The Marsh Madness by Victoria Abbott

Author:Victoria Abbott [Abbott, Victoria]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2015-09-01T06:00:00+00:00

* * *

AS PART OF the pretense of being normal, Vera and I ate a distracted dinner in the dining room. Vera could barely manage a grunt. I wondered if she’d ever get over what she called “the theft of my books.” The signora was feeling the stress too. The muddy floor was probably part of it. She forgot to bring Parmesan cheese for the pasta and was really rattled when I offered to get it.

“Let things be,” Vera growled, the only words she spoke all through dinner.

That should have prepared me for the discovery that the signora had forgotten to make the tiramisu.

Things went from bad to worse. Good Cat and Bad Cat prowled, both restless and unpredictable. Bad Cat managed to nick one of my knees. And I may have even heard a muffled ouch from Vera.

Walter was the only cheerful one of the bunch. Unlike us, he wasn’t waiting for the police to show up and arrest Vera and me. He was waiting for tidbits to fall in his vicinity.

In the meantime, in case we weren’t planning to stay home and forget about everything, Castellano hadn’t taken any chances.

There was a fresh new officer in a parked cruiser outside the front of Van Alst House. They’d stopped trying to fool us with unmarked police vehicles. I didn’t know this guy, and as I’d spent altogether too much time with the police, I wasn’t crazy about getting to know him, but I was pressed into service. The signora—once she decided that he was only a victim of circumstance—had sent me on several forays with thermoses of very good coffee, buckets of almond cookies and, on my last errand, a large and very smelly sandwich of Genoa salami and Asiago cheese on ciabatta. I knew she’d be wringing her hands and dancing her little dance while she waited for me at the back door. She seemed to have a mandate to feed the world.

I didn’t need to distract the police, but it seemed like a good idea to keep on this guy’s good side. It took a while to wear down his initial truculence—we were under surveillance, after all—but he mellowed as the evening wore on. I kind of felt sorry for him. We’d invited him to wait inside a couple of times. I suggested he’d have a better chance of making sure we didn’t leg it. But apparently protocol meant he had to freeze in his vehicle, even though nothing really prevented me from skulking out the back door, then dashing through the trees and over the fields. In the resulting confusion, Vera and the signora could have vanished in the Cadillac.

I paced around, restless. My special place still bore the signs of the invasion of the snoopy police. It took quite a while to get it back to normal, as much as anything could be normal. I decided I’d have to wash my police-tossed unmentionables and made a trip down to the first-floor utility area with my laundry basket.

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