A Bone To Pick

just happened to be appropriately dressed and just happened to see the wedding invitation on my way out the door, and decided I’d just drop in. It was all right to look at Arthur when he entered, everyone else was. His pale blond hair was crisp and curly and short, his blue eyes as direct and engaging as ever. He was wearing a gray tux and he looked great. It didn’t hurt quite as much as I’d thought it would.

When the “Wedding March” began, everyone rose for the entrance of the bride, and I gritted my teeth in anticipation. I was pretty sure my fixed smile looked more like a snarl. I turned reluctantly to watch Lynn make her entrance. Here she came, swathed in white, veiled, as tall as Arthur, her straight, short hair curled for the occasion. Lynn was almost a foot taller than I, something that had obviously bothered her, but I guessed it wasn’t going to bother her anymore.

Then Lynn passed me, and when I saw her in profile I gasped. Lynn was clearly pregnant.

It would be hard to say why this was such a blow; I certainly hadn’t wanted to become pregnant while I was dating Arthur, and would have been horrified if I’d been faced with the situation. But I had often thought of marrying him, and I had occasionally thought about babies; most women my age, if they do want to get married, do think about babies. Somehow, just for a little while, it seemed to me that I had been robbed of something.

I spoke to enough people on the way out of the church to be sure my attendance registered and would be reported to the happy couple, and then I skipped the reception. There was no point in putting myself through that. I thought it was pretty stupid of me to have come at all; not gallant, not brave, just dumb.

The funeral came third, a few days after my mother’s wedding, and, as funerals go, it was pretty decent. Though it was in early June, the day Jane Engle was buried was not insufferably hot, and it was not raining. The little Episcopal church held a reasonable number of people-I won’t say mourners, because Jane’s passing was more a time to be marked than a tragic occasion. Jane had been old, and, as it turned out, very ill, though she had told no one. The people in the pews had gone to church with Jane, or remembered her from her years working in the high school library, but she had no family besides one aging cousin, Parnell Engle, who was himself too ill that day to come. Aubrey Scott, the Episcopal priest, whom I hadn’t seen since my mother’s wedding, was eloquent about Jane’s inoffensive life and her charm and intelligence; Jane bad certainly had her tart side, too, but the Reverend Mr. Scott tactfully included that under “colorful.” It was not an adjective I would have chosen for silver-haired Jane, never married-like me, I reminded myself miserably, and wondered if this many people would come to my funeral. My eyes wandered over the faces in the pews, all more or less familiar. Besides me, there was one other attendee from Real Murders, the disbanded club in which Jane and I had become friends-LeMaster Cane, a black businessman. He was sitting at the back in a pew by himself.

I made a point of standing by LeMaster at the graveside, so he wouldn’t look so lonely. When I murmured that it was good to see him, he replied, “Jane was the only white person who ever looked at me like she couldn’t tell what color I am.” Which effectively shut me up.

I realized that I hadn’t known Jane as well as I thought I had. For the first time, I really felt I would miss her.

I thought of her little, neat house, crammed with her mother’s furniture and Jane’s own books. I remembered Jane had liked cats, and I wondered if anyone had taken over the care of her gold tabby, Madeleine. (The cat had been named for the nineteenth-century Scottish poisoner Madeleine Smith, a favorite murderer of Jane’s. Maybe Jane had been more “colorful” than I’d realized. Not many little old ladies I knew had favorite murderers. Maybe I was “colorful,” too.)

As I walked slowly to my car, leaving Jane Engle forever in Shady Rest Cemetery-I thought-I heard someone calling my name behind me.

“Miss Teagarden!” panted the man who was hurrying to catch up. I waited, wondering what on earth he could want. His round, red face topped by thinning light brown hair was familiar, but I couldn’t recall his name.

“Bubba Sewell,” he introduced himself, giving my hand a quick shake. He had the thickest southern accent I’d heard in a long time. “I was Miss Engle’s lawyer. You are Aurora Teagarden, right?”

“Yes, excuse me,” I said. “I was just so surprised.” I remembered now that I’d seen Bubba Sewell at the hospital during Jane’s last illness.

“Well, it’s fortunate you came today,” Bubba Sewell said. He’d caught his breath, and I saw him now as he undoubtedly wanted to present himself; an expensively suited, sophisticated but down-home man in the know. A college-educated good ole boy. His small brown eyes watched me sharply and curiously. “Miss Engle had a clause in her will that is significant to you,” he said significantly.

“Oh?” I could feel my heels sinking into the soft turf and wondered if I’d have to step out of my shoes and pull them up by hand. It was warm enough for my face to feel damp; of course, my glasses began to slide down my nose. I poked them back up with my forefinger.

“Maybe you have a minute now to come by my office and talk about it?”

I glanced automatically at my watch. “Yes, I have time,” I said judiciously after a moment’s pause. This was pure bluff, so Mr. Sewell wouldn’t think I was a woman with nothing to do.

Actually, I very nearly was. A cutback in funding meant that, for the library to stay open the same number of hours, some staff had to go part-time. I hoped it was because I was the most recently hired that the first one to feel the ax was me. I was only working eighteen to twenty hours a week now. If I hadn’t been living rent free and receiving a small salary as resident manager of one of Mother’s apartment buildings (actually a row of four town houses), my situation would have been bleak in the extreme.

Mr. Sewell gave me such elaborate directions to his office that I couldn’t have gotten lost if I’d tried, and he furthermore insisted I follow him there. The whole way he gave turn signals so far in advance that I almost made the wrong left once. In addition he would wave and point into his rearview mirror, waiting to see me nod every time in acknowledgment. Since I’d lived in Lawrenceton my whole life, this was unnecessary and intensely irritating. Only my curiosity about what he was going to tell me kept me from ramming his rear, and then apologizing picturesquely with tears and a handkerchief.

“Wasn’t too hard to find, was it!” he said encouragingly when I got out of my car in the parking lot of the Jasper Building, one of the oldest office buildings in our town and a familiar landmark to me from childhood.

“No,” I said briefly, not trusting myself to speak further.

“I’m up on the third floor,” Lawyer Sewell announced, I guess in case I got lost between the parking lot and the front door. I bit the inside of my lip and boarded the elevator in silence, while Sewell kept up a patter of small talk about the attendance at the funeral, how Jane’s loss would affect many, many people, the weather, and why he liked having an office in the Jasper Building (atmosphere…much better than one of those prefabricated buildings).

By the time he opened his office door, I was wondering how sharp-tongued Jane could have endured Bubba Sewell. When I saw that he had three employees in his smallish office, I realized he must be more intelligent than he seemed, and there were other unmistakable signs of prosperity-knick-knacks from the Sharper Image catalog, superior prints on the walls and leather upholstery on the chairs, and so on. I looked around Sewell’s office while he gave some rapid instructions to the well-dressed red-haired secretary who was his first line of defense. She didn’t seem like a fool, and she treated him with a kind of friendly respect.

“Well, well, now, let’s see about you, Miss Teagarden,” the lawyer said jovially when we were alone. “Where’s that file? Gosh-a-Moses, it’s somewhere in this mess here!”

Much rummaging among the papers on his desk. By now I was not deceived. Bubba Sewell for some reason found this Lord Peter Wimsey-like pretense of foolishness useful, but he was not foolish, not a bit.

“Here we are, it was right there all the time!” He flourished the file as though its existence had been in doubt.

I folded my hands in my lap and tried not to sigh obviously. I might have lots of time, but that didn’t mean I wanted to spend it as an unwilling audience to a one-man performance.

“Hoo-wee, I’m sure glad you managed to turn it up,” I said.

Bubba Sewell’s hands stilled, and he shot me an extremely sharp look from under his bushy eyebrows.

“Miss Teagarden,” he said, dropping his previous good-ole-boy manner completely, “Miss Engle left you everything.”

Those are certainly some of the most thrilling words in the English language, but I wasn’t going to let my jaw hit the floor. My hands, which had been clasped loosely in my lap, gripped convulsively for a minute, and I let out a