The April Fools' Day Murder

  PRAISE FOR LEE HARRIS

  AND HER CHRISTINE BENNETT MYSTERIES

  “An excellent series.”

  —Pittsburgh Tribune-Review

  “A not-to-miss series.”

  —Mystery Scene

  “Harris’s holiday series … a strong example of the suburban cozy.”

  —Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine

  “Another wonderful Christine Bennett mystery.”

  —MLB News

  A Fawcett Book

  Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

  Copyright © 2001 by Lee Harris

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Fawcett and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 00-108954

  eISBN: 978-0-307-56558-7

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Dedication

  Other Books by This Author

  The author wishes to thank Ana M. Soler

  and James L. V. Wegman for their

  usual help and support. I count on it but

  I never take it for granted.

  And a very special thanks to

  Carole Anne Nelson

  for the title.

  As much a fool as he was, he loved money, and knew how to keep it when he had it, and was wise enough to keep his own counsel.

  —CERVANTES

  Don Quixote

  1

  It was a particularly unpleasant March. It blew in like a lion and showed no signs of blowing out any other way. The trees and spring flowers that normally began blooming toward the end of the month remained bare. I cut several long branches of forsythia from the bushes in our backyard and put them in water in our living room and family room to force the flowers, checking daily for a hint of yellow.

  Eddie, who had turned three the previous November, had one cold after another, several of which I caught myself, and even Jack, who was rarely under the weather, came down with a debilitating flu at the end of February that kept him home for a few days at the beginning of March. A windstorm in the middle of the month brought down an old tree at the far end of our backyard, narrowly missing our garage. Observing the damage the next morning, I felt utterly drained. It would be a big job to cut it into pieces the right size for firewood or for the DPW to pick up at the curb.

  “I have had enough!” I said out loud to the cold air, the cloudy sky, and the still hard ground. But no one heard me.

  Eddie had been attending nursery school two mornings a week, probably the source of all the sniffles in the family, but during March he missed almost as many sessions as he went to. That meant I had to ask Elsie Rivers, my chief baby-sitter and surrogate grandmother, to come to our house while I taught my poetry course on Tuesday mornings.

  All in all, it wasn’t the best month of my life, and I had T. S. Eliot’s cruelest month to look forward to when March was over. Sometimes you just can’t win.

  It was in March that I ran into an Oakwood man I had heard of but never met, and I lived to regret that run-in. For run-in was what it was. I was in Prince’s, the upscale supermarket—we have two in our area, one ordinary, one carrying more exotic, and more expensive, items that I like to buy for treats. No chance this penny-pincher will ever take something off a shelf that costs ten cents more than I can pay in another place close to home.

  Jack, my lawyer-cop husband who is a fabulous cook, had asked me to pick up some oil-cured olives for a dish he was planning to make over the weekend, and I was staring at cans and jars of green, black, and dark red olives when I heard the sound of a small boy imitating a train or a race car. I wasn’t sure which, and I looked down to find my cart of groceries gone and my son zipping down the aisle pushing the cart at a dangerous level of speed.

  “Eddie, stop!” I called as I took off after him, holding a jar of what might be the olives I needed to buy.

  But I was too late to avoid disaster. I heard a male voice say, “Ow!” and then, a second or two later as I scampered on the scene, “What the hell do you think you’re doing?”

  Eddie had managed to smack the man in the rear, probably rather painfully, and my son now stood looking up at me, his hands behind his back as though the cart had simply taken off by itself, and a sympathetic onlooker, of which there were none, might generously conclude that he was in the process of stopping it when its victim got in the way.

  “I’m terribly sorry,” I said to the man, who looked enraged enough to do us both in. “Eddie, you are not to push the cart by yourself.”

  He fought back tears, which had no effect on either me or the man rubbing the back of his leg.

  “If you can’t control that kid, leave him home when you shop. He’s a goddamn menace.”

  “I’m very sorry,” I said again.

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it.” He then bent down and, to my utter chagrin, picked up a cane that had apparently been knocked out of his hand when the cart hit him.

  I felt terrible. “I hope you’re all right,” I said lamely, taking Eddie’s hand so he could not get away, not that he wanted to. “Can I help you? Is there anything I can do?”

  “Keep that kid away from me,” the man growled, taking hold of his cart and pushing it away from us.

  “Eddie, you hurt that man,” I said, lifting him and setting him in the child’s seat, where he should have been in the first place.

  “No.”

  “Yes, you did. You pushed the cart right into him and you hurt him.”

  “No!” he shouted.

  “Keep quiet. We’ll talk about it when we get home. I just need a few more things.”

  “You picked the wrong guy,” a woman’s voice said beside me.

  “What do you mean?” I turned to see a woman that I knew vaguely from church, or maybe the town council.

  “He growls if you pat him on the head. You’re lucky he just walked away.”

  “Who is he?”

  “That’s Willard Platt.”

  “I’ve heard the name.”

  “He and his wife live over in Oakwood on the hill, a big house set way back from the road.”

  I knew the one she meant. My aunt had pointed it out many years ago when I was still a nun and came to visit monthly. It was a beautiful home, although somewhat forbidding in its setting, larger than I could ever imagine living in myself and, frankly, not the kind of place I would send my child to trick or treat on Halloween. “Well, my son has left him black and blue. I notice he walks with a cane. I really feel terrible.”

  “He probably won’t do anything, but he’s init
iated some pesty lawsuits.”

  “That’s all I need,” I said.

  “Have a nice day,” the woman said breezily and went down toward the other end of the aisle.

  I finished my shopping, got in the express line, and checked out. It was late in the afternoon and cold. I pulled Eddie’s hood over his head and tied the cord. He was very docile, sensing my anger. I pushed the cart through the automatic door and turned toward where I had parked my car. As I crossed the car lane that ran in front of the store, I saw someone standing next to a car parked about twenty feet from us. I stopped and looked. It was Willard Platt, cane in hand, watching us. My heart pounding, I went to our car, which was quite close, got Eddie in his car seat and the bag of groceries in the front seat, and went around to my side. I glanced at Platt just before I sat down. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought he was writing something down.

  Although I am approaching my mid-thirties, lawsuits and upscale supermarket shopping and children have entered my life only in the last few years. At the age of fifteen I went to live at St. Stephen’s Convent on the Hudson River north of New York’s northern suburbs, and it was my home for fifteen years. I was a nun for many of those years, released from my vows and leaving at the age of thirty to live a secular life in the house I inherited from my Aunt Margaret. The house is now expanded, both in additions and in family, and my own life is very different from those years as a nun, years that I cherish. I am a suburban homeowner, part-time teacher, and full-time wife and mother, all things that bring pleasure to my life, except when they entail collisions at Prince’s.

  “It was my fault,” I told Jack when we were having dinner later on. Eddie had eaten, taken a bath, and gone to bed. I had let him know I was angry and that he’d hurt someone and that I never wanted him to do that again. “I let him run around, I took my eyes off him—” I shook my head. “I hope that man wasn’t hurt.”

  “You handled it as best you could, Chris. Eddie knows he shouldn’t have done it. Don’t beat yourself up.”

  “Does the name Willard Platt mean anything to you?”

  “Platt? I don’t think so.”

  “You know the big house up on the hill? The one set way back from the road? Probably dates back to the Fifties.”

  “Sure. It’s not far from Vitale’s Nursery, where we bought the annuals last spring.”

  “That’s the one. He and his wife live there.”

  “Oh, that guy. I think he has a permanent gripe against humanity.”

  “What have you heard?”

  “Well, he doesn’t exactly eat little children for dinner but he’s a general pain in the ass. Made it hard for the town when they wanted to upgrade the sewer over there and had to dig up part of the road. Insisted they post a tremendous bond and do some landscaping on his property that the town should never have paid for. Look, it takes all kinds.”

  “I expect he’s in pain. He uses a cane—which our son knocked out of his hand—and when you’re in pain, it’s hard to be bright and smiley.”

  Jack gave me a look. “Relax,” he said. “Knowing you, I bet you were nicer to him than anyone else has been for a long time. By the way, did you get those oil-cured olives for me?”

  I laughed. Jack always knows what’s important in life. “I did, and they were the cause of the trouble. I was looking over the olive shelf—did you know how many kinds of olives there are?—when Eddie took off with the cart. But I got the olives. What’re you going to do with them?”

  “It’s a great-sounding dish: fresh tuna, pasta, those olives, and tomatoes. Maybe some capers in there—I don’t remember. I can’t wait for the weekend.”

  “It’ll be here soon enough. I’ll be glad to see the last of March.”

  As it happened, the last of March was Friday. It snowed in the morning and the wind blew so hard that small drifts formed on the lawns. They were rather pretty, very smooth, almost like sculptures, starting from nothing and rising in little hills, showing the direction of the wind. But as aesthetically pleasing as they were, I longed for warmer weather and less wind.

  I was doing some word processing for my friend Arnold Gold, the lawyer, and happily Eddie took a good nap after lunch. He had become occasionally irritable about naps lately, thinking he was missing something while he slept, and I knew these quiet afternoons would run their course in the next year or sooner. I was able to finish a major section of my work before I heard him stir, so I closed down my work and looked in his room. He had been sleeping in a bed since his third birthday, a metal rail protecting him on one side, the wall on the other.

  “Want to go out?” I asked as I helped him out of the bed.

  “OK.”

  “I want to buy some peat pots for my seedlings,” I said. “Peep pots?” he asked, sounding confused. “Peat pots. They’re little pots for my tomato and pepper plants.”

  “OK.”

  He put his shoes on and I tied the laces. Then we bundled up and went out to the car. I drove to the nursery that was near the Platt house and picked up a bunch of peat pots and some good potting soil. I was a little ahead of myself, having just planted the seeds on St. Patrick’s Day. The delicate seedlings were barely up and hadn’t formed any true leaves yet, but I wanted the pots handy for when I needed them. Eddie behaved admirably, helping to carry some of the small packages I accumulated. The woman who checked me out gave him a lollipop, so he was in a fine mood as we went out to the car.

  The nursery was on a hill, starting near Oakwood Avenue at the bottom and going up the slope from there. They stocked some wonderful things, and I knew if I was ever left there with a lot of money, I would have no trouble spending it. I’d had my eye on a beautiful Japanese split-leaf maple that just dazzled me. The entrance to the nursery was at the highest point, where there was a kind of plateau on which the shop and the parking lot had been built. I drove out the exit lane and then, on a lark, turned up the hill instead of down. In a moment we were driving by the Platt house.

  I slowed down to a stop. “Look at that big house, Eddie.”

  He peered out the window. One house was just the same as all the others to him.

  I drove up to the end of the road, turned in the little cul-de-sac, and started down. The plantings on the Platt property were striking, as were the trees. They showed more thought and care than we had used on our own piece of land. No one was about, and I sat for a moment, just looking, until Eddie called from the backseat. “I wanna go home.”

  “OK, we’re on our way.”

  I turned the heat up when we got home, and Eddie and I put the peat pots and soil in the broom closet. Then we inspected my seedlings. They didn’t look like much but they held a lot of promise, and that, I thought philosophically, was what life was all about.

  2

  On Saturday morning I awoke to find Jack’s side of the bed empty, which didn’t surprise me. He was a pretty early riser and he enjoyed giving Eddie breakfast on weekend mornings and then fixing something for the two of us.

  I went downstairs and into the kitchen. No one was there. I looked into the large family room we built onto the back of the house, but no one was there either.

  “Jack?” I called. “Eddie?”

  No answer. No one was in the living room or dining room, so I went back upstairs and looked in Eddie’s room. It was empty. So was the room we used as a study. As I was inspecting those rooms, I thought I heard a sound and I called again, but there was no answer. I glanced in our bedroom but no one was there. Feeling as though there was something I was missing, I went downstairs again. This time, although no one was in the kitchen, there was a box on the table. It was tied with a large pink bow.

  “Am I supposed to open this?” I asked the empty kitchen.

  No answer.

  “Then I will.”

  I pulled off the ribbon, lifted the lid, and started feeling my way through the tissue paper. I took out piece after piece, but found nothing. Finally, I pulled out the last piece on the bottom and there, writ
ten on the bottom of the box in thick red letters, were the words: APRIL FOOL!

  “Oh,” I said. “You guys are too much. Where are you?”

  At that moment, my husband and my son dashed out of the family room shouting “April Fool” at the top of their lungs.

  “You two are really something. Where have you been hiding?”

  “We tricked you,” Eddie said, laughing gleefully. “You sure did. I wish I’d thought of tricking you too.”

  “Admit it,” Jack said. “This is one area we excel in. Don’t even try to compete.”

  I didn’t bother trying. I did a little thinking back to when I was a child and kind of remembered that my father had been a bit of a prankster. He had never given me a box empty except for tissue paper, but he had told me things that were unbelievable—which I almost believed since they came from my father—and then shouted the two magic words before I became too concerned. Although almost thirty years had passed since those days, it seemed I was still in the position of being the one surprised. Something to think about.

  Jack and Eddie went out a little while later, as they often did on Saturdays, and I spent some time enjoying being home all by myself. There is something magical about being in a house alone. I love the silence, the feeling that no one has a claim on my attention and my time. I use those infrequent hours to good effect; I do the word processing for Arnold Gold, I read, I prepare for the course I have been teaching at a local college. This morning I just tidied up, checked my seedlings, made sure my kitchen was stocked, and then sat down with the Times.

  The guys were back by lunchtime, no surprise there, and Eddie decided to take a nap after he ate, having had a busy morning out with his father after playing a prank on his mother. I came downstairs after getting him into bed and found Jack working on the kitchen faucet, which had been dripping for the last week.

  “I got a kit at the hardware store,” he said. “I think this’ll do it for a year or so.”

  “That’s great. I thought I’d go back to the nursery and have a look at those Japanese split-leaf maples we talked about. I think they’re awfully expensive but—”