Steamed

speak about this over dinner, but I suppose we can’t just ignore the pink elephant in the middle of table now, can we? The detective has been by several times. In fact, he was here yesterday. We gave him what information we could, but he doesn’t have enough evidence to arrest anyone. Yet. He was asking us whether we’d done any painting around the house. And, good Lord, he specifically wanted to know whether we’d painted anything orange ! Can you imagine?” Sheryl Rafferty was someone who’d choose tasteful shades of Ralph Lauren and hire a professional to do the painting. The image of her teetering on a ladder with a roller of orange paint in her hand was ludicrous.
    “And,” she continued, “he wanted to know about that Veronica, that, uh, girl Eric was seeing before he met you. I told him the truth, which is that Veronica was a gold-digging tramp and that she probably murdered our son once she... well, once he broke things off with her.”
    “When exactly was that?”
    “Oh, don’t worry, dear. He wasn’t seeing her when you two started dating. I suppose it was about six weeks or so before he died. I know you two hadn’t known each other long, but when it’s right, it’s right. We didn’t even know he’d been seeing someone else after her—you, of course, as we know now. But Eric was probably afraid to introduce us to you after the Veronica fiasco. We all despised her. In fact, we had just found out about you the day he died. I’d spoken to him on the phone earlier in the day, and he told me that he was taking a young woman named Chloe to dinner. He said you’d been out together a bunch of times and that he was absolutely smitten.” Mrs. Rafferty’s eyes twinkled at the memory of that last phone call. “I just know you two would have been together forever.”
    “That’s enough, Sheryl.” Phil, who struck me as the more grief-stricken of the parents, looked miserable. “I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Can we just get through dinner, please?”
    I excused myself to use the bathroom but just needed a breather. Eric, it seemed, had invented a relationship with me and had lied to his parents, probably because he’d wanted to convince them that he was hooked up with someone other than the despised Veronica. Sheryl had not only believed him but had gone on to fantasize about our supposed romance and to cultivate the image of her son heading down the road toward blissful matrimony.
    Only when I’d walked out of the dining room did I realize that I had no idea where the bathroom was. I wandered through the living room and once again glanced into the study, where a computer screen illuminated the stacks of boxes. If I was going to play the amateur crime-solver, I was obliged to take a quick peek in there, wasn’t I?
    I stuck my head in the study and looked around. Only a few yards from where I stood was a rolltop desk on which rested a computer and a phone. The monitor told me that someone, Phil or Sheryl, was in the middle of losing a game of hearts and favored a tropical fish desktop theme. Most of the desk’s surface was thick with piles of bills and torn-open business envelopes. Immediately recognizable were envelopes from the same bank I used and bills from the same cable and electricity companies that sometimes dunned me for overdue payments. My own desk was often cluttered with unpaid bills, but even at my most impoverished or lazy, I’d never begun to create anything remotely like this picture of financial disaster. How could the wealthy Raffertys have fallen so behind in paying their bills?
    I tiptoed to the desk and took a peek at a bank statement that was lying open across one of the stacks.
    It was Eric’s bank statement. Maybe I could find out how rich he’d really been.
    I held the green paper close to the light from the monitor and scanned it as quickly as I could. The late-August date showed that it was the most recent statement.
    And Eric had been nearly broke. His final balance barely broke seven hundred dollars. I looked around quickly and grabbed an envelope from a credit card company. The account was also Eric’s. He’d owed a whopping amount of money for just that one card, an amount that did not, of course, include all the bills for utilities, other credit cards, and who knew what else. Oh, and his car was about to be repossessed.
    I left the study and headed back to the dining room. Although I hadn’t had time to think through the meaning of