"And a little more than two weeks after that, we're all nearly blown up by a bomb, just before you and a dozen other women are made severely ill by what appears to have been poison that may have been deliberately placed in a bowl of one of your dad's favorite foods."
"Thank God for the bomb. All the rest could possibly be accidents, although the number of accidents is beginning to make even the sheriff suspicious. But there's no way to argue with that bomb."
"True; I think about it whenever I'm tempted to doubt your dad."
"And shortly afterward, a harmless neighborhood layabout is killed in what again may have been sabotage, and again the more logical target would have been Dad."
"And now today your father has a car wreck that he thinks may have been due to sabotage. So maybe the big question is, who is trying to kill your father, and why?"
"Either he knows something or the killer is afraid he'll find something out," I said. "Dad's the one who kept the sheriff and the coroner from declaring Mrs. Grover's death an accident. Dad's the one who points out the suspicious side of all these so-called accidents. Dad keeps turning over stones, and maybe the killer is afraid he'll eventually find something."
"If that's the case, it all goes back to Mrs. Grover. If we figure out who killed her, we know who's trying to kill your dad."
"Or, conversely, if we figure out who's trying to kill Dad, we'll know who did in Mrs. Grover." We rode a while in silence, no doubt both trying to come up with a plausible suspect.
"Maybe I'm too close to this," I said with a sigh. "I can think of dozens of people who would have been capable of doing all this, but I can't for the life of me see why any of them would want to kill Mrs. Grover. And I have a hard time seeing most of them as cold-blooded murderers."
"Is there anyone you can see as a murderer?" Michael asked.
"Samantha," I said, only half joking. "I can see her killing anyone who seriously inconvenienced her. I certainly go out of my way to avoid crossing her."
"I can see that. But what could Samantha have against Mrs. Grover? Granted, Mrs. Grover was a supremely irritating person, but that's hardly grounds for murder."
"They had some kind of small run-in at the Donleavys' picnic. But then who didn't? I know I did."
"So did I," Michael said.
"Maybe she knew something damaging about Samantha. Although I can't imagine what. She was here less than a week before she died. Even Mother would have difficulty unearthing any juicy skeletons after only five days in a strange city."
"Maybe it was something she knew about Samantha before she came here," Michael said. "I seem to recall being an object of mild suspicion myself because she knew my mother from Fort Lauderdale. Was Samantha originally from Florida?"
"No, but her fiance was. The one before Rob."
"The bank robber?"
"Embezzler. But that was Miami, not Fort Lauderdale."
"It's the same thing," Michael said. "All part of the same metropolitan area. Like Manhattan and Brooklyn."
"Is it?" I said. "Geography was never my strong point. So they both had ties to the Miami/Fort Lauderdale area."
"Samantha through her shady former fiance," Michael expanded. "This is much more promising."
"If I remember correctly, the fiance claimed his partner had gotten all the money, and the partner claimed that the fiance had gotten the lion's share."
"Wouldn't it be funny if Samantha'd somehow gotten her claws into most of the loot? Played both of them against each other and made off with the loot under their greedy noses?"
"It's probably beastly of me, but I can definitely imagine Samantha doing it. Or killing, for enough money," I said. "And the estimates of how much they milked out of their clients range between ten and fifteen million dollars."
Michael whistled. "There's a motive to be reckoned with. But do you really think she'd try to kill her future father-in-law to keep it quiet?"
"She's never much liked Dad," I said. "And besides, I can also see her disposing of anyone who tried to get in her way about the wedding."
"What, has your dad tried to butt in on the wedding? Insisted on a nonpoisonous wedding bouquet, perhaps?"
"She's probably overheard him trying to talk Rob out of marrying her. I know I have. And come to think of it, even if she didn't hear him talking to Rob, I know for a fact that at the picnic she overheard him tell me he thought the marriage was a bad idea and he was going to keep trying to talk Rob out of it."
"Oh," Michael said.
"You can see how she might resent that."