A Quiche Before Dying

mean to invent details, it’s just that it’s my job to do that, and I can’t always turn it off.“
    “I appreciate your honesty,“ Mel said, looking as if he’d like to shake her teeth loose. “Can you tell me the order that people came to the table?“
    “I have no idea,“ Missy said. “People came, then went and came back again. When I extricated myself from the crowd in the hall—let me see—I think Grady was there already. Yes, he was, because he accidentally bashed a chair leg into me while I was sitting down. And somebody else. I think Ruth Rogers. Or maybe her sister. I wasn’t really paying any attention. I was puzzling over some stuff I didn’t remember putting on my plate.“
    “With coconut?“ Jane asked. “Somebody gave me a lump of that, too. Maybe—maybe the tea was poisoned and there was an antidote in the coconut stuff, and that’s why someone made sure we all had some. But then, that can’t be, because I didn’t eat mine, so I should be dead.“ She glanced at Mel and realized she was making an ass of herself.
    He cleared his throat. “Now that you’ve reasoned that out, could we continue? You said you left the table—“
    “Yes, Mrs. Pryce got snooty about not having a drink, and that made me realize I didn’t either. So we all went back—I mean Shelley and I did—“
    “And you got Mrs. Pryce’s tea?“
    “No, I did not,“ Jane exclaimed. “She went ahead of us and had already gone when Shelley and I got to the kitchen. I think she went around the other way, because when we got back, she stepped on Grady’s contact lens. She was coming in the dining room from the other doorway.“
    “Did she have a cup of tea then?“ Mel persisted.
    Jane grabbed Willard’s collar and dragged him away from Mel, on whose trouser leg he was slobbering. “Sorry about that. I don’t know if she had her tea. She probably did. That’s what she went to the kitchen for, but I was looking down at Grady and half the others crawling around on the floor. In fact, that would have been a great time to put something on her food. Everybody was looking at Grady. Surely you’ve questioned everybody else about this.“
    “Endlessly,“ Mel said with disgust. “And it sounds like a fire drill in a lunatic asylum. Half this crowd doesn’t know where they were, much less where anybody else was at any given moment. Look, I’d like for each of you to write down for me exactly what you did, in what order, and what you can recall of where other people were. In the meantime, I want to talk to you about possible motives.”
    All three women smiled.
    “What? What’s funny about motives?”
    Shelley broke the news to him. “You’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who had more enemies internationally. There are probably clubs all over the world that meet just to discuss what they’d like to do to her.”
    Mel slumped in his chair, his gaze shifting slowly from Shelley to Jane. “Someday,“ he said with great deliberation, “someday when we have lots of time, I’m going to tell you what I think of the people you hang around with, Jane.”
     

9
     
    “I’m sorry we scared him off before we could talk about motives,“ Shelley said as the red MG in the driveway roared to life.
    “And I’m sorry he left without rescheduling our date,“ Jane muttered into her iced tea.
    “Oh, Jane. I’m sorry,“ Shelley said. “But you are getting a one-track mind.“
    “Shelley, it’s a track my mind’s been on for some time. I’m just hoping my body gets a chance to catch up. I’ve been a widow for some time, you know. I don’t mean to be indelicate, but I didn’t bury my hormones with Steve, you know.“
    “You weren’t planning to sleep with him at the ice cream store, were you?“ Shelley asked bluntly.
    “I was hoping to eventually get the opportunity to be asked,“ Jane said sourly. “The ice cream store seemed a good enough place to get on that path.”
    Missy gave Jane a sympathetic look.
    “Still, it is his job to sort this out. It apparently is murder,“ Shelley went on.
    “What I don’t understand,“ Missy said, “is why anybody had to murder her. After all, she was well into her eighties, I would guess. If you really hated her all that much, why not just wait with delicious anticipation for her to die? She was bound to before long. It seems an unnecessary risk to take.“
    “Obviously someone had to stop her from something she could still do or say about somebody,“ Jane