Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

just Mother’s roses that needed major coaxing this morning. Around the room I could see at least a hundred roses sporting one or more Q-tips. Most held over two or three, but Mother was not the only exhibitor whose roses bristled with as many as two dozen. It reminded me of going backstage when Michael was directing Hedda Gabler and seeing the women in their elegant Victorian costumes sitting around with their hair in curlers.
    Mother had finished ten roses already, and had several dozen more waiting, either in small groups in buckets or already deposited in one of the identical glass vases my volunteers had set out on Friday. I glanced at my watch. No wonder she was so focused. Over half of the four hours of prep time had gone by already, and she had only done a fraction of her roses. I glanced around at the several dozen other exhibitors. She wasn’t alone. All up and down the aisles of tables, other anxious exhibitors were preparing their entries with the same obsessive precision, while around them waited enough roses to keep them grooming for hours. Maybe days.
    The cumulative effect was . . . well, intimidating. Here I was, bleary-eyed and caffeine deprived, watching the competitors spending more time grooming a single rose than I usually spent on my face in a week. Of course, I was a devotee of the sort of natural look you acquire not by artful application of makeup but by washing your face and applying a few smears of a hypoallergenic combination sun block and moisturizer. Wasn’t there a category for the most natural rose? I studied the program. No, not that I could see. That explained why the most neglected rose in the barn was receiving easily twice as much primping time as I’d bothered with the night of my senior prom.
    “There.” Mother pulled the last Q-tip from a deep red rose and nodded with satisfaction at the results.
    “Very nice,” I said.
    “I just might have a chance to get the Dowager Queen with that one,” Mother said, in an undertone.
    Get the Dowager Queen? After a few moments, I realized she wasn’t hatching some new plot to use the rose as a weaponagainst Mrs. Winkleson, only expressing her hope of winning the Dowager Queen trophy, given for the best bloom of a variety introduced prior to 1867. But it still sounded faintly ominous. I shoved the thought aside and tried to look suitably impressed with the rose in question.
    “Meg, dear, could you get a runner to take this one over to the show barn?”
    I looked around, but none of our runners were in sight.
    “I’ll take it over myself,” I said, turning back to her table. “I need to check how things are going over there.”
    “Thank you, dear.’
    Mother was busily tidying her work area, sweeping the little bits of leaf and petal into a trash bag and arranging her tools in perfect order before beginning to groom another batch of roses. I picked up the vase sitting on her table, making sure not to unsettle the rose it contained, and turned toward the door.
    “Meg, dear.”
    I turned back. Mother was looking from a red rose on her table to me and then back again, with a small frown on her face.
    “What’s up?” I asked.
    “This is the one I just finished,” she said, pointing to the red rose in front of her. “You picked up the one I was about to work on.”
    Oops.
    “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can see that. I’m not sure what I was thinking. I guess I was on autopilot. Not quite awake.”
    “It doesn’t even have a tag yet.”
    Mother shook her head slightly, took the rose from me, andheld out the one she’d finished. I took it, and lingered long enough to watch her begin peering at the next rose.
    I peered too. It already looked fine to me. No better than the one in my hand, but certainly no worse.
    Mother shook her head and began snipping vigorously with the deckle-edged scissors. Clearly I had no aptitude for rose showing.
    I made sure I had a good grip on the vase and headed for the door. Just as I was about to slip out, I heard a shriek from the other end of the barn.
    “Goat! Goat!”

Chapter 37
     
     
     
     
    I whirled back and saw a small posse of shaggy black-and-white forms romping through the open door at the other end of the barn. Around me, rose growers were shrieking and cursing, grabbing buckets and holding them above their heads, throwing random objects at the goats, or just standing horrorstricken, with single roses clutched convulsively to their chests.
    “Don’t startle them!” Mr.