At least I assumed he did. I toyed briefly with the notion of Dad going off the deep end and trying to frame Jake for his late wife's murder so he could get Mother back. And then disposing of Mrs. Grover when she found out his plot.
Or Mother, knocking off Mrs. Wendell in order to get her hands on Jake, and then doing away with the suspicious Mrs. Grover who called her a blond hussy and tried to stop the marriage.
I sighed. Dad couldn't possibly carry off such a scheme; he'd have been visibly bursting with enthusiasm and would have dropped what he thought were indecipherable hints to all and sundry. Mother would never have done anything that required that much effort; she'd have tried to enlist someone else to do it for her.
No, I couldn't see either parent as a murderer. But then, I was a biased witness. For that matter, like most children, I had a hard time seeing my parents as sexual beings, despite the evidence of Pam, Rob, and myself. Perhaps I was missing all the telltale signs of a passionate geriatric love triangle being played out in front of my nose.
I glanced over at suspect number one. She was looking at me with a faint frown of genuine concern on her face.
"Are you all right, Meg?" she asked.
"A little tired," I lied. "The weather, I'm sure."
"Perhaps you should stay here this afternoon, where it's cooler. Jake and I are going over to have tea with Mrs. Fenniman, so you'll have some quiet. Or you could come with us; Mrs. Fenniman's air-conditioning is working."
I was touched by her concern, but realized in that instant that I had other plans for the afternoon.
"No, I have a few things to do." With Jake and Mother safely out of the way, I was going to play detective. After all, if Dad could do it, why not me?
I waited until Mother and Jake took off. Then I grabbed an unfamiliar-looking dish--one that I could plausibly claim I had mistaken for something of Jake's--and trotted over to his house. Quite openly; just one neighbor returning another's pie plate.
I knocked, in case someone was there. Then I reached out, heart pounding, to open the door.
Which was locked. Unheard of. People in Yorktown don't lock their doors.
Searching Jake's house was going to be a little harder than I thought. I wandered around to the back door, calling "yoo-hoo" very quietly. The back door was locked, too.
But he'd left the window by the back door open.
I had pried open the screen and was halfway in the window when I heard a voice behind me.
"Lost your key?"
I started, hitting my head on the window frame, and turned to find Michael behind me. Holding Spike's leash.
"I know what this looks like," I began, turning to look over my shoulder and lifting the tips of my sneakers out of Spike's reach.
"To me, it looks very much as if you've been reading too many of the same books your dad has. And why Jake? Isn't he the one local who's not a suspect? Or is this only one in a series of clandestine searches?"
"He's not a suspect, but he has a whole roomful of the victim's stuff. I want to see Mrs. Grover's stuff."
"Surely the sheriff took any important evidence?"
"The sheriff wouldn't know important evidence if it walked into his office and introduced itself. Look, either call the cops or go away; I'm getting very uncomfortable hanging half-in and half-out of this window."
"I have a better idea," Michael said. "I'll give you a cover story. Here." He picked up Spike and, before the little beast could react, tossed him over my leg into the house. Spike shook himself, looked around, and then ran out of sight, growling all the way.
"You were helping me retrieve Spike," Michael said, offering me a leg up and then jumping nimbly in after me. "Don't ask how he got into Mr. Wendell's house. The place obviously needs to be vermin-proofed."
Now that I'd succeeded in getting in, I felt temporarily disoriented. I had a whole house to search, and I had no idea what I was looking for.
Of course there wasn't that much to search. It was a rather bare house. There seemed to be even less furniture and fewer decorations than the last time I'd seen it, just after Mrs. Grover disappeared. I reached under the sink and fortunately found a pair of kitchen gloves.
"Here," I said, handing them to Michael. "You wear these. I brought my own."
"So where do we start?" he asked, following me from the kitchen into the living room.
"I'll look in the guest room," I said, more decisively than I felt. "You search his desk."
"What am I looking for?"
"How should I know? Discrepancies. Anomalies. The missing will. Blunt objects still bearing telltale traces of hair and blood. We're working blind here."
Michael chuckled and sat down at Jake's desk. He began deftly rummaging through the desk, whistling "Secret Agent Man" almost inaudibly.