The Purrfect Murder

know.”
    “Folly, you must go to the sheriff about this. I can understand why you’ve hidden it.”
    “Can you?” Her voice rose, she sucked again on the long white cigarette.
    “I think I can, and I don’t need details. Things happen. We get carried away.” She threw up her hands. “Why is it always the woman’s fault?”
    “Control women and you control men,” Folly flatly said. “Therefore we’re always supposed to be morally better than men. When a woman fails, it’s quite a long way down, even today, Harry, even today.”
    “It could be worse.” Harry tried to lighten the mood. “Could be living under the Taliban.”
    “We’re the only power on earth with the guts to make sure we don’t.”
    Harry didn’t reply, because she had a different view although no solution for such extremism. There really are people happy to kill anyone who doesn’t believe as they do. “Please promise me you will go if not to Rick then to Cooper. She’s a woman. She’ll understand. They won’t make it public.”
    “No, they won’t, but whoever wrote this letter will.”
    “Folly, you can fight it.”
    “Harry, I was young when I married into all this wealth. I am sure it has not escaped you that, middle-aged as I am, my husband is quite a bit older. I was naive about the laws, and I signed a prenuptial agreement stating that if I ever had sex with another man, I would be divorced with no settlement. Harsh. However, I was so in love at the time that I signed it with a flourish.”
    “Ah.” Harry understood, with attendant sorrow.
    She smiled wanly. “I discovered that I am human and, well, fragile.”
    “I understand.”
    “I can hear Miranda now, telling me not to set my store in earthly treasures. Well, I can’t quote the Bible as she can, but you know what I mean. But the truth is, Harry, I love all this. I love the power it gives me, not just to live fantastically well but because I can do some good with the money. He never interferes with my charities.”
    “If you pay, there will only be more letters.”
    “I can hope whoever is out there will be caught and killed.”
    “If they aren’t killed but caught, well…” Harry turned her hands palms up, a reinforcing gesture. “Folly, go to Cooper. We can always say that you were selected as a victim because of your money. You were so worried about your husband’s response and his health”—a slight smiled played across Harry’s lips—“that you thought the money was well spent to protect him.”
    A long pause followed. “I underestimated you, Harry. I promise you I will think about it.”
    As Harry rose to leave, she noticed when Folly stubbed out her cigarette in a cut-crystal ashtray that it was a Virginia Slims. She would tell Cooper.
    As they walked to the mighty double front doors, Harry said, “I am very sorry to upset you, but your welfare is so important, not just to me but to the entire community.”
    “Who knows you’ve come to me?”
    “No one.”
    “Thank you for that.” Folly kissed her on the cheek.

24
    T he
slap slap
of the paintbrush provided a rhythmic counterpoint to Mike McElvoy’s staccato yap. Orrie Eberhard, applying the second coat to the rococo molding, said nothing.
    “Emotional, rude, difficult—I mean, I can work with anybody, but she was a whistling bitch.” Mike slapped his clipboard against his thigh.
    Orrie fought the urge to dump the bucket of Benjamin Moore paint right on Mike’s head. Some would have splashed on Cynthia Cooper, though, and he liked her, so he kept on doing his job.
    “Show me the punch list.” Cooper reached for the clipboard, ran down the list quickly. “All right, Mike, let’s start with the kitchen.”
    “Fine.” He thought he could blow his way through this, but her attention to detail was unnerving.
    In the cavernous kitchen he pointed to the outtake-exhaust hole in the ceiling.
    “Right. It says here that it needs to be widened by two inches.” Coop pulled out a little measuring tape and measured the hole. “Read the code last night. This is code.”
    “Well,” he stammered, “she was bringing in one of those twenty-thousand-dollar stoves, and it needs a larger exhaust pipe.”
    “That’s not what the code says.”
    “Yes, but the county commissioners will change it soon enough, and she’d have to rip out everything. I was doing her a favor.”
    “She wouldn’t have to rip out anything, Mike. This house met the code when it was built. To date, the