Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

questioned him and why he was here in the first place, but I got a chance to study him at close range and form a highly unfavorable opinion. He hardly bothered to meet my eyes, so busy was he inventorying the contents of the kitchen, tightening his lips and narrowing his eyes whenever he spotted anything particularly extravagant or outrageous.
    By the time I finished with Theobald, Rob’s time to guess the pink lady’s charade was almost up.
    “The sound and the furry,” he was saying, over and over again. “The sound and the furry. The sound and the furry.”
    “Time!” Mother called at last.
    “Fury, you . . . you . . . oh!” exclaimed the lady in pink, doing a very authentic interpretation of the word, now that her time was up. “The Sound and the Fury !”
    “Oh, of course,” Rob said. “Sorry.”
    Another charades team took the floor. I went on with my name and address gathering.
    As I suspected, the catering staff consisted mainly of starvinggrad students. Most of Mrs. Winkleson’s house hold staff did not speak English well— if at all— and I was only able to get their information thanks to translating help from Marston, who apparently spoke Spanish, French, and some form of pigeon Chinese in addition to his native Russian. His real name was Vladislav Konstantinovich Rozhdestvensky, which probably explained why Mrs. Winkleson preferred to call him Marston.
    I finished my list and tried to think of something else to keep me busy, lest Mother recruit me to replace Rob on charade duty, but in the nick of time the chief sent Horace in to begin processing the kitchen and Sammy to move us out into the already processed living room. Chief Burke began interviewing witnesses, and apparently he decided my suggestion was a wise one. He started with the rose growers, while the rest of us were told to stay in the living room and wait our turns.
    To my relief, Mother did not suggest resuming the game of charades. Instead, she and Marston put their heads together, and then, after they had a short conference with the chief, Marston brought back vacuums, dust racks, and other cleaning supplies and the maids began cleaning the room.
    Fine by me. I was relieved that the noise of the vacuums discouraged general conversation.
    The caterers pitched in, gathering their dishes and equipment.
    “If anyone would like a doggie bag, we’d be happy to pack one,” the catering supervisor said. Curiously, no one was particularly interested, not even in leftover crab croquettes, so her staff begged some black plastic garbage bags from Marston and began disposing of the suspect victuals.
    A few guests pitched in to help with the cleanup effort, but most arranged themselves on the uncomfortable chairs and sofas and waited.
    Three of the rose growers approached me.
    “Do you think she’s going to make it?” one of them asked.
    Did I look like a doctor? Or a fortune teller?
    “I think she has a good chance,” I said aloud. “Dad seemed quite optimistic when they left.”
    “Oh,” one woman said. They all looked at each other and sighed.
    “I suppose we should keep working on the programs, then,” a second woman said. “You’ll let us know if you hear anything to the contrary?”
    The three of them pulled up chairs next to a small gilt table at one side of the room, pulled stacks of programs and black pens out of their purses and tote bags, and resumed inking blots to cover up the printer’s error. After a while they filched an unopened bottle of champagne from the bar, and by the time they’d finished it, they seemed to be enjoying their task a great deal more, though I doubted we’d be able to use much of their handiwork.
    “Meg?” It was my cousin Rose Noire, resplendent in a dress that looked like several hundred black chiffon scarves thrown randomly over her body and then sprayed with silver glitter. “I have a question. Do you think it would be okay for me to substitute for Mrs. Sechrest?”
    She held her head high, like Sidney Carton on his way to the guillotine.
    “Substitute for her how?” I asked.
    “I understand she had all her miniature roses ready to bring over for the show,” Rose Noire said. “I could groom them. Your mother and a couple of the other exhibitors are willing to coach me. Then we could enter them in the show in her name. So she could compete one last time in the shows she loved. And it would be sort of a . . . a ‘take that!’ to the murderer.”
    Not Sidney Carton. More