Catch a Falling Knife

can entertain you while you wait.”
    She called, “Winston, Great-Grandma is here.”
    Sandra went up the stairs and a minute later Winston walked down them, holding on to the handrail, just like a grownup. He had a Dr. Seuss book in one hand.
    “Hi Great-Grandma,” Winston said, “how is your blue car?”
    “My blue car is fine,” I said, catching him and giving him a kiss. “Would you like me to read you the book?”
    He acquiesced to that so we sat on the couch and read about the cat in the hat. In a few minutes Sandra reappeared down the stairs, wearing shorts and a sweatshirt, with her blond hair cascading down to her waist. She looked years younger and more carefree. I finished reading the book to Winston and then gave him my car keys, as a condition of leaving him.
    Sandra and I set up shop on her small breakfast table in a nook beside the kitchen. I opened the manila folder in which I had carried the poems and showed them to her. There weren’t that many so she quickly read all of them. They included the limericks about Mark and Elise.
    When she had finished she said, “She has an obsession with Elise and Mark. I knew when I met her that I didn’t want her around Mark.”
    I thought about telling Sandra that if she wanted to protect Mark she should take him back. “Let’s concentrate on this poem,” I said, finding the one about dreams and the devil. I asked her what she made of it.
    Sandra studied it for a minute and said, “She’s upset with what she thinks is her fate and this may lead her to do something she shouldn’t. Of course, you’ve got to understand that poets write about doing a lot of things they wouldn’t actually do. Many of them are rather passive people, but they momentarily escape from their unhappy lives through their words.”
    “Isn’t the line ‘Keep it, Lady Luck’ out of place? The rhythm seems to be different.”
    “Yes, it has only three feet while the other lines have four. That’s a good observation, Gogi. Maybe you missed your calling.”
    Not likely. “You’re talking about something like iambic pentameter.”
    “Well, tetrameter, at least for the other lines. But most of the feet are iambic.”
    That was more than I cared to know about poetry. “I was searching for a clever idea, like how Donna put Elise’s name in the limerick about her.”
    Sandra studied the poem again. Suddenly she stood up, almost knocking over the table, and said, “Look, Gogi. The first letters of the words, ‘Keep it, Lady Luck’ spell out the word ‘kill.’”
    “Now that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for,” I said. “I came to the right place.”
    “Of course, it might be coincidence,” Sandra said, sitting down again, “but the way she deliberately used that wording…”
    “Let’s look at the next line: ‘Each lass is Satan’s earthly prize.’ The first letters of the first five words…”
    “Spell out ‘Elise.’ Holy cow, do you suppose Donna killed Elise?”
    “It’s never been very far from my thoughts. Look at the following line.”
    “He makes angels run amuck.”
    “If you take the first letters of ‘makes angels run’ and the last letter of ‘amuck’…”
    “It spells Mark. Holy cow!” Sandra said again.
    Teachers are conditioned not to swear, especially in the presence of their grandmothers. I said, “Is that too farfetched?”
    “No. After all, it’s hard to find a good word that starts with k, especially at the end of a sentence. Gogi, Donna is going to kill Mark.”
    “That may have been her original plan. But when he became a suspect she may have backed off, figuring that if he was convicted of Elise’s murder, she would still get her revenge on him for liking Elise instead of her—if that’s what infuriated her.”
    “But with the new things you and Mark found out yesterday about Eric Hoffman, doesn’t that change things? Mark isn’t so much of a suspect, anymore.”
    “How do you know about that?” I didn’t think anybody else knew what Mark and I had done yesterday.
    “Mark called me last night after you were in bed.”
    So that’s what the murmuring was that I had heard through my closed door. And I had thought it was the television set.
    “We’ve got to warn Mark,” Sandra said, getting more agitated.
    She picked up her cordless phone and called my number.
    “He’s not there,” she said. She left a message for him to call her immediately.
    Sandra couldn’t sit down. She began pacing around the