A Quiche Before Dying

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’s at 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