Pudding Up With Murder Read online

  The television was off, but a man in a large red armchair sat staring at it with a rather blank expression. He took occasional sips from a fancy-looking drink on a table beside him. There was no one else in the room.

  “Marcus?” Ellie said. “Happy birthday!” She moved forward and touched his arm. “Thank you for inviting us to the party.”

  “Of course,” he said in a gruff voice as though he hadn’t spoken for a while. “And who is your friend?”

  “This is Lilah! She brought Mick, the dog I told you about.”

  The man’s face grew slightly animated. “How are you, boy?” he asked, talking to Mick.

  Mick obligingly moved forward and thrust his skull between the man’s knees. That earned a bark of laughter from Marcus Cantwell. He had a big lionlike head with a sheaf of white hair; I realized in a flash of insight that he reminded me of Andrew Jackson.

  Still not acknowledging me, Cantwell scratched Mick’s ears. “So you’re a special dog, are you? You can understand what people say to you?”

  To my relief, Mick nodded up at Cantwell, his doggy expression at its most earnest. Cantwell laughed again, and his face became human for the first time. “Excellent! What a wonderful dog. A Labrador. Terrific dog. I have a golden out there. A whole slew of dogs, big and small. Can’t resist ’em. Never could,” he said to Mick, massaging him with big hands. The pointer finger on his left hand was purple, as though he had hit it with a hammer. I wondered vaguely if he were a carpenter.

  I tried to make eye contact with Ellie, but she was gazing fondly at Cantwell and the dog. Didn’t she realize how weird this guy was?

  Suddenly Ellie remembered the pan in her hands. “I brought some rice pudding for the children, Marcus. I’m going to run it to the kitchen—I’ll be back in a jiff. Lilah can tell you all about Mick.”

  To my great dismay, she darted out of the room. Despite the vast number of people in Cantwell’s sunny yard, I was alone with the man in his echoing house, and he had yet to look me in the eye.

  I scanned the room, desperate to make conversation. “What a lovely place you have here,” I said. This got no response; perhaps he was deaf to clichés. “That piano in the corner looks like an antique—it’s beautiful.”

  “Hmm,” Cantwell said. I was half tempted to tell him how rude he was, but I thought of Ellie and refrained.

  “That’s quite a bruise you have on your finger there,” I said, gabbling out anything in my fear of silence. “My mother gets those sometimes—bursts a blood vessel. She looked it up once. It’s called Achenbach’s syndrome. I’ll probably get it someday, too—it’s hereditary.” I was shocked at the ridiculous topic of conversation I had chosen, but I felt a dull obligation to keep talking.

  Cantwell glanced at his finger, then shrugged. “Your dog is well trained,” he said in a startling non sequitur. It wasn’t even true; Mick was spoiled but innately nice.

  “Thanks. He’s a special boy.”

  “Yes,” said Cantwell, staring broodingly into Mick’s eyes. I wondered if he were on some sort of medication. His actions seemed weirdly delayed—even the movements of his hands in Mick’s fur—and the hands shook slightly. His sleeves were rolled up to the elbows, and I noticed a jagged scar on his left arm.

  “Oh my—that’s quite a scar! Is it from surgery?”

  “I’ve never had surgery,” Cantwell said. “This is nothing.”

  A warning voice in my brain said, Are you almost finished commenting on this man’s body?

  The room was horribly silent, and I stood there like an intruder. Talk about anything but his weird old fingers and the scary marks on his skin, Lilah. “Uh. So you like dogs. What’s, um, your favorite breed?”

  Cantwell cleared his throat, then spoke to Mick’s face. “Hmm. Hard to decide. I have a couple of purebreds out there and a couple of mutts. They’re all special in their own way.”

  I peered into the hall, hoping to see Ellie or anyone else. A solitary dog came trotting toward me. It was a beautiful corgi—all golden fur and no legs to speak of. It moved right past me—did everyone in this house ignore visitors?—and ran to Cantwell, pausing to sniff Mick and be sniffed in return.

  “This is Cleopatra,” Cantwell said. “She’s a spoiled miss.”

  “I understand you have quite a few children and grandchildren here today.”

  Cantwell could not have looked less interested. “A whole slew of them out there,” he said. “Take your pick.”

  “Don’t you want to go out and enjoy your party guests?” I asked. My tone was, perhaps, a bit judgmental.

  “Soon enough,” Cantwell said. He had turned to a side table and was rooting around in a drawer. He lifted out a digital camera. His eyes flicked to mine for the first time, and I raised my brows at him. “May I photograph your dog?” he asked.

  It was a weird question; I felt suddenly as though I’d walked back in time and Cantwell was someone from the nineteenth century who had never been schooled in etiquette for a hundred years later.

  “Yes, you may photograph him,” I intoned solemnly, wishing that I could videotape Cantwell’s weirdness to show to Jay. Then again, Jay had grown up in the house next door. Surely he would have encountered this strange man before. The thought was vaguely troubling, so I didn’t realize at first that Cantwell was saying something to me in his mumbling voice. “I’m sorry—what?” I asked.

  “I said Ellie is a good woman. I wish any one of my wives had been like her.”

  This was such a preposterous thing to say that I was utterly at a loss. He seemed to be expecting a response, so I answered with a non sequitur of my own. “Did anyone ever tell you that you resemble Andrew Jackson?”

  Cantwell’s dismayed expression brought me an unexpected feeling of satisfaction.

  • • •

  THE TRAITOR ELLIE eventually returned, and with a reproachful look in her direction I mumbled about needing to check something outside. I called Mick and escaped the dreary room where Cantwell stared at nothing.

  We had almost made it out the back door (surely I could tell Ellie I wasn’t feeling well and had to leave) when I ran into a young man—perhaps twenty or so—who stood clutching a handful of brownies and peering into the hall.

  “Hello,” I said, since I couldn’t pass him without acknowledging him.

  “Hey,” he said. “Do you want a brownie?” His face was so sweet and generous that I took one of the proffered sweets and thanked him. “No problem,” he said. “I probably shouldn’t eat all five of them, anyway. Isn’t there some sort of disease you get from too much sugar?”

  “Diabetes,” I said. “But there are all sorts of healthy dishes that are sweet and can help wean you off sugar, if you have an addiction.”

  This amused him. “Yeah? So you can be, like, addicted to sweets?”

  “Of course you can. Sugar has the same addictive effect as many drugs.”

  He shoved one of the brownies in his mouth and asked, with his mouth full, “Are you a doctor or something?”

  “No, but I am in the food industry, and I know a lot about food preparation and the content of various ingredients.”

  “Okay, that’s cool,” he said. He was cute, with boyish good looks and messy brown hair that I thought might have been styled that way. I was betting he had no problem getting dates, although he did look a bit—high.

  In a sudden panic, I asked, “Is there anything in these brownies? Drug-wise?”

  His eyes widened, and he pointed at me. “You mean like weed? Hilarious!” He laughed for a while and then pantomimed smoking a joint, then laughed some more. “No, they aren’t drug brownies! My aunt Melanie made them. But what an awesome thought—Aunt Mel baking weed into her desserts.” He glanced around, as though looking for someone to tell. Then he sighed with satisfaction and said, “Why did you think so? Do you think I look stoned?”
>
  “Kind of,” I said, taking a nibble of the brownie.

  “I get that a lot. It’s just the way my eyes are. Look at the stupid family pictures in that hallway and you’ll see that I look like a stoned baby, too. It’s hilarious.”

  “Are you Mr. Cantwell’s son?”

  He stuck out his brownie-free hand with automatic politeness. “Yeah, I should have said. I’m Cash. His son by his third wife, Barbara. That’s my mom. She’s out there with my stepdad, Burt. And who are you?”

  “I’m Lilah Drake.”

  “Lilah. That’s a cool name. So you’ve never met my family?”

  “No. This is my first visit.”

  He sighed rather theatrically. “We’re a complicated clan, but I can lead you through the introductions, if you want.” He looked me up and down for a moment, as if just noticing that I was female. “Are you here with anyone?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  His face fell slightly. “Well, I guess I can introduce both of you. But it would be more fun as just the two of us.”

  I grinned. Something about his demeanor made everything he said seem harmless and even amusing. “I bet it would. Why is your name Cash, exactly?”

  “Because it’s less obnoxious than Cassius, which is my real name. What sort of parents burden their kid with a name like that? A name from gosh darn Julius Caesar? So I was just Cash from, like, birth onward.” He consumed one of the smaller brownies in one bite, his face thoughtful.

  Ellie probably wouldn’t have forgiven me if I left minutes after I had arrived; this guy seemed like an entertaining way to pass the time. “Where are these family pictures you spoke of?”

  Cash Cantwell put a friendly arm around me and steered me back down the hall. Mick followed us, then settled on a little rug he found mid-hallway. A bit farther down we found a wall loaded down with silver-framed photographs. Cash sneered at it. “Pretty grim, isn’t it? It makes you think of death, somehow.”

  I would have laughed except that the wall did have a dark aura, perhaps because so many of the faces were serious. Cash pointed out his four stepsiblings, his arm still slung around my shoulder, and narrated the birth order. First there was Emma, the eldest, who was married to Timothy. They had three children: Tim Junior, Carrie, and Peach. “Peach was an accident baby, but everyone loves her the best. She’s, like, the only nice member of our family. You’ll meet her. She’s six.”

  I nodded, admiring Emma Cantwell‘s chestnut hair and regular features.

  He pointed at another girl. “That’s Prudence. Prue. She’s an artist. She’s super awesome and gets asked to paint these murals all over the U.S. She can be a super psycho, but she’s still a pretty good sister. She never got married, but she’s had about eight thousand boyfriends. The current one is the guy who looks like he’s in a motorcycle gang—all black leather. He’s pretty cool, though. His name is Demon or Damien or whatever.”

  “Got it. Emma, then Prue. And I doubt her boyfriend’s name is Demon. Who’s next?”

  “Then Dad got divorced and remarried, this time with Claudia, and had Scott and Owen. Scott’s the one with red hair. He’s a lawyer and tends to threaten to sue people a lot. He’s a major tool, but he can be all right sometimes. He hasn’t been bad yet today.”

  “Okay.”

  He pointed. “And that’s Scott’s little brother, Owen. He looks like Scott, but without the freckles and with blond hair. Owen is between jobs, like always. But he has a degree in philosophy, which my dad says makes him suitable for no profession at all.” Cash grinned at this and ate another brownie while I studied the pictures. All of the children were of above-average attractiveness, and yet Cantwell had struck me as a barely functioning human being with minimal good looks. His wives must have all been pretty and outgoing, because if Cash was anything like the others, the children had gotten all of their charm and beauty from their mothers.

  “You look disbelieving. What seems so strange?” Cash asked with surprising perception.

  “Oh—it’s just—I only just met your dad, but—”

  Cash smiled and pointed at me. He seemed to convey a lot of emotions through pointing. “You think he’s totally weird.” I tried to deny it, but he held up a hand. “He is; he’s an old weirdo. But he wasn’t always that way. There was a time when he actually left the house and went to work and interacted with people like a normal guy. But he got weirder as he got older. My mom tried to get him tested for depression or some other illness, but he was never diagnosed with anything. And now he barely leaves the house except to do his gardening or walk those stupid dogs.”

  “You don’t like dogs?”

  “They’re okay. I mean, I actually like walking them and playing with them and stuff. But we all know that he loves the animals more than he loves us, so sometimes it’s hard to take.”

  “That can’t be true.”

  Cash pursed his lips. “He was late to Peach’s christening because he took Cleopatra to get her toenails clipped. And he didn’t even pretend he had a better reason. That’s what he told Emma—that his dog’s nails were too long.”

  “Wow,” I said.

  “Yeah. I have a weird family, no doubt about it, but what can you do? You learn to live with it. See this picture of me as a baby? Don’t I look super high?”

  He did. His little eyes were slit against his chubby cheeks in a look of supreme happiness. “Okay, I see your point,” I admitted.

  He pointed at me. “See? I’ve actually had teachers kick me out of class because they said I looked stoned. It’s a lifelong curse, man.” He was still smiling, though. Cash seemed emotionally indestructible.

  “I’m surprised your lawyer stepbrother didn’t threaten to sue those teachers,” I joked.

  Cash laughed. “He did talk about it once. You think you’re kidding, but you haven’t met Scott. He’s one litigious dude.”

  “Okay, I think I have the whole family down pat. Thanks for clearing it up for me.”

  “Speaking of Cleopatra, I think she likes your dog.” He pointed at Mick and started laughing. The little corgi had made her way into the hallway and nestled against Mick, as though he were a pillow put there for her pleasure. Mick accepted this with a docile expression.

  “Your dad said she was spoiled; I guess he was right. Either that or she’s just got a crush on Mick. All the lady dogs do,” I joked, bending to pet the two canines. The corgi was very sweet; she closed her eyes under my ministrations and made a sound almost like purring.

  “You’re funny. Who are you here with, anyway?”

  I pointed at Mick. “This is the guy your dad actually wanted to meet. I’m here with Ellie from next door.”

  “Ellie!” Cash clapped his hands, which were finally brownie-free. “She’s one awesome lady. All us kids like her, and it’s hard to please all of us. She was always giving us fruit from her trees, or veggies from her garden, or flowers to bring to our moms. And if we ever wanted to play over there, she was cool with it. She had three kids, too, and one of them used to babysit for me when I was little.”

  “Jay?” I asked, surprised.

  “Yeah, that’s him. He was awesome. He always brought over cool stuff, like comic books or action guys or whatever he didn’t want anymore, and he’d give them to me to play with. He was already into books and girls and stuff by then. A high school kid. I really looked up to him. He was supersmart. I think he became a lawyer or something.”

  “He’s a cop,” I said. “I’m actually dating him.”

  Cash pointed at me in disbelief. “You’re dating Jay Parker? Man, that is so cool! Is he here?”

  “No, he’s away at some training thing in New York.”

  “I’ll bet he’s a great boyfriend, huh?”

  “Yes, he is.” I studied him. “Aren’t you going out with anyone?”

  A slight shadow passed over his perp
etually happy expression. “I like someone. She kind of threw me over, but she’s out there because my mom invited her.”

  “And your mom is here because . . . ?”

  He shrugged. “We all kind of keep it in the family. All the exes come back for the big events. I don’t know if it’s because of Dad’s money or just because we’re a weird group that sticks together even after we separate. It’s nice, though. I always felt like I had tons of family, even though my teachers sometimes called it a broken home. You’re not supposed to call it that, anyway.”

  “And who is the girl you like?”

  “Her name’s Lola. She’s the dark-haired girl—did you see her? Her mom’s Italian, which is where she got the black hair, and her dad is Irish. She’s this amazingly beautiful blend of them.” His face was vulnerable now. “We went to high school together. Now she goes to Columbia. She’s studying music.”

  “Where do you go to school?”

  “I’m at DePaul. But I’m thinking I won’t stay. I mean, I’ll finish out the year and all, but I want to ask my dad to bankroll me for a year so I can try something else. Maybe the Peace Corps or some kind of service trip or something. I’m a hands-on kind of guy.”

  “Then, when you came back, you could major in social work.”

  He brightened. “Yeah! That’s what I was thinking. I like people, and I know how they tick. Right now I’m majoring in economics, and it’s doing nothing for me. I can’t see spending my life running some business or adding numbers in some ledger. I need to—you know—discover myself.”

  “That sounds smart, Cash.”

  “Yeah. I’m going to ask him today. I just have to get up the courage, you know? He had a spaz when Prue wanted to major in art, so I can just imagine what he would think of this.”

  “You have to follow your heart,” I said. To myself I thought that if Cantwell was as rich as everyone hinted, it wouldn’t be a big deal to let a kid spend a year overseas.

  “Yeah,” Cash said. He looked a bit sad, so I patted his shoulder.