Grime and Punishment

told the kids why you’re here or anything about the threat. I don’t want them to know. Shut up, Willard!“ The dog, knowing the guest and sure he was no intruder, was making much of acting the fierce watchdog.
    “Right. Are they here now?“
    “Just Todd. He’s out in the backyard, trying to make a paper airplane fly. Mike and Katie ought to be back pretty soon. They’re eating out. Let me get you settled. I have a tuna casserole in the oven for us. You do like that, don’t you?“
    “As long as it’s never been frozen in a little tray.”
    Once she had him installed in the tiny room that served as a sewing room and emergency guest room, he sat down on the edge of the narrow bed and she took a chair by the window. Todd was still out back, and had flown half a dozen sheets of notebook paper into the field behind the house where they fluttered around like confused ghosts.
    “Janey, I’ve been thinking about what you told me. Answer a few things for me—what about the doors? Were any of them forced?“
    “Not that anyone can tell. But the last time I left the house, I’m not sure the kitchen door got locked. I wasn’t that last to leave. Shelley was, and we were all upset about something else.“
    “Something else?”
    Jane paused a moment, then launched into a full account of her hideous conversation with Joyce Greenway. Uncle Jim took out a pipe and accessories and made a busy production of preparing to smoke it while she talked. It was a little easier this time. While telling Detective VanDyne, she’d feared seeing his contempt. But with Uncle Jim, she dreaded his pity. As she spoke, she recognized with another part of her mind that she was really sick and tired of pity. She’d had a lifetime quota since Steve died.
    “The funny thing is, in the first month or soafter he died, I was almost obsessed with finding out who it was. It seemed important and somehow necessary to discover. Then I sort of lost interest. No, that wasn’t it. I just assumed it was someone I didn’t know anyway, so what was the point?”
    Jim waited until she got this out of her system, then quietly asked, “Would you think this woman would kill to keep you from finding out about her and Steve?“
    “I’d love to suspect her, but no, I don’t think she would have. The revelation won’t change her life. It was merely something she felt guilty and embarrassed about, not threatened. She more or less admitted she was paying the blackmail just to assuage her conscience.“
    “Threatened is the operative word, I think.“
    “What do you mean?“
    “Well, the business of the knife in the bed—it’s clearly a threat.“
    “I’ll say!“
    “The point is, it could have been for real.”
    Jane got up and found him an ashtray. Sitting back down in the straight chair by the window, she said, “You mean it’s somebody who doesn’t really want to kill me? Just shut me up and make me stop meddling?“
    “It’s possible. If this woman could slip in and out of the house in the daytime when you’re gone without notice, she could certainly do it at night, or when you were home, and put the knife into you instead of the mattress. What about keys? Do any of your neighbors have keys to the house?”
    Jane looked down at her hands. How was she going to break this to him? Might as well just dump the whole truth in his lap. “Nearly everybody. For a while after Steve died, I was handing them out like free samples at the grocery store. Shelley went to the hardware store and got me a half dozen of them.“
    “Good God!“
    “Uncle Jim, people were coming in and out, helping. Bringing food, taking care of the pets, staying with the kids while I was seeing funeral directors and lawyers and police. But we all have keys to each other’s houses. You know, somebody has to go to a teacher conference, but gives a neighbor a key to let in the plumber or cable television people or whatever. We all do it all the time. We have to, or we’d be slaves to our houses.”
    It was obvious he was appalled at such a system. “Didn’t any of them give them back?“
    “I don’t remember. Probably not. And I didn’t think to ask for them. There was no reason to think it was dangerous to have keys out with my—my friends. Oh, Uncle Jim, I want more than anything to go back to the wandering-maniac theory...“
    “Sure you do, but this maniac could hardly know you’d spent the day out picking your neighbors’ lives apart, could he?”
    She was