The Windsor Knot

all the same. What are the other choices?”

“‘O Perfect Love.’”

“Not bad. Who used that one?”

“The Duke and Duchess of Windsor.” She sighed. “Oh, dear, I wouldn’t like to identify with her on my wedding day, poor thing. She’d had two husbands before Edward. Her husband’s family hated her. Her mother-in-law Queen Mary never spoke to her.” Elizabeth shuddered. “And everybody blamed her for the King’s abdication.”

“Cameron is not required to give up seals or porpoises on your account, I trust?”

“No. And everybody seems very calm about the prospect of our marriage. Congratulations, but no confetti, if you know what I mean. Not wildly ecstatic.”

“You’re thinking of Princess Diana, I suppose? I’ve always thought that Prince Charles would have been driven to marry her by public and family opinion alone.”

“No. Actually I was thinking of Charles’s grandmother, Elizabeth of York. The Queen Mum. She was old Queen Mary’s other daughter-in-law. There was no way poor divorced American Wallis could compete with her. Of course, she had a better pedigree than Wallis Simpson. When the future George VI proposed to her, she was the daughter of a Scottish earl, living in Glamis Castle in the Highlands.”

“Trust you to admire the Scottish royal,” muttered Geoffrey.

Elizabeth ignored him. “She was very charming and not just a social butterfly, either! During the First World War, her family used their castle as a convalescent home for soldiers. And Elizabeth worked as a nurse, even though she was only fifteen at the time.”

“She does not sound like you in the least,” Geoffrey remarked.

“Anyway, she got to know the King’s younger son, Bertie, and when he asked her to marry him, she turned him down.”

“She seems to have had a clearer view of royal life than you do, dear.”

Elizabeth ignored him. “He kept proposing to her, though, and-get this! His parents-the King and Queen, mind you!-said to him, ‘You’ll be a lucky fellow if she accepts you.’ Imagine being that approved of.”

“And were they right?”

“They were. She was marvelous. They got married in 1923, and when she entered Westminster Abbey for the wedding, she laid her bouquet on the grave of the unknown warrior and walked to the altar without it. And during World War II, she actually practiced with a pistol at Windsor, because, she said, if the Nazis invaded England, she wanted to go down fighting. I would like very much to meet her.”

“And her wedding song was…?”

“‘Lead Us Heavenly Father.’”

“I think you ought to go for that one,” said Geoffrey. “It will have sentimental associations for you. Assuming, of course, that you can find anyone around here who can sing it.”

“Yes, I hope I have better luck with musicians than I did with caterers. Did you hear about Charles’s recommendation?”

“Yes,” murmured Geoffrey, looking troubled. “Charles is behaving oddly these days. And don’t say ‘How perfectly normal,’ because I know that he’s always peculiar, but he’s being strange in a different way.”

“Do you think he’s up to something?”

Geoffrey hesitated. “I think he bears watching.”

The sheriff’s reading glasses were perched on the end of his nose as he examined the blue cloisonne urn on his desk. Cautiously he picked it up and checked to make sure that the lid was on tight before examining the bottom. “Made in China,” he announced with a sigh of disgust. “That’s no help.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. It’s heavy, though, isn’t it?” asked Clay, who had just finished photographing the urn and dusting it for prints.

“There’s something in there, all right. I was hoping for a serial number, or-if we were really lucky-the name of a funeral home inscribed on the bottom.”

The deputy shook his head. “It’s never that easy.”

“It is in real life.” Wesley grinned. “Remember the fool who tried to hold up the bank in Decatur, and wrote his holdup note on his own deposit slip?”

“Well, in this case you’re out of luck. You’ve got no clues as to the origin of the vase; no fingerprints, thanks to five years of Clarine’s diligent housekeeping; and no trace of the packaging that the vase was sent in, also thanks to the widow’s cleaning mania.” He took a long swallow of coffee and made a face. Wesley Rountree could not make coffee worth a damn. “I think you’re going to have to open it.”

“You’re right,” sighed Wesley. “I reckon it could just be filled with sand. Before we go any farther in looking into this matter, we have to know.”

He wiped his hands against his trouser legs and took a flat-footed stance facing the desk. Cradling the urn in the crook of his arm, Wesley gripped the lid and turned. After a moment’s hesitation, it turned easily, and within seconds he had set it back on the desktop and lifted the lid.

“It isn’t sand,” he said, peering at the contents of the urn. “It isn’t fine ash, either.”

The deputy ambled over to Wesley’s desk to take a look. “There’s chunks of stuff in there,” he said. “What is that? Bone?”

“Looks like it,” the sheriff agreed. “So we have somebody in this urn, even if it isn’t Emmet Mason.”

“Yeah, but who?”

“Let me think about this,” said Wesley, running a hand across his bristly hair. “I need to talk it out and see what occurs to me. Five years ago Emmet leaves for California on a business trip…”

“Did he?”

“Good question. We know he’s dead there now, but we don’t know that he went there then. What we do know is that five years ago Clarine Mason got a phone call, purporting to come from California, telling her that her husband was dead.”

“But you can make a phone call from anywhere,” Clay pointed out.

“True. And then she got a package, containing this blue urn, supposedly filled with the ashes of her cremated husband.”

“But since we don’t have the wrapping and since she never looked at it, we don’t know that the package actually came from California.” The deputy shook his head. “I don’t think that narrows it down a whole lot, Wesley.”

The sheriff leaned back in his swivel chair and closed his eyes. “I am trying to remember Emmet Mason,” he said. “Friendly fellow, kind of beefy. Ran the hardware store, but wasn’t too interested in tools himself, as far as I could tell. He was big in little theatre, though. He’d lived here all his life. The Masons have been here for a good hundred years. They built that homestead where Clarine lives now before the Civil War.”

“So?”

“I’ve got to call Clarine. Why don’t you get on the other line and call around to all the funeral homes in the area.”

“What for?”

“Ask if any of them do cremations.”

Charles Chandler figured that it was a long shot, at best, considering the amount of time he had at his disposal-ten days, at the most-but he felt that he owed it to himself and his potential as a scientist to make an effort.

With that in mind, he had dressed in his most conventional outfit: khaki slacks, a navy blue blazer, and an ugly yellow tie borrowed from Geoffrey, who evidently prized it. Now, clean-shaven and smelling like Old Spice, he was ready to make a Serious Effort in the matrimonial sweepstakes. He needed the million dollars.

The problem was that he had no idea how to go about locating a suitable young woman. Like Geoffrey, Charles had gone to prep school away from Chandler Grove. After that had come college and the colony of scientists, as Charles liked to call them. He hardly knew anyone in Chandler Grove anymore, a fact that until recently was a source of comfort to him, since he found idle socializing both frightening and time-consuming.