Murder Had a Little Lamb (3 page)

As I surveyed the pathetic display, my two cats came into the room. Tinkerbell, who had both the coloring and the personality of a tiger, bounded in from the bedroom, ready for a cuddle. Catherine the Great, my older and wiser feline who I’d nicknamed Cat, made a much grander entrance from the kitchen. I noticed that the gray fur on her cheek was askew, a sign that she’d been easing her arthritis by lying in front of the refrigerator, basking in its warmth.

“Who’s the pretty birdy?” Prometheus immediately chimed in, strutting from side to side on his perch with the skill and grace of a seasoned vaudevillian. My blue-and-gold macaw waited only a second before answering his own question: “Prometheus is the pretty birdy. Apple,
awk!
I want apple!”

My animals all struck me as inappropriately cheerful, given my own somber mood. Only Leilani, the Jackson’s Chameleon Nick and I had brought back from a trip to Maui, seemed sufficiently somber. She blinked at me from her glass tank, where she rested on one of the small tree branches strewn along the bottom.

Even though I always gave each and every one of them a warm greeting, today I just wasn’t up to it.

I turned to Nick. “This isn’t quite the way I envisioned our homecoming,” I said sadly.

“Me, either,” Nick agreed, sounding as gloomy as I did. “But I think we were right about not going ahead with the ceremony. How could we, when we’d always associate our wedding day with such a terrible event?”

I nodded. I hadn’t doubted for a moment that we’d made the right decision. But that didn’t mean I could stop myself from thinking about all the flowers and lovely food just sitting there, completely wasted. I was also picturing our guests as the police finally allowed them to head back to their cars, some shuffling along like zombies and others half-jogging as if they couldn’t wait to get away.

I jumped when my cellphone rang. I couldn’t imagine who would be insensitive enough to call me at a time like this.

Then I glanced at the caller ID screen.

“Hello, Dorothy,” I said, surprising myself by how calm I sounded. I cast Nick a glance that reflected how I really felt about my almost-but-not-quite-yet-mother-in-law’s interruption. He rolled his eyes, then disappeared into the bedroom.

Which left me to deal with my almost-mother-in-law by myself.

“Nick and I just got home,” I told her. “We’ve barely—”

“What an embarrassment!” Dorothy cut in, not even bothering to say hello, much less asking how I was. “Jessica, I’m beside myself!”

“It was a terrible day,” I agreed. “I can imagine how upset you must be.”

“Of course I’m upset!” she spat back. “This is completely unacceptable, and I want this horrid thing to go away as quickly as possible.”

“We all do,” I assured her. When it comes to dealing with the woman who gave birth to the man I love,
I always tread carefully. “But I’m sure the police will do everything they possibly can to—”

“And as
quietly
as possible,” she continued, as if she hadn’t heard a word I’d said. “Which is why I decided that
you
have to do something about this.”

“Me?”
I squawked. “What do you want
me
to do?”

“Find out who did this disgusting thing, of course!”

It took me a few seconds to get over my shock.
“Excuse
me?” I finally said.

“Solve the murder!” Dorothy insisted shrilly. “Find out who killed poor Cousin Nathaniel as fast as you can so we can all move on! That
is
what you do, isn’t it? When you’re not doing that—that
job
of yours, riding around in that ridiculous bus treating cats and dogs and Lord only knows what else? Solving crimes is your hobby, isn’t it? You do it the way some people do needlepoint or—or collect porcelain dolls or Wedgwood.”

It was hard to imagine anyone placing investigating murders and displaying dolls in the same category. Then again, this wasn’t the first time Dorothy and I failed to see things the same way.

“Solving homicide cases is the police department’s job,” I pointed out.

“Hmph!” she snorted. “Who knows how competent
they
are?”

She had me there. But I wasn’t about to go down that road.

I tried to be diplomatic. “It’s true that in the past, I’ve gotten involved in solving a few crimes. But it’s not exactly what you’d call a hobby. In fact, it’s—”

“Yes, but it’s something you’re good at, isn’t it?”
she persisted. “You have a knack for it. The way
I
happen to be good with people.”

I wasn’t going to touch
that
one with a ten-foot pole.

“I’d help,” Dorothy went on, “but I have to get back to Florida. In fact, we’re about to check out of our hotel. Not that I haven’t thought about extending our trip. Even Henry agreed that it might make sense for us to stay on Long Island until this nastiness is cleared up.”

I suspected that “Henry agreed” meant that, as usual, Henry felt that asserting his will was an uphill battle so demanding that it would have left Sir Edmund Hillary gasping for air.

“But I’ve decided to go back home, just as we’d planned,” Dorothy continued. “Otherwise, the senior center where Henry and I play Bingo every day would simply fall apart. Goodness, you’d think figuring out the rules of the game was rocket science.”

“I understand that you’re upset about what happened to Nathaniel,” I said, trying a different tack. “And of course you’re concerned. Anyone would be. But that doesn’t mean—”

“Jessica, I’ve made up my mind,” Dorothy said firmly. “You’re going to solve this crime. Besides, what else do you have to do with all your free time?”

I was still struggling to come up with an answer to that when she continued, “Now that that’s settled, I suppose I should tell you everything I know about Nathaniel Stibbins. If you’re going to figure out who committed this unseemly crime before the newspapers turn it into a circus, you’re going to need all the help you can get.”

I sighed. Somehow, having this conversation while I
was still wearing my wedding gown just seemed
wrong
. But before I had a chance to suggest gently that maybe this wasn’t the best time for a briefing on the dearly departed, Dorothy said, “After college, he spent a few years trying to figure out what he wanted to be when he grew up—as if he wasn’t grown up already. He had some crazy idea that he was meant to be a great artist or something.

“At any rate, he finally got a job teaching art, which was much more practical. He ended up staying at the same school for—let’s see, he was probably in his late thirties, so it must have been something like ten years. Anyway, he spent all that time teaching at a very posh girls’ school in the Bromptons. It’s called the Worth School.”

I must admit, I was surprised. I’d heard of the Worth School, of course. In fact, one or two of my clients out on the South Fork sent their children there. But I didn’t know much about it, aside from the fact that its student body was reputed to consist mainly of the offspring of some of the biggest movers and shakers in the country, parents who’d made megabucks in the movie industry, the recording industry, the fashion industry, and just about every other lucrative industry you could think of.

Its atypical student body was a result of the school’s location. The cluster of idyllic beach communities on Long Island’s South Fork was close enough to New York City that it had served as a popular summer community for the wealthy for decades. In more recent years, some of the summer residents began making it their year-round home after deciding that
small-town life was a better place to raise children than the big city. But I was pretty sure that Worth was a boarding school, as well as a day school. That meant its students could come from anywhere—as long as Mom or Dad were able to pay for both the hefty tuition and campus housing.

“Start your investigation at the Worth School,” Dorothy instructed. “Oh, I know you probably have your own ideas about the best way to jump in, but I assume the police will manage to do an adequate job of checking out all the more obvious possibilities. Nathaniel’s personal life, for one, although I don’t think he was married or even closely attached. After all, when he RSVP’d he said he’d be coming alone. Of course, I don’t really know anything about his social activities. I don’t think anyone in the family does, since none of us made much of an effort to keep in touch with him.

“At any rate,” she continued, “the only information I was able to get out of any of my relatives was about his current job. And if I were you, I’d begin by taking a close look at what was going on at that snooty school. People of privilege always seem to think they’re better than the rest of us, and I wouldn’t be surprised if somehow Nathaniel’s association with that place is what finally caught up with him.

“Besides,” Dorothy went on, barely stopping to take a breath, “when I sent Nathaniel his wedding invitation, I mailed it to the school. Since no one has been in touch with him, I wasn’t sure the home address I had for him was current, so sending it to his workplace seemed like the most sensible thing to do.
And whoever did this—this
thing
to him clearly knew exactly where he was going to be today. If you ask me, somebody at that school saw the invitation and decided that your wedding was the perfect time and place to pounce. They probably figured that no one at a stranger’s wedding was likely to notice them, much less be able to identify them if they were spotted.”

Dorothy had clearly given this a great deal of thought. And I had to admit she had a point. That did indeed strike me as a likely scenario—especially since the wedding guests were all accounted for, clearing them of suspicion.

Of course, the catering staff offered another possibility. Yet I instantly realized that it was unlikely that one of them was the killer. After all, that meant someone would have had to have signed on as an employee after learning that Nathaniel was going to be attending the Popper-Burby event—which struck me as an impossibly convoluted scenario.

Another explanation was that Nathaniel had walked in on someone doing something he or she shouldn’t have been doing—or that for some other reason a fight had broken out in the kitchen while the ceremony was starting up. But it would have had to have been quite an altercation to have resulted in such a devastating outcome. And if that had been the case, the rest of us would have heard shouting or some other sign of a commotion inside the house. After all, it was just a few paces away from the spot where the ceremony was taking place.

Besides, the young woman from the catering company had said that all the other employees had been
outside. As for her alibi, being in the wine cellar, I supposed the forensic evidence the police uncovered would determine whether or not she was telling the truth.

At this point, my suspicion was that Dorothy was right: Someone who didn’t like Nathaniel had learned that he was going to be there today—and had decided to take advantage of the occasion by sneaking onto the property to do him harm.

In other words, Nathaniel’s murder was most likely premeditated.

“I’ve never thought much of that school,” Dorothy said shrilly, making me lose my train of thought. “It’s filled with snobbish rich kids, with their horses and their European vacations and their sense of entitlement. I never understood why on earth Ruthie’s boy would want to work at a place like that. Then again, Nathaniel Stibbins always was the black sheep of the family.”

There it was again:
black sheep
. That same expression she’d used before.

“Dorothy,” I said, “you keep referring to Nathaniel as the black sheep of the family. What exactly do you mean by that?”

She let out a deep sigh. “It all started back when he was a small boy. Even then he was unusually self-centered. I remember that practically from the time he was born, he simply refused to share any of his toys. And whenever the whole family got together, he insisted on getting the first hot dog off the grill or grabbing the best seat in front of the TV. I can still picture him in short pants, literally climbing over the legs of
the other children to get to the front of the line at one of those dreadful family barbecues one of my great-aunts insisted on having every summer. Of course, she’s gone now …”

“Is that all?” I asked. Being greedy for hot dogs might not have been the most admirable trait in the world, but I didn’t quite understand how it could cause someone to be branded “the black sheep of the family” for life.

In fact, I was about to ask what else Poor Cousin Nathaniel had done to earn him that distinction when I heard Dorothy say, “Not there, Henry. I said it was in the big suitcase, not the small one. It’s underneath your blue shirt, exactly where I put it—”

“Dorothy?” I said, trying to reel her back into our conversation.

“Jessica, I have to go,” Dorothy said tartly. “Henry needs me. But if I were you, I’d see what I could find out about the goings-on at that snobbish school. And don’t worry, I promise I’ll call you as often as I can to see how things are going.”

Great, I thought miserably. Not only has Dorothy just ordered me to solve the mystery of her long-lost relative’s murder, she also intends to plague me with questions and advice every step of the way.

“What did my mother want?” Nick asked a few seconds later, coming out of the bedroom dressed in jeans and his favorite T-shirt. It was the one I always pictured him wearing whenever I thought about him, the dingy white one that sported the faded image of Led Zeppelin, his favorite classic rock band.

“She wanted to give me a directive,” I replied, still trying to grasp what had just happened.

Grinning, he said, “Don’t tell me she’s already planning our do-over wedding.”

I cast him a look of despair. “She wants me to find out who killed Cousin Nathaniel.”

“What?”

With a shrug, I explained, “She insists that having someone in the family murdered looks bad, and she wants it cleared up as soon as possible.”

Dorothy Burby was the only person I knew who was capable of making a murder sound like a spilled glass of milk.