Dead Man Waltzing

her. If she did, I’m sure it will be no more than a token, a memento.”

“Okay.” I glanced at my watch. “Look, I’ve got to go. Are you okay?”

Patting my cheek, he said, “I’ll be fine, Anastasia. Thanks for springing me from the pokey. I’ll see you this evening for the Latin class.”

“You don’t have to come if you don’t feel up to it,” I said. “I can call Vitaly.”

“I’ll be there.” Maurice got out of the car. “Ciao.”

* * *

I arrived late to the furniture store, where I had promised to help my sister, Danielle, pick out a new sofa. The old one had collapsed under her and her boyfriend, Coop, when they were, she alleged, simply watching Jeopardy! a couple nights ago. The store was a freestanding building on Lee Highway, surrounded by a gymnastics place, a restaurant, and an oil-change garage. Traffic whizzed by. Dani was pacing the concrete walkway in front of the store, curly red hair billowing around her, frown etching her pretty face.

“Sorry,” I started as I came up to her, thinking her uncharacteristic anger was directed at me.

“Have you talked to Mom today?” she asked, ignoring my apology.

Ah, now I knew where her anger was coming from. She and our mother had had a difficult relationship since Mom chose to follow her passion for horses and dressage rather than stick around to be a wife and mother. Dad had given her an ultimatum-him or the horses-and she’d chosen the nags. I’d been fifteen when she left and I’d sorta, kinda, maybe understood her choice. By then, I’d been ballroom dancing for several years and knew I wouldn’t be me if I couldn’t continue. Danielle, a couple years younger, had never forgiven her.

“No, I haven’t been home. Is she okay?”

Danielle snorted. “‘Okay.’ That’s one word for it.”

I moved into the air-conditioned cool of the store and Danielle trailed after me. We waved away the saleswoman charging toward us like Yogi Bear after a pic-a-nic basket.

“She wants us to join her on a vacation,” Danielle said, clearly incensed.

“So?”

“So, she’s going to a dressage competition in Georgia and she wants us to meet her afterward on Jekyll Island. Her treat.”

“Oh.” The reason for Danielle’s anger became plain: Jekyll Island was the site of our last vacation as a family, before Mom moved out.

“She wants to ruin our memories of our last vacation together,” Danielle said, plopping down onto a brown plaid sofa. “Too hard.” She popped up again and punched the pillows of a beige microfiber conversation pit.

“Not beige,” I objected, drawn to a red leather sofa.

“Beige blends,” she said.

“There’s such a thing as too much blending.” I admit I was biased; I’d rather go naked than wear beige or brown or any of the other “blendy” colors Danielle stocked her closet with. As a union negotiator, she thought a “nonthreatening” wardrobe helped her connect with the employees she was helping. I didn’t think that perspective needed to extend to her living environment. “Don’t you want something that pops?”

“Not really.” Checking the price tag, she added, “You’re not going, are you?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t even talked to Mom. It would depend when it is, I guess.”

“Well, I’m not going.”

“Did you tell Mom that?”

She bit her lip. “I told her I’d think about it.”

I sighed. For a woman who dealt with confrontation day in and day out in her job, Danielle was strangely loath to lay things on the line in her personal life. “Well, if you said you’d think about it, why not think about it? It might be fun… a girls’ weekend at the beach, mani-pedis, pina coladas, shell collecting.”

“Daddy should be there.” She put on a little-girl-lost face, eyes wide, mouth trembling.

Sheesh. Getting all maudlin wasn’t going to help. “Dad? With Beryl, I presume?” His second wife, a woman he’d married five years ago, after Dani and I had already left home. “They could have a room that adjoined ours, and Mom and Beryl could compare notes while they had their toenails painted.” I put on a New Jersey voice like Beryl’s. “‘Didn’t you just hate the way Ronald tossed his socks near the hamper but never in it, Jean?’”

“Not like that!” Dani tried to suppress a laugh but failed. “You know what I meant.”

“Yeah. You meant you want to turn time back a dozen or so years. Not possible, baby sister.”

“I don’t see why not,” she grumbled.

I wisely left that unanswered. Instead, I distracted her by telling her about Corinne Blakely’s death and Maurice’s involvement.

“I can’t see Maurice poisoning someone,” she said.

“We don’t know that she was poisoned,” I cautioned, even though I had told her that poison was my guess for the murder weapon, since Maurice would have noticed a gun, knife, or garrote.

“Poison’s a woman’s weapon.”

“How sexist.”

“It is,” she insisted. “I read it somewhere. Who does Maurice think did it?” Crowding me onto an ottoman as she passed me, she fingered the fringe on a pillow.

“Someone whose secrets Corinne was going to reveal in her new tell-all memoir.”

Danielle stopped examining furniture to look at me. “Really?”

I nodded. “But I think it might have been her grandson. He struck me as the kind of whiny rich kid who expects to have things-everything he wants-handed to him on a platter. Immediately.”

“Was he at the restaurant?”

“Not as far as I know. Good point.” Danielle’s question made me think: Were there slow-acting poisons someone could have administered to Corinne earlier in the day/week/month that resulted in her death at the Swallow? My knowledge of poisons was severely limited. I knew better than to drink household cleaners or splash them in my eyes, and I thought oleander leaves were poisonous to animals-and maybe humans?-but that’s where my expertise stopped.

“What about this?” We had wandered halfway around the store and I pointed at an olive green sofa with puffy cushions and a faint red stripe thinner than angel hair pasta. Not too bright, not too boring. Best of all, it was on sale. Dani sat on it, leaned back, and reclined with her feet hanging just off the edge.

“It’s nice,” she said, “but I don’t think it goes with my Aegean Sunset walls.”

“Maybe I should come over and see the apartment, now that you’ve off-loaded the broken sofa on Goodwill.” I made a frame of my hand and pretended to peer through it. “It’s been a while since I’ve seen the place; I haven’t been over since you repainted.”

“Sure,” Dani said. “How about tomorrow night? Cooper left today for a business trip, some sort of security convention in Las Vegas-ha!-so I don’t have plans any evening this week.”

I never had evening plans unless I was teaching, so I didn’t feel too sympathetic that she was dateless for a few days. I pointed out another sale couch, but she said, “I’ve got to think about it. This is the first store I’ve been to; I want to look in a couple other places.”

I rolled my eyes but said nothing, used to my sister’s habits. I was impulsive and made decisions about sofas or clothes or holidays on a whim, on intuition. Dani pondered things, researched products in Consumer Reports, and spent forty dollars in gas trekking around to eighteen stores in order to save ten bucks on something.

“Fine,” I said. “Let me know when you want to go looking again. I’m getting ideas for when I can afford to replace Aunt Laurinda’s midcentury atrocities.”

“You know,” Danielle said as we threaded our way back through the displays to the door, “her furniture might be worth money, like to a collector or something.”

“I don’t think they’re legitimate antiques. They’re just old.”

“Retro,” Danielle corrected me. “Collectible. Maybe you could make enough off of them to buy new furniture.”

“It’s worth a thought.” We pushed through the glass door to the parking lot. “How would I find someone who