Grime and Punishment

you were saying about VanDyne?...“ She pulled into traffic.
    Jane told her about the conversation she’d had with him, but finished by saying, “Forget about him for a minute. I want to tell you why somebody wanted to kill Edith.“ The idea was only partially developed in her own mind, but she needed to hear herself say it before she’d know whether it had any merit. “Remember the talk we had on the phone about my desk drawer being meddled with? Well, I think that’s the other part of the story. I think Edith had gone snooping in it. You see, we were trying to figure out who would want to steal anything in it.
    What we didn’t consider was somebody wanting to steal information.”
    They’d reached a dilapidated shopping center in a suburb that looked like it had once been a little outlying town before Chicago oozed out and engulfed it. Shelley circled around a dry cleaner of questionable hygiene and went down an alley. There, looking like a scrap of country town, was a clapboard building that had big bags of fertilizer and grass seed piled in front and a faded sign that said, FEED.
    “ What in the world are you talking about?“ Shelley asked, coming to a stop in front of this vision and turning the engine off. “This is all too baroque for me.“
    “Blackmail.“
    “Blackmail! You?”
    Jane bristled. “I’m certain she was quite disappointed in her efforts to find out anything interesting about me.“
    “Oh, I didn’t mean that. Well, maybe I did.”
    Jane smiled. “I guess I might as well just face the fact that I’m boring and be proud of it. A few more encounters with Detective VanDyne ought to do the trick.“
    “Jane, we’re both boring in a conventional sense. All of us are. But blackmail? And how does my missing pearl necklace figure in this theory?“
    “Beats me,“ Jane said. “It might not have anything to do with it. The necklace might have been missing for a while, mightn’t it? When were you last sure you had it?“
    “The day I stuck it in the drawer a year or so ago,“ Shelley admitted. “Let me think about this while I get the birdseed.”
    She hadn’t been kidding about her recipe for birdseed. She took in two big, empty, lidded plastic buckets that had once contained a stupendous amount of plaster, and had the clerk fill them with a precise mixture of shelled sunflower seeds (“The cardinals love it.“), shelled peanuts (“For chickadees.“), safflower seeds (“A favorite with the titmice.“) and cracked corn (“Sparrows have to eat something.“).
    While Shelley supervised the mixing, Jane roamed around the store. It was like being in a different world, a rather old world. Or at least an unfamiliar one to a woman who had lived nearly everywhere on earth but the American farm belt. Besides the barrels of every seed known to the mind of man or bird, there were barrels of rabbit food—which looked surprisingly like rabbit droppings—and pressed-meal dog bones big enough for a woolly-mammoth-sized dog. There were all sorts of cages and water troughs and animal food dispensers, and a huge supply of old-fashioned mousetraps. There were even salt licks for deer. In another section, she found canning equipment, heavy ceramic bowls, and blue-speckled pots and pans and giant coffee pots, like cowboys probably had on the trail.
    On the last aisle there were gardening supplies. This evidence of suburbia was probably what kept the delightfully old-fashioned store in business. Here, the floor had been cleared, and a big sign said that in a short time this section would be full of the best quality Dutch bulbs for fall planting. Next to the sign, a wire rack contained a tidy stack of bulb catalogues. Jane picked one up and was paying for it when Shelley’s long-suffering clerk went staggering out the door under the substantial weight of her purchases.
    “We can always tell autumn is just around the corner when you come in, Miz Nowack,“ he was saying as Jane got in the minivan. “You’re always the first to stock up.“
    “Everybody feeds the birds in the winter, and if I start earlier I get all the good ones,“ Shelley replied with a laugh as she started the van.
    She shifted conversational gears as easily as the van’s gears. They’d hardly cleared the driveway of the feed store when she said, “In some ways it makes sense, Jane. If you leave the pearls out of it. One thing it would explain is the difference in the way people feel about Edith. You know—some