Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

cute for my taste. But since Mrs. Winkleson had painted it dark gray with matte black shutters and had shingled the roof in black, the poor cottage looked like the perfect home for a wicked witch. As I walked toward it, I more than half expected to hear a gleeful cackle and then a cracked crone’s voice saying, “Come in, my pretty.” Instead, silence.
    I knocked with my knuckles before noticing that there was a black wrought-iron knocker on the door, almost invisible against the black paint. After a minute or so I tried again with the iron, and added my voice.
    “Mr. Darby!” I called. “It’s Meg Langslow. Are you there?”

Chapter 22
     
     
     
     
    I was reaching for the knocker to try again when I finally heard a stirring inside Mr. Darby’s cottage. A thud as if something had fallen from a table. A scraping sound, like a chair being moved.
    The door finally opened, and Mr. Darby peered out. He looked a little befuddled.
    “Wha’s up?” he asked. There was a faint odor of bourbon on his breath.
    “The goats are interfering with the crime scene,” I said. “Can you move them to another pasture?”
    He blinked as if it was taking the words a few seconds to reach his brain, and then nodded.
    “Of course,” he said. “Be right there.”
    He stepped back into the interior of the cottage, without closing the door, and I seized the chance to step inside and look around. I breathed a sigh of relief to see that Mr. Darby hadn’t followed Mrs. Winkleson’s decorating rules. Even I might have felt claustrophobic if he had, so tiny was the room. Room rather than apartment. There was a kitchenette at one end and a carelessly made bed at the other. It was overheated for my taste, but it was so small it probably didn’t cost much to overheat, especially since the heat appeared to come from a wood stove. Hecould probably get his firewood for free in the estate’s woods.
    An open door gave a glimpse of a minuscule bathroom, and a curtain partially concealed a closet only about two feet wide. Every square inch of the walls was covered with shelves, mostly mismatched and battered— probably trash heap rescues— and every square inch of the shelves contained the sort of paraphernalia you usually saw in a barn. Bits of tack and grooming equipment. Veterinary manuals and supplies. A few framed pictures of cows, horses, sheep, or goats. Everything neatly and tidily arranged, but the sheer amount of stuff was overwhelming, as if he’d tried to squeeze the entire contents of a half-acre feed and tack store into his cottage. Okay, the mystery of the over-tidy barns was solved.
    And I saw no signs of canine occupation.
    “Anything I can do to help?” I said, trying to pretend there was a reason for me to hang around. A reason other than snooping. I reached for the door knob as if about to close the door.
    “No, they’ll pretty much follow me if I bring some special feed,” he said. He snagged a bucket from a hook and grabbed a scoop from a burlap bag on the floor. He filled the bucket halfway from the bag— the special feed, I assumed— and then began stumbling toward the door.
    I preceded him out. As I hoped, he simply pulled the door shut, without checking to make sure it was locked, so he didn’t notice that while he was filling the feed bag, I’d surreptitiously twisted the button on the inside of the doorknob to the unlocked position.
    Instead of taking the path, he dived into the woods. Takinganother, less visible path, I realized. I glanced at my watch and followed.
    A mere two minutes later, we arrived at the edge of the goat pasture.
    “I’ll leave you to it, then,” I said, pausing still inside the woods. He didn’t seem to notice. He stumbled forward, shaking the bucket slightly, and I could see goats converging on him from all over the field.
    I took the barely visible path back to the cottage.
    It would have taken him five minutes at the most to walk from the rose garden to where I’d found Mrs. Sechrest’s body. Not a lot of time, but still enough to get there and commit the deed. The short time frame actually made it more plausible that he wouldn’t notice he was killing the wrong woman, as long as Mrs. Sechrest had her back to him. I closed my eyes and tried to picture the body. Yes, she had been facing toward the barns, and away from the direction Mr. Darby would have been coming from.
    If he’d gone to the pasture to kill her. He could have been just going back to his cottage to