Grime and Punishment

it wasn’t her house anymore. When she woke before the alarm, sweating and exhausted, she could smell coffee. Shelley was already in the kitchen, puttering around silently. She had on faded jeans and a baggy pink cotton shirt that was wrinkled just enough to be trendy without looking sloppy. But for the first time Jane could remember, her friend looked tired and worried.
    “Paul called from the airport,“ she said as she poured Jane a cup of coffee.
    “I didn’t hear the phone.“ Apparently she’d slept more soundly than she realized.
    “I got it on the first ring. He got some sort of middle-of-the-night milk flight and is on his way now, after about sixteen stopovers.“
    “You don’t have to go to the airport, do you?”
    “No, he left a company car there.”
    Jane took a cautious sip. Shelley’s coffee had a reputation for burning the bottom out of cups. Steve used to say you had to use a blowtorch to cool it. But this time it wasn’t bad. Jane dragged out a package of grocery-store donuts and offered Shelley one. They sat together in companionable silence for a few minutes, and finally Shelley sighed and brushed the donut crumbs into a neat pile in the center of her paper napkin. “So, what are you doing today?“
    “Whatever you need me to do.“
    “I don’t think I need anything, but that’s sweet of you. It’s all over now, or at least I hope to God it is. Don’t you drive your blind children this morning?”
    One of Jane’s volunteer activities was to take a group of blind children from the high school to a weekly session in special techniques in daily living. “Not until Friday.“
    “This is Friday.“
    “No! It is! I was supposed to have Edith to clean for the first time today. Oh, Lord! I haven’t even straightened up enough for her to work on the actual dirt. Do you think they’ll send her, after what happened?“
    “I can’t imagine why not.”
    Jane was already scurrying around the kitchen, throwing things in the dishwasher and wastebasket with random abandon. Out of the corner of her eye, she noticed a car coming down the street. Shelley was instantly on the move.
    “There’s Paul,“ she said, slipping on her immaculate tennis shoes.
    “Get along, then. I’ll check with you later and see if there’s anything you need.”
    Jane went through the house like a demented whirlwind. Steve used to have a fit about Jane’s feeling that she had to tidy up for the cleaning lady’s arrival. “That’s what you’re paying her to do,“ he’d say as she snatched the newspaper away from him to dispose of it the moment he was through.
    “Men just don’t understand. I’m paying her to do the real cleaning, the stuff I hate,“ she’d explained repeatedly. “The icky corners of the bathroom, the windowsill dusting, the serious clear-to-the-corner vacuuming, scrubbing the stains out of the sink. But a cleaning lady can’t get to that unless everything is picked up.”
    As she passed the door to her bedroom, she heard her alarm buzzing and realized she’d forgotten the time in her frantic haste to prepare for Edith. She roused the boys without much sympathy for their sleepy pleas for another five minutes. Katie was already up, doing her hair. “Put away all those bottles and tubes and cans, Katie. I’m having a new cleaning lady today and I don’t want—“
    “Mother! You’re having a cleaning lady? What if she gets killed too?“
    “Katie, don’t be ridiculous!”
    Jane said it with a conviction she didn’t feel. Lightning doesn’t strike twice in the same place, she’d been telling herself, but that didn’t necessarily apply to murder. At least, she supposed it didn’t. Still, she went back and gave Katie a hug that both pleased and embarrassed her. “Don’t worry, kiddo.”
    As she headed out later with her first car pool, she noticed the red MG back in front of the Nowacks’. Now that Paul was back, VanDyne was probably questioning him. Did Paul Nowack have enemies who might have had something to do with the murder? Jane wondered. Who could guess? For, as much as she and Shelley saw of each other, Jane never felt she knew Paul at all. He traveled a great deal, and Jane had few opportunities to make her own assessment of him. As a neighbor, he was nice in a quiet way. But it wasn’t any sort of shyness—more a sense of a powerful personality that was at rest. It had to be. How else would a Polish steelworker’s boy turn into the man who owned a