The House of Seven Mabels

outside to sit under the patio table umbrella for a glass of wine for dessert for Jane, a beer for Mel, who’d mellowed considerably since she’d last spoken with him.
    “There’s no clear sign of her being pushed down the stairs, but it wouldn’t take an enormous force that would leave bruises,“ he said taking a sip of his beer. “This is good.“
    “Are you going to continue investigating?“
    “We have to. The missing purse is one reason. Apparently nobody working at the site ever once saw Sandra without it. A bag with a long strap hung over her opposite shoulder so it couldn’t be dropped or stolen.“
    “Even I noticed that. The first time we met her, Shelley and I stashed our purses between us. When I asked if Sandra wanted to put hers there as well, she acted like I’d spit in her glass.“
    “I sort of wish you had. That would have kept you out of this,“ Mel said with a laugh.
    “And no sign of it in the house somewhere?“
    “Nope. But the primary reason to treat it as a crime is that she was so heartily disliked by
    everyone on the project. Nobody has anything good to say about her. They’re all very frank about it. She seems to have gone out of her way to offend people working on the house. Maybe one of them had a stronger motive than the criticism of her that they’ve voiced.“
    “Do you know yet when she died?“
    “When she hit the basement floor,“ Mel said.
    “I know that. I mean what time?“
    “The pathologist says some time between three-thirty and five-thirty. Too bad she wasn’t wearing a watch that stopped conveniently.“
    “That’s quite a window of time,“ Jane said. “I suppose you’ve asked everyone working there if anyone disappeared for a while.“
    “Of course I did,“ Mel said, surprisingly mildly. “Everybody was doing his or her own job and didn’t pay much attention to what the others were doing. Some said they went outside on their breaks for a cigarette, a couple took bathroom breaks. You can’t break alibis like that.“
    There was a long companionable silence as they watched Max and Meow, Jane’s cats, returning from the field behind her house after a long day of hunting mice and chipmunks. Mel rose to let them in the house, but Jane said, “No, please don’t open that door. I want them to throw up the remains outside instead of on my floors.“
    It was another full five minutes before Jane admitted that she and Shelley had taken Jacqueline and Henrietta to lunch earlier.
    Mel started to object, but Jane cut him off. “We had a legitimate reason to meet with them. We’re supposed to be doing the decorating and they’re the carpenters who are using all the special wood. We wanted to make sure the color scheme we had in mind for the first part of the house to be finished met their approval.“
    Mel yelped with laughter. “I’ll bet you cleared up that part of your talk pretty quickly and plunged into pure gossip.“
    Jane smiled. “Of course we did. Were you told about Jacqueline’s getting shocked and passing out?“
    “The electrician told us all about it. The wiring had been tampered with. Not badly enough to kill her because when she plugged in whatever it was, the fuse blew. Or so the electrician says. And so does my assistant, who understands electricity. She passed out because she jumped backward, tripped, and struck her head on a sawhorse when she fell.“
    “The electrician is Thomasina, right? We haven’t run across her yet.“
    “You’re not going to enjoy it when you do. She’s a really tough, foulmouthed woman who won’t listen to what anyone else is asking or saying.“
    “Your prime suspect?“
    “Not necessarily. But if any of them are truly mean enough to kill someone and I had to choose at random, I’d like to pick her.“ He downed a little more of his glass of beer before continuing. He seemed to need it.
    “She went on and on about the house never being locked up,“ he said, glowering at the memory of his interview with her. “Or even sufficiently boarding up the downstairs windows. I got the full rundown on what valuable tools were in her toolbox that had been stolen. By the time she got to the fact that her precious wiring had been tampered with, I feared she was going to have a stroke right on the spot. Like most self-employed people, she’s underinsured, and if Jacqueline had wanted to sue her for the accident, it could have gotten really ugly.“
    “I think we’ll keep our distance from her in