see it turn out to be him."

"You and me both."

"Not to mention your dad."

"Right. Though for different reasons."

"Like disqualifying Jake as a suitor for your mother."

"Exactly. But unless he's sitting on some really dynamite evidence, I think he'll have to find some other way of breaking up the match. As a murderer, I'm afraid Jake's a nonstarter."

"Sad but true."

"Getting back to what we know: two weeks after Mrs. Grover's suspicious death, an electrician is nearly killed in a freak electrical accident that may have been a booby trap. And if it was a booby trap, the most logical person for it to be aimed at was Dad, who would have fixed the fuse box if he hadn't been AWOL."

"And a little more than two weeks after that, we're all nearly blown up by a bomb, just before you and a dozen other women are made severely ill by what appears to have been poison that may have been deliberately placed in a bowl of one of your dad's favorite foods."

"Thank God for the bomb. All the rest could possibly be accidents, although the number of accidents is beginning to make even the sheriff suspicious. But there's no way to argue with that bomb."

"True; I think about it whenever I'm tempted to doubt your dad."

"And shortly afterward, a harmless neighborhood layabout is killed in what again may have been sabotage, and again the more logical target would have been Dad."

"And now today your father has a car wreck that he thinks may have been due to sabotage. So maybe the big question is, who is trying to kill your father, and why?"

"Either he knows something or the killer is afraid he'll find something out," I said. "Dad's the one who kept the sheriff and the coroner from declaring Mrs. Grover's death an accident. Dad's the one who points out the suspicious side of all these so-called accidents. Dad keeps turning over stones, and maybe the killer is afraid he'll eventually find something."

"If that's the case, it all goes back to Mrs. Grover. If we figure out who killed her, we know who's trying to kill your dad."

"Or, conversely, if we figure out who's trying to kill Dad, we'll know who did in Mrs. Grover." We rode a while in silence, no doubt both trying to come up with a plausible suspect.

"Maybe I'm too close to this," I said with a sigh. "I can think of dozens of people who would have been capable of doing all this, but I can't for the life of me see why any of them would want to kill Mrs. Grover. And I have a hard time seeing most of them as cold-blooded murderers."

"Is there anyone you can see as a murderer?" Michael asked.

"Samantha," I said, only half joking. "I can see her killing anyone who seriously inconvenienced her. I certainly go out of my way to avoid crossing her."

"I can see that. But what could Samantha have against Mrs. Grover? Granted, Mrs. Grover was a supremely irritating person, but that's hardly grounds for murder."

"They had some kind of small run-in at the Donleavys' picnic. But then who didn't? I know I did."

"So did I," Michael said.

"Maybe she knew something damaging about Samantha. Although I can't imagine what. She was here less than a week before she died. Even Mother would have difficulty unearthing any juicy skeletons after only five days in a strange city."

"Maybe it was something she knew about Samantha before she came here," Michael said. "I seem to recall being an object of mild suspicion myself because she knew my mother from Fort Lauderdale. Was Samantha originally from Florida?"

"No, but her fiance was. The one before Rob."

"The bank robber?"

"Embezzler. But that was Miami, not Fort Lauderdale."

"It's the same thing," Michael said. "All part of the same metropolitan area. Like Manhattan and Brooklyn."

"Is it?" I said. "Geography was never my strong point. So they both had ties to the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area."

"Samantha through her shady former fiance," Michael expanded. "This is much more promising."

"If I remember correctly, the fiance claimed his partner had gotten all the money, and the partner claimed that the fiance had gotten the lion's share."

"Wouldn't it be funny if Samantha'd somehow gotten her claws into most of the loot? Played both of them against each other and made off with the loot under their greedy noses?"

"It's probably beastly of me, but I can definitely imagine Samantha doing it. Or killing, for enough money," I said. "And the estimates of how much they milked out of their clients range between ten and fifteen million dollars."

Michael whistled. "There's a motive to be reckoned with. But do you really think she'd try to kill her future father-in-law to keep it quiet?"

"She's never much liked Dad," I said. "And besides, I can also see her disposing of anyone who tried to get in her way about the wedding."

"What, has your dad tried to butt in on the wedding? Insisted on a nonpoisonous wedding bouquet, perhaps?"

"She's probably overheard him trying to talk Rob out of marrying her. I know I have. And come to think of it, even if she didn't hear him talking to Rob, I know for a fact that at the picnic she overheard him tell me he thought the marriage was a bad idea and he was going to keep trying to talk Rob out of it."

"Oh," Michael said.

"You can see how she might resent that."

"Definitely. Samantha goes at the top of the list of people on whom I will not willingly turn my back. And on whom I will keep an eye when your father's in the neighborhood. Any other suspects?"

"It's a pity we can't frame the Beastly Barry for it," I said. "I thought we'd be rid of him, at least for a little while, after Eileen's wedding, but it begins to look as if he'll never leave. At least that's the way it looks to poor Mr. Donleavy. I'm surprised he didn't try to join us today."

"I doubt if his enthusiasm for small children extends to doing anything with or for them that involves actual work," Michael said, glancing at the backseat where the small boys appeared still asleep. "Is he frameable, do you suppose?" he added, with seemingly genuine interest. Civil of him to adopt my dislike of the Beastly so enthusiastically.

"Well, he was here for the Donleavys' Memorial Day picnic when Mrs. Grover was killed. I remember she did something or other that ticked him off pretty seriously, and he's normally about as excitable as a house plant."

"Maybe he's one of those people who's slow to anger but even slower to get over it, and he's been plotting revenge," Michael suggested.

"And he was here shortly before the fuse box incident. It was just after Eileen went on the Renaissance kick, and I remember you had him measured for his doublet that day."

"He could have put the bomb in the jack-in-the-box and lied about it," Michael said.

"And he could have poisoned the salsa; he was hanging around here for the whole Fourth of July weekend, and some days afterward--I remember he kept trying to come up and read to me while I was recovering. He's had plenty of time to have rigged the lawn mower or the car since he practically moved into the Donleavys'."

"The hell with framing him," Michael said. "If he has even a shadow of a motive, he's worth suspecting for real."

"I'm afraid I have a hard time believing that he's capable of rational thought, much less planning two murders and several attempted murders."

"Well, they weren't very well planned," Michael said. "The killer seems to have missed his intended victim at least three out of four times, and missed altogether all but two attempts. Hell, maybe Mrs. Grover wasn't the intended victim. Maybe he missed that time, too."

"That would explain why we're having such a hard time figuring out why she was killed."

"Maybe it would help if we eliminated some more suspects. We've more or less eliminated Jake and your mother for lack of opportunity. And as the intended victim, your father's pretty much out of the running."

"Unless you like the theory that Mother and Jake are in cahoots, or alternatively, that Dad is the murderer and is trying to divert suspicion by staging a series of crimes that appear to be aimed at him. I mean, it has been remarkable how he's escaped every time."

"Do you really see either of your parents as a multiple murderer?" Michael asked.

"No. But I can't expect the rest of the world to take my word for it."

"We'll classify them as highly improbable."

"I would have called Pam a likely suspect at one point," I said. "Mrs. Grover was horrible to Natalie and Eric."

"That's no reason to kill someone," Michael said.

"Not in and of itself, no," I said. "But if she caught Mrs. Grover doing something she felt was seriously damaging to her kids--mentally or physically damaging--then yes. Pam thinks child molesters should be executed. Preferably at the hands of their victims' parents."

"That's a little extreme, but I see her point," Michael said.

"But there's no way Pam would sabotage a car the kids ride in all the time, or poison salsa they might find as soon as Dad."

"True. You know, come to think of it, the way the murderer has kept missing your Dad does suggest one interesting thing about his or her personality."

"I'm all ears."

"The murderer has come up with a number of rather clever ways to bump off your Dad in the course of his usual activities. So we know the murderer has a relatively good idea of your Dad's tastes and habits. But each of the attempts failed--or succeeded with the wrong person--because your father didn't happen to be doing what the murderer expected him to be doing at any given time."

"Always a serious mistake, expecting Dad to be where he's supposed to be."

"Exactly. I've only known him since the beginning of the summer, but I've picked up that much. The murderer, however, despite knowing rather a lot of useful details about your Dad, has apparently not grasped this critical aspect of his character. I suspect the murderer is a person of limited imagination and very regular habits. Enough imagination to come up with a series of ideas, but not enough to think them through and make them foolproof. Not enough to recognize that there were going to be an awful lot of external events around this summer to interrupt everyone's usual habits. And that your dad doesn't have very many usual habits anyway."

"So the murderer, who has a highly organized but pedestrian mind, knows Dad reasonably well but doesn't really understand him."

"Precisely," Michael said.

"Unfortunately, it seems to me that the people who best fit that description are the very suspects we've already been looking at."

"True," Michael said. "We need more."

"He or she has some basic knowledge of poisons."

"Thanks to your dad, that doesn't eliminate anyone in the county." We both thought in silence for several miles.

"Mechanical ability," Michael said at last. "Whoever did it knew how to tamper with cars and lawn mowers and fuse boxes. That should eliminate a few people."

"Mother, certainly, if we hadn't already counted her out. And Dad, for that matter."

"Samantha, too, I should think," Michael said.

"Now, don't you be a chauvinist like A.j. I know she gives the impression that she'd die before she'd lift a finger to do anything mechanical, but that only applies when there's someone else around who'll do it for her if she bats her eyes. Remember how she bailed us out when we were trying to reinstall my distributor cap?"

"I stand rebuked. Return her to the top of the suspect list. What about the bomb?

Surely most of our suspects have little or no experience with bombs."

"No, but I hear you can build one with fertilizer, which everyone in town has by the ton, and these days I'm sure any eight-year-old could find step-by-step instructions on the Internet."

We both glanced at the back of the car, where the troop of eight-year-olds appeared to be sound asleep, oblivious to the new level of destructiveness they could be achieving with a little initiative.

We continued to dissect the case all the way home, without coming up with anything else useful. Was the murderer really that brilliant, or were we all being particularly dense?

Wednesday, July 20

I was helping Dad with some gopher stomping the next morning when Aunt Phoebe showed up to introduce a visiting cousin.

"Cousin Walter?" Dad said. "I don't remember a Cousin Walter."

"I'll explain the genealogy to you later, Dad," I said, poking him with my elbow.

Cousin Walter was about six two, very physically fit, with a crew cut and a bulge under one arm of his bulky, unseasonably heavy navy sports coat. I'd never heard of Cousin Walter either, but if the FBI or the SBI or the DEA or whatever law enforcement agency sent him wanted us to pretend he was a cousin, that was fine with me.

No one in town would be fooled--we were all chuckling already about the half-dozen locals who'd introduced relatives nobody had ever met before or even heard of. Everybody was going along with the joke--we were glad to have them. I apologized for not inviting our newfound cousin to the wedding, he graciously accepted an oral invitation, and Dad and I returned to our gopher stomping. We were still at it when Michael showed up.

In my book, gopher stomping is useless but fun. Dad is convinced that if you systematically destroy a gopher's tunnels by treading on them to cave them in and then stomping to pack the dirt, the gopher will eventually get discouraged and go elsewhere. I think that far from discouraging them it probably pleases them immensely; they get to have the fun of digging all over again. But Dad likes to do it, and I help him out. Besides, with an outdoor wedding coming up, to which at least half a dozen middle-aged or elderly relatives would insist on wearing spike heels, reducing the pitfalls in the yard seemed like a good idea.

"I've come to a fork," Dad announced. "Are you at a dead end, Meg?"

"No, I'm still going strong," I replied. "Michael, would you like to take one?"

"One what?" Michael asked.

"One fork of the gopher trail," Dad explained, stopping for a moment and mopping his face with a bandanna. "Come over here and I'll show you." After Dad demonstrated the basics of gopher stomping, we all three stomped a while in silence. Michael looked as if he wasn't sure whether or not we were putting him on.

"By the way," Michael said, pausing to stretch, "I was actually looking for Spike. Have you seen him?"

"No, not for several days," Dad said. "How did he get loose?"

"Took off after the peacocks and hasn't been seen since."

"Do I detect a note of concern?" I asked. "Don't tell me you're actually getting fond of the beast."

"I wouldn't say fond," Michael replied. "But after two months of feeding him and walking him and giving him so many doggie treats Mom will probably have to put him on a diet when she gets back, we've reached a sort of truce."

"That's great," I said.

"Yeah," Michael said. "He hardly ever bites me anymore. Unless I try to take away something he ought not to be chewing. Or give him a flea bath. Or wake him suddenly. Or sometimes when he gets too frustrated at not being able to kill the postman."

"Next thing you know he'll be fetching your pipe and slippers," Dad remarked.

"Hardly." Michael snorted. "But just when I was beginning to think we could get through the summer without one of us killing the other, he disappears like this. What am I going to tell Mom?"

"We'll put the word out on the neighborhood grapevine," I said.

"And we'll add that you've offered a small monetary reward for information leading to his capture," Dad added.

"Every kid in the neighborhood will be scouring the bushes for him," I said.

"Remember to warn them he bites," Michael said.

"I think the entire county has figured that out by now," Dad remarked. "Well, I think that will discourage the little critters for a while," he added, finishing off his trail with a crescendo of stomping around an exit hole. "Let's go find the local urchins."

The local urchins had a lively afternoon looking for Spike, but things quieted down by late afternoon. The storm we'd been expecting all day broke about five o'clock. The power went out almost immediately, of course. It always did when we had a thunderstorm. Mother had had the foresight to be visiting a cousin in Williamsburg, and called to say she'd be staying the night.

Rob went out with his bar exam review group to celebrate getting through the bar exams. Celebrating was a little premature if you asked me; he wouldn't know for months if he'd passed. But even if he hadn't, at least he wouldn't have to study night and day for a while, which I suppose was worth celebrating. I didn't expect him home till the wee hours, if at all.

Usually I like a good thunderstorm, especially since there was hope that it would break the latest heat wave. But tonight the candles I'd lit made the house look unfamiliar and creepy, and I was abnormally conscious of being by myself. The kitten was under the bed, spitting and wailing occasionally. The peacocks, who by rights should have been roosting somewhere, were awake and shrieking. I found myself starting at shadows, jumping at every clap of thunder, and straining to hear the suspicious noises that I was sure were being muffled by the steady drumming of the rain. Or drowned out by the menagerie.

When the rain let up at about nine-thirty, I decided to go out for some air. The ground was soaked, and it looked as if it would start raining again any time, but I couldn't stand being cooped up in the house any more. I put on my denim jacket and fled to the backyard. I found myself staring down at the river from the edge of the bluff, wondering if we'd ever find out the truth about Mrs. Grover's death. Morbid thoughts. Here I was in the backyard of the house I'd grown up in, and yet I found myself looking over my shoulder for shadowy figures. But it was only because I was so on edge, and straining to hear the slightest noise, that I heard the faint whining coming from somewhere down the bluff.

I peered down. I caught a faint glimpse of movement, a flash of something white.

"Hello," I called. I heard a feeble little bark.

Spike.