The Sourdough Wars

cheer up during the process. What I’d been saying finally seemed to hit her—that her friend had killed her brother and may have tried to frame her. The part about framing her was the only part that really seemed to make any impression, and now that it didn’t seem too likely, relief was coming out of her pores like sweat.
    But Chris wasn’t satisfied. She opened everything and looked again. Then she shrugged, walked back into the bedroom, and, just as abruptly, turned around again. “Wait a minute.” She went back, opened the linen cabinet and removed a box of Stay-Safe Maxi-Pads. She stepped back, startled. “This is it. Feel.” She handed the box to me. It was the heaviest box of pads ever made.
    I looked at Anita. Her shoulders had tensed again and something was flickering in her eyes. But she nodded, setting her lips. I ripped off the top of the Maxi-Pads and saw that the box was about half-full. I took out the first layer of pads, and there it was—a little handgun lying in a cuddly pad-nest. Anita reached for it, but I stopped her. “No. It might have her prints on it. We’d better not touch it.”
    “But it might be loaded.”
    “Let’s just leave it alone for right now.”
    She nodded in agreement, and I put the box on the bathroom dresser. “Let’s go back to the study.”
    Again, she led the way, shaking her head. “I just don’t get it. How did you figure any of this out? I mean, I get it about the dying message, but…” She stopped.
    When we got back to the study, she said she needed a brandy and poured one for each of us as well. When we were comfortable, she finished her thought. “How do you know I wasn’t Sally’s accomplice? Or for that matter, maybe someone else was, and she just happened to hide the gun in a convenient place.”
    “I think she put the gun there because she wanted leverage with you. Otherwise, why not just toss it in the bay?”
    She nodded. “Go on.”
    “Here’s what I think happened. First of all, here’s what we know. Chris spent the night before the auction with Peter, and sometime in the middle of the night he got a phone call. The next day he said he had an appointment at ten. Chris and I think that whoever made the phone call made the appointment with him, turned up at ten, and killed him.
    “Couldn’t the phone company…?”
    I interrupted her. “The call came from a hotel. Somebody wasn’t taking chances. We think Sally was afraid she couldn’t outbid everyone else. So she wanted to stop the auction. First she tried to stop it by making threatening calls to the other bidders to try to scare them off. But that didn’t work. She turned up at Peter’s, pretending to have gotten a threatening call herself, took in the situation, and saw that the calls weren’t going to stop the auction.
    “So that night she called Peter. We think she got hysterical, probably confessed to making the threatening calls, and begged Peter to sell her the starter and call off the auction. She thought he might because Sally really believed that
she
had dumped
him
years ago and that he was still in love with her. She had that kind of capacity for self-deception. But we think what really happened is that Peter just never cared much for Sally. By all accounts—including Chris’s—he was a very passive and not very forthcoming person. So when Sally made a play for him, he went along with it but never really got interested in her. He hardly even noticed there was a romance, I think. It was simply a fling, and he withdrew from it so gradually that neither he nor Sally really noticed consciously what was happening. But at some level Sally did see it happening and she started withdrawing, too. But she made herself think she’d been the first to do it. It’s complicated, but I think that’s the way Sally was. She was so egotistical, she had to believe she dumped him. What do you think?”
    “I saw it happen,” Anita said. “It was exactly like that. Peter never really got excited about anybody—I beg your pardon, Chris. Maybe you were an exception.”
    Chris smiled sadly. “A minor one, I think. If we’d gone on seeing each other, he probably would have lost interest pretty quickly. I’ve come to see, I think that his real interest in me was the momentum I started about the auction. That was sort of the glue that held us together. But I didn’t see it at the time.”
    “And Sally,” I said, “didn’t see that her own aggression was the glue—to use