The House of Seven Mabels (10 page)

speaks well of your tastes. She'll go along with what you want, I'd guess. She's known you both for a long time, hasn't she?"

"Yes," Shelley said. "We go back years to PTA work."

That made everyone laugh.

When their food arrived, they fell to eating, and conversation was solely about the food. As they were considering dessert, Jane asked, "Did anyone truly hate Sandra?"

"Hate? I wouldn't go that far," Jacqueline said. "She was seriously annoying and not very good at what she was trying to do. I think the only person who genuinely disliked her was Thomasina."

"We haven't met Thomasina yet," Jane said. "She's the electrician, isn't she?"

"And she's very good," Henrietta said. "But she had her toolbox stolen and went haywire because Sandra was responsible for making sure any tools that couldn't be hauled home every night were securely locked up. And there was that time Jackie got a serious shock when she turned the planer on."

Jacqueline objected. "It was nothing. Just a jolt that knocked me off my feet."

"It knocked you out, Jackie! Don't be shy about it," Henrietta said. "You were lucky it didn't kill you."

"I'm fine. And I'm sure it wasn't anything Thomasina did wrong. The planer worked fine the
day before and she was off sick the day before

that. It was just another of those nasty tricks someone was playing. And I wasn't knocked out by the shock. It was because I jumped back, tripped, and hit my head on one of the saw-horses."

Jane and Shelley looked at each other with alarm.

"We hadn't heard about this," Jane said, any thoughts she'd had about dessert completely forgotten.

Thomasina is the one we need to meet next," Shelley said as they were on their way home.

"She sounds like a good suspect, doesn't she?"

"She may not have been the angriest one. We still don't know several of the others," Shelley reminded Jane.

"Who are we missing?"

Shelley consulted her sheet of workers. "There's Carl Stringfield, the guy who works with Evaline. The big tall man we watched casually twirl a big piece of Sheetrock, slap it up against the wall and place it perfectly. And, of course, the elusive plumber."

"I wonder how much of what we already know Mel knows."

After Shelley had sorted out this obscure sentence structure, she said, "We probably know more about their personalities and backgrounds. At least that's true of Bitsy, Evaline, Jacqueline, and Henrietta. But he's much more likely to be up to speed on the actual evidence of whether or

not Sandra's death was a murder or a clumsy accident."

"I'll try to snag Mel tonight for dinner," Jane offered. "After all, he's only working one case now instead of three. He's going to feel strongly motivated to have a bit of a real life off the job."

"What are you going to make for dinner?" Shelley asked, getting to the heart of the plan. "What's his favorite dinner?"

"Steaks cooked medium rare on the grill. Twice-baked potatoes. Greasy, overcooked green beans. And he'll even pick at a salad if he's forced to."

"Then I'd leave out the salad," Shelley said with a grin. "I wonder what his terribly high-maintenance mother who's probably eaten at the most expensive restaurants in the country thinks of his tastes."

Jane shuddered at the thought of Mel's mother. She'd once spent a Christmas with Mel and ended up at Jane's, who found her formidable and clearly hostile to the idea of her son forming a romantic attachment to a woman she hadn't handpicked for him. Especially a widow with three children.

Jane had prevailed earlier and driven the two of them to lunch in her disreputable station wagon, so she just had to drop Shelley off and hit the grocery store after leaving a voice mail message on Mel's cell phone that he was invited to his favorite dinner. If that didn't get his full attention, nothing would.

When she returned, loaded down with groceries, there was a light flashing on the answering machine. "I wouldn't miss it for the world," Mel said. "Six-thirty?"

"We still don't know what happened to her," he said when they'd finished what he said was a fabulous meal. They'd eaten in the kitchen with Katie and Todd, but had gone outside to sit under the patio table umbrella for a glass of wine for dessert for Jane, a beer for Mel, who'd mellowed considerably since she'd last spoken with him.

"There's no clear sign of her being pushed down the stairs, but it wouldn't take an enormous force that would leave bruises," he said taking a sip of his beer. "This is good."

"Are you going to continue investigating?"

"We have to. The missing purse is one reason. Apparently nobody working at the site ever once saw Sandra without it. A bag with a long strap hung over her opposite shoulder so it couldn't be dropped or stolen."

"Even I noticed that. The first time we met her, Shelley and I stashed our purses between us. When I asked if Sandra wanted to put hers there as well, she acted like I'd spit in her glass."

"I sort of wish you had. That would have kept you out of this," Mel said with a laugh.

"And no sign of it in the house somewhere?"

"Nope. But the primary reason to treat it as a crime is that she was so heartily disliked by

everyone on the project. Nobody has anything good to say about her. They're all very frank about it. She seems to have gone out of her way to offend people working on the house. Maybe one of them had a stronger motive than the criticism of her that they've voiced."

"Do you know yet when she died?"

"When she hit the basement floor," Mel said.

"I know that. I mean what time?"

"The pathologist says some time between three-thirty and five-thirty. Too bad she wasn't wearing a watch that stopped conveniently."

"That's quite a window of time," Jane said. "I suppose you've asked everyone working there if anyone disappeared for a while."

"Of course I did," Mel said, surprisingly mildly. "Everybody was doing his or her own job and didn't pay much attention to what the others were doing. Some said they went outside on their breaks for a cigarette, a couple took bathroom breaks. You can't break alibis like that."

There was a long companionable silence as they watched Max and Meow, Jane's cats, returning from the field behind her house after a long day of hunting mice and chipmunks. Mel rose to let them in the house, but Jane said, "No, please don't open that door. I want them to throw up the remains outside instead of on my floors."

It was another full five minutes before Jane admitted that she and Shelley had taken Jacqueline and Henrietta to lunch earlier.

Mel started to object, but Jane cut him off. "We had a legitimate reason to meet with them. We're supposed to be doing the decorating and they're the carpenters who are using all the special wood. We wanted to make sure the color scheme we had in mind for the first part of the house to be finished met their approval."

Mel yelped with laughter. "I'll bet you cleared up that part of your talk pretty quickly and plunged into pure gossip."

Jane smiled. "Of course we did. Were you told about Jacqueline's getting shocked and passing out?"

"The electrician told us all about it. The wiring had been tampered with. Not badly enough to kill her because when she plugged in whatever it was, the fuse blew. Or so the electrician says. And so does my assistant, who understands electricity. She passed out because she jumped backward, tripped, and struck her head on a sawhorse when she fell."

"The electrician is Thomasina, right? We haven't run across her yet."

"You're not going to enjoy it when you do. She's a really tough, foulmouthed woman who won't listen to what anyone else is asking or saying."

"Your prime suspect?"

"Not necessarily. But if any of them are truly mean enough to kill someone and I had to choose at random, I'd like to pick her." He downed a little more of his glass of beer before continuing. He seemed to need it.

"She went on and on about the house never being locked up," he said, glowering at the memory of his interview with her. "Or even sufficiently boarding up the downstairs windows. I got the full rundown on what valuable tools were in her toolbox that had been stolen. By the time she got to the fact that her precious wiring had been tampered with, I feared she was going to have a stroke right on the spot. Like most self-employed people, she's underinsured, and if Jacqueline had wanted to sue her for the accident, it could have gotten really ugly."

"I think we'll keep our distance from her in that case," Jane said with a smile.

A cat threw up outside.

"Excuse me for a moment," she said as she went into the garage to get a shovel to heave the remains over the back fence.

Mel was laughing out loud when she returned from this common errand. "I've never known a woman so calm about pieces of dead animals."

Jane looked surprised. "I do this a couple times a week. Most of the time inside the house. Aren't you glad you don't live here? All my kids have learned how to imitate the nasty sounds that precede a cat upchucking and sometimes do it in the middle of the night to make me think I don't dare get out of bed without turning on a light. Didn't I tell you about the time I nearly took a header in the bathroom on a mouse's head? Just like stepping on a marble, albeit a fuzzy one."

Mel laughed but then turned serious. "You're a remarkable woman."

"No, I'm an ordinary woman with two cats," she said, leaning forward to kiss him. "You must have just grown up without cats."

"Without dogs, too," he said, being a bit pathetic.

"Don't start with me about dogs! Training Willard took longer than potty-training a male child."

He chuckled and said, "Want to go for a little drive?"

"To your apartment?" Jane asked with a gleam in her eye.

"We could drop in there. After all, I need to thank you again for dinner."

When she got home later, she saw that Shelley's kitchen light was still on. The phone was already ringing when Jane came in the door.

"What did Mel tell you?" Shelley asked.

"I don't remember," Jane said dreamily.

"You were at his apartment tonight, weren't you? But get a grip on yourself and come back to real life. Tell me what he said."

Jane took a deep breath, cast the latter part of the evening out of her mind, and recounted what he'd said before the cat episode.

Fifteen

Early the next morning Jane took the cats and Willard out in the yard and sat contentedly watching them while she had her first cup of coffee and one of the three cigarettes she allowed herself per day. She wished she could quit entirely, and often forgot to smoke one of them. In bad winters, she seldom braved the weather outside to smoke more than one, but three a day was better than twenty.

When she went back inside, the answering machine had a message from her sister, Marty. She sighed. Marty called her only when she couldn't remember where in the world their parents were, and it was always for financial help. So she'd call Jane, and after listening to silly pleas that fell on Jane's deaf ears, Jane would give her the current telephone number for their parents. One time Marty asked if she could use Jane's calling card account, to which Jane replied that she most certainly could not.

Why didn't Marty break down and buy a com-

puter? She'd married or lived off a string of wealthy men. That way she could always reach anyone she wanted by E-mail. Jane and her parents were in touch at least weekly often daily, and it was free, unlike phone calls to foreign countries.

As usual, Jane didn't return the call right away. Sometimes she got lucky if she dawdled and whatever problem Marty imagined had already solved itself. And on occasion, Marty herself couldn't even remember. This evening would be soon enough.

The phone rang while she was writing down the number on the caller ID. She wondered vaguely where Marty was now. She didn't recognize the area code.

She saw that it was Shelley and picked up.

"Are you back to real life yet? I saw you sitting outside grinning. Nice evening with Mel?"

"Unfortunately, I am back to the nitty-gritty. Come on over and I'll feed you some kind of breakfast."

Shelley was there in about half a minute. "Isn't it great when all the kids want for breakfast is an egg sandwich and a bottle of orange juice to eat and drink on their way to school?" she said. "I shudder at the recollection of having to cook pancakes or bacon at the crack of dawn."

"All I have is some sort of healthy granola bars," Jane said apologetically. "But they're not bad. Here you go," she said, tossing a couple on

the kitchen table and pouring their coffee. "Got a call from my sister while I was outside."

"What does she need now?"

"I haven't called back to see. Remember the time she wanted me to rush to Seattle because she had to have an ingrown toenail removed and expected the whole family to gather around to comfort her?"

"I'd forgotten that one. The one I liked best was the time you were supposed to go to Nashville— or was it Savannah? — to help her pick out a dress for a banquet."

"Savannah, I think. I suspect she thought I'd pay for the dress, and naturally pay for my plane fare as well. The worst ones are when she's getting divorced, and her money's tied up in court, and she wants huge loans. I can always say the kids have some sort of program at school and I can't go anywhere when she wants me to fly halfway across the country, but it's harder to turn her down on money."

"I think that would be easier. Just tell her you don't have any."

"She knows better than to believe that. Even my parents won't do it. I don't know why she continues to ask them."