The Sourdough Wars

covered in shrimp-colored cotton, each attended by its personal ficus. The living room was beyond. Anita was wearing a sweat suit in the same color as the upholstery. It could have been a coincidence, but it was the sort of studied touch she was fond of. She probably had eight or ten sweat suits, all color-coordinated with her furnishings so she’d always look good around the house and never have to spend time thinking about it.
    We’d decided that I’d do most of the talking, so I spoke first, introducing Chris.
    “I guessed. What can I do for you?”
    Anita was leading us down the stairs to her study. It was rigged up to resemble some baronial library, with yards and yards of books lining the walls and looking as if they’d been bought that way—by the yard. There were also wing chairs and a fireplace with a healthy blaze in it. The concept was pretentious, but it was nevertheless a comfortable room. A bowl of freesias scented it, the only personal touch—possibly in the whole house. Hiring a decorator took so much less time than choosing one’s furniture.
    “We think,” I said, “that we know who killed Peter.” Her brown eyes flashed, just for a second, before she shifted them back to neutral. “Sit down.”
    “We think it was Sally.”
    “I see. But why not tell the police?”
    “Because we think if we did, they might get the wrong idea. They might think you were her accomplice.”
    “Me? But why on earth would they think that?”
    “Because we think the murder weapon is in your house.”
    She sank into one of the wing chairs. “I guess,” she said, “you’d better start at the beginning.” She sighed as she said it, and looked at her watch. Apparently, solving her brother’s murder was going to take too long to suit her.
    “Before Sally died,” I began, “she said something.”
    “Before?” Again, Anita glanced at her watch. “When before? A week before? A month before?”
    “With her last gasp.”
    Anita produced her own gasp.
    “One of the sourdough bidders, Clayton Thompson, found her with the knife in her chest, and she spoke to him before she died. These were her last words, as he understood them: ‘Peter.’ And then she paused. Then she said ‘I need a,’ and then she paused again. Then she said the word ‘gun.’ And then she paused again, and she said ‘I need a’ and again she paused. Her last word was ‘bathroom.’ So what he heard was something like this: ‘Peter… I need a… gun … I need a… bathroom.’ A strange thing for a dying person to say, don’t you think?”
    Anita shrugged.
    “But suppose she weren’t really saying ‘I need a’ but ‘Anita’? Where does that get us?”
    Again, she didn’t answer.
    “Not too far. But suppose she were trying to say, ‘Anita’s gun’ and ‘Anita’s bathroom.’ ”
    Now I had her attention. Her head jerked up and she stared, looking very alarmed. “I lent her my gun. I remember now. Oh my God, it was when she first moved up to Sonoma. She said she heard noises at night. But that was ages ago.”
    “She never returned the gun?”
    “No. I forgot about it till now.”
    “I think what she was trying to say is that she hid it in your bathroom.”
    “Why would she do that?”
    Anita was a no-nonsense person, so I didn’t mince words. “Frankly, Anita, I think she was trying to frame you.”
    Her shoulders tightened and she gripped the chair arm, but otherwise she kept as cool as ever.
    “Would she have had the opportunity?” I asked. “Could she have gotten into your house?”
    “She was my houseguest at the time.”
    “The time of the murder?”
    “Yes. She stayed with me when she came down for the auction. Sally and I go back a long way—Peter and I grew up with the Tosi boys, you know, so when Bob married Sally, she and I became friends. We were the same kind of people, in a way.”
    “Do you have a guest bathroom?”
    “Yes—off the guest room. Shall we look there for the gun?” She stood up and led the way. Chris and I followed her into a frou-frou bedroom done up in a Laura Ashley print—bedspread, chair, pillows, curtains, all in the same pink print on a cream background. It was the kind of room I dreamed about when I was a teenager.
    The bathroom was compact and had about a million hiding places in it. We looked through the towels in the linen cabinet and peered in the medicine chest and rummaged through all the drawers of the dresser and didn’t find the gun. Anita seemed to