The Buzzard Table - By Margaret Maron Page 0,4

landline first.

I immediately called Dwight, and after he got through fuming because I won’t keep my phone on 24/7, he got around to telling me what he had forgotten to tell me several days ago. “We’re supposed to go to Mrs. Lattimore’s for dinner tonight.”

“What?”

At least he had the grace to sound abashed. “Sorry, shug. Kate passed on the invitation last week, but things were sorta hectic that day. That arson case, then Cal’s molar. Remember all the blood?”

I did remember. Dwight and I contribute to the nanny that Kate and Rob hired to watch their own three. The oldest, Mary Pat, is in the same class as Cal, so he rides the school bus home with her every afternoon and Dwight usually picks him up because he gets off work earlier than I do. That molar hadn’t quite been ready to turn loose and Cal had grabbed an apple from the bowl of fresh fruit the nanny keeps for them. Two bites into it on the drive home and the molar tore free. In his determination not to swallow the thing, Cal had wound up with chunks of apple and bloody saliva down the front of his jacket, on his face and hands, and on the seat and armrest of Dwight’s truck before that tooth was found and securely wrapped in a tissue. At nine and a half, Cal’s not entirely sure there really is a tooth fairy, but he wasn’t going to take any chances of losing a potential moneymaker.

So yes, it was understandable that Dwight might have forgotten an invitation to dinner, especially to one that promised to be somewhat stiff and formal.

“Sigrid Harald’s down and her mother, too,” he told me. “I can understand why Mrs. Lattimore would want Kate and Rob to come, but why us?”

Why indeed?

Until age and cancer overtook her, Mrs. Lattimore had been a force in Cotton Grove, our nearest town, using her money and her family connections to get things done the way she wanted them done.

My mother and Mrs. Lattimore had been distant cousins, so distant that they were not in the same social circle, especially after Mother went and married “down,” choosing a disreputable bootlegging tobacco farmer with eight motherless little boys instead of a white-collar professional from further up the social scale.

Our homeplace is a much-added-onto structure that began as an old-fashioned four-over-four wooden farmhouse out in the country, surrounded by several hundred acres of rolling fields and scrub woodlands.

The Lattimore house is a three-story Victorian clapboard and shingled “cottage” with steeply pitched roofs, a turret or two, and extensive verandas. It sits on a large corner lot one block away from the town square. A life-size bronze deer stands amid head-high hydrangea bushes and stares moodily through the tall iron railings at the passing cars. Given the current price of scrap copper and brass, the Cotton Grove police chief keeps predicting that someone’s going to try and steal that deer one of these nights even though his office backs up to Mrs. Lattimore’s yard.

“I don’t want to be left looking like a fool,” he says gloomily.

“It’ll take a crane and flatbed to move that thing,” Dwight tells him. “I’m sure somebody would notice a crane.”

“You think?”

I’d never been inside the scrolled iron gates, but Mrs. Lattimore was related to Kate’s older son through Kate’s first husband, so her daughter and granddaughter had known Kate for years.

We had met that granddaughter a few weeks earlier when we finally took a honeymoon trip to New York and stayed in the apartment that Kate still owned. Upon hearing our plans, Mrs. Lattimore asked us to take along a small bronze sculpture that she wanted to be rid of, which was how we came to know Lieutenant Harald, a homicide detective with the New York City Police Department.

A careless word on my part had led to my having to tell Sigrid that her grandmother’s cancer had returned and that she was not expected to make it past spring.

Through Kate, I knew that Sigrid’s mother, Anne, had made a quick trip down the day after we got back ourselves. She’d been in New Zealand when we were in New York and Kate said she’d gotten off one plane and right onto another without even going home to change. Now she was evidently back in Cotton Grove again, and this time with Sigrid, whom we’d met after a killer used that bronze to smash in someone’s head.

Sigrid and Dwight had gotten along okay