“Who can say?" he answered. "I don't know anything yet." He turned back to Shelley. "Are you ready to go home?"
“I'll come with you, Shelley," Jane said. She handed the list to the detective and wondered if he'd be able to read her handwriting. She hardly recognized it as her own.
“No, Jane. I'm fine now. Really. Go get your kids back from the Dragon Lady.”
Jane smiled. "Okay. But you'll come over for dinner?”
Shelley agreed and went off with her protector. Jane called her mother-in-law and made the briefest possible explanation of what had occurred. "I'll be over in a few minutes to pick up the kids."
“Oh, no need, Jane. They're happy as clams here. I've fixed a nice angel food cake. I know how Mike loves them."
“And I suppose he's wolfing it down now and spoiling his appetite for dinner?" This was one of Thelma's favorite tricks. She used to do it all the time with Steve, asking him to stop by to visit her in the late afternoon for some reason, then filling him up so he wouldn't want whatever Jane had fixed.
“Oh, were you cooking dinner tonight? I had no idea," Thelma said with a little laugh.
“I always cook dinner," Jane lied. She eyed a Kentucky Fried Chicken box from the evening before in the wastebasket. I must not lose my temper with her, she told herself. She's doing me a favor at the moment and that puts her in a position of power: "I'll be over in a few minutes.”
She then reported in to Dorothy Wallenberg. "I'm running over to pick up Todd. I appreciate your helping me out."
“Jane, what in heaven's name happened at Shelley's?"
“The cleaning lady was murdered."
“Murdered! My God! You said before that she died. I thought a heart attack or something. Murdered? Who did it?"
“Nobody knows. Please, Dorothy, don't tell Todd about it being murder yet. I want to sort of ease into it with him later. Without any warning, it would scare him to death."
“Of course it would. It scares me, and I'm worried about you being right next door. Shelley's home alone right now, too, isn't she? Thank God her children were gone. Don't worry about getting Todd. He's out playing with the kids, and I'd promised to take them all out for Burger King. Let me just bring him back to you later."
“Thanks, Dorothy. That sounds wonderful. The police ought to be gone by then and it'll be less horrible.”
As she backed out to go get Mike and Katie, the last police car pulled away. All that remained was a red MG. That had to be Detective VanDyne's. Somehow he looked like the sort of bachelor who'd have one.
When Jane got to her mother-in-law's, Thelma was greedy for details about the crisis. She was a stately, angular, blue-haired lady with a perpetually haughty look, but her usual frosty manner thawed as she exclaimed, "Murder! Good Lord, Jane. How terrible! Well, it just goes to prove what I've always said you and the children ought to move in here with me. It's not safe for you to be living alone.”
Jane gritted her teeth and took a deep breath. "Thelma, you'd have hardly been able to prevent this, and none of us were endangered anyway." This, she knew, was beside the point. Her mother-in-law had been harping for months on how they ought to move in with her. The bedrooms in her elegant condo were the size of skating rinks, but there were only two of them, and Jane sometimes had nightmares about living there and having to be Thelma's "roommate." Of course, Thelma didn't really want them there; what she was really angling for was an invitation to move in with them.
“She'd be packed in thirty seconds," Jane had said to Shelley the week before, "if I even hinted that I might agree. It would be like having Gen‑ eral Patton around the house. Slapping the troops — namely me — for their own good."
“You've got to stand firm, Jane," Shelley had advised. "She'd have you asking her permission to pee within the week."
“It's this modern permissive society," Thelma was going on. "When standards are allowed to slip, we're all in peril."
“I can't see how that figures, Thelma. We don't even know anything about this woman or why she was killed."
“Mark my words, it'll all come out eventually and you'll see I'm right. Ah, children, your mother has finally come to pick you up," she said as Mike and Katie came out of the second bedroom, which was fitted out as a TV room. Thelma had every video game in the world, part of her insidious campaign to make herself indispensable. She managed, too, by some mysterious process that Jane found highly suspicious, to get rental movies before they were even in the rental shops.
“What's goin' on, Mom?" Mike asked.
“Mother! I was supposed to go to Jenny's after school and Gram said you wouldn't let me," Katie complained.
Jane cast a black look at Thelma, who was smiling fondly on her grandchildren.
“I'll explain on the way home. Get your things," Jane said. "Thelma, I don't know how to thank you for your support."
“It's the least I can do, Jane. After all, they are my own flesh and blood."
“As she drove home ("No, Mike, my nerves are too frayed to ride with you in rush-hourtraffic."), she explained to them what had happened in the most innocuous way she could. Her aim was to make the murder sound like a pure freak of nature that would almost instantly be sorted out, with no danger to them whatsoever. But in her own mind she was deeply troubled. If somebody could commit murder in Shelley's house, they could do it in hers. The first thing she was going to do when she got home was check all the locks.
The kids, however, weren't upset. They were fascinated by the idea of a real live murder next door. To them, it was an adventure, impersonal and exciting, like something on television. Tomorrow they'd be the center of attention at school, famous for their proximity to something so out of the ordinary. They hadn't known the victim, so they had no sense of personal loss. Nor had they had the misfortune of actually viewing death, as Jane had. Best of all, they showed no signs of making any connection with their father. They'd grieved him properly at the time, and still missed him, but this didn't appear to be reactivating their distress, as it had with her.
They're so damned resilient, Jane thought. It must come from having no sense of their own mortality yet.
Shelley came to dinner, and in front of the kids neither she nor Jane discussed the afternoon's events. Todd turned up, filled to the brim with a double cheese Whopper and fries and content to listen to Mike and Katie's account without taking much interest. Eventually they all wandered off to their separate pursuits, and Jane and Shelley were left to sit over the remnants of the makeshift dinner.
“You'll stay here tonight?" Jane said. It was halfway between an invitation and an order.
“Thanks, I'm planning to. Mary Ellen Revere invited me to stay at her house and I lied and said I'd already agreed to stay here. I know I've got to get it over with, sleeping in that house, but not until Paul gets back tomorrow. He tried to get a flight tonight and couldn't. I called my sister and told her that, if this isn't solved by the time they're ready to come back, I want her to keep the kids a little longer. Jane, why do you suppose this happened?"
“I have no idea. I guess it could have been someone that woman knew."
“But why? And how would the killer have known she was at my house? As I understand it, she didn't even know where she'd be until she reported in to work early this morning. The Happy Helper man called a while ago. He said she's a 'floater,' a worker with no regular assignment but to fill in. Like a substitute teacher."
“Well, there's always the wandering maniac theory. That's what Thelma thinks — somebody whose lack of moral fiber pushed them over the brink."
“The next stage after growing hair on the palms of your hands? Murdering cleaning ladies? Forget wandering maniacs. You know as well as I do this is a neighborhood of devoted snoops. You can't even go for a walk without somebody alerting the police. If you aren't decked out like a full-fledged jogger, you're assumed to be a criminal. How would this maniachave cruised around the neighborhood without being noticed?"
“You know what you're saying, don't you? That it had to be someone familiar. Someone from the neighborhood.”
Shelley's eyes widened. "Not necessarily, Jane. It could have been someone who looked like they had business around here. A TV repair truck or a Sears van or a gas meter reader in a uniform."
“Shelley, what would be the point? There would be no reason to go to all the trouble of disguising himself just to kill her in your house instead of her own."
“There is that, of course. Well, then we have to consider that he didn't want to kill her. Suppose it was someone who came to rob the house."
“Was anything stolen?"
“No, nothing was touched, apparently. I haven't searched everything, of course, but it doesn't look like anything's been torn apart or dumped out, as if someone had been rummaging for valuables.”
Jane had to take her word on this. If you moved so much as an ashtray in Shelley's house, she noticed immediately.
“So why kill her and not take anything?”
“Maybe she caught him coming in?"
“While she was vacuuming the guest room?"