Pushing Up Daisies

he was to say to them.

'The congressman is really quite impressed with your work. He's recommending the town turn the empty lot on Brookhaven Road into a small park honoring his predecessor. If it goes through, I feel sure he'll want your advice on how to proceed.'

Colford cast a quick look in the congressman's direction and saw that he'd delivered his packaged greeting, so she excused herself and went to bail him out.

'What did Dragon Lady want?' Jon asked when he and Lucy returned moments later, when the coast was clear.

'I'm not sure. If I were the suspicious type, I'd say it was a gentle bribe.'

'See, I told you there'd be potential clients here. Who's that one?' she said, surreptitiously pointing into the crowd. 'We saw her at the nail salon.'

'She's already a client, Caroline Sturgis.' She saw us looking, so I waved, and she and another woman came over. They were working on a couple of martinis, and I had the feeling it wasn't their first round. Caroline's friend loudly claimed to need landscaping advice, so we chatted about that, and I gave her my thirty-second sales pitch and my card.

'PH Factor? What ever does it mean?'

When that line of conversation dried up, it was strictly party chat. Chappell went to hover around Win Fifield's group, making sure to steer clear of the over-protective Ms. Colford. Caroline and friend moseyed back to the bar for thirds.

'Your buddy Jon?' Lucy said.

'He's not my buddy. Just a means to an end.'

'He's got some major acne scars.'

'That's very grown-up of you. I've been too polite to stare.'

'I can't help it, I'm observant. He's obviously growing the beard to cover them, but you can still see them even though he's using hair dye to fill in the light spots. They looked like that constellation—not the Big Dipper, the other one everyone knows, the crooked W.'

'Cassiopeia?' I asked, the light dawning. 'Or maybe W for Wellington. As in Wellington aerator sandals,' I said. I was furious. 'Where is that little rat?'

Her eyes widened. 'Anna's prowler? That sneaky little bastard.'

I scoured the room for Mike O'Malley. This was something I did want to share with the group. I saw him leaving and called out across the room but couldn't catch his eye. Coming in as Mike left was a tall, white-haired gentleman in a gray, tweedy sport jacket and denim shirt that hung on his bony shoulders.

A clatter of glasses, then the crash of a drinks-laden tray caused a commotion off to my right.

'Let her have some air.'

'Get a chair. Get some water. Where's Richard?'

'Richard!'

Margery Stapley had fainted.

CHAPTER 35

The party broke up shortly after Margery hit the deck and Richard whisked her away. The absence of our hosts gave us all license to leave and begin the business of serious gossiping in the privacy of our homes.

Lucy and I took our postmortem to the Paradise Diner. Jon Chappell had disappeared into the crowd when Margery fainted, and it was a good thing. I was ready to tear him a new one.

'Leave it to you to stare at a guy's pockmarks. What the hell was he doing snooping around my house and scaring Anna half to death?'

'This is the world in which we live. I bet he poked through your garbage, too.'

Lucy was eyeing that morning's scones. 'You don't want to eat those,' I said under my breath. With that glowing recommendation, she got up, put two on a plate as if she worked there, and came back to the booth. Pete, the cook, was in love.

'Well, the air was certainly humming. And we seem to have gotten to the bottom of the Anna incident. What an asshole.'

'Y Senor Felix?'

'Nothing. Still in Mexico, I guess. I'll give him one more day before he goes on the DNR list—do not resuscitate. For all I know, that entire playboy story was something he lifted from a Mexican soap opera. I thought he'd at least come back for Hugo's sake.'

'Too bad. I had high hopes there.'

'For . . . ?'

'Why not? He's handsome and possibly rich. And you didn't seem to want him. Stranger things have happened.'

'Which leads me to Margery Stapley,' I said, dropping the subject of Felix.

'What do you think really knocked the old girl off her feet?' Lucy said, working on her second scone. 'I wonder if they got that on video. It could be, like, Wedding Bloopers, only Senior Bloopers.'

'I bet it had something to do with the older guy that came in just as O'Malley was leaving. The one in the denim shirt and tweed jacket. He had a familiar face. Did you notice him?'

'Just barely. Who'd you think it was?'

'This is probably crazy, but I thought it might be William Peacock, Dorothy's long-lost brother,' I answered. 'I've been looking at so many old pictures of Dorothy, I thought I saw a resemblance.'

The swinging doors from the restrooms flapped against each other, and I felt someone standing over my shoulder.

'That's a damn good guess,' Gerald Fraser said, sliding into the booth next to Lucy. 'That was William. He was a teenager when he left. No one knew why.'

'You think William found out that the woman he thought was his sister was really his sister's lover?' I asked.

'It'd be hard to keep it from him, once he got to that age. At the time, people thought he was just looking for adventure—too young to have been in the war, too old to stay home with his spinster sisters.'

'And he never came back?'

'I couldn't say. Hillary recognized him right away, though, from all the pictures the sisters had.'

He glanced quickly out the front door, and only then did I notice Hillary sitting in her Lexus.

'I'm gonna try to see him in the next couple of days. Care to join me when I do?' Gerald asked.

'Say when.'

Gerald said good night and took off.

Lucy licked her index finger, picking up the last few crumbs from the plate. 'At least someone's getting lucky to night.'

CHAPTER 36

The next morning, I dropped Lucy at the train station and drove straight to the police station to see Mike O'Malley. The station was locked, so I jogged across the road to Babe's.

'How's it going?' I asked, looking around. The crowd was mixed—late laborers and early commuters but no cops.

'It's going,' Babe said, juggling dishes and menus. 'Want a menu or just coffee?'

'Just coffee. I overdid it last night.'

'Suit yourself. You're the one who's always saying you shouldn't skip breakfast.'

Common sense kicked in. I ordered.

'You seemed distressingly sober. Did I miss something?' she asked, bringing my setup. 'Unless you had your