was acting up and Samantha wanted my help.
'I'm sure Meg will be able to take care of it,' Mother said soothingly as she adjusted her hat in the hall mirror. 'Jake and I are following your orders today, dear. We're going down to get him a new suit for the wedding, and then we're going to run a whole lot of little errands.'
'What sort of little errands?' I asked. Perhaps it was paranoid of me, but I couldn't help suspecting that, as usual, some of Mother's errands would later turn out to involve major amounts of work on my part.
'Oh, this and that,' Mother said, vaguely. 'Some things for the house. I don't have a list yet. We're going to make a list over a nice breakfast, and then see how much we can get done by lunch.'
'Wonderful,' I said, insincerely. Mother turned loose on the unsuspecting county. I much preferred her indolent.
'There's Jake now, dear,' she said, and floated out toward the front door just as Dad came in the back.
'Meg,' he said. 'Have you seen Mrs. Grover this morning? She was supposed to meet me here at six A.m. to go bird-watching. She's half an hour late.'
'She probably decided to be sensible and sleep in. That certainly was what I had in mind this morning,' I said, looking pointedly at the bridesmaid.
'Probably so. Well, if she shows up, or if anyone needs me, I'll be in the side yard.' I nodded; my mouth was filled with one of Pam's blueberry muffins.
'Okay,' I told the bridesmaid, as I finished filling my traveling coffee mug. 'Let's go get Samantha and bring the caterer to heel.'
The neighbors two houses down had recently put up an eight-foot fence to keep in their Labradors. When we started down the street, I saw Michael trying to pull a small furry dog away from that very fence. The little dog was barking almost hysterically and leaping repeatedly at the fence. We heard an occasional bored bark from one of the Labs. Michael finally succeeded in dragging his dog away, and they headed in our direction. When the dog caught sight of us he quickened his pace.
'Oh, what a cute little dog,' the bridesmaid cooed as we came near them.
'If you say so,' Michael said. 'I consider him--don't!' he shouted, as she bent down to pet the dog. 'He'll take your nose off,' he explained, as the dog went into a frenzy of snarling and snapping. 'Bad dog, Spike,' he said rather mechanically, as if he had to say it rather often.
'Oh, his name's Spike,' she said inanely.
'No, actually Mother calls him Sweetie-cakes, or Cutesy-poo, or something like that,' Michael said, with disgust. 'I don't think even a nasty little dog like him deserves that, so I've decided to call him Spike. After a bully I knew in grade school.' As if he understood what Michael was saying, Spike glanced up at him balefully and curled his lip.
'Charming,' I said. Spike was a small dustmop of black and white fur with a petulant, pushed-in face. I prefer cats and collies, myself.
'Mom rescued him from an animal shelter where she was doing some volunteer work.'
'Oh, that's so nice,' the bridesmaid said.
'She is fond of remarking that he must have been mistreated,' Michael said, 'and will mellow when he learns to expect food and kindness instead of ill treatment.'
'Oh, then she hasn't had him long,' I said.
'Only seven years. At this rate, I think he'll go senile before he mellows.'
Spike trotted over to the neighbors' mailbox and lifted his leg. However, he lifted the wrong leg, and instead of watering the post came perilously close to spraying the bridesmaid and me.
'We'd better go,' she said, wrinkling her nose. 'Samantha will be getting impatient.'
'The caterer is showing signs of rebellion,' I said. 'We're gathering a posse to deal with him.'
'Good luck. Are you bringing your friend Eileen in later today?'
'If she shows up,' I said. 'Mother took a garbled message from her yesterday. Something about her and Steven running away to the beach.'
'Perhaps they're eloping.'
'Don't get my hopes up.'
We dealt with the caterer by phone, and then spent what seemed like hours in earnest discussion over whether or not there should be finger bowls, and if so, whether they should have flowers or paper-thin lemon slices floating in them. Left to my own devices, I could have settled this in thirty seconds.
When this weighty issue had been decided and I had my marching orders, Samantha and her bridesmaid went off to meet yet another bridesmaid for lunch. Probably going to split a lettuce leaf between the three of them, I thought, guiltily remembering the muffin with which I'd already undermined my day's calorie count.
I went home, fixed myself an early and depressingly meager lunch, and spent the next few hours on the back porch swing with the phone, racking up long distance charges. One of Eileen's bridesmaids, from Tennessee, had provided two completely contradictory shoe sizes, and I had to elicit the truth.
One of Mother's more elusive cousins had to be tracked down--as it turned out, to a commune in California. After failing miserably to find out through any other means the phone number of the Cape May bed and breakfast where Eileen and Steven were reputed to be hiding, I called Barry at Professor Donleavy's and managed to extract the information without actually promising to go out with him. And finally, I reached Eileen and Steven and made Eileen promise to come home within a day or two to decide on her dress and ours.
Having reached the end of my patience, I retired to the hammock and addressed envelopes for a few hours. When Mother hadn't shown up by six o'clock, I began fixing some dinner. When she hadn't shown up by seven- thirty, I ate it. Jake finally dropped her off after nine, tired but happy and laden with parcels.
Not a wildly exciting or productive afternoon, but trivial as my activities were to the progress of the weddings, they loomed large in the light of subsequent events.
Wednesday, June 1
Subsequent events began happening the next morning at breakfast.
'Meg, have you seen Mrs. Grover?' Mother asked while waiting for me to finish fixing her a fresh fruit salad.
'Yes,' I said. 'I met her at the party, remember? At both parties.'
'Yes, but have you seen her since? Jake called a little while ago to say she didn't come home last night. He wanted to report her missing to the sheriff, but for some silly reason you can't do much until she's been gone for twenty-four hours.'
'Does he think something could have happened to her?' I asked. Trying hard not to sound too hopeful.
'Goodness, I hope not,' Mother said. 'I think perhaps he's worried that she may have gotten a little vexed at his leaving her alone all day yesterday. While he and I did all our little errands.'
'Maybe he's right. She is supposed to be his houseguest.'
'Yes, but good heavens, half the neighbors had invited her to visit them or offered to take her places. Your father even came out early to take her bird-watching and she never showed up.'
'Well, let's call some of the neighbors and see if anyone has seen her.'
We called all the neighbors. No one had seen Mrs. Grover. I went over and searched Jake's yard and the small woods in back of it, in case she'd fallen, broken her hip, and been unable to move, as had happened to an elderly neighbor the previous year. No Mrs. Grover. We braved the dust of the attic and the damp of the cellar to see if she might have been overcome by illness while indulging in a bit of household snooping. Still no Mrs. Grover. There were dishes in the sink and half a cup of cold coffee on the bedside table in her room that Jake didn't think had been there when he left yesterday morning, but he couldn't be sure. She had left three suitcases and quite a lot of clothes, but there was no way we could tell if anything was missing. I was quietly amused by the number of small but valuable household items that seemed to have found their way into her suitcases. Things she considered part of her rightful inheritance from the late Emma Wendell, I supposed.
Having met the woman, I could easily believe that she would storm off and leave Jake to have fits worrying about her. But that didn't mean she couldn't have gotten ill or had an accident. And I privately doubted that she
