A Will and a Way

rogues’ gallery.”
    He’d come straight from the garage, where he and Randall had found the still-wet brake fluid on the concrete. Not all of it, Michael mused. Whoever had tampered with the brakes had left enough fluid in so that the car would react normally for the first few miles. And then, nothing. Michael had already concluded that the police would find a hole in the lines. Just as they’d find one in the lines of Pandora’s, to match the dark puddle beneath her car. It had been every bit as lethal as his.
    He wasn’t ready to tell Pandora that whoever had tried to kill them had been as close as the garage a day, perhaps two, before. Instead he looked at her sketches.
    “What do you see?” she demanded.
    “That you have tremendous talent and should give serious thought to painting.”
    “I mean in their faces.” Impatient with herself, she drew her legs up Indian style. “There’s just nothing there. No spark, no streak of anything that tells me this one’s capable of killing.”
    “Anyone’s capable of killing. Oh yes,” Michael added when she opened her mouth to disagree. “Anyone. It’s simply that the motive has to fit the personality, the circumstances, the need. When a person’s threatened, he kills. For some it’s only when their lives or the lives of someone they love are threatened.”
    “That’s entirely different.”
    “No.” He sat on the bed. “It’s a matter of different degrees. Some people kill because their home is threatened, their possessions. Some kill because a desire is threatened. Wealth, power, those are very strong desires.
    “So a very ordinary, even conventional person might kill to achieve that desire.”
    He gestured to her sketches. “One of them tried. Aunt Patience with her round little face and myopic eyes.”
    “You can’t seriously believe—”
    “She’s devoted to Morgan, obsessively so. She’s never married. Why? Because she’s always taken care of him.”
    He picked up the next sketch. “Or there’s Morgan himself, stout, blunt, hard-nosed. He thought Jolley was mad and a nuisance.”
    “They all did.”
    “Exactly. Carlson, straitlaced, humorless, and Jolley’s only surviving son.”
    “He tried contesting the will.”
    “Going the conventional route. Still, he knew his father was shrewd, perhaps better than anyone. Who’s to say he wouldn’t cover his bases in a more direct way? Biff…” He had a laugh as he looked at the sketch. Pandora had drawn him precisely as he was. Self-absorbed.
    “I can’t see him getting his hands dirty.”
    “For a slice of a hundred fifty million? I can. Pretty little Ginger. One wonders if she can possibly be as sweet and spacey as she appears. And Hank.” Pandora had drawn him with his arm muscle flexed. “Would he settle for a couple of thousand when he could have millions?”
    “I don’t know—that’s just the point.” Pandora shuffled the sketches. “Even when I have them all lined up in front of me, I don’t know.”
    “Lined up,” Michael murmured. “Maybe that is the answer. I think it’s time we had a nice, family party.”
    “Party? You don’t mean actually invite them all here.”
    “It’s perfect.”
    “They won’t come.”
    “Oh yes, they will.” He was already thinking ahead. “You can bank on it. A little hint that things aren’t going well around here, and they’ll jump at the chance to give us an extra push. You see the doctor in a week. If he gives you a clean bill of health, we’re going to start a little game of our own.”
    “What game?”
    “In a week,” he repeated, and took her face in his hands. It was narrow, dominated by the mop of hair and sharp eyes. Not beautiful, but special. It had taken him a long time to admit it. “A bit pale.”
    “I’m always pale with a concussion. Are you going to pamper me?”
    “At least.” But his smile faded as he gathered her close. “Oh God, I thought I’d lost you.”
    The trace of desperation in his voice urged her to soothe. “We’d both have been lost if you hadn’t handled the car so well.” She snuggled into his shoulder. It was real and solid, like the one she’d sometimes imagined leaning on. It wouldn’t hurt, just this once, to pretend it would always be there. “I never thought we’d walk away from that one.”
    “But we did.” He drew back to look at her. She looked tired and drawn, but he knew her will was as strong as ever. “And now we’re going to talk about what you said