“Oh, of course,” I said, nodding solemnly.
Roma stuck her tongue out at me and then she laughed.
“Seriously,” I said. “Would you like Marcus and me to try to catch Micah?”
Roma nodded. “Please. I’m not having any luck and I’m worried about where she’s sleeping, especially since it’s been so cold.”
“Okay,” I said, dropping a chunk of cheese into my soup. “Let me know once you have Smokey and then I’ll see if we can get Micah for you.”
After lunch Maggie helped Roma load the dishwasher and I changed into my old jeans and a long-sleeved T-shirt.
We covered the hardwood floors with cardboard that Harry Junior had saved for Roma from the recycling bins at the community center. Then Maggie settled in with a brush and a small foam roller to paint around the big bay window. Roma started in on the brushwork on the adjacent wall, and I followed her with the roller. This was the second coat and we wanted it to look good.
Eddie, with some guidance from Oren, had stripped and refinished all the wide oak trim and baseboard in the room. Roma had carefully taped off all the wood before Maggie and I had arrived.
“Eddie did a great job with this trim,” Mags said as she worked her brush along the edge of the big window.
“He has more patience than I do,” Roma said. She was working on a small stepladder above my head, cutting in with her brush where the wall and ceiling met. “Eventually, he wants to do all the woodwork in the house.”
Maggie looked at me and raised her eyebrows. “Eventually?”
“You know what I mean,” Roma said.
“It’s none of our business,” I began.
“But that’s not going to stop you.” Roma looked down from her perch on the ladder and smiled at me.
“No, it’s not,” Maggie agreed, her head turned almost upside down as she worked underneath the window.
“Does that mean you and Eddie have talked about the future?” I asked.
Roma continued to paint along the top of the wall. “We have. Well, sort of. It’s just . . .” She stopped painting and turned to look down at Maggie and me. “You know that Eddie’s been divorced for a long time.”
“Uh-huh,” Maggie said.
I nodded.
“He has a good relationship with his ex, Sydney’s mother.”
Sydney was Eddie’s ten-year-old daughter from his brief marriage to his high school sweetheart.
“He gets to spend a lot of time with Syd in the off-season, but even so, I know he wishes he had more time with her.” Roma sighed softly. “I don’t want him to regret giving up the chance to have more children.”
I opened my mouth to tell Roma that from what I’d seen, what Eddie wanted was a life with her, but she spoke first, inclining her head toward Maggie. “What I really want to know is what’s happening with Maggie’s love life.”
“I don’t have a love life,” Mags said, keeping her gaze focused on the stretch of wall in front of her.
“I don’t think that’s true,” Roma said teasingly, shaking her head. She looked at me again, raising an eyebrow. “The night of the fundraiser I saw Maggie and Brady Chapman this close together.” She held up her thumb and index finger maybe a couple of millimeters apart.
“It’s not what you think,” Maggie said.
I leaned my roller on the edge of the paint tray. “You don’t know what we think,” I said, smiling sweetly.
“Brady had a little grease mark on his tie. I had one of those detergent pens in my purse. All I was doing was cleaning his tie.”
I looked up at Roma. “She was cleaning his tie,” I said.
Roma closed her free hand into a fist and pressed it to her chest. “Awww, isn’t that sweet?”
“I was,” Maggie insisted, still focusing on her painting.
“The lady doth protest too much, methinks,” I said.
Maggie sat back on her heels and looked over at me. “Brady and I are just friends,” she said, enunciating each word slowly and carefully.
“Marcus and I started out as just friends,” I said.
Above me on the ladder, Roma cleared her throat.
“Sort of,” I amended.
“Eddie and I were just friends at first,” Roma offered.
I remembered how Maggie had squeezed Brady’s hand at the fundraiser, urging him to go to the hospital. “You like him, Mags,” I said.
She couldn’t hold my gaze.
“You do!” Roma crowed.
“He’s not my type,” Maggie said, pulling her painting pail a little closer. “He’s so serious and competitive. He wears suits. He’s a lawyer, for heaven’s sake.”
“So?” I said.
“So I like the sensitive type—artists, musicians, guys whose idea of dressing up is putting on a clean T-shirt.”
“Brady has a sensitive side,” I said. “When Marcus’s sister needed a lawyer, he took her case. He’s been helping Ruby get the last of Agatha’s estate settled and I know he’s only charging her for his expenses because the money’s all going into art scholarships.”
I held up a finger before she could interrupt me. “And he stepped in to be goalie for the first responder team because Derek isn’t going to be able to get back for Winterfest.”
“He sounds like a nice guy,” Roma said.
“Brady is not interested in me romantically,” Maggie insisted.
Roma and I exchanged a look, which Maggie caught.
“Now what is it?”
“You’ve been out of the dating pool a little too long, Mags,” I said.
“You really haven’t noticed the way he looks at you?” Roma asked.
Maggie was clearly surprised. Then she shook her head. “No. Anyway, things are too complicated right now, with his mother coming back and then dying the way she did.”
Roma looked down at me. “Does Marcus know what happened yet?”
I shook my head.
“That was such a bizarre accident,” Maggie said, pushing back the sleeves of her gray T-shirt.
“I know,” Roma agreed, turning back to her painting. “What are the chances that Dayna Chapman would come back to town and then end up dying from an allergy attack the same day she got here?”
Maggie had glanced over at me and she must have seen something in my face, or maybe it was just the fact that I didn’t immediately agree.
“Kath, no,” she said quietly.
Roma turned around again and looked down at us. “What is it?” she said.
“You think that Dayna Chapman’s death wasn’t an accident,” Maggie continued, as if Roma hadn’t spoken.
“What?” Roma said.
“Why?” Maggie asked.
“I could be wrong,” I said, looking from one to the other. “I probably am wrong.”
Maggie made a face. “Sure, because you’re always wrong about this kind of thing.”
“The police are still investigating and so is the medical examiner’s office.”
“Why would anyone want to kill the woman?” Roma asked. “She hasn’t been here in more than twenty years.”
“I don’t know,” I said, leaning over to put more paint on my roller. “And maybe no one did. It just seems like an awfully big coincidence that Dayna would show up and then eat the one thing that could kill her. And Olivia has been so insistent that there were no nuts of any kind in the chocolates she made. At least none that she put there.”
“She could just be trying to cover herself,” Maggie said.
“Why?” I said. “If she had put nuts of any kind in the chocolates she made for the fundraiser, why lie about it? She hadn’t made any promise that they would be nut free. And then she picked up that other chocolate from Dana’s box and ate it and had a reaction herself. Not very smart if she knew there were nuts in it. She could have died, too.”
Maggie shook her head
“Mags, it doesn’t mean I’m right,” I said. I turned back to the wall with my paint roller.
Roma had come down the ladder and was moving it to the right. She didn’t look at me and I realized she hadn’t said a word. My stomach gave a little twist.