Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

take a break. Maybe to sneak a drink. I couldn’t remember him smelling of bourbon before, though, and suspected that he’d achieved his current tipsy state in an effort to cope with the shock of the attempted murder.
    Interesting that he hadn’t seemed all that shocked until the true identity of the body was revealed.
    I reached his cottage, glanced around to make sure no one was in the little clearing around it, and slipped inside.
    Fifteen minutes’ careful search revealed nothing at all suspicious. From the look of it, Mr. Darby had no interests otherthan animals, mainly farm animals. I saw no signs that he was a dog own er or lover. Even his TV was tuned to the Animal Planet channel, and the only light reading in sight was a complete set of James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small series.
    A framed diploma informed me that Mr. Darby had a B.S. in Agriculture from Caerphilly College. Behind it was another framed diploma from Clay County High School. So Mr. Darby was relatively local, Clay County being Caerphilly’s more rural next-door neighbor.
    He had a few anti-hunting pamphlets in the mix, which would make it hard for him to explain away any little bottles of doe urine I might have found. But I didn’t find any, or, for that matter, anything that seemed to indicate he was plotting revenge on Mrs. Winkleson. Of course, my search was a little hampered by the fact that I couldn’t really pick things up or dig too deeply into anything. I didn’t want to leave any trace of my hurried search— or for that matter, any fingerprints, in case Chief Burke eventually decided that Mr. Darby was suspicious enough to warrant Horace’s attention.
    I stood by the wood stove for a few moments. I wasn’t looking forward to going back out in the drizzle, especially since I’d become used to the temperature in Mr. Darby’s overheated cocoon. And—
    I suddenly caught a hint of a familiar smell. The sharp, metallic smell of blood. Was it coming from the stove? Or somewhere else in the room? Or—
    After a few minutes of sniffing the air like a hyperactive beagle, I realized that the smell was coming from my own jeans. The rain had washed away most of the blood, except, I suppose,in the cuffs. When I stood by the stove, the heat brought the smell out more strongly.
    I wasn’t going to find anything incriminating or useful here in Mr. Darby’s cottage. I decided to return to the barns by way of the house. I had a change of clothes in the trunk of my car. I made sure everything looked untouched, clicked the door knob button back to the locked position, and shut the door carefully behind me.
    I only made two wrong turns on my way up to the house, and the swan had not returned to haunt my car. I grabbed my black pants and shirt from the trunk and trotted up the steps to ring the doorbell.
    Marston answered and made no objection to my using the powder room off the foyer to change out of my bloodstained clothes.
    “If you’d like us to launder the soiled garment, I would be happy to arrange that,” he said.
    “Thanks,” I said. “Tempting, but I don’t want to put you to any trouble.”
    I shed my jeans and T-shirt and looked to see if there was any blood on the underwear or skin beneath. I couldn’t see any, but then the light in the powder room wasn’t the greatest. Considering that this was where any guests would go if they wanted to check their hair and makeup, I’d have installed something brighter than a 25-watt bulb. But Mrs. Winkleson might not have many guests to worry about.
    I’d also have gone for a different interpretation of the black and white color scheme. The black sink and toilet were a little hard to spot against the black tiles, black walls, and black ceiling.Even the mirror was black tinted glass that made me look like one of the undead.
    It occurred to me that since the hand towels were also black, I didn’t need to worry about leaving stains on them. I grabbed one, drew a basin full of water, snagged the soap— where in the world had she found black soap?— and gave myself a quick scrub, just in case there was blood that I couldn’t see for the dim light.
    As far as I could tell, I was bloodstain-free and looking reasonably presentable in my party gear. Of course, by party time my nice clothes would probably be damp and mud-spattered. The other party guests, the ones who hadn’t spent part of the day finding a blood-soaked stabbing victim, would have to overlook that.
    I