Third Degree (A Murder 101 Mystery)

was exiting. I was taken aback, not expecting to see her until the funeral, which I would eventually attend, but which had been put on hold until the coroner released the body, according to the local paper. She gave me the once-over, her eyes lingering on my wrapped wrist.
    “Alison. Hello,” she said.
    “Hi, Lydia. How are you?” I asked, giving her an awkward hug. We weren’t really friends, but we had shared an intimate experience, albeit indirectly, so I felt like a verbal greeting wasn’t enough. By her stiff response to my hug, I guessed I was wrong.
    “I’m doing the best I can,” she said. “We have so many house guests that I decided that we should go out to dinner. Do something normal.” She fiddled with the diamond heart necklace around her throat. The size of the heart, coupled with the size of the diamonds in it, made me think it cost about the same as what I made in a year.
    “That sounds like a good idea,” I said.
    Her eyes went back to my wrist. “What happened?” she asked.
    “This? Oh, I fell at school,” I said, rolling my eyes at my own stupidity. “The stairs behind my office are about a thousand years old, well, not really, but it seems that way, but they’re old, and they’re cracked, well, some of them are, and I was walking, running actually, and I fell, and ripped my dress—”
    She interrupted me, thankfully. “Are you okay?”
    “I’m fine. Just sprained, I think.”
    She stared at the wrist and then at me for a few more seconds before speaking. “Are you here alone? You can join us, if you’d like.”
    “No, I’m with my boy … with Crawford. Remember? The guy you met at the supermarket?”
    “I remember,” she said tersely. “The police officer.”
    “Right.” I put my hand on the bathroom door; we seemed to have run out of things to talk about. “Well, good to see you,” I said, and headed inside, relieved to be away from Crawford and his marriage talk, Lydia Wilmott and her appraising gaze, and the wilted salad that had been served to me before I had abruptly departed the table.
    But the thought of my martini, sitting there undrunk, would eventually lure me back.

Ten
     
    Any good will I had toward Ginny Miller evaporated the next time I saw her.
    This woman was turning out to be a pain in the ass.
    I was taking out the garbage, ironically as it turned out, when Ginny appeared curbside in a beat-up blue Subaru Outback. So I now knew the identity of the person who had followed me from Tony’s until Crawford had scared her off with his backward driving. I glared at her a little bit as she turned her car off.
    I was a little cranky, I admit. I had broken my one-martini-on-weeknights rule, and you try showering with a headache and a sprained wrist. By the time Ginny pulled up, spraying gravel onto my bare legs and throwing her car in park, I had managed to drag the garbage can down to the edge of the curb with my one good hand. Any vestige of the sweet wife who loved her husband was gone, and the cranky nurse was back. She got out of the car and approached me. “Bergeron!”
    “Why do you always call me by my last name?” I asked. “My name is Alison, or if you prefer, Dr. Bergeron. But this last-name stuff is getting old. You sound like an army staff sergeant and I don’t think that’s what you’re going for.” I crossed my arms over my chest. “And why were you following me?”
    “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
    “Cut the shit, Ginny. Yes you do. You were following me and Crawford that same day everything happened. Why?”
    She shrugged. “I’m not sure, really.” At least she was honest. “I was out of my head.”
    “You could have gotten us killed,” I said. “Crawford’s got a gun and he’s not a guy who takes kindly to being tailed.”
    She took that in but didn’t respond. She came up short when she saw my wrist. “What happened to you?”
    “I fell.” I tossed the garbage into the can, wishing that Crawford hadn’t gone home the night before and was around to experience what I was sure was going to turn into complete unpleasantness. Ginny was dressed in scrubs, clogs on her feet. Judging from the circles under her eyes, she was returning from—rather than going to—work. “Why were you following me the other day?”
    She looked surprised that I had figured out her identity. “I wanted to talk to you.”
    “So you followed me from Tony’s? I have a phone, you know. I’m even in the book. You