A Star-Spangled Murder Read online

  “She’s teething,” Titania explained as they entered the lawn behind her home. “She’s going to get better about this type of thing as she gets older.… There’s my father,” she added as the bearded man Susan had seen in the restaurant last night crossed the lawn to meet them.

  “Hi. I’m Ted Taylor,” he introduced himself, and offered his hand. “I know that you’re Susan Henshaw. My daughter has told me about you.”

  Susan was surprised, but didn’t say anything. Karma was licking dirt off her knee.

  “Why don’t you and your dog go down by the water?” Ted Taylor suggested to his daughter. “Your sisters are there trying to find sea urchins—although I think they’re going to have to wait for the tide to go out more.”

  “Great! Come on, Karma!”

  But the dog seemed to have developed a compelling attraction for Susan’s legs, and there was lots of pushing and shoving before the girl and her pet departed.

  “Let’s go in the house,” the man suggested, leading the way. “I appreciate you coming over. I don’t know what Titania told you.…”

  “She just said that you wanted to speak with me,” Susan explained, entering the house as he held the door for her. “But I would have come over tonight anyway. I wanted you to know how sorry I am about your brother. If there’s anything I can do—”

  “Actually, there is,” Ted Taylor interrupted her polite offer. “I wanted to ask you a tremendous favor.”

  “Oh?” Susan, more than a little curious, followed him into the living room.

  But it seemed that Ted Taylor was having trouble getting to the point. “How do you like the house? It’s not decorated, of course, but …” He glanced around the room, apparently proud and definitely expecting a positive response.

  Susan gushed praise, all the while wondering just what was to come. Ted sat down on the leather couch, patting the cushion at his side to indicate a space for her. Susan sat, prepared to hear an outrageous request for her precious vacation time. What she heard was the history of the house.

  “Nice, isn’t it?” he began, glancing up at the beamed ceiling and then out the windows and across Penobscot Bay.

  “Very.”

  “Most people never get the chance to build and live in their dream houses.… Hell, for all I know, most people don’t have a dream house stashed away in the back of their head.…”

  “But you did.”

  “Yup. Even as a kid, I’ve wanted to build things. I wanted to be an architect before I knew what one was. I moved from blocks, to shop classes in junior high, to drafting classes in high school, and straight for a degree in architectural engineering in college. This house, with some variations, was my graduate thesis. But it’s hard to get a job designing houses straight out of college. I’ve worked for rental car agencies, doughnut chains, and grocery stores. And finally, about six years ago, I got enough recognition for a chance with the best firm of architects in the country—if not the world. Recently I got together the money to buy this land and build this.…” He stopped and glanced around again, his gaze finally landing on the empty fireplace. “And here it is: my dream house. I sometimes thought I would kill to build this house. And I’ve never spent a night in it.”

  “It didn’t take very long to build,” Susan said, because she knew she should say something and she had no idea what was appropriate.

  It appeared to be the right comment. Ted Taylor immediately launched into a very technical explanation of new building techniques, modular construction, and the like. Susan sat, tried to comprehend, and finally gave up; she couldn’t relate all this talk of LED-controlled windows and computer-driven wells to the two old homes that she owned and loved.

  Finally, after a complex explanation of radiant heat, he interrupted himself. “… but that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.” He stroked his beard and gave Susan a long, serious look. “I wanted to ask you to help my daughters. I’ve been thinking everything over ever since I found out that Humphrey was murdered. You’re the only person I could think of. You’ve met the girls and you know people up here. That deputy sheriff, what’s her name … ?”

  “Janet Shapiro.”

  “That’s right, Janet Shapiro. Well, she said she’d known you for years. She said that you’re one of the summer people everyone trusts, and you’re involved because Humphrey was found in your living room, and she said you had been involved in solving murders before this. In fact, Janet Shapiro said you probably know more than she does … and I can’t think of anyone else.” He stopped with what Susan thought was a look of desperation on his face.

  “To do what?” she asked quietly.

  “Protect my girls,” he said with finality.

  “From what? I don’t understand,” Susan said slowly, knowing that with every question, she was getting in deeper and deeper.

  “I’m afraid they’re going to be accused of murdering their stepfather.…”

  “Surely not! They’re only children!” Susan was shocked.

  “That may be. But you tell me—if someone has been threatening to kill someone and then that someone is killed …”

  “Maybe you’d better tell me this story from the beginning.”

  “I … I can only tell you what I know. And I don’t know that much. Tricia has worked very hard to keep me out of her new marriage.”

  “But you can tell me what you know. I really can’t believe that childish threats against a new stepparent are going to be taken seriously. After all, lots of children tell their parents that they hate them at one time or another.…”

  “It isn’t quite that simple.”

  “Then why don’t you explain?”

  Ted sighed. “It’s hard. I don’t even know exactly when it started.…” He stared up at the ceiling, a frown on his face.

  “When did you get divorced?” Susan asked, hoping to direct him.

  “Last year. I moved out right after Labor Day.…” He paused and began again. “Oh, all this is my fault. And Tricia’s. We should have let the girls know that we were having trouble, but we kept it from them. Even our short trial separation two years ago, we explained as a long design job that I had in San Francisco. We should have explained,” he repeated sadly.

  “So your moving out came as a shock to the girls?”

  “Exactly. They had absolutely no time to adjust to the situation. One day I was living at home with them and their mother, and the next day I was gone and Tricia had filed the divorce papers.”

  “And your daughters?”

  “Nothing at first. They were fine—we even took them to a family therapist, thinking that they would need some help to get through all this. But the woman talked with them and said they didn’t need therapy—that they were handling everything with great maturity. And that’s the way it seemed. They agreed to everything. Weekend visits to me. Weekdays with their mother. They helped me pick out an apartment with rooms for them, and they even helped furnish them. Tricia and I really thought everything was going well, that we had achieved the ideal divorce.”

  “But you hadn’t.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know. Maybe it was the perfect divorce as long as one of us didn’t remarry.”

  Susan remembered the New Year’s Eve celebration that Titania had told her about. “And when your ex-wife remarried, all the trouble began?”

  “Not until they got back from the honeymoon. Trish and Humphrey went to the Caribbean, and the girls stayed with me. And everything went well. Although they were planning what they were going to do while Trish was away. I didn’t understand at the time, but later some of the things I’d overheard or didn’t understand became pretty clear—very clear, in fact.”

  “So what happened?”

  “Well, the first thing they did was booby-trap our house.”

  “What did they do exactly?”

  “Actually they must have done that while the honeymoon was going on. My apartment is on the other side of town from Tricia’s house—the el
ementary school is in the middle—and I guess the girls took a detour on the way home more than once that week.”

  “How did they booby-trap the house?”

  “Let me think. They put tacks in Humphrey’s shoes and jelly in the pockets of his sport coats. They put salt in the sugar bowl and sugar in the salt shaker. They poured all the Scotch down the drain (and Scotch is the only drink my brother ever touches) and filled the bottle with a similar-looking liquid that turned out to be food coloring and flat tonic water. They took out the top step of the stairway to the basement—”

  “What?”

  “That’s right. They removed the top step so that whoever went down there would fall to the bottom.”

  “But that’s serious! Someone could have been killed!”

  “And that’s what people are going to start to talk about now that Humphrey is dead, aren’t they? You see what I’m saying here now, don’t you?” he asked gently. “You see that I have to protect my girls.”

  “It does sound like you have a problem,” Susan admitted. “And I gather that it didn’t stop with that particular incident?”

  “No. It got worse. At first Trish thought that the girls were doing all this because I told them to—or at least that they had gotten the idea from me. Thinking that, she didn’t even tell me about it at the time. She just sat the girls down and explained that she and Humphrey were married, that they were going to stay married, and that they were all going to have to learn to get along together. She grounded all three of them and took away Titania’s phone privileges—because she assumed that Titania was the ringleader, and besides, she’s the only one old enough to care whether or not she talks on the phone.”

  “And things settled down for a while?”

  “No way. The three of them were stranded together, and they spent most of their time planning to drive their new stepfather crazy. Motor oil from the shelf in the garage turned up in the imported olive oil that only my brother uses. Strange items appeared in the mail—COD in Humphrey’s name. His name ended up on the lists of every insurance man in the state—poor Humphrey was seriously thinking of having the phone number changed, and Trish was so frantic that she called me and we set up another appointment with the therapist who had seen them earlier.”

  “Sounds like a good idea.”

  “Well, it was and it wasn’t. Humphrey was pretty upset, as I said, and he went into the therapist’s office and said that he didn’t understand why all this was happening when this woman had said everything was going to be all right. Well, this didn’t thrill the therapist, and she told him that it was all his fault. That he had been incredibly insensitive springing the remarriage on his own nieces the way that he had and that now he had to live with the results. She damn near spent the entire session lecturing him. The girls were in the waiting room, but the door was open. I remember glancing out at Titania, and she was thrilled to death, a huge smirk on her face.

  “But things did calm down for a while then. I think maybe the girls realized how much their behavior was bothering their mother. And I made it very plain that they weren’t doing me a great favor either.”

  “How did you do that?”

  “The next weekend they spent at my house—they spend each weekend with me when I’m in town—I took them all camping. We’ve been going since the girls were little. Well, I just waited until I thought the time was right and I laid it all out for them.”

  “Do you mind telling me what you said?”

  “I don’t remember exactly.” He looked out the window, watching a red and white lobster boat chugging around in circles, picking up lobster pots and then dumping them back into the water when empty. “I had thought about it a lot before starting. I knew it was very important to say the right thing, and sometimes I think that the more important it is to get something right, the more likely something is to go wrong. I remember that I started by explaining that I knew about the pranks they’d been pulling on my brother, and that I thought their behavior was inappropriate no matter how distressed they were. I told them that they really had no right to interfere in their parents’ decisions about marriage. I told them that I understood they were hurt but that I had grown up in a family where my parents argued all the time and that they might find they were better off when Tricia and I were apart. I told them that they had a home with me always. And I told them to stop what they were doing. I think that’s all.

  “Then later the next day, I took Titania aside and explained to her that I thought she was the leader of the group and the other two girls would follow her, and that I would appreciate her cooperation in this matter. She said there wouldn’t be any more pranks and … and we went fishing and came home.”

  “Did—” Susan tried to break into his monologue.

  “Of course, I did it all wrong. I can see that now,” he surprised her by saying. “I should have asked how they felt and listened to what they were going through instead of giving lectures. I was stupid.” He shrugged, still watching the fishermen. “I just wasn’t thinking at the time. Tricia was frantic and Humphrey was upset and they were both blaming me. And I saw how the girls were suffering.… I did the wrong thing.” He looked at Susan. “Being a parent is awfully hard on the ego, isn’t it?”

  Susan smiled. “It is indeed,” she agreed wholeheartedly.

  “Would you like a beer?” he surprised her by offering. “It’s been a long day and I’m thirsty.”

  Susan remembered that he had spent part of his day identifying the dead body of his brother and agreed that a drink would be nice.

  “Then why don’t we continue this in the kitchen? Now that I think about it, I missed lunch, too. Tricia always has a full refrigerator.”

  “Great,” Susan agreed, getting up and following him. An enthusiastic cook, she was anxious to see the kitchen as well as hear the rest of his story. As she expected, the room was wonderful. A long rectangle with windows across one wall looked out into the woods, and a line of skylights looked up to the clouds. There was a large green Garland stove at one end of the room, and a Sub-Zero refrigerator at the other. In between, mahogany cabinets lined the walls and displayed the most up-to-date appliances from Japan and Germany. “Wow!”

  “All the woodwork in the house was done by a man who used to do the interiors of yachts—and he really outdid himself here. I was lucky to find him,” Ted Taylor said, opening the refrigerator and handing her a Coors. “Do you like Brie? Or maybe some pâté? I don’t know what these are.…” He held out a ceramic bowl filled with ebony ovals.

  “They’re smoked mussels. And they’re wonderful, but I don’t need anything to eat, thanks. Go ahead, though.”

  “I will.” He peered at the mussels. “Do I eat them cold?”

  “Yes. Usually on crackers or French bread,” Susan suggested.

  He had already popped two into his mouth. “Great.” He was filling the countertop near the refrigerator with food, eating as he piled. “One of the worst things about being a bachelor is that you have to plan everything—like if you want a full refrigerator, you have to shop for food. When Trish and I were married, I got used to living like this. And I miss it,” he finished wistfully.

  Susan wasn’t impressed. If she and Jed broke up (heaven forbid!), she certainly hoped to be remembered for something other than her housekeeping. And how hard was it to learn to shop for yourself? But she remained calm. “There certainly is a lot of food here,” she said casually, wondering when they were going to get back to his story.

  “There are a lot of hungry people here,” he answered, putting a dish of something on the turntable in the white microwave.

  “Your daughters and your ex-wife and Judy and Sally …”

  “Don’t forget Paul and Ryan,” Ted said, pressing a few buttons and leaning back against the counter.

  “Who are they?”

  “Paul is Judy’s husband, and Ryan belongs to Sally. If you haven’t met them, they’re probably out fishing. They are born-again fishermen—
can’t get enough of it.”

  “You said you took your girls fishing.”

  “I like to fish. They live for it. But I’m glad they’re here. It helps keep everyone busy.” He turned to the microwave, which was now beeping urgently. “I hope this is done,” he muttered, taking out the dish and opening it. Steam billowed out. “Looks like it. Why don’t we sit at the table and I can finish the story.”

  But when they were seated, it seemed difficult to begin again.

  “You were talking about the camping trip,” Susan reminded him. “I gather things didn’t get better when everyone returned home.”

  “It looked like it for a while. In fact, I was busy complimenting myself on what a good job I had done when we discovered that the girls had gone underground.” He took a few bites of the casserole he had heated before continuing. “The story gets a little more complicated here—and a lot more serious.”

  “What happened?”

  “They started acting alone. Tierney repeated some pranks—she put enough pushpins in Humphrey’s jacket pockets to keep every bulletin board in her elementary school filled forever.” He chuckled. “And she tried to put whipped cream in his shaving cream can, but of course, that was impossible and she just made a terrible mess in the bathroom and got in trouble. Titania and Theresa were the problems.”

  “Both of them?”

  “One or both of them. We’re really not at all sure. They’ve refused to tell on each other. They fight like cats and dogs, but they bond together against adults.”

  He leaned forward and continued. “The first thing that happened is that the brakes on Humphrey’s car were oiled—and, of course, they didn’t work very well after that. The attempt was amateur—fortunately—and Humphrey had a slight fender bender on his way to work one Monday morning. The mechanics at the local gas station made some not-so-funny comments about someone trying to kill Humphrey, and then Tricia called me and we lectured the girls, threatened and punished. The next thing that happened is that Humphrey discovered that someone had tampered with the allergy medicine he takes—that someone had put talcum powder in the capsules. Obviously this was all too serious to ignore or treat as some sort of childish prank.…”