Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

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. Normally 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, onthe 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