“I understand. I think you could do with a shrink, but I do understand. But what about all those hours of the year that the kids are at school and don't need your attention or even want it?"
“You know that time is busy. You do what I do with it—cook, clean, run car pools, do civic stuff. I've got my blind kids I drive once a week—"
“But your own kids can learn to help cook, you could hire help to clean if you had extra income, Mike can drive now and could take up part of the car-pooling if you'd let Thelma get him a car like she keeps threatening. If you had a part-time job, or a job at home, you could still do a lot of your other things. Jane, it wouldn't hurt them a bit to be more responsible at home."
“You've thought about this a lot, haven't you?" Jane asked.
“On my own behalf, I assure you."
“You're going to work?"
“I'm thinking about helping Paul with the franchises in some way." Shelley's husband was a type-A second-generation Pole who owned a chain of Greek fast-food restaurants.
“But you've got a built-in employer who won't care if you've got to stay home with somebody with measles or take off a day to work on the PTA carnival."
“Yes, but so have you, come to that. There's Steve's family's pharmacies. You've worked there before.”
Jane held up her forefingers in a cross shape. "Work for Thelma? Have you gone completely insane? It's bad enough having her for a mother-in-law."
“Maybe you're right."
“In any case, my job right now involves getting Katie up and moving. Thanks for listening to my selfish whimpering."
“What are friends for?" Shelley said.
Mel VanDyne showed up on the dot of one with a picnic lunch in paper sacks from a chic catering shop. They drove a few blocks to a city park and staked out a picnic table as far as possible from a raucous softball game. He took four bottled wine coolers from a little insulated bag.
“Where's the rest of your family?" he asked politely as he unwrapped pricey little crustless sandwiches and individual plastic cups of pasta salad.
“My oldest son is looking at colleges with a friend, my youngest is on a trip with his grandmother, Katie'sat work, and my mom's visiting a friend," Jane reeled off, proud of resisting the urge to elaborate on these domestic arrangements. Now that she'd decided to give up trying to impress him, she felt much more comfortable around him.
“So tell me about the people at the dinner." So much for small talk.
Jane quickly summarized the discussion she'd had earlier in the day with Shelley and Missy. "We don't know anything about her family, of course. Or about the maid."
“We've done some checking," he said, unwrapping plastic forks and handing one to her. "According to the maid, there's only one child still living, a son who was in plumbing fixtures who's retired to Arizona. The two daughters, both deceased, each left children and grandchildren. They're scattered all over the country. There was a safe in the house. Presumably a will in it, but we haven't found the combination yet. We're hoping that the obit notice in the paper will bring out a lawyer. The maid didn't know who that might be, and she's not well enough to question thoroughly. There was a checkbook in the desk showing a balance of close to twenty thousand dollars, so there might be money involved."
“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 want it to be Grady—or anybody in the class!" Jane said.
“No? But it was, and I don't want anybody to get away with it. Do you?”