“What about the maid?'
“She's in pretty bad shape. Not much question of poisoning herself, although it's possible. She could have misjudged a dosage.' At Jane's surprised look, he said, 'We do think of these things, too.'
“What about the poison? What was it?'
“We don't know yet. The path lab is doing tests for the usual—arsenic, strychnine, digitalis. But these tests take longer than anyone likes to admit, and they haven't come up with anything yet. There are about a thousand weird things that are poisonous, and it takes a while to test for each one. And it's complicated by the fact that Mrs. Pryce was so old. At her age, a lot of systems have failed or are failing on their own. Also, it could have taken a virtually indetectable amount of some poisons to push her and the maid over. Maria Espinoza says she's seventy- nine and Pryce was eighty-seven, and they both had bad hearts. It could have been something that would only make you and me a little bit sick, but was deadly to them.'
“But the murderer must have known that. Doesn't that narrow the field to people who knew them well enough to gauge the dosage?'
“Not necessarily. The killer could have just used something at hand and hoped like hell that it would work. Maybe it wasn't even meant to kill her. Just to make her sick as a 'punishment.' '
“Could it have been in her house? In a prescription?'
“Unlikely. A lot of things that are poisonous in large amounts are used in minute portions for medication. But you'd have to eat a bowlful of pills. It was in the quiche or the tea. More accurately, in Mrs. Pryce's quiche or tea. The maid didn't serve herself, she just ate and drank what was left of her employer's food. I guess it was a habit of hers. She says she had a bite or two of the quiche, but thought it tasted strange and left the rest. Unfortunately, she'd already put all the plates in the dishwasher and run them through by the time we got there.'
“Why didn't Pryce taste it?'
“I don't know, except the pathologist says some elderly people lose their sense of taste. Or maybe she was just a glutton who didn't care.'
“Oh, she cared. She made nasty remarks about every dish in front of her. She said there was too much mayonnaise in the potato salad and too much oil on the green salad, and Missy's cake was too dry. But those are texture things, not taste, I guess. And it seemed she put away a lot of food in spite of her complaints.'
“Run through what she'd come down on everybody about again, would you?' Mel said. 'Aren't you going to eat that sandwich?”
He'd managed to wolf down his share of the dainty edibles. 'I'll give you half,' Jane said. While she wasn't very hungry, she'd heard great things about the caterer he'd gotten this stuff from, and didn't want to miss her chance to at least taste their work. 'Let's see—she accused my mother of being an embassy hanger-on, which Is a really nasty remark from an insider. She called Desiree a drunk and Grady an embezzler and Missy a pornographer. She wouldn't sit by Naomi Smith because she was afraid Naomi would give her some disease, and at the end she made a crack about Bob Neufield being too depraved to serve his country.”
Mel was taking notes with one hand and eating with the other. 'Uh-huh. So she didn't go after you or your friend Shelley or Ruth Rogers.'
“Yet, you mean?' Jane asked, thinking about Shelley's theory that they were better suspects because they might have killed her to keep her from getting around to them.
“Not exactly,' he said around the last bite of her pasta salad, which he'd liberated without her noticing. 'I'm just trying to get a relative fix on this. Em? bezzlement's a pretty strong accusation. Thinking somebody's going to give you a cold is nothing.'
“Oh, but it's not a cold. Mrs. Pryce accused Naomi of having cancer and asked her to move. Ruth Rogers came tearing in and told her off. Said her sister had a rare blood disease that wasn't contagious.'
“Still, it's rude as hell, but not really damaging. Not like accusing the mayor of stealing the city's money.'
“I agree, but when you get to know Grady, you'll know how crazy the accusation is. He's a really nice man.”
He looked at her pityingly. 'Jane, really nice people have embezzled money. The two are not mutually exclusive.'
“But I don't
“No? But it was, and I don't want anybody to get away with it. Do you?”
It was a stupid question and it made her mad. 'Why did you ask me out yesterday?' Jane asked, surprising him with the question only slightly more than she surprised herself.
“Why . ? I don't know. To apologize for disappearing. To see how you were. To thank you for Christmas dinner—'
“Out of duty?' she asked.
“No!' he snapped. He started gathering up the paraphernalia of lunch and stuffing it into an empty sack. 'But I've got a duty right now, and I better get back to it. Are you through?' His voice was cold and formal.
“It appears I am,' she said, taking a bite of the sandwich she'd managed to save from his cleanup. It was so trendily wholesome that it tasted like' sawdustwith a little basil. It was probably just as well that he'd hogged hers.
They got in the car and rode silently. As Mel pulled into her driveway, he said, 'Sorry about that. I'm tired, and murder pisses me off. Do I get another chance? How about a late dinner tonight after your class?'
“On two conditions.'
“Yeah? What are they?' he asked suspiciously. 'You take a nap first, and you keep your greedy hands off my food.”
Mel grinned.
Jane stood in the driveway and watched as he drove off, thinking that he'd said something profound. Murder pissed her off, too. On the surface of her life, she'd taken Mrs. Pryce's death rather lightly. Partly because Pryce was such a dreadful person; partly because Jane herself was so preoccupied with her mother's visit and the story she was working on about Priscilla. But underneath, she was extremely distressed.
Murder was wrong; there was no provocation sufficient to justify it. And Jane was of the belief that killing someone was one of those horrible hurdles that, once taken, became easier. For the first time, she consciously realized that someone in the class was dangerous to all of them for that reason. But when the class was over in a few days, they'd all go their separate ways, meeting only casually at the dry cleaner's and the grocery store. And if that person had gotten away with murder, it would be harder to unravel the truth.
This crime would be much easier to figure out now rather than later. Mel and the police weren't making any progress, for all their technical inventory. This wasn't one of those cases where there were blood samples and fingerprints to analyze. This was very personal; a neighborhood crime that would have to be solved in the neighborhood, not in a crime lab.
11
When Jane came in the door, the phone was ringing. It was Ruth Rogers. 'Jane, your mother seems such a lovely, interesting person, and there's never much time to visit with each other in class. Might the two of you be free this afternoon for tea?'
“Ruth, how nice. I'd love it, but I'll have to check that Mom doesn't have any plans.”
Cecily had just come into the kitchen with a towel on her head. 'Sounds great,' she said when Jane explained.
“Why don't you come by around three?' Ruth said.
This arranged, Jane hung up. 'I didn't know you were here,' she said to Cecily. 'How was lunch with your friend?'
“Fine, except that I'm getting to the age that my contemporaries all want to talk about who's died lately. It's depressing. I resisted telling her about Mrs. Pryce's death. Harriet didn't know her and wouldn't have appreciated the justice in it. I put your car in the garage and the keys on the dining room table.' Cecily gave her hair a final rub, took the towel to the guest bath just off the kitchen, and came back, running her fingers through her damp curls. Jane felt a surge of feminine resentment that this was all her mother had to do to look smashing. She mentioned this.
Cecily sat down at the kitchen table, smiling. 'I've always been sorry that you girls got your father's hair. But
