The Wicked Flea

to the beginning of the path. We’re going to wait there so no one else goes in. Then you and Ulysses are going to run to your car and call the police.”
    We followed my plan. The path Douglas meant diverged from the main trail in a pretty section of pines. The path was barely that; it couldn’t have been more than six inches wide and looked more like an animal track than like a walking trail. “Hurry!” I told him. “Run!”
    He finally did. When he’d taken off, I turned my attention to Ceci, who had been uncharacteristically silent. Her lips looked blue. “Ceci, are you okay?”
    “I’m cold,” she said. The temperature had, in fact, dropped, and the pines blocked the sun. The chilling element, however, must have been the news of Sylvia’s murder.
    “Zip up your parka,” I advised. “Do you want to put your hood up? I can give you my jacket, too.”
    “You are a dear girl,” she said. “Offering me the shirt off your back!”
    “The police’ll be here in no time, and then I’ll get you home.”
    ‘They won’t send the same policewoman, will they? Officer Pasquarelli? What am I saying? Of course not. She’s been suspended. I hate that expression! It sounds as if she’s been hanged.” Healthy color suddenly returned to Ceci’s face. “You don’t think Douglas could be dramatizing things, do you?” Her glance eagerly traced the narrow track that meandered under the pines and disappeared in a dense thicket. “Sylvia might just have fallen, you know. Or fainted. Douglas doesn’t strike me as a terribly imaginative type, but you never know, do you? I think we’d better go see whether Sylvia needs help.”
    “Ceci, I don’t...”
    By the time I realized that she wasn’t just free-associating, she’d dragged the imperturbable Quest to his feet and was hauling him swiftly down the track. Too late, I realized that my promise to get her home soon hadn’t conveyed the comfort I’d intended; rather, she’d viewed it as a threat to remove her from the action. Rowdy, who never wants to be left out either, was trying to pull me after Quest and Ceci.
    “Ceci!” I called out. “I don’t think this is a good idea!” I have to confess that as I was hollering to Ceci, I was also mulling over what she’d said about Douglas. He didn’t strike me as the imaginative type, either, certainly not as the type who imagines dead bodies where there are none. On the other hand, as Ceci didn’t know, Douglas was consulting a psychiatrist, my own Dr. Foote, about something. He seemed far too bland, too ordinary, to possess so vivid and unusual a symptom as the tendency to hallucinate corpses. Still, as Ceci said, you never know, do you?
    Ceci had moved beyond the pretty pines to thick woods, which consisted of tall, bare trees, barren saplings, and weedy shrubs. I ran, with Rowdy dashing ahead. Mainly because Quest was slowing Ceci’s progress, we quickly caught up. She and the Newfie had, however, come to a stop at the edge of a small clearing that was little more than a widening of the track. In its center stood a waist-high boulder, the kind that the last glacier deposited in great numbers as it retreated from New England. Steeling myself for the macabre sight of Sylvia’s body, I came to a halt next to Ceci, maybe five or six yards from the boulder. With its flat top, it looked like a small version of one of those expensive granite food-prep islands you see in trendy kitchens. Shards of blue-and-white crockery were scattered on the boulder and on the ground next to it, as if a butterfingered cook had smashed a stack of plates. Heightening the sense of domesticity was the apparent presence of the klutz who’d dropped the china. Indeed, she seemed to have fainted at the sight of what she’d done. She lay on the ground on the far side of the boulder, her head visible to its right, her feet to its left. Even from a distance, the stench was strong and nauseating.
    “There are a terrible number of skunks in Newton,” Ceci remarked. “You wouldn’t expect it, but there are. I’m afraid one of them...” She began to step forward.
    “Don’t!” I ordered. “Ceci, if she really has been killed, we need to stay away. The worst thing we can do is get our footprints and everything all over the place.”
    To my amazement, instead of barging ahead or launching into a monologue about the broken china, Ceci held still and asked softly and pensively, “Holly, how did Douglas know it’s