The Good, the Bad, and the Emus(17)

“Where was it you thought you saw this ostrich?” Grandfather asked.

“Or emu,” Stanley said. “Out near Riverton.”

“Riverton?” Grandfather frowned as if the name rang a bell.

“That’s in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, isn’t it?” Dad asked. “Were you out there on your case?”

“Actually, I was,” Stanley said. “On Dr. Blake’s case.”

“My case?” Grandfather sat up, looking alert. “You were out there on my case? Why didn’t you say so earlier?”

“Because it was dinnertime when we got here,” I said. “And Mother always disapproves of talking business over dinner.”

“Thank you, dear,” Mother said.

There was also the fact that Grandfather had been a little testy when we first arrived, probably because he’d just spent several hours patiently answering questions from the boys, and we’d decided to wait until the meal had mellowed him. He was incredibly spry for a man in his nineties, but neither his legs nor his patience could take too much of the boys all at once.

“What’s the case?” Dad asked.

“I hired him to see if he could find any trace of your mother,” Grandfather said. “What were you doing up in Riverton?”

“That’s where Cordelia lived for the last twenty or so years of her life.”

“Lived?” Grandfather said. “Past tense? She’s dead?”

Stanley nodded.

That news cast a predictable pall on the gathering, and we all fell silent. No doubt the rest of the family were thinking the same gloomy thoughts that had come to me when I’d first learned that I’d lost my grandmother before ever having the chance to meet her. Stanley glanced around and evidently decided to give everyone some time to digest the news. He applied himself to the last bits of his meal.

Either everyone had finished eating or no one quite felt comfortable asking for seconds on potato salad quite so soon after hearing such bad news. The silence might have dragged on quite a bit longer if we hadn’t been startled out of it by sudden shrieks of alarm from the boys. They had been over by the chicken coop, throwing small handfuls of grain at the bantams, while Natalie hovered over them like a protective mother crow. One of the bantams had begun chasing the boys and pecking at their ankles. Natalie rescued them handily enough but Spike, our eight-and-a-half-pound furball, who had appointed himself the boys’ canine guardian angel, had counterattacked, and we all dashed over to save the chickens from Spike or possibly Spike from the chickens. By the time we’d separated all the combatants and soothed everyone’s ruffled feathers and feelings, the mood at the table had lightened a bit.

“Well, it’s sad,” Grandfather said. “But not surprising when you come to think of it. Slip of a girl like that—you can’t expect her to last as long as a tough old goat like me.”

“She lasted just fine until this past December,” Stanley said. “And she didn’t just fade away or anything of the sort—she was killed by a fire, and it may have been murder.”

“Murder!” Dad looked stricken. I felt guilty. He’d been so excited at the idea of helping Stanley with a case. And few things excited him more than the notion of getting involved in a real-life murder investigation. But if the victim was his own mother …

“According to her cousin,” Stanley said. He quickly sketched in what we’d learned about Cordelia’s death from Annabel and the Riverton Record.

“What did the local police have to say?” Grandfather asked.

“I haven’t talked to them yet,” Stanley said. “It seemed to go a little beyond the original scope of the case, and I wanted to make sure you were comfortable with my taking it in this direction.”

Grandfather was frowning, but before he could open his mouth, Dad spoke up.

“Comfortable with it! We insist on it!” Dad pounded his fist on the table.

“Yeah,” my brother, Rob, said, through a mouthful of watermelon. “You think we want someone to get away with knocking off my grandmother?”

“I agree,” I said. “And Stanley can probably also find out a lot of information about Cordelia. Her cousin Annabel is reclusive, but she knows a lot about Cordelia’s life, and she’s very interested in helping us solve the case.”

Stanley and I had agreed that it was better not to come right out and say that she was holding her information hostage to our solving the murder. That was the sort of thing that would set Grandfather off.

“Just think,” I went on. “Photos. Journals. Home movies. Genealogy files—apparently Cordelia’s mother was interested in that.”