War and Peas

out a double murder?“ Jane asked.
    “I don’t think those are really related skills,“ Shelley replied.

Twenty-one

    Jane went home and started dinner. She fried some bacon, set it aside to drain, and poured a can of pearl onions into a sieve, then into the bottom of a baking dish. A large can of baked beans went on top of the onions, then a drizzle of molasses, and finally the crumbled bacon. She put the baking dish into the oven and cleaned up the top of the molasses jar before putting the lid back on. She’d learned to do that after permanently gluing the tops on three or four bottles. Her baked beans were a nuisance to make, but the kids loved them and she had something of a local reputation on the neighborhood picnic circuit for them.
    She dialed Mel’s office number, but he wasn’t in. She didn’t leave a message. He’d call when he got a chance anyway, and it wasn’t as if she had anything worthwhile to tell him, nor did she want to openly pump him for information. He’d tell her what he could, when he could. She’d been involved with him in murder investigations before. In fact, that was how she’d met him. Shelley had found a dead cleaning lady in her guest bedroom and Mel had been the detective in charge of the investigation. Back then, he’d thought their interest was merely interference. But Shelley and Jane had solved the case—Mel called it “stumbling onto the solution“—and his attitude had changed slightly.
    Though he’d never admit it, they’d helped him a couple of times, and he’d learned that he could share some information with them and trust that they wouldn’t go blabbing it around or put themselves in danger—at least, not much danger—by snooping. Jane and Shelley didn’t fool themselves into thinking they were better at solving crimes than the police were. They just had a different fix.
    The police had all the technical expertise: the fingerprint people, the specialists in blood, fiber, and DNA—the people who could make a case hold up in court. And they had the manpower to check alibis, look into suspects’ legal histories, and call on other, far-flung law-enforcement agencies. But they were, of necessity, slow and meticulous, not given to the bizarre flights of imagination that had sometimes led Jane and Shelley in the right direction. While Mel concentrated on evidence, they tended to chew over relationships.
    Occasionally they “chewed“ them into unrecognizable shreds, Jane thought. This was such a case. Too many relationships, too many people whose real feelings about others were a mystery. And at the heart of this case, Regina Palmer.
    Jane still had no clear idea of what the woman had been like, and that kept nagging at her. It wasn’t just that she’d seen Regina only briefly in life. Jane had the feeling that if she’d met Regina a couple dozen times, she probably wouldn’t know much more about what had made her tick. Regina had apparently been a very self-controlled, logical person. A secretive person, but not necessarily in a pejorative sense, as in keeping guilty secrets. Just a person who “kept herself to herself,“ as Jane’s grandmother would have put it.
    Nearly everyone spoke of Regina with respect and admiration. There was no question that she had been extremely efficient at her job. But Jane hadn’t heard much warmth of feeling expressed. Lisa, as her best friend, spoke of her fondly, and Derek had had some heated negative feelings about her. Yet, taken together, their views didn’t seem to make her quite real. Whitney Abbot, a cold fish himself and offended by Shelley’s prying, wasn’t about to paint a vivid word picture of his fiancée.
    Sharlene worshipped Regina, but through an idealistic haze of gratitude. And in spite of her adoration of her boss and the fact that she had kept Regina’s appointment diary, Sharlene hadn’t seemed to really know her, either. There had been, apparently, an unspoken barrier between them that both women had respected. Sharlene wouldn’t have dreamed of prying into Regina’s personal life. Even if she’d been curious, doing so would have offended her sense of professional propriety.
    As for the others involved with the museum, Caspar made no bones about disliking Regina, but he seemed to dislike anyone who stood in his way. It was an oddly impersonal antipathy based entirely on his thwarted financial expectations. Or was it? Had there perhaps been a genuine spark of antagonism, of