War and Peas

a couple screws into a wall all by myself.”
    Shelley grinned. “What’s next? Repairing washing machines? Overhauling carburetors?“
    “No, so far I’m only up to spark plugs. But anything’s possible. What was going on at the museum when you left? Had anybody admitted to writing the note?“
    “Not that I know of, but I got my information from the woman in the gift shop. That’s what makes me wonder if the note wasn’t a real threat. If it were simply a joke, why wouldn’t whoever wrote it just say so?“
    “Maybe they have and the gift-shop woman hasn’t heard about it yet. And think, Shelley, if you wrote somebody a note like that to be funny and the person turned up murdered a few days later, would you leap right in and say you wrote it?“
    “Both of us would. But we wouldn’t have killed anyone, so we’d have no reason to worry.”
    They walked back around to the driveway. “But what if we’d done something else bad?”
    “What do you mean?“
    “Suppose Regina told Georgia, for instance, that she was going to expose some financial hanky-panky and Georgia wrote that note, but then somebody else killed Regina for some other reason entirely. If I were Georgia, I wouldn’t want to admit to the note and then have to explain to everybody what it was all about. I’m just not convinced that the note necessarily had anything to do with Regina’s death. And there’s a lot of further confusion in my mind about Regina’s office being searched. Was that note what somebody was looking for? If so, they obviously didn’t find it. But why go looking for it in the basement?“
    “I know, I know,“ Shelley said. “I can’t make any sense of it, either. I’m starting to get paranoid and think everybody’s up to something shady.“
    “I wonder if it comes down to Regina herself,“ Jane said, putting the library book back in the car and closing the doors after making sure the cats were out. “I can’t face vacuuming this now. I’ll try to bribe one of the kids to do it. Let’s go in and sit down. I think it’s about to rain.”
    When they were settled at Jane’s kitchen table, and had duly admired the birdless bird feeder, Shelley said, “What do you mean about Regina?“
    “Just that we didn’t really know her at all. We’re relying almost entirely on other people’s impressions of her, and they’re not all the same. And yet I don’t feel like I’ve got a balanced picture of what she was really like, merely a bunch of conflicting ideas. How long will it be before birds come?“
    “Any second now.“
    “Really?“
    “No, Jane! Maybe tomorrow. Maybe next week. You’re right about Regina. Sharlene thought she was a goddess—remote, perfect, sort of bloodless, but kind. I’m not sure that’s what Sharlene thinks, but that’s the impression I had.“
    “Right. Me, too,“ Jane said. “But Derek seems to have seen her as a stumbling block to his sexual and professional ambitions. He tried to seduce her out of her job and it didn’t work. He thinks she was cold and probably imagines she was as ambitious and aggressive as he is. And for all we know, he was right.“
    “And we’re told that Caspar Snellen hated her, too, claiming that she’d tricked Miss Daisy into giving the money to the museum just to further her own ambitions. Regina’s ambitions, I mean.”
    Jane nodded. “Caspar’s a creep, but even creeps can be right occasionally.“
    “Probably not in this case, though,“ Shelley said. “Everybody seems to agree that Babs McDonald was a lifelong friend to Miss Daisy, and if Babs even suspected that Regina was conning her friend, she wouldn’t have been supportive of her. And she must have been, or Regina wouldn’t have kept her job all this time.“
    “I suppose so,“ Jane allowed. “But Babs said herself that she didn’t approve of Caspar or Georgia. She wouldn’t have wanted them to have Miss Daisy’s money to throw away. Maybe she just turned a blind eye—“
    “I don’t think Babs ever turned a blind eye on anything,“ Shelley said.
    “You say that only because you want to be her when you grow up,“ Jane said.
    Shelley laughed. “I guess I wouldn’t mind. I sure hope I have her figure, her hair, and her wardrobe when I’m her age.“
    “You can’t fool me. You can buy all that stuff. What you want is her ‘presence.’ “
    Shelley looked disgruntled at this blunt truth. “I wonder what the real story is about her husband’s death. I