"Nearly everyone who comes into the shop wants to hear all about it," he went on. "And a lot of people are coming in on remarkably flimsy pretexts."
"That's small-town life for you."
"Seems to have driven Mrs. Grover's death quite out of everyone's head. I haven't mentioned your dad's suspicion that the fuse box might have been tampered with, of course."
"Of course," I said. "Too bad the distraction is likely to be temporary. People were starting to get hysterical about the idea that a murderer could be running around loose, so if it weren't for Mr. Price's close call, I'd have called the fuse box incident a lucky thing."
"It was certainly a lucky thing for Mr. Price your dad showed up when he did."
"And lucky for Dad that he didn't show up earlier," I added. "If he had, he'd have been the one who was electrocuted, and there wouldn't have been a doctor around to revive him."
"Where was he all day, anyway?"
"In Richmond, at the medical examiner's office. He announced at dinner the night before that he was going next week to try to get some more definite action on Mrs. Grover's case. And then, as usual, he changed his mind on impulse and decided to take off the next morning."
"Had he talked to the medical examiner's office before?"
"On the phone. But he seemed to think he wasn't going to get anywhere unless he went down and kicked up a fuss in person. He also seems to think he has some evidence the ME hasn't really seen."
"The sandbag graphs, perhaps," Michael said. "And the results of the milk jug flotilla. I can't wait to see if the fuse box really was sabotaged."
"Perhaps it's my overactive imagination. But it has occurred to me to wonder if it's really an accident that this happened the day after he went around announcing to the immediate world that he was going to see the ME about Mrs. Grover's death."
"If I were your dad, I'd watch my back," Michael said. "As a matter of fact, I intend to watch my own back. I tried to talk your mother into letting me mess with the fuse box, remember?"
Saturday, June 18
Things were quiet. Too quiet, as they say in the movies. The local grapevine still didn't see the connection between Mrs. Grover's death and the fuse box incident, and none of us who did felt like setting off panic by mentioning the possibility. I wished I didn't see a connection. I felt as if I were waiting for the other shoe to drop, but had no idea whether the shoe would be another murder or another explosion or merely another catastrophic change in one of the brides' plans. I tried to avoid looking over my shoulder every thirty seconds as I sat in the quiet, airless house all day, writing notes and calling caterers and florists and the calligrapher who had had Samantha's invitations for quite some time now. Of course, everybody in town and in both families already knew who was invited; the invitations were just a formality. But a necessary one, in Samantha's eyes.
"What on earth do you think could have happened to Mrs. Thornhill," I fumed to Dad when he dropped by in the evening to tell me the good news that he had finally located a substitute electrician to replace the fuse box. The bad news, of course, was that the electrician wasn't coming by until sometime Monday. I didn't plan on holding my breath.
"Why, who's Mrs. Thornhill?" Dad asked, looking startled. "And why do you think something may have happened to her?"
"The calligrapher who's holding Samantha's invitations hostage, remember? I can only guess that something must have happened to her. She hasn't answered any of my calls, and believe me, I've had plenty of time to call. We are now seriously overdue mailing out those damned invitations."
"But you don't know that anything's happened?"
"No. Good grief, I'm not suggesting she's another murder victim. Although wasn't there a story in the Arabian Nights where the wicked king was killed because someone knew he licked his finger to turn the pages when he read and gave him a book with poison on all the pages? Maybe we should interrogate the printers; maybe they were intending to poison Samantha and accidentally bumped off Mrs. Thornhill."
"I know you think this is ridiculous, Meg," Dad said, with a sigh. He took off his glasses to rub his eyes, and then began cleaning them with the tail of his shirt. Since this was the shirt he'd been gardening in all day, he wasn't producing much of an improvement. He looked tired and depressed and much older than usual.
"Here, drink your tea and let me do that," I said, grabbing a tissue and holding out my hand for the glasses. With uncharacteristic meekness, Dad handed over the glasses and leaned back to sip his tea.
"I don't think it's ridiculous," I went on, as I polished the glasses and wondered where he could possibly have gotten purple glitter paint on the lenses. "I'm just trying to keep my sense of humor in a trying situation."