Alex Harris 00 - Poisoned

were in labor, so with them in pain to begin with, and trying to kill one another, well, you can just image the screaming. Mike ran from one frazzled, screaming woman to the other. The babies, two girls the spitting image of their father, were born within an hour of each other.”
    “So, who did he end up with? But wait just a minute. I want to get my sweater out of the van.” I got up and went and got my sweater along with Millie’s jacket, Sam’s sweatshirt, a small blanket for Meme, and the cheesecake Mary-Beth had made. “Okay, go ahead.”
    “Neither one. Cathy divorced him as soon as she got out of the hospital, and Jane doesn’t want anything else to do with him ever again. So they took him for all he’s worth and now he lives at home with his widowed father.”
    “What about Jane and Cathy?” Sam asked, as she ate a piece of the cake savoring the cherry topping.
    “They’re doing great. They’ve both enrolled in Mommy and Me classes together, and the little girls are growing up together just like the sisters they are. They’re even thinking about moving in together to save costs. After all, they both got great big houses in the settlements.”
    “Jeez! And I think I have problems when I can’t get my kids to brush their teeth before they go to bed,” Sam said.
    “So what does this have to do with the murder?” Millie asked, looking as if she had missed something.
    “Nothing. I just mentioned that Mike used to cut Mrs. Brissart’s lawn. He may have to again,” Mary-Beth added.
    We talked for a bit more over the heavenly concoction Mary-Beth made and then gathered everything up for the trip back to Indian Cove.
    There wasn’t one morsel of food left.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

    When I woke Sunday leaves covered my yard. So much for the nice little pile I raked together late yesterday afternoon. From the look of things, a blustering wind sometime during the night ran rampant. I loved the look of the leaves and only raked them because all my neighbors did.
    It was still very early but John had already gone to the station. He usually spent several nights a week at my place and I wondered if I should ask him to move in altogether. The thought crossed my mind more than once but my house was small with only one bathroom; perfect for me, but toss in a man and it could be quite crowded. And it didn’t have to be a big man. When my nephew spends the night, I feel the walls closing in. Of course, my sister lives in a big house with lots of room and even she feels the walls closing in with Henry around. The little guy has boundless energy that keeps him in motion from the time he gets up until the time he goes to bed.
    Before I met him, John inherited his grandmother’s old house and worked on renovations whenever time allowed. It would be lovely when completed, but who knew when that would be? Now with another murder, he didn’t have time to work on the place. If it ever got done maybe I could move in there, though the thought of leaving my little house didn’t sit well with me. Whenever John asked my opinion about some new sink he wanted to add or paint color, I used the opportunity to pick something I knew I could live with if and when I moved into his house.
    After making my bed, something I did without fail every day, I took a shower and got ready to go out. I still wanted to talk to a few others and I figured it would be easy to catch them home on a Sunday morning. Trish Hollander’s desire to find a job opened up the perfect excuse to go barging into someone’s home this early—I would deliver a brochure about my firm. I was, after all, an astute businesswoman always on the prowl for an asset to Always Prepared. The fact that Trish had absolutely no viable skills as far as office work went momentarily eluded me. The fact that Trish’s father, Steven, would most certainly be home at such an ungodly hour did not.
    I found the Estenfelder’s address on the Internet, and practically ran out of the house, Always Prepared literature tucked firmly in my purse. Steven and his daughter lived in a house located in an entirely different price bracket from mine, though this being Indian Cove, physically not all that far away.
    I shivered inside my oversized sweater as I headed down a leaf-laden country road not too far from the Sound. I made a right turn at the next intersection and headed inland.
    Even in this affluent section of the city, signs of Halloween dotted the landscape. My own front porch