through the yard for the third time, to a spellbound audience of deputies. The sheriff was down at my sister Pam's house, interviewing any neighbors who might have seen someone tampering with the car. The cousin who ran the local plant nursery and gardening service was working up an estimate for replacing the damaged portions of the hedge for the neighbors' insurance agent, who happened to be another cousin. A wonderful day in the neighborhood.
Although I'm sure Eric and his little friends would disagree, I found our trip to ride the roller coasters blissfully uneventful--at least compared to how the day began. Oh, I was exhausted by the end of it, of course, and was trying hard to hide a tendency to jump at loud noises. But no new bodies were discovered. Apart from the sort of mayhem that small boys routinely inflict on each other, no one tried to murder anyone. Only one of the kids threw up. And the only new item added to my list of things to do was 'Hit Dad up for reimbursement.'
'Where do they get the energy?' I asked, as we watched them careening around in the bumper cars for the fifth or sixth time. 'I don't want to sound like a stick in the mud, but I just can't keep up with them.'
'Oh, don't worry,' Michael said. 'They don't think of you as a stick in the mud. I overheard A.j. telling Eric how great it was that his aunt Meg wasn't scared to go on the big rides like most girls.'
'I'm flattered. Even if A.j. is a little male chauvinist pig.'
'And Eric told A.j. that his aunt Meg wasn't scared of anything.'
'I wish that was true.' I sighed.
'You're worrying about your Dad,' Michael observed.
Eric and the horde bounded up demanding food just then, cutting off my answer. Which would have been that I was worried about all of us. If someone was trying to kill my Dad, he--or she--might already have killed at least one innocent bystander in the process by tampering with Dad's lawn mower. Michael and the four little boys and I might have just missed becoming victims ourselves.
Michael brought up the subject again on the way home, after a glance to make sure that Eric and his friends were curled up asleep in the back of the station wagon.
'Wonder if they've had time to find out anything about your dad's car?' he said quietly. 'Brake line cut, or brake fluid drained, or whatever.'
'Did it look suspicious to you?' I asked.
'I'm not exactly a master mechanic,' he admitted. 'Your dad seemed to find something of interest.'
'Dad's no master mechanic either. In fact, anything he might possibly know about how car brakes work would pretty much have to have come from a detective story. But I'd be willing to bet that either they find the brakes had been tampered with or at least that they can't rule out sabotage.'
Michael nodded.
'I'm going to have to give Mom a hard time when this summer is all over,' he said. 'I distinctly remember her telling me this was a quiet, peaceful little town where nothing ever happened.'
'Until we got our own serial killer.'
'If that's the right name for it.'
'True. Serial killer does seem to imply some sort of random, sick, purposelessness, and I get the feeling there is a very rational purpose to everything that's gone on this summer, if only we knew what it was.'
'So what do we know?' Michael asked. 'I mean really know--'
'As opposed to Dad's highly imaginative speculations?' I asked.
'Right.'
'Not much,' I admitted. 'On the day after Memorial Day, a visitor from out of town either was killed or died in a freak accident. And while she managed to alienate a significant portion of the county before her death, the only person who would seem to have known her well enough to want to do her in has a cast-iron alibi.'
'Is it so cast-iron?' Michael asked. 'I mean, apart from the alibi, Jake's so perfect for it.'
'If it were just Mother giving him his alibi, I'd say no. Not because I think she'd lie, but because she's too spacey.'
'What a thing to say about your own mother,' Michael said.
'Do you disagree?'
He shrugged.
'But anyway,' I continued, 'Since they spent the entire day billing and cooing in front of half a dozen waiters and salesclerks, the sheriff can say with complete confidence that Jake couldn't have been within twenty miles of the neighborhood for hours before or after the time Mrs. Grover died.'
'Hard to argue with that.' Michael sighed. 'Pity. There's something about Jake that gets on my nerves. He's so aggressively banal. I'd love to see it turn out to be him.'
'You and me both.'
'Not to mention your dad.'
'Right. Though for different reasons.'
'Like disqualifying Jake as a suitor for your mother.'
'Exactly. But unless he's sitting on some really dynamite evidence, I think he'll have to find some other way of breaking up the match. As a murderer, I'm afraid Jake's a nonstarter.'
'Sad but true.'
'Getting back to what we know: two weeks after Mrs. Grover's suspicious death, an electrician is nearly killed in a freak electrical accident that may have been a booby trap. And if it was a booby trap, the most logical person for it to be aimed at was Dad, who would have fixed the fuse box if he hadn't been AWOL.'
'And a little more than two weeks after that, we're all nearly blown up by a bomb, just before you and a dozen other women are made severely ill by what appears to have been poison that may have been deliberately placed in a bowl of one of your dad's favorite foods.'
'Thank God for the bomb. All the rest could possibly be accidents, although the number of accidents is beginning to make even the sheriff suspicious. But there's no way to argue with that bomb.'
'True; I think about it whenever I'm tempted to doubt your dad.'
'And shortly afterward, a harmless neighborhood layabout is killed in what again may have been sabotage, and again the more logical target would have been Dad.'
'And now today your father has a car wreck that he thinks may have been due to sabotage. So maybe the big question is, who is trying to kill your father, and why?'
'Either he knows something or the killer is afraid he'll find something out,' I said. 'Dad's the one who kept the sheriff and the coroner from declaring Mrs. Grover's death an accident. Dad's the one who points out the suspicious side of all these so-called accidents. Dad keeps turning over stones, and maybe the killer is afraid he'll eventually find something.'
'If that's the case, it all goes back to Mrs. Grover. If we figure out who killed her, we know who's trying to kill your dad.'
'Or, conversely, if we figure out who's trying to kill Dad, we'll know who did in Mrs. Grover.' We rode a while in silence, no doubt both trying to come up with a plausible suspect.
'Maybe I'm too close to this,' I said with a sigh. 'I can think of dozens of people who would have been capable of doing all this, but I can't for the life of me see why any of them would want to kill Mrs. Grover. And I have a hard time seeing most of them as cold-blooded murderers.'
'Is there anyone you can see as a murderer?' Michael asked.
'Samantha,' I said, only half joking. 'I can see her killing anyone who seriously inconvenienced her. I certainly go out of my way to avoid crossing her.'
'I can see that. But what could Samantha have against Mrs. Grover? Granted, Mrs. Grover was a supremely irritating person, but that's hardly grounds for murder.'
'They had some kind of small run-in at the Donleavys' picnic. But then who didn't? I know I did.'
'So did I,' Michael said.
'Maybe she knew something damaging about Samantha. Although I can't imagine what. She was here less than a week before she died. Even Mother would have difficulty unearthing any juicy skeletons after only five days in a strange city.'
'Maybe it was something she knew about Samantha before she came here,' Michael said. 'I seem to recall being an object of mild suspicion myself because she knew my mother from Fort Lauderdale. Was Samantha originally from Florida?'
