'No, but her fiance was. The one before Rob.'
'The bank robber?'
'Embezzler. But that was Miami, not Fort Lauderdale.'
'It's the same thing,' Michael said. 'All part of the same metropolitan area. Like Manhattan and Brooklyn.'
'Is it?' I said. 'Geography was never my strong point. So they both had ties to the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area.'
'Samantha through her shady former fiance,' Michael expanded. 'This is much more promising.'
'If I remember correctly, the fiance claimed his partner had gotten all the money, and the partner claimed that the fiance had gotten the lion's share.'
'Wouldn't it be funny if Samantha'd somehow gotten her claws into most of the loot? Played both of them against each other and made off with the loot under their greedy noses?'
'It's probably beastly of me, but I can definitely imagine Samantha doing it. Or killing, for enough money,' I said. 'And the estimates of how much they milked out of their clients range between ten and fifteen million dollars.'
Michael whistled. 'There's a motive to be reckoned with. But do you really think she'd try to kill her future father-in-law to keep it quiet?'
'She's never much liked Dad,' I said. 'And besides, I can also see her disposing of anyone who tried to get in her way about the wedding.'
'What, has your dad tried to butt in on the wedding? Insisted on a nonpoisonous wedding bouquet, perhaps?'
'She's probably overheard him trying to talk Rob out of marrying her. I know I have. And come to think of it, even if she didn't hear him talking to Rob, I know for a fact that at the picnic she overheard him tell me he thought the marriage was a bad idea and he was going to keep trying to talk Rob out of it.'
'Oh,' Michael said.
'You can see how she might resent that.'
'Definitely. Samantha goes at the top of the list of people on whom I will not willingly turn my back. And on whom I will keep an eye when your father's in the neighborhood. Any other suspects?'
'It's a pity we can't frame the Beastly Barry for it,' I said. 'I thought we'd be rid of him, at least for a little while, after Eileen's wedding, but it begins to look as if he'll never leave. At least that's the way it looks to poor Mr. Donleavy. I'm surprised he didn't try to join us today.'
'I doubt if his enthusiasm for small children extends to doing anything with or for them that involves actual work,' Michael said, glancing at the backseat where the small boys appeared still asleep. 'Is he frameable, do you suppose?' he added, with seemingly genuine interest. Civil of him to adopt my dislike of the Beastly so enthusiastically.
'Well, he was here for the Donleavys' Memorial Day picnic when Mrs. Grover was killed. I remember she did something or other that ticked him off pretty seriously, and he's normally about as excitable as a house plant.'
'Maybe he's one of those people who's slow to anger but even slower to get over it, and he's been plotting revenge,' Michael suggested.
'And he was here shortly before the fuse box incident. It was just after Eileen went on the Renaissance kick, and I remember you had him measured for his doublet that day.'
'He could have put the bomb in the jack-in-the-box and lied about it,' Michael said.
'And he could have poisoned the salsa; he was hanging around here for the whole Fourth of July weekend, and some days afterward--I remember he kept trying to come up and read to me while I was recovering. He's had plenty of time to have rigged the lawn mower or the car since he practically moved into the Donleavys'.'
'The hell with framing him,' Michael said. 'If he has even a shadow of a motive, he's worth suspecting for real.'
'I'm afraid I have a hard time believing that he's capable of rational thought, much less planning two murders and several attempted murders.'
'Well, they weren't very well planned,' Michael said. 'The killer seems to have missed his intended victim at least three out of four times, and missed altogether all but two attempts. Hell, maybe Mrs. Grover wasn't the intended victim. Maybe he missed that time, too.'
'That would explain why we're having such a hard time figuring out why she was killed.'
'Maybe it would help if we eliminated some more suspects. We've more or less eliminated Jake and your mother for lack of opportunity. And as the intended victim, your father's pretty much out of the running.'
'Unless you like the theory that Mother and Jake are in cahoots, or alternatively, that Dad is the murderer and is trying to divert suspicion by staging a series of crimes that appear to be aimed at him. I mean, it has been remarkable how he's escaped every time.'
'Do you really see either of your parents as a multiple murderer?' Michael asked.
'No. But I can't expect the rest of the world to take my word for it.'
'We'll classify them as highly improbable.'
'I would have called Pam a likely suspect at one point,' I said. 'Mrs. Grover was horrible to Natalie and Eric.'
'That's no reason to kill someone,' Michael said.
'Not in and of itself, no,' I said. 'But if she caught Mrs. Grover doing something she felt was seriously damaging to her kids--mentally or physically damaging--then yes. Pam thinks child molesters should be executed. Preferably at the hands of their victims' parents.'
'That's a little extreme, but I see her point,' Michael said.
'But there's no way Pam would sabotage a car the kids ride in all the time, or poison salsa they might find as soon as Dad.'
'True. You know, come to think of it, the way the murderer has kept missing your Dad does suggest one interesting thing about his or her personality.'
'I'm all ears.'
'The murderer has come up with a number of rather clever ways to bump off your Dad in the course of his usual activities. So we know the murderer has a relatively good idea of your Dad's tastes and habits. But each of the attempts failed--or succeeded with the wrong person--because your father didn't happen to be doing what the murderer expected him to be doing at any given time.'
'Always a serious mistake, expecting Dad to be where he's supposed to be.'
'Exactly. I've only known him since the beginning of the summer, but I've picked up that much. The murderer, however, despite knowing rather a lot of useful details about your Dad, has apparently not grasped this critical aspect of his character. I suspect the murderer is a person of limited imagination and very regular habits. Enough imagination to come up with a series of ideas, but not enough to think them through and make them foolproof. Not enough to recognize that there were going to be an awful lot of external events around this summer to interrupt everyone's usual habits. And that your dad doesn't have very many usual habits anyway.'
'So the murderer, who has a highly organized but pedestrian mind, knows Dad reasonably well but doesn't really understand him.'
'Precisely,' Michael said.
'Unfortunately, it seems to me that the people who best fit that description are the very suspects we've already been looking at.'
'True,' Michael said. 'We need more.'
'He or she has some basic knowledge of poisons.'
'Thanks to your dad, that doesn't eliminate anyone in the county.' We both thought in silence for several miles.
'Mechanical ability,' Michael said at last. 'Whoever did it knew how to tamper with cars and lawn mowers and fuse boxes. That should eliminate a few people.'
'Mother, certainly, if we hadn't already counted her out. And Dad, for that matter.'
'Samantha, too, I should think,' Michael said.
'Now, don't you be a chauvinist like A.j. I know she gives the impression that she'd die before she'd lift a
