Fed up

at a wedding ceremony, I presumably shouldn’t wear a tube top and stilettos.
    I tried to reach Josh on his cell at Simmer but just got his voice mail and didn’t feel like leaving a message. I parked myself on the couch, ordered in Thai food, and lamented the crummy schedule that kept Josh chronically exhausted and separated him from me.
    While washing down yum nuah and drunken noodles with a few bottles of beer, I dealt with a phone call from the same detective who’d questioned Josh the other day. With my mouth half full of food, I reeled off my account of Francie’s death to a man who sounded less interested in figuring out who had killed Francie than he was in learning where he, too, could get good Thai food. In his view, was her horrible death just one more murder? Or maybe the authorities felt hopeless about solving the crime. If so, I could understand why. After all, the crime scene had been compromised, and a great deal of the evidence had been destroyed.
    “You know,” I said, punctuating my words by jabbing my fork in the air, “I heard that digitalis is what killed Francie. That’s foxglove. It’s a common biennial. I hope you’re finding out who does and doesn’t have a garden. I, for one, don’t. I live in a condo. There’s a yard, but it’s just a lawn, really, with no flowers.”
    “Ma’am, I really can’t comment on the investigation, but we’re doing everything we can,” the disembodied voice said unconvincingly.
    “I watched that woman die, and let me tell you, it wasn’t a pretty sight.” I took a big swig from my beer. “And why didn’t that police officer think something fishy might be up when he got to the house and there was a half-dead woman and a bunch of other people sick and vomiting all over the place, huh? That was a mistake, wasn’t it?”
    Okay, my alcohol tolerance was negligible, presumably because in a show of solidarity, I’d had almost nothing to drink since Adrianna got pregnant. With Ade out of commission—she was the only girlfriend I ever went to bars with—abstaining from alcohol had been an easy sacrifice. Somehow the lure of the beer that Josh kept in my fridge had sucked me in tonight, and the alcohol was hitting me hard.
    Even so, I answered as many of the detective’s questions as I could, but I knew almost nothing about the people who’d been at Leo and Francie’s. The exception was, of course, Josh. I’d never seen either Francie or Leo before, I knew Digger only through Josh, and I’d met Robin, Marlee, and Nelson only a few times. I hung up and polished off the spicy beef salad.
    “Damn detective,” I said to Inga, who was perched on a windowsill, eyeballing my noodles. Inga licked her paw in response.
    I heard a thud as Gato leapt down from the fridge and casually strolled into the living room as though he hadn’t been hiding out for the past few days. He gave Inga the hairy eyeball and hissed spitefully before hopping onto the couch and curling up a foot away from me. I reached over, patted him, and whispered, “That’s a start, buddy.”
     

 
    THURSDAY was a day of rain-barrel activities: researching designs that I could pass on to hunky Emilio, returning phone calls from potential clients, and preparing written materials on the environmental benefits of watering gardens with rainwater. I was pretty pleased with the pamphlet that I came up with to pass out to clients. I gave myself extra credit for printing it on recycled paper. I was building an e-mail list, too, so that we could keep clients posted on new developments in the exciting world of rain barrels without using more paper than necessary.
    I worked steadily, with hardly any interruptions, and by early evening I was starving and ready for my dinner with Robin and weirdo Nelson. The grilled cheese and tomato sandwich that I’d eaten for lunch hadn’t satisfied this gourmet girl, and I was really hoping that the fare at Marlee’s restaurant would be better than the Boston Mystery Diner claimed.
    I showered, dried my hair, and stood disgruntled in front of my closet, unable to find anything I was in the mood to wear. Then I remembered that I still had a bag of Adrianna’s prepregnancy clothes to root through. In spite of my loyalty to Adrianna, I dreaded the inevitable day when her fabulous clothes would once again fit her, and she’d demand their return. In the meantime, I was making the most of the goods. Until now, I’d been wearing her summer things, but it