Swan for the Money by Donna Andrews

Author:Donna Andrews [Andrews, Donna]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
ISBN: 9780312377182
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2010-08-03T05:00:00+00:00

Chapter 22

I was reaching for the knocker to try again when I finally heard a stirring inside Mr. Darby’s cottage. A thud as if something had fallen from a table. A scraping sound, like a chair being moved.

The door finally opened, and Mr. Darby peered out. He looked a little befuddled.

“Wha’s up?” he asked. There was a faint odor of bourbon on his breath.

“The goats are interfering with the crime scene,” I said. “Can you move them to another pasture?”

He blinked as if it was taking the words a few seconds to reach his brain, and then nodded.

“Of course,” he said. “Be right there.”

He stepped back into the interior of the cottage, without closing the door, and I seized the chance to step inside and look around. I breathed a sigh of relief to see that Mr. Darby hadn’t followed Mrs. Winkleson’s decorating rules. Even I might have felt claustrophobic if he had, so tiny was the room. Room rather than apartment. There was a kitchenette at one end and a carelessly made bed at the other. It was overheated for my taste, but it was so small it probably didn’t cost much to overheat, especially since the heat appeared to come from a wood stove. He could probably get his firewood for free in the estate’s woods.

An open door gave a glimpse of a minuscule bathroom, and a curtain partially concealed a closet only about two feet wide. Every square inch of the walls was covered with shelves, mostly mismatched and battered— probably trash heap rescues— and every square inch of the shelves contained the sort of paraphernalia you usually saw in a barn. Bits of tack and grooming equipment. Veterinary manuals and supplies. A few framed pictures of cows, horses, sheep, or goats. Everything neatly and tidily arranged, but the sheer amount of stuff was overwhelming, as if he’d tried to squeeze the entire contents of a half-acre feed and tack store into his cottage. Okay, the mystery of the over-tidy barns was solved.

And I saw no signs of canine occupation.

“Anything I can do to help?” I said, trying to pretend there was a reason for me to hang around. A reason other than snooping. I reached for the door knob as if about to close the door.

“No, they’ll pretty much follow me if I bring some special feed,” he said. He snagged a bucket from a hook and grabbed a scoop from a burlap bag on the floor. He filled the bucket halfway from the bag— the special feed, I assumed— and then began stumbling toward the door.

I preceded him out. As I hoped, he simply pulled the door shut, without checking to make sure it was locked, so he didn’t notice that while he was filling the feed bag, I’d surreptitiously twisted the button on the inside of the doorknob to the unlocked position.

Instead of taking the path, he dived into the woods. Taking another, less visible path, I realized. I glanced at my watch and followed.

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