Swan for the Money Read online

  Swan for

  the Money

  OTHER MEG LANGSLOW MYSTERIES BY DONNA ANDREWS

  Six Geese A-Slaying

  Cockatiels at Seven

  The Penguin Who Knew Too Much

  No Nest for the Wicket

  Owls Well That Ends Well

  We’ll Always Have Parrots

  Crouching Buzzard, Leaping Loon

  Revenge of the Wrought-Iron Flamingos

  Murder with Puffins

  Murder with Peacocks

  Swan for

  the Money

  A Meg Langslow Mystery

  Donna Andrews

  Minotaur Books

  New York

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.

  SWAN FOR THE MONEY. Copyright © 2009 by Donna Andrews. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.thomasdunnebooks.com

  www.minotaurbooks.com

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-37717-5

  ISBN-10: 0-312-37717-7

  First Edition: August 2009

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Acknowledgments

  Swan for the Money would never have been written if I hadn’t arrived early for a signing at a bookstore and decided to pass the time by browsing in the gardening section, in the hope of finding some new techniques for repelling the deer and Japanese beetles from my roses. I stumbled across Aurelia Scott’s Otherwise Normal People: Inside the Thorny World of Competitive Rose Gardening, and after half a chapter I knew that Meg’s future had to include a rose show. I recommend Scott’s book not only to readers who would like to learn more about rose shows, but to anyone who enjoys a nonfiction story told with grace, intelligence, and humor.

  I also owe special thanks to Kathy Harig of Mystery Loves Company, who first introduced me to fainting goats.

  Thanks to all the folks at St. Martins/Minotaur: Andrew Martin, Pete Wolverton, Hector DeJean, Lauren Manzella, Toni Plummer, and especially my editor, Ruth Cavin.

  I’m grateful to my agent, Ellen Geiger, and the staff of The Frances Goldin Literary Agency, who take care of the business side of things so I can focus on the writing, and to the staff at Curtis-Brown, especially Dave Barbor, who helps make Meg international.

  Thanks to the members of my writing groups: Carla Couple, Ellen Crosby, Laura Durham, Peggy Hansen, Valerie Patterson, Noreen Wald, and Sandi Wilson of the Rector Lane Irregulars, and Erin Hooper Bush, Meriah Crawford, M. Sindy Felin, Barb Goffman, and C. Ellet Logan of the Hellebore Writers. And to the other friends who read drafts, listen to me brainstorm, and generally provide moral support: Chris Cowan, Kathy Deligianis, Suzanne Frisbee, David Niemi, Dina Willner, and all the Teabuds.

  The members of the Potomac Rose Society patiently put up with my questions and lurking at one of their rose shows. To the extent that the rogue, non-ARS-affiliated, rose show in this book bears any resemblance to a real rose show, they are responsible, but any ghastly errors are mine alone.

  A special thank you to my family, who put up with the cranky me when the book is going slowly and are always ready to celebrate when it’s going well. They are, as my nephews Liam and Aidan are so fond of saying, “Awesome!”

  Swan for

  the Money

  Chapter 1

  “Dreadful news!” Dad said.

  He collapsed into a chair at the foot of the breakfast table, as if no longer able to bear the weight of his dire tidings, and wiped his balding head with a pocket handkerchief. The head, the handkerchief, the hand holding it, and nearly every stitch of his clothing were so encrusted with mud and garden dirt that Mother would probably have ordered him off to take a shower immediately if she weren’t so visibly curious to hear his news.

  “Yes?” she said, one hand clutching her throat in a gesture that would have looked artificial and old-fashioned on anyone else. On her it merely looked elegant.

  “We’ve lost Matilda,” Dad said.

  “Oh, no!” she exclaimed. From her expression, I could tell that she found this news genuinely heartbreaking.

  Faint murmurs of sympathy arose from the dozen assorted friends and relatives seated around the table, but I could tell from their uniformly puzzled faces that they were all mentally asking the same question I was: who the heck was Matilda?

  We used to have a Matilda in the clan, my Great Aunt Matilda. But she’d been dead for years, and I couldn’t recall anyone else gracing a recent arrival to the family with such an unusual name. Nor could I remember any friends or neighbors named Matilda. There was a time when I would have assumed Matilda was one of Dad’s patients, but he was semi-retired now, and his medical practice consisted mostly of those same family, friends, and neighbors, whose names I would recognize. Not a Matilda in the bunch.

  “And what’s more,” Dad went on, sitting up and frowning fiercely, “it was foul play. No question. I only suspected it with Adelaide, but I’m sure of it now.”

  “It’s the Pruitts,” Mother said. “I’ve suspected them all along.” Not surprising. The Pruitts were an old local family who used to own most of Caerphilly County and often behaved as if they still did. Most locals were quick to blame the Pruitts whenever anything sneaky or underhanded took place. Mother and Dad only spent weekends here in Caerphilly, in the old farm house they’d dubbed their summer cottage, but they were quickly picking up many local attitudes.

  “You suspect the Pruitts of two murders?” my brother, Rob, asked. “Have you told the police?”

  “Murders?” Dad echoed. “What murders?”

  “This Matilda and Adelaide you’re talking about,” Rob said.

  Dad burst into laughter. I suddenly realized what he’d been talking about.

  “It’s not murder,” I said. “Because Matilda and Adelaide aren’t people, are they? They’re roses.”

  “Meg’s right, of course,” Mother said, sounding slightly cross, as if baffled at how long it took us to figure this out.

  “Sheesh.” Rob returned to his food. “Roses. That’s all we talk about these days.”

  “Now you know how I feel,” I muttered, though not loud enough for anyone but Michael to hear. For the last two months, ever since Mother recruited me to organize the Caerphilly Garden Club’s annual rose show, roses had taken over my life. Nor
mally I’d be asleep at this hour, not trekking to my parents’ farm to collect boxes of rose show equipment and haul them to the farm whose owner, Mrs. Winkleson, was hosting tomorrow’s show. And normally the gala breakfast might have made up for the early hour, but today my stomach was wound too tight to enjoy it.

  “Can’t we talk about something else for a change?” Rob was saying.

  “Peonies, for example,” my husband, Michael, said. “Much more practical for our yard. They don’t require a lot of cosseting, like roses, and the deer don’t seem to eat them.”

  I could tell from Rob’s face that he didn’t consider peonies a conversational improvement over roses, and Mother and Dad ignored the interruption.

  “Meg,” Mother said to me. “Your father needs coffee.” She managed to give the impression that only with an instant infusion of caffeine could Dad possibly survive this new horticultural tragedy.

  “I could use some, too,” Michael said, and shot out to the kitchen before I could even push my chair back.

  “Matilda and Adelaide were two of my most promising black roses,” Dad said to the rest of the table.

  “And two of our best chances for winning the Winkleson Trophy,” Mother said. “Which will be given out this weekend at the Caerphilly Rose Show to the darkest rose,” she added, on the off chance that any of the assembled relatives had managed to escape hearing about the Langslow house hold’s new hobby of breeding and showing roses.

  “Is there a big prize?” Rob asked.

  “No money involved,” I said. “Just the thrill of winning.”

  “Big thrill,” Rob said, through a mouthful of scrambled eggs.

  “And a trophy,” Mother added. “Quite possibly a lovely engraved Waterford bowl. That’s what I suggested.” Yes, that sounded like Mother’s kind of suggestion. She was a confirmed human magpie, easily seduced by anything that glittered, and a sucker for anything that had ever come out of the Waterford factory.

  “Well, if the winning rose is bred by the exhibitor, there’s always a remote possibility that a commercial rose company might want to buy it,” Dad said. “Of course, that would only happen if it were a significant advance toward the creation of a truly black rose. All the big commercial breeders have their own black rose breeding programs.”

  “And ridiculous programs to begin with,” put in my grandfather. “A genuinely black rose is a scientific impossibility.”

  “Oh, I hope not,” put in my cousin Rose Noire, née Rosemary Keenan, to those who had known her before she’d become a purveyor of all-natural cosmetics and perfumes and adopted a name to match. “I do hope one day to greet one of my namesakes!”

  She probably would. Talking to plants wasn’t even unusual in my family. Although Rose Noire was one of the few who expected the plants to answer.

  “Useless things, roses,” my grandfather said. “Had all the vitality bred out of them, so the poor things can barely survive without massive applications of chemicals all the time. Environmentally unsound.” A typical reaction from my grandfather, Dr. Montgomery Blake, the world famous zoologist and environmental activist. Of course, he could merely be vexed that Dad’s rose growing was preventing him from working full-time on the Blake Foundation’s latest animal welfare campaigns, whatever they were.

  “Getting back to Matilda and Deirdre—” I said.

  “Adelaide,” Dad corrected.

  “Sorry,” I said. “It’s no wonder I didn’t recognize the names— last time I got an update on your rose-breeding program, you were just referring to them by numbers.”

  “But that’s so dehumanizing!” Rose Noire exclaimed.

  “Don’t you mean deflowering?” Rob asked, with a snigger.

  “How can you expect a living creature to thrive when all it has is a number, not a name?” Rose Noire went on.

  “That’s why we decided to name them,” Mother said.

  “Unofficially, of course,” Dad added. “I haven’t yet registered them with the ARS. Officially, Matilda is L2005-0013.”

  “But we’re going to name them all after family members,” Mother said.

  “No shortage of names there,” Dr. Blake muttered. He was still getting used to the fact that when he claimed Dad as his long-lost son, he’d found himself allied by marriage with Mother’s family, the Hollingsworths, whose numbers exceeded the population of some small countries.

  “I hope you stick to dead relatives,” Michael said, as he emerged from the kitchen with a pot of coffee. “Otherwise we’ll have no end of confusion. And imagine if it got around the county that Rose Noire was suffering from black spot disease, or that Rob had thrips.”

  “What are thrips?” Rob asked, looking alarmed.

  “Getting back to Matilda and Adelaide,” I repeated, “what happened to them, and what makes you think it was foul play?”

  “They were eaten,” Dad said. “Undoubtedly by marauding deer. And I found this in some bushes nearby.”

  He held up a small brown glass bottle with a neatly printed label proclaiming that it contained “100 percent Doe Urine.”

  “James!” Mother said. “At the breakfast table?”

  “Someone obviously sprinkled this near Matilda,” Dad said. He tried to pocket the bottle discreetly, out of deference to Mother’s sensibilities, but Dr. Blake held out his hand for it. “In fact, they probably sprinkled the stuff in a path leading from the woods straight to Matilda.”

  “Yuck,” Rob said, making a face. “If I were a deer, I’d steer clear of roses some other deer had already peed on.”

  “But you’re not a deer,” my grandfather said. “To a deer, especially a male, doe urine would be an irresistible lure. Hunters have used deer urine for centuries to cover up their human scent and attract deer to their hunting areas. It’s particularly effective if the urine is—”

  “Dr. Blake!” Mother exclaimed. I wasn’t sure whether she was objecting to his words or to the fact that he had opened the bottle and was sniffing it curiously.

  “So hunters use the stuff,” I said. “You’re sure that bottle wasn’t just discarded by some passing hunters?”

  “We hadn’t given anyone permission to hunt our land,” Mother said.

  It took a few seconds for the grammatical implications to sink in— the fact that she said “hadn’t” rather than “haven’t.” Did her use of the pluperfect tense mean that now, after Matilda’s demise, they had given hunting rights to someone? But by the time that thought struck me, Mother and Dad were deep in a discussion of which surviving black roses were likely to produce a prize-worthy bloom by Saturday’s contest. Everybody else appeared to be listening attentively, or as attentively as possible while consuming vast quantities of bacon, sausage, country ham, French toast, waffles, pancakes, cinnamon toast, croissants, and fresh fruit. Were the rest of the family really that interested in rose culture, or did they just figure they’d better come up to speed on the subject in self defense?

  “Meg,” Dad said, “I’m leaving this in your hands.”

  He gestured to my grandfather, who ceremoniously handed me the empty doe urine bottle.

  “Yuck,” I said, dropping the thing on the table. I wasn’t normally squeamish, but my stomach rose at the thought of the little bottle’s former contents. “What in the world to you expect me to do with it?”

  “Find out who used it on Matilda,” Dad said. “And help me figure out how to stop it. I’m counting on you!”

  Chapter 2

  I was opening my mouth to suggest that thanks to the rose show, I already had more than enough to do today, things that were a lot more important than tracking down the owner of a bottle of deer urine. But I thought better of it. Matilda was important to Dad. And if someone had sabotaged his entries in the rose show, wasn’t that rose show business?

  Better yet, wasn’t it a crime?

  “Maybe you can get the chief involved,” Michael said, as if reading my thoughts.

  I shook my head slightly. Yes, Chief Burke would probab
ly understand why Dad was so upset. His wife was going to be one of tomorrow’s rose exhibitors. But that didn’t mean he’d be willing to drop real police business to hunt for the elusive user of the doe urine.

  Not unless someone brought him some actual proof that the doe urine was evidence of a crime. And clearly as the organizer of the rose show, I was the best someone to find that evidence.

  Ah, well. At least the prime suspects were mostly people like the Pruitts, whom I didn’t like and would be just as happy to see getting into trouble.

  My fingers hovered over the wretched little bottle.

  “Allow me,” Michael said. He picked up the bottle and stepped into the kitchen with it.

  “Don’t throw it away!” Dad called after him. “It’s evidence.”

  “Not very useful evidence,” I said. “Do you expect the perpetrator to be carrying around a sales receipt for the doe urine, or perhaps another few bottles to use if the opportunity arises?”

  “We could have it tested for fingerprints.’

  My grandfather looked at the bare hand with which he’d been holding the bottle, then at Dad’s equally ungloved hands. He cocked one eyebrow at Dad.

  “Or something,” Dad said. His shoulders sagged as if someone had begun deflating him.

  “Here you go.” Michael emerged from the kitchen holding a zip-locked plastic bag containing the doe urine bottle.

  “An evidence bag!” Dad exclaimed. “Excellent! How remiss of me not to have thought of it.”

  I grimaced and tucked the thing in a side pocket of my tote.

  “You’ve been under a great deal of emotional stress this morning,” Rose Noire said. “I could fix you some herbal tisane.”

  “A little more time in the garden,” Dad said. “That’s all I need.”

  He helped himself to more bacon, no doubt to fuel his gardening.

  Of course, I didn’t see what good bagging the evidence would do, since Dr. Blake and Dad— and who knew how many other people— had been handling it, mingling their own fingerprints and DNA with whatever useful trace evidence a forensic examination might have found on the bottle.