The Christie Caper - Carolyn Hart [143]
Annie glanced up at the rows of cheerful mugs with the titles and authors inscribed in bright-red flowing script. She needed a mug that would brighten her empty evening. Perhaps Margaret Scherf’s first Martin Buell mystery, Always Murder a Friend. Or Annie’s favorite by Constance and Gwenyth Little,The Great Black Kanba. How about the zany humor in Lion in the Cellar by Pamela Branch? Or would her spirits improve if she spent an hour with Ellie and Ben in Mum’s the Word by Dorothy Cannell?
“Perhaps,” wafted the husky voice, “I am somehow lacking.”
Annie damn near jumped out of her skin. Jerking around, she gazed into limpid dark-blue eyes. “Where the he—Laurel, where did you come from? I didn’t hear the door.” Annie tried not to sound too startled and accusing, but, honestly, if Laurel didn’t stop materializing without warning …
Her mother-in-law gave a lilting sigh. Anyone who didn’t believe sighs could lilt just hadn’t dealt with Laurel. The lucky devils.
Her alarm past, Annie surveyed her gorgeous—yes, that was the only appropriate descriptive adjective for Laurel—mother-in-law and smiled. How did Laurel manage always to appear young, fresh, and vibrant, no matter how bizarre her getup? On Annie, the baggy tweed suit and mottled horn-rims, along with a stenographer’s notebook and freshly sharpened No. 2 pencil, would have looked like a grade school librarian’s trophies from a rummage sale. On Laurel, the effect was enchanting. The horn-rims gave a piquant accent to her elegant patrician features and shining golden hair (Dammit, how could anyone look so marvelous with hair drawn back in a tight, nononsense bun?), the droopy tweeds fell in becoming folds against her svelte figure.
“You see, I have to wonder if it’s me?” Laurel continued earnestly. “Annie, would you say that I am not simpatico?”
Annie’s smile broadened to a fond grin. “Laurel, nobody would say you are not simpatico.” And also flakey, but this thought Annie didn’t share. Off-the-wall. Just one step (which way?) from certifiable. But, always and ever, simpatico—to people, to animals ranging from anteaters to dolphins to whales, to situations, to the whole damn world, when you came down to it.
But those dark-blue eyes, so unnervingly like other eyes that lately, when business was mentioned, slid evasively away from her own—Annie struggled back to the present, determined to focus on Laurel.
“… have always tried to be so open to experience, so welcoming. If you know what I mean?”
Annie deliberately turned her thoughts away from Laurel’s five marriages. And why, after so many trips to the altar, was Laurel persisting in not marrying their neighbor, Howard Cahill, who would be such an attractive father-in-law, so stable, so respectable?
“… so disappointed when Alice didn’t come.”
It was not the first time in their acquaintance, which was surely long in content if not in time, that Annie was left staring at Laurel in hopeless confusion.
Alice?
Who was Alice? Had they been talking about someone named Alice?
“Alice?” she murmured uncertainly.
“Oh, my dear.” A wave of a graceful hand, the pink-tinted nails glossed to perfection. “Certainly you know all about Alice.”
Alice Springs? Alice in Wonderland? Alice Blue Gown? Annie pounced on the latter. “Alice Blue Gown?” she proposed hopefully. It was just offbeat enough to be the answer.
But Laurel was pursuing her own thoughts, which, understandably, could well occupy her fully. Annie had seen the day when Laurel’s thoughts had occupied many minds more than hers. But it was better not to dwell upon the past. Though that period—the one with saints—had held its own unique charms. It was at moments such as this, indeed, that Annie herself was likely to call upon the excellent advice of Saint Vincent Ferrer. (Ask God simply to fill you with charity, the greatest of all virtues; with it you can accomplish what you desire.) Annie surely needed heaps of charity in order to attain patience, a definite requisite for an amiable relationship with her mother-in-law.
“… thirteen