Silence Of The Hams

coach a bunch of little boys,“ Jane said.
    They pulled into Jane’s driveway. Shelley said, “There’s a calling committee. If it’s been canceled somebody will have told us.”
    But neither of them had a message on her answering machine. And since it was beginning to cloud up, they decided to drive the boys to the practice later and stick around to remove them if it rained. Jane had an hour to kill, looked around the kitchen—which appeared to have been the site of a food explosion—and decided it could wait to be cleaned up. She went to the basement with the intention of getting a little writing done and ended up playing solitaire on the computer while her mind churned over Emma’s death.
    By the time Shelley knocked on the door upstairs, Jane had done nothing but further confuse and frustrate herself. They rounded up their boys and Suzie Williams’s son and went to pick up the other two in their car pool and delivered them to the soccer field behind the high school. Summer vacation was still new enough that the boys were hyper and the trip seemed much longer than it really was. Tony Belton was already out on the field, demonstrating various techniques to the early birds.
    “I’m surprised he doesn’t have a glamorous middle-aged widow still hanging on his arm,“ Shelley said.
    “If you look closely, though, you can see the talon marks,“ Jane said.
    A few other mothers and one father were sitting in the bleachers, but Shelley and Jane didn’t know any of them well enough to feel obligated to sit with them. Instead, they settled by a pile of paperwork and equipment in the center front that presumably belonged to Tony Belton. Shelley was fidgety.
    “What’s on your mind?“ Jane finally asked.
    Shelley thought for a minute and said, “Well, I’m hardly even willing to consider it, much less talk about it, but has it occurred to you that Patsy Mallett is a very strong, determined woman and—“
    “And a very likeable one,“ Jane said, nodding.
    “Yes, that’s why I’m reluctant to even say this, but she did know both Stonecipher and Emma.“
    “Right. I have to admit I thought about that, too. But while she knows a little about them, what could Emma have known about her? That seems to be the key here.“
    “Something dreadful about the bookkeeping she does?“ Shelley suggested.
    “Like fudging some extra profit out for herself? I guess it’s possible in theory,“ Jane said. “But you’d have to put a cattle prod to the small of my back to make me believe it. If nothing else, there’s the practical consideration: if you were going to cheat somebody, would you pick a particularly bad-natured attorney?“
    “Not unless you were sure you could get away with it and were cheating everybody. I don’t believe she’s capable of it either, but I had to say it, just to get it out of my head. It makes me feel slimy to even think about it.“
    “That’s the tough thing about this,“ Jane said. “There’s nobody but maybe Rhonda that I’d really like to pin this on. And she’s not even a good villain, just an annoying woman.“
    “Speaking of annoying women—“ Shelley said, gesturing toward a newcomer who was dragging coolers and cardboard boxes out of a station wagon. The team’s mothers took turns bringing snacks for the boys to indulge in after the practice. Jane, Shelley, and several others had objected repeatedly and almost violently to this tradition on the grounds that the boys went from soccer practice straight home to dinners they didn’t want to eat because they were full of snacks. But the tradition persisted. Most of the mothers at least attempted to bring something halfway healthy, but one—the one now approaching the field—brought the most appetite-repressing things she could find. Sodas instead of juice, Twinkies and chocolate-chip cookies instead of granola bars, and far too much of everything. Nobody could figure out whether she did it to be hateful, or just had no common sense.
    “I think she means it well,“ Jane said, trying to be generous. “She likes that stuff, her tubby little boy obviously loves it, and for that matter, so do the rest of the boys. Her kid probably goes home and tucks away all his dinner, and she wonders why the rest of us have such picky eaters.”
    When the practice was over and the boys fell on the snacks like a pack of hyenas, Tony Belton approached the bleachers. He greeted them by name and sat down to glance through the