Murder in Wonderland
MURDER in WONDERLAND
Allie Griffin Mysteries, Book 1
L E S L I E L E I G H
Copyright © 2015
Published by: Rascal Hearts
All Rights Reserved
. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.
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Table of Contents
It was the knot in the wood of the old oak table that started it all. It looked like a bulging eye. It wasn't that big; her thumb could just about cover it. But it was unseemly, this accusing eye like some perverted peeping Tom ogling her from under the table. She'd kept a trivet there on other days. Today she needed that trivet for the all-important teapot. And that meant it had to move just off the center of the table. And that meant exposing the eye. And no matter how she experimented with the placement of the basket that would hold the scones, or the one for the cookies ("Fancy a biscuit?"), or the fancy sugar cellar with the old apothecary look to it that she'd gotten on eBay for a steal, the eye was there, peeking through, unblinking,
leering
.
Hell of a time to have to run out for a tablecloth.
Allie Griffin glanced at the clock. 9:30. Ok. If she threw on a baseball cap and sunglasses, and brushed the cat hair off her sweatshirt, she might actually look like some poor slob's idea of semi-presentable.
The cat!
"
Ou est ma chatte
?" she exclaimed, never one to miss an opportunity for a well-placed quote from Mr. Dodgson's masterpiece.
Ten-year-old Dinah, her mixed-breed tabby, was splayed out over the arm of the couch like one of those pocketed aprons you drape there to store remotes.
Dinah was diabetic and required a dose of insulin twice a day—one in the morning, one at night, exactly twelve hours apart. Allie was supposed to have given it to her an hour ago.
"Oh, Dinah," she started to say, forbidding herself the addition of "you poor baby" for fear that her frustration with the feline might give way to empathy.
She was a whiz at this now: holding the ampule steady as she plunged the needle in, withdrew it and flicked it gently to dislodge any air bubbles. Just a quick shot in the scruff of the neck and it was over. The cat didn't flinch. She nudged it once. Twice. The animal picked its head up groggily, then without any cues discernible to the non-cat-owner, pronounced Allie unworthy of attention and dropped its head back onto its paw.
Tablecloths, tablecloths.
Shortly after Tom passed away, she'd found herself giving away things they'd acquired together. It was as if by shedding bits of their shared life she was, in essence, shedding a skin that was dried out and dying.
Where to buy a tablecloth?
The closet that for years had held their fine linens had long ago been converted to a repository for Things Without A Home. Opening that closet was like opening the door to some secret shadow government hangar; you never knew what you would find, and you almost didn’t want to know.
She donned her sunglasses and her baseball cap (University of Vermont—go Catamounts!) and trudged out into the scathing morning air.
It was a cold March in Verdenier. Everywhere in Vermont was cold. There had been a late thaw and the sap wasn't flowing on time. It seemed everyone all around her had some sort of crises at hand. The ups and downs of the maple syrup industry had never affected her or anyone she knew in any way, and so she could never understand what the big deal was if the sap flowed sooner or later. Come June there was always syrup. Come September there were always leaf peepers driving through to buy up the stuff by the metric ton.
The road to the center of town was blocked by a combine. The thing slumped along at a snail's pace as she tapped anxiously on the wheel, the beat to some tune she didn't know, the tapping gradually becoming more frantic with every limping inch they went. No use honking the horn. Green Street was lined with trees. There was no direction for the driver to go until he reached his destination.
All she could think of was the book club arriving before she was ready for them. She imagined them gathered outside in the driveway, milling about like picketers, and her pulling up in sweats and a cap, looking like a mobster's wife avoiding the press with a tablecloth under her arm. And then they'd walk into her house and there'd be cat vomit on the rug. Or Dinah would be sitting on the table, nodding off, her chin resting on the creamer and her bushy tail whipping at the butter dish.
She looked in her rearview mirror and saw a million-wheeled caterpillar stretching into the horizon behind her. Finally, Farmer Brown turned off into his field.
Ladies and gentleman, I give you the only citizen in this Godforsaken town without a sense of urgency
. Oh, to be that carefree at the moment.
She made it to the Walgreens in the center of town. Center of town? Wherever you were in Verdenier was the center of town. Verdenier had no edges.
Polyurethane? Really? Was that her only option at this late hour?
How could she have been so myopic not to have seen that the bulging, ogling eye would be the unseemly blemish on an otherwise perfect occasion?
That smell. That plasticky, polyurethane smell; and what was with that armhair-prickling static that you always got from polyurethane? That would be the highlight of the book club meeting. She imagined the Burlington Free Press headline: Three Dead from Tablecloth Asphyxiation in Book Club Catastrophe. Subheading: Static Electrocution Sends Two To Hospital.
"Are there any of these that don't, you know, reek?" she asked the clerk, a slack-jawed teenager spending his Saturdays as the envy of all his friends.
"What?"
"Do you have any linen tablecloths? Or tablecloths that are, you know, cloth? Not plastic?"
"Umm..." a trace of a smile appeared in the corner of his face. "This is, like, Walgreens?"
She made a sound like a sigh that was supposed to be a grunt. "Never mind."
"You know you got marker on your face?" He pointed with a bent finger.
No.
No. Please, God, no.
She took out her phone and stared at the dark screen. Then she said a word that her sister had told her time and time again not to use around her niece because the little girl had repeated that word to the pastor. She licked the back of her thumb frantically and rubbed it for all it was worth over the smudge on her face.
She said the
word
again. The
word
ing calligraphy marker she
word
ing used for the
word
ing sign. She had the mother
word
ing thing in her
word
ing hand when she
word
ing scratched her cheek or something.
Word
.
She wound up buying the polyurethane tablecloth. It was better than paper. Perhaps the smell of freshly warmed scones would mask the smell.
This book club meeting had to come off without a hitch.
Allie Griffin wanted to be the Martha Stewart of this half-a-horse town. Hosting the club in her home instead of down at the bookstore was a shrewd bit of planning on her part. A veritable coup d'état calculated to establish her as the epicenter of the Verdenier elite. And it had worked. The buzz around town was that if you had been invited to Allie Griffin's literary soirée, you were in. You meant something. No general admission to some generic bookstore event here. Sure, she'd hosted plenty of those. This was going to be different. This was...exclusive.
Of course, exclusive was just a word. Devious scheming meant she had to invite a couple of folks she would have given anything to exclude. How else could she expect to corner the social market if she didn't invite her competitors and lord her superlative hosting prowess over their heads?
Like Tori Cardinal, for instance.
Victoria Cardinal was a born socialite. Blessed with the proverbial gift of gab and a flair for the refined gesture to the point where she could make blowing her nose look like a royal flourish, Tori Cardinal was an exercise in paradox: her personality had none of the charm for which her physical attributes were suited. That gift of gab fueled torrents of venom that spewed freely, searing through flesh and bone wherever it touched. Her refined gestures often took the form of a wave of the hand to dismiss anyone who wasn't up to her standards—which was pretty much everyone.
But Tori Cardinal had money. Lots of it. She wore it in her hair, on her wrist and in every place that caught the sun. There's a certain power that kind of wealth has over certain types, types who will put up with any kind of cruelty just so long as it pays off once in a while—like a slot machine or a six-month stint of one-night-stands.
Allie Griffin wasn't wealthy by anyone's standards. Her husband's pension and wise investments kept her heat on and her meals regular. Above all, it allowed her time, which was more precious to her than all the meals and working heaters in the world. Meals and heat could be recovered. Money could be made. Time, on the other hand, was as ephemeral as a spent breath.
Finally she was at home with her polyurethane tablecloth. She spread the reeking thing out over the table, obscuring the offensive eye. She smoothed it out and heard the tiny applause of thousands of static electricity gnats underneath her hand. She took a cleansing breath. One, two, three...
Scones were in the oven on warm. Their cinnamon scent perfumed the kitchen quickly, then timidly tested the rest of the rooms before boldly asserting itself through the entire house. Allie noticed it as soon as she emerged from the shower. Breathing it in was like inhaling the exhaust of Paradise.
Hair done. Makeup done. All dressed but for a shirt. One more task at hand.
Dinah was splayed across the floor. She hefted all 22 pounds of the kitty over her shoulder and marched it into the bedroom. She plopped it down on the bed, where the cat oriented itself for a moment before succumbing to gravity and passing out cold again. Now the shirt—neat and fashionably casual and one hundred percent free of cat hair.
Deep breaths. Seven people arriving at any moment.
No marker on the face. Check. Scones in the oven. Check. The tablescape looking like something the Mad Hatter himself would be proud to preside over. Check. Her favorite accoutrement: A set of teacups, each one individually etched with a different character from the story, in the original illustrations by Sir John Tenniel. Double check.
"Oh my ears and whiskers, how late it's getting!" she said with a triumphant smile.
Her mother had read her the book when she was just old enough to understand human language. Many of the jokes, if not all of them, were lost on her. Lewis Carroll—or Mr. Dodgson, as Allie preferred to call him, showing respect for the man as well as his real name—had penned a children's story that was as multilayered as a mouthful of fine tea. Subsequent readings of
Alice in Wonderland
never failed to reveal something new in the text. Like little surprises in a never-ending series of Russian dolls, new discoveries lay within each rereading of the book. She delighted in each new pun or piece of wordplay as her own little brain grew ever more primed to notice it. On those first reading sessions with her mother, she had mistakenly heard the title as "Allison Wonderland.” How wonderful, she thought, that the title of this perfect book should contain part of her own name. Wonderland was hers.
The truth revealed itself soon enough: "Allison Wonderland" was
Alice in Wonderland
—or more accurately,
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
—and Alice was not short for Allison after all. But every once in a while, well on into adulthood, she preferred to hear the spoken title in its original, misheard form.
Her little secret then, in choosing
this
book for her big book club extravaganza, was not that this year marked the 150th anniversary of its publication—although it did—but that for Allie Griffin, it was
all
about the book. She almost didn't choose it, for fear that something so dear from her childhood might be tainted forever by the social politics of adulthood. But as it turned out, this book was the best thing about the whole enterprise.
This she mused upon while waiting for the group to arrive, wringing her hands and pacing. And arrive they did, almost piling onto one another in the doorway. This was a prompt group, after all. No fashionable lateness here.
Except for Tori Cardinal.
Of course she would be late. One needs an audience to make an entrance.
Allie greeted the rest of the guests in succession. She felt as phony as a flight attendant. Big smile. Singsong voice.
Rachel Forrester came in first. She put her cheek to Allie's and kissed the air around her earlobe.
"Mmm, it smells like a gingerbread house in here," she said, misidentifying the aroma by a mile. It was the kind of mistake Allie herself would make. She saw a kindred spirit in Rachel, as the two of them danced around each other constantly, afraid to let down their respective guards for fear that they might reveal similar cuts from matching cloths underneath.
Next was June Brody. June was dark and mysterious and never smiled but for a slight hinge in the left-hand corner of her mouth. She kept her head tilted down slightly and her pupils rolled to the top of her eyes, as if she scrutinized the world through invisible granny glasses.
Then came Jenny and Jill, the identical Metzger twins. Allie could never tell them apart and doubted whether anyone on earth could. Not that they looked all that similar. It was just that the blandness of their personalities seemed to smear together into one gray, formless mass between them. One of them, either Jill or Jenny, wore glasses. There had to be some sort of Mnemonic she could create to remember which was which based on that distinguishing feature alone.
Next in was Delaney Collins, which meant that not too far behind was Ben Sokol. Del Collins and Ben Sokol were often joined at the hip, and would have given every impression that they were married were it not for the fact that Ben was openly gay.
Del took Allie's hand in princess fashion—by the fingers only. "Hoi dawl," she said in mock Long Islandese. "Yaw lookin' fabulous." Del, ever the aspiring star, was an essential component to any social gathering. Always on, always performing, she was welcome filler for dead air at any given time.
Ben, Del's partner in crime, came in last and kissed Allie full on the cheek. "Greetings, skinny."
"I love you," Allie said.
Ben eyed her to her toes. "No, seriously, where the hell are you under there?"
"Stop it, you’re killing me."
"Stop? Are you sure?"
"Ok, don't stop," she said coyly.
"Com'ere, my honey." Ben leaned in, put his cheek to hers, and whispered softly, "Sweetheart, you have a booger in your nose."
With a nearly audible gasp, she threw her hand over her nose and swung around 180 degrees in search of anything resembling a tissue. The rest of the guests were milling about in the living room. Brushing past them, as if to put out a fire in the kitchen, she went and tore a swatch of paper towel from the roll beside the sink.