Glen dropped onto a matching couch. “Hell of a thing about Pat. She was always game for everything. I missed having her around. I hear she died from a drug overdose. Somebody told Cleo they thought it was suicide.”
Max shook his head. “It turns out that was a mistake. I’ve heard the investigation is focused on murder.”
Glen’s eyes widened, his lips parted. He looked utterly stunned. “Pat murdered? That’s crazy.” His voice was shocked. “Why would anyone murder Pat?”
Why, indeed? Max thought. “I’m hoping to find out more for the family.” There were, as Max well knew, many ways to tell the truth. Certainly he would be happy to share whatever he learned with Pat’s sister in California. If Glen mistakenly assumed Max was working for the family, the interpretation was Glen’s, not Max’s. “I thought you were the best person to tell me about Pat’s last few weeks.”
Glen’s aristocratic face drooped in unhappy lines. “Yeah. Well, I don’t suppose you knew, but we had to let Pat go a couple of weeks ago.”
Max kept his face interested and uncritical.
Glen’s gaze slid away, fastened on a print of the Acropolis hanging on a sidewall. “Cleo was thinking about redecorating the office, make it more gray and chrome like the big-city firms. I’m afraid Pat wasn’t very tactful. Anyway, Cleo said we should have a young, eager receptionist.” He avoided looking at Max. “So I let her go. I’m afraid she got pretty upset with me. That’s why when we heard she committed suicide, I felt really bad. But Cleo said people make their own choices.”
Max could hear the voice of Glen’s second wife, smooth and satisfied, as he spoke.
“Murder . . .” Glen sagged back against the couch. “God, I’m glad it wasn’t suicide.”
“Do you know anyone who was angry with Pat? Or anyone who feared her?”
Glen looked startled, eyes widening, lips parting. “Not that I ever knew about. It doesn’t seem possible. I guess there’s something we didn’t know about Pat. But”—he looked at Max with a suddenly relieved expression—“I’m sure glad she didn’t kill herself.”
Annie always took pleasure in their back porch. Green wicker chairs with cream-colored cushions offered comfort and a gorgeous view of the garden. She plopped into a chair on one side of the wicker table, bright with daisy-yellow place mats and settings for breakfast. She took a deep breath of the sweet scent of pittosporum blooms. Hydrangeas, butterfly bushes, jessamine lantana, roses, and bougainvillea created a patchwork of colors. In the early-morning quiet, the caw of crows sounded cheerful. Glossy magnolia leaves rattled in a light breeze.
The screen door opened and Max stepped out of the kitchen, carrying a plate. His hair was still damp from the shower. “Hot, moist, and ready to devour.”
Annie grinned. “You or the Danishes?”
Max laughed. Despite the shower, his face was still flushed from their prebreakfast jog. “Both. And the same to you, Mrs. Darling.”
After an early-morning jog and shower, Annie enjoyed cooling down on the back porch. It was a lovely beginning to a lovely day except for her nagging sense of a task left undone. She took a sip of orange juice, frowned, and opened her mouth.
Before she could speak, Max broke off a piece of a raspberry Danish and popped it in her mouth. “You look like the Selkirk Rex.”
The sweet roll was flaky with just the right amount of buttery richness. She reached up to touch her damp tangled hair. Surely she wasn’t that frizzy, though it was flattering to be compared to the elegant long-haired cat with soft, plush, curly ringlets and amber eyes. The Selkirk Rex on Laurel’s Cat Truth poster had its mouth agape:
Annie grabbed her coffee mug. “I wish somebody would listen to me.”
Dorothy L darted after a butterfly, then jumped onto the tabletop. Annie gently removed her. “Not during breakfast.” She took a moment to smooth Dorothy L’s fluffy fur, but she wasn’t distracted from her worry. “Pat walked to the Jamison house. That has to mean something.”
Max settled in the opposite chair, poured coffee into their red pottery mugs. He speared a piece of papaya. “Sometimes what you see is what you get. She walked to the Jamison house. Maybe that’s all there was to it. I’m not saying she committed suicide. Maybe somebody dropped OxyContin in her coffee, but,” and he flipped up one finger after another for emphasis, “we can’t find any hint anywhere that anyone had any reason to kill her. At the law firm, a competent, hard-nosed legal secretary made it clear Pat knew nothing about the inner workings of the firm, plus Glen Jamison was pitifully glad to hear she didn’t kill herself. Henny Brawley knows everybody on the island, but Henny can’t come up with anything out of the ordinary about Pat. You talked to Elaine Jamison and she said Pat didn’t have an enemy in the world.”
Annie felt as isolated as if she were marooned on a desert island. “She had an enemy. And I think it was someone who lives in the Jamison house.”
Annie enjoyed the quiet at Death on Demand before it opened. She’d left Max murmuring into his newspaper that people who went to work at eight-thirty when they didn’t have to be there until nine were seriously deranged and in need of recreational counseling. She’d kissed the back of his neck, which caught his attention big-time, but she’d not been deflected from her departure. She was still smiling as she unlocked the door. She would catch up with paperwork, and though she hadn’t told Max, she would continue to worry at the problem of Pat Merridew. There would only be a few early shoppers. Readers looking for hammock books would begin to drift in after lunch as the June day heated up.
Instead of heading straight to her office, she wandered aimlessly around the coffee area. Finding out what happened to Pat was like tugging at a ball of snarled yarn. She felt sure if she tugged at the right string, she would find some proof of her conviction that Pat had been murdered and that her murder was linked to the Jamisons.
She glanced at the Cat Truth poster with the gorgeous, wide-mouthed Selkirk Rex. “You tell ’em, honey.” But her smile slipped away. Annie had told everyone, most especially Billy Cameron, and he wasn’t listening. She reached down to straighten a poster hanging crookedly beside the fireplace. A red-brown Abyssinian, tail high, stepped through dew damp grass:
