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.

—C
ERVANTES
    
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 initiated 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.