Swan for the Money: A Meg Langslow Mystery

candidates were arranged in a semicircle around the little black-and-white tag that said “Category 127.”
    “Look at that,” he said, pointing to one of the roses.
    “Very nice,” I said. And it was. Like most of the entrants, it wasn’t really black but a very dark, velvety red. Still, this one looked at least a shade darker than almost all of the others. I was about to reassure him that yes, his rose was a shoo-in for the Winkleson prize when I realized that the rose in question might not be Dad’s.
    The entry tags were folded up so the judges wouldn’t knowwhile judging which grower had entered which rose. I could only read the top few lines, containing the name of the rose variety and the category number. Even in as few words as that, I could tell that this tag wasn’t in Dad’s elegant and unmistakable printing. But then Mother was probably writing the tags. I unfolded the tag on the dark rose and peeked at the exhibitor’s name.
    The dark rose was Mrs. Winkleson’s.
    As I closed the tag up again, I was struggling to find something reassuring to say that wouldn’t actually be a lie. Unless the judges were blind, odds were good that they might give Mrs. Winkleson the swan. Dad looked around to see if anyone else was nearby before whispering again.
    “That’s Matilda,” he said.
    “Matilda that you thought had been eaten by deer?”
    Dad nodded.
    “How can you tell?”
    “She’s got it listed as a Black Magic,” he said. “That’s a very popular dark red rose. From Jackson and Perkins. The majority of the roses here are Black Magic. See?”
    He pointed out some of the other tags. I inspected them and nodded.
    “Yes, most of them are Black Magic,” I said. “But none of them look like this.”
    “Precisely,” Dad said. “I’m quite familiar with Black Magic. I’ve used any number of them in my hybridizing program. So either it’s a sport— a chance genetic mutation of the sort rose breeders dream about— or that’s not a Black Magic rose at all. And I’m betting the latter. Look at the shape.”
    I studied Mrs. Winkleson’s rose and then the Black Magic roses entered by all the other exhibitors. There was a time when they’d have all looked alike to me, but I must have begun to absorb a few things from all the rose-centric dinner table conversations I’d heard in recent months.
    “It’s . . . fluffier,” I said. “As if it had more petals packed into the same space.”
    “It does have more petals,” Dad said. “I used some dark red cabbage rose stock in my hybridizing program. And the leaves are different. They’re smaller, and lighter in color. And smell it.”
    I bent down to Mrs. Winkleson’s flower and inhaled deeply.
    “Now that’s how a rose should smell,” I said. The spurious Black Magic rose had an intense, almost intoxicating fragrance that tickled my memory. I took another deep sniff.
    “Cloves and licorice,” I said.
    “Good nose. Now smell the others.”
    I did so. They all smelled nice, though not nearly as strong. And different. Nice, but no hint of cloves or licorice.
    “They have the typical moderate damask scent you’d expect from a Black Magic rose,” Dad said. “Not that one. That’s Matilda. I’d recognize that spicy scent anywhere.”
    From what I remembered of Great Aunt Matilda and her seven marriages— or was it eight?— spicy was appropriate.
    “Has Mother seen this?” I asked aloud.
    “Not yet,” Dad said. “And don’t tell her.”
    “No, not while Mrs. Winkleson is still recuperating from the last murder attempt,” I said. “If you’re right, what can we do?”
    “I don’t know,” Dad said. “There may be nothing we can do to prevent her from winning the trophy with a stolen rose.”
    I studied the competitors again.
    “Well, I think that one has a chance,” I said, pointing to a rose at the other end of the semicircle from Mrs. Winkle-son’s.
    “That’s Cordelia,” Dad said. “My other candidate. I wasn’t sure whether to enter her or Matilda, until the deer made the decision for me. At least I thought it was deer. Now I’m not so sure.”
    “Nice name,” I said. Dad nodded, growing a little misty-eyed. Cordelia was the name of his long-lost mother. Before Dr. Blake had entered our lives, all we’d known about my paternal grandmother was that she’d left Dad as an infant in the fiction section of a Charlottesville library— which, for a family of readers, seemed just as acceptable as the more