Praise for the writing of bestselling author Stevi Mittman

“A vibrant, funny story that wraps around your heart— Mittman makes you laugh, makes you think, makes you feel…and always makes you smile.”

—USA TODAY bestselling and RWA Hall of Fame author Jennifer Greene on Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

“Don’t miss this book—it has all the heart that her historicals held, as well as Stevi’s wonderful and wacky sense of humor.”

—USA TODAY bestselling author Elizabeth Boyle on Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway?

“Who Makes Up These Rules, Anyway? is filled with humor. Teddi jokes even while her life is falling apart, and there’s a great surprise ending. A keeper.”

—Romantic Times BOOKclub Top Pick! 4-½ stars

“If any writer is going to sit on the throne so recently vacated by the wonderful LaVyrle Spencer, it just may be Stephanie Mittman. With A Kiss To Dream On, she proves that she can spin a story of real people dealing with genuine problems as love—not fantasy love, but true love—grows between them.”

—barnesandnoble.com

“One of those special books that will make your heart smile…Sit back, kick off your shoes and enjoy.”

—New York Times bestselling author Debbie Macomber on A Taste of Honey

Stevi Mittman

Stevi Mittman is having the time of her life. She’d had a ball writing eight romance novels under her given name, Stephanie, and winning numerous awards and accolades, when she suddenly found herself going off in another direction—contemporary women’s fiction. From there it was a hop, skip and a jump to funny mysteries set in suburbia. Think Desperate Housewives meets Jessica Fletcher.

Now she likes telling people she’s left historical romance to write hysterical mysteries, which she writes under her nickname, Stevi. What Goes with Blood Red, Anyway? is her second book for Harlequin NEXT in her LIFE ON LONG ISLAND CAN BE MURDER series featuring Teddi Bayer, the reluctant suburban sleuth who has plenty of trouble of her own.

In addition to the books, Stevi is blogging on her Web site (www.stevimittman.com) while Teddi blogs on her own interior design site (www.TipsFromTeddi.com). It’s an ideal situation for Stevi, whose own home on Long Island was featured in Distinction magazine after she decorated it herself. She even plans to feature some of her own room treatments on Teddi’s site.

Stevi lives in a dream house in Ithaca, New York, with her wonderful husband and two incredibly affectionate cats, who will no doubt show up in pictures on the Web site.

What Goes with Blood Red, Anyway?
Stevi Mittman

www.millsandboon.co.uk

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From the Author

Dear Reader,

For those of you who can’t get enough of Teddi Bayer, who want to know what she’s doing between books, what that ex-husband of hers is screwing up now, who’s on her radar screen and who’s off, and for more of Teddi’s decorating tips, there’s a place you can go—www.TipsFromTeddi.com. It’s loaded with Teddi’s favorite decorating ideas, as well as links to Web sites that help you measure for wallpaper, painting tips and provide answers to your decorating quandaries.

And then there’s Teddi’s journal, in which she records dates, thoughts, her New Year’s resolutions and her suspicions about various neighbors and friends.

For more murder, mayhem and matching drapes, be sure to check out www.TipsFromTeddi.com!

Teddi’s had a great time creating it, and can’t wait for you to drop by.

Stevi Mittman

This book is dedicated to all the incredible women in my life, especially Miriam Brody, Cathy Penner and Janet Rose, who are always there for me; and to Tara Gavin, my editor, and Irene Goodman, my agent, both of whom are the best pom-pom-less cheerleaders I know.

And, of course, to the one incredible man in my life, Alan, with thanks…

Contents

CHAPTER 1

CHAPTER 2

CHAPTER 3

CHAPTER 4

CHAPTER 5

CHAPTER 6

CHAPTER 7

CHAPTER 8

CHAPTER 9

CHAPTER 10

CHAPTER 11

CHAPTER 12

CHAPTER 13

CHAPTER 14

CHAPTER 15

CHAPTER 16

CHAPTER 17

CHAPTER 18

CHAPTER 19

CHAPTER 20

CHAPTER 21

CHAPTER 22

CHAPTER 23

CHAPTER 1

Design Tip of the Day

The most neglected area of any house tends to be the ceiling. Look up. Now imagine what antique mirror tiles on your library ceiling could do (click here). Imagine baby-pink and apple-green circus stripes that extend down 12 inches onto the walls of your baby’s room (click here). Imagine ornate white molding against a deep blue ceiling in your dining room (click here). Imagine a field of flowers over your bed (click here) achieved simply by stapling sheets to the ceiling and running ribbon over the seams. Look up again—what do you see?

—From TipsfromTeddi.com

Elise Meyers’s eyes are staring at the ceiling I’ve designed for her new kitchen. It’s a Marrakech-bazaar tromp l’oeil sort of thing. She’s lying on the newly tiled but not-yet-sealed terra-cotta floor in a getup that men in dark theaters wearing wrinkled raincoats can only dream about, and I can’t really tell how she feels about the work I’ve put my heart and soul into.

“So, what do you think?” I ask, fingers crossed, breath held, staring up at the ceiling myself. She doesn’t acknowledge me, doesn’t even blink. I suppose she just doesn’t understand how important this is to me, that this new business I’ve started isn’t just a job. It’s security, self-respect, sanity. “You hate it. I can change it. Just tell me what you don’t like. Is it the colors? The red is a little soft with the mustardy gold. Maybe it could be deeper—”

She just keeps staring at the ceiling, ignoring me. I mean really, how can I fix things if my clients don’t tell me what’s wrong? I’m not a mind reader.

“Elise?”

I stamp my foot, trying, I suppose, to snap her out of her reverie, or stupor, or whatever it is. Only she still doesn’t blink.

And then I notice the trickle of blood.

“I should have known,” I mumble, more to myself than to Detective Harold Nelson of the Nassau County Police Department, who is taking down my statement. He is keeping one eye on me and the other on his partner, who is donning rubber gloves and kneeling over the body of the very scantily clad Elise. “Maggie May was waiting by the open door, and I thought, ‘I’ll probably find Elise dead….’”

“Maggie May?”

I gesture with my head toward a pathetic little ball of white fluff whimpering on her little red monogrammed L.L. Bean bed in the dining room. The detective appears to melt. I’d have pegged him for a mastiff man, which just shows how much I know about men.

“Right,” he says. “So you thought she’d be dead because…?”

I hesitate. There’s a uniformed policeman investigating the new vegetable sink that was supposed to be installed today—a hammered copper bowl that just sits on the center-island counter with a faucet poised over it. The idea was for it to make you actually want to eat an avocado or something equally healthy. Not that it matters now. And I don’t see the bar faucet, which I’d had to special order, but I don’t suppose that matters now, either.

And there’s something else different, but for the life of me I can’t think what.

The detective is waiting to hear why I should have known. Because things were going too well. Because it was a gorgeous September morning and the sun was shining. And, most important, because Elise was loving how the kitchen I was redecorating for her was turning out. So, I ask you—how could I not have known that something dreadful was going to happen? Still, even if I had sensed disaster looming, I’d have thought leak, crack, incorrect measurement—not murder.

“Well, because I’m a worrier,” I explain to the patient Detective Nelson, whose eyes keep straying over to Elise. She really did have a great figure for someone in her forties. Better than mine will be when I get there, which is sooner than I want to think about. I concentrate on the detective and let him concentrate on Elise’s body. “And this just proves that if you don’t worry about a particular thing, that’s the one that’s bound to happen. Then you can spend the rest of your life worrying about what you’re not worrying about.”

Well, I’ve got his full attention now. He’s staring at me like it’s my marbles on the floor and not the bunch of pills I stepped on. He seems to be framing his next question carefully so as to prevent another babblefest, but it’s futile. When I’m upset I can’t help saying stupid things. As if to prove it, I shake my head and out comes a pronouncement that my mother has been right all these years and my ex-husband, once again, was wrong.

“How’s that?” he asks, apparently fascinated by the pull-out warming drawer in the center island, despite the fact that Elise is lying face up on the unsealed tile floor with pills and change scattered around her.

“See?” I say, pointing to the broom just inches from her hand. “A little housework can kill you.”

The police photographer looks up at me. He is taking pictures of every angle of the kitchen and of Elise. And of the dark red stain that is seeping into the floor.

And, except for Elise, it’s all very familiar, the red stains in the kitchen, the police, the questions…

“You seem pretty cavalier about all this,” the detective says.

“If you’d had this dream a few hundred times, you’d be cavalier, too,” I tell him. Ever since the thing last year with my soon-to-be-ex-husband, Rio, when he tried to drive me crazy and I sort of shot him, the police have been regular fixtures in my dreams. Rather than think about that black time in my life, I choose to imagine myself as Cinderella trying to scrub out those stains.

When Cinderella before she meets the prince is a step up, you know you’re in trouble.

“This is no dream, lady,” he says.

I take great comfort in the fact that he knows the script. “The detective always says that. And as soon as he does, I wake up.”

Only nothing happens.

I ask the detective to pinch me, which sometimes works in my the-police-are-coming-to-get-me-again dreams. It occurs to me that this guy doesn’t look a whit like Jerry Orbach, who is the usual detective in my dreams, nor, for that matter, like David Caruso, who is my dream detective. At any rate, he’s watching the fingerprinting guy and he ignores me.

So I pinch myself.

It hurts. And I’m still in Elise’s up-to-the-minute, high-tech-appliance-with-old-world-charm kitchen. And Elise is still dead.

“This isn’t a dream.”

I say it slowly, feeling as though I’m somehow under water and every movement is that much harder, every word that much more distorted. The photographer, now snapping close-ups of the blood patterns on the terra-cotta floor, is coming closer and closer to me. Gently, with a glance for permission from the detective, he pulls on the cuff of my white jeans, lifts my leg and takes a picture of the bottom of one of my brand-new driving moccasins.

I kick the shoe off and it goes flying toward a young female officer leaning over Elise. I shut my eyes tightly and hear an ear-piercing scream. I figure I’ve hit her with the shoe, but she isn’t the one screaming.

Things around me double and turn yellow like those old color photographs from the early ’50s. Blackness hovers. Someone pushes my head between my knees and rubs circles on the back of my white Banana Republic V-neck T—soft, slow, seductive circles. I tilt my head slightly and peer up to find someone who looks too good to be real. I figure his looks must be enhanced by either the angle or my weakened state.

“Keep your head down,” he says, crouching beside me, murmuring about how I’m going to be all right. “And close your eyes.”

To be perfectly honest, what the good-looking detective is doing to my back with his talented fingers is not helping me get my bearings. If anything, things seem even less real and almost…dare I think it with Elise lying dead? Delicious.

“So, here we all are in a kitchen again, Mrs. Gallo,” Detective Nelson announces, bringing me back to reality and making sure I know he was there the last time.

“It’s Bayer now,” I tell him. It’s a little awkward, me with one name, the kids with another, but it’s not as if their teachers don’t know the situation. Heck, anyone who picked up a copy of Newsday or turned on a TV learned the whole story last summer. His jaded look says he thinks I’ve already hooked up with a new jerk to replace the old one. “Teddi Bayer. I’ve gone back to my maiden name.”

Detective Number Two nods, but Nelson says, “A rose by any other name.”

Whatever that’s supposed to mean.

Detective Cliché adds something on the order of, “outta the frying pan, into the fire.” I assume he is referring to the gazillion times the cops have had to come and take my mother, June Bayer, to South Winds Psychiatric Center, her home away from home.

I just shrug, and then there is this awkward silence, which I break by saying aloud what I’m wondering—who would want to kill Elise Meyers?

“I just can’t imagine how anyone could murder someone as nice as Elise Meyers.” Isn’t it amazing how much nicer you think people are after they’re gone? Elise could be a real pain in the butt, but lying there on 12-by-12 tiles that she wasn’t so sure about but decided to trust me on…well, she looks almost angelic. That is, if you don’t count the hot-pink satin and black-lace getup she’s got on.

Nelson asks what makes me think it was murder while he casually places his card on the table by my arm. “Looks to me like the dog knocks the pills and stuff off the counter, she hears him, comes down and slips cleaning up the mess. Bang. Dead.”

I roll my eyes the way my twelve-year-old daughter does when she wants to ask how I can be so old and still so stupid but wouldn’t dare say it in so many words.

Detective Nelson catches the look and says something obnoxious, like Why don’t you give us your version, Sherlock? at which point Detective Number Two pulls out his card and places it on top of Nelson’s, as if he’s trumping it. Detective Andrew Scoones. And his isn’t wrinkled, either. His card, I mean.

“Well,” I say, brushing some wayward bangs out of my eyes so that I can see better. Maybe so I look better, too. “First off, Maggie May is a bichon frise and couldn’t reach the counter with a ladder. So tell me how she could have knocked anything off a work island three feet above her head. Second, the dog was out front when I got here, but only the backyard has an invisible fence, and it doesn’t look like Elise was taking her out for a walk, does it?”

Thinking about the details is easier than thinking about Elise lying dead on the floor.

“Since the tiles aren’t sealed yet, they aren’t slippery. And, on top of all that, the faucet is missing.” I’m on a roll now, imagining myself in a movie or on TV, and I continue. “In addition, since the alarm wasn’t going off when I got here, she must have disarmed it, which means she either knew the killer or didn’t care about his opinion, since her…uh…cellulite was showing.”

Everyone is staring at me. They are either incredibly impressed with my deductions or they figure I’ve gone nuts. Considering I’ve been down the latter road before and I’d recognize the signs (they always want you to sit down and stay calm, no matter what the situation is), I’m betting it’s the former.

“Just call me Mrs. Monk,” I say smugly. Of course, I miss the most important detail—the television character, Mrs. Monk, is dead, as Nelson quickly points out.

“So your theory is that someone broke into her house and killed her for her faucet?” Nelson asks. He pretends to be taking down what I say in a little notebook, but I don’t think he really is. “You get that, Drew?” he asks his partner, who actually is taking what appear to be copious notes.

“I’m saying that I left the faucet on the counter yesterday when I delivered the bar stools and that it’s not there now.”

The detectives exchange a look as though I’ve picked up on something they already know but I’m not supposed to.

I don’t bother mentioning my feeling that something else is not quite right in the kitchen because they are already acting like I’ve got a screw loose and because it seems as though something is more right than wrong.

I mean, if you don’t count Elise.

Detective Scoones puts on a new pair of rubber gloves and picks some of the pills off the floor to look at them. He lifts one off the little teddy Elise has on.

“Looks like she interrupted a robbery,” he says.

“Only, her ring’s still on,” I say, embarrassed that I checked while I waited for the police to show up, and pointedly not looking at Elise now because I don’t want to see them looking at a dead woman’s finger even though I did.

Detective Nelson suggests that maybe they just couldn’t get the ring off Elise’s finger.

I think about how she waved that diamond around like it was a medal, and I swear I can hear her voice in my head echoing Charlton Heston’s sentiments— “From my cold, dead hands.” Only I guess she wouldn’t let go even then.

Things aren’t adding up, but Detective Harold Nelson isn’t interested in my theories. And, truth be told, I’m not interested in Detective Nelson, so I direct my observations to Andrew Scoones, aka The Handsome Detective.

I tell him that, in addition to the ring, she’s got a Bvlgari watch worth about ten thousand dollars. They start to cover Elise’s body with a sheet and stop to look for the watch, which I already know isn’t there.

“You should check upstairs in her nightstand,” I say. Elise had been very specific about needing a small drawer beside her bed for “everyday” jewelry. If I had a ten thousand dollar watch, it a) wouldn’t be “everyday” jewelry, and b) would be kept in a safe. But then, I had a husband who would have stolen it and given it to one of his girlfriends and then accused me of losing it, like he did with the little diamond anniversary necklace he gave me. “She kept her watch in the top drawer on the left side of the bed.”

“You just happen to know which side of the bed she slept on?” Nelson asks, one eyebrow raised like this tidbit of information actually proves his theory that I’m the killer and I’ve just hoisted myself by my own petard. A little slow on the uptake, it finally occurs to me that they know damn well that this is a murder. They are simply toying with me to see what they can get.

“There anything else you want us to check out on this murder theory?” he asks, as though the fact that I’m an interior designer means I couldn’t possibly have anything valuable to offer beyond what color to paint a focal wall.

They suggest I leave the house for a breath of fresh air and Detective Scoones, Drew, instructs an officer to accompany me. When I ask if I can go home, he tells me he’d like me to stick around.

Meanwhile, Detective Nelson tells one of the uniformed cops to check upstairs. When the cop reminds him they already have, Nelson tells him to check again, thoroughly. The thought that the murderer might still be there hadn’t occurred to me, and that—combined with the blood on my shoe—leaves me weak-kneed all over again.

Or maybe it’s the idea that the good-looking Detective Drew wants me to hang around. Funny how your brain (or is it just mine?) can operate on two levels at the same time. Like when your great-aunt in NYC dies and for just a split second you wonder if her rent-controlled apartment can pass to you. I mean, you’re sad and all, but there’s this little section of your brain, this piece that sentiment and emotion doesn’t touch….

Never mind. I’m sure it’s just me.

As an officer escorts me toward the door, limping because I am down to one of my good Todd’s driving moccasins that I’ll probably never find on sale again, it occurs to me that maybe the reason I can’t leave is because I’m a suspect. “They can’t possibly think I could have killed Elise, right?” I ask as he opens the front door for me. He looks me over. My working wardrobe consists of only black, white and beige, so that I never clash with swatches I’m showing a customer. Today I am wearing white jeans from T.J. Maxx’s clearance rack with some designer’s name on the back pocket. They’re a size ten, but they run small, and I look pretty good. I mean, for me.

“I wouldn’t think so,” the patrolman says. “No blood. If you hit that woman, you’d be pretty spattered in blood.”

I stiffen, holding my arms away from my clothing. Suddenly I don’t know what to do with my hands. My body seems alien to me—a piece of evidence. Even though they don’t have Elise’s blood on them, I will have to throw out the clothing I have on because every time I even glimpse them in my closet I will remember that I was wearing them when I found Elise.

Outside, four police cars are parked at odd angles to the curb, and neighbors are beginning to cluster at the ends of driveways. Two women in jogging suits round the corner and stop in their tracks to stare at me. They converse with each other in hushed tones and then take off in the other direction. It is eerily quiet and I think about how different this neighborhood is from my own.

I am in a foreign country, or maybe on another planet.

In my world the residents would be all over the police, demanding to know what happened. There would be a lot of yelling, and every sentence would have either “Syosset” or “this community” in it, driving home what the police already know—that we don’t tolerate bad things happening in our neighborhood. Someone, probably Joan Favata, would be marshaling her daughters to take all the littler kids around the corner to Mrs. Kroll’s place where they could play on the new swing set, and someone else would be pushing money at the older ones to stroll down to Carvel for soft ice cream so that no one would see something awful come out of the house, like a body bag.

Here in The Estates, there appear to be no children. There isn’t a single basketball hoop in anyone’s driveway, no bikes litter the road. There isn’t a single Sesame Street Plastic Playhouse or so much as a doll stroller blocking the sidewalks. A lone woman in a midcalf skirt and man-tailored blouse with a Ralph Lauren–ad dog leaves a nouveau Victorian with a wraparound porch that’s a shade too small for the wicker furniture on it. She throws a fisherman’s knit sweater over her shoulders as she casually saunters by the patrol car. Striking a pose, she stops to talk to one of the patrolmen while signaling her dog to stay off Elise’s perfectly manicured lawn and sit beside her. The cop pats the dog and appears noncommittal as the woman gestures toward first Elise’s house and then her own.

Across the street a man has the hood of his Mercedes up, pretending to look at the motor. He waits for the woman to leave Elise’s driveway and meets her in the street, where they both rub their arms to ward off the fall chill and glare suspiciously at the cop and at me.

The gardeners across the street start putting their tools in their trucks, but they are asked to stay put until they are released by the police. They begin to argue—they have other leaves to blow, this is no business of theirs, and the neighbors begin to demand to know what’s going on. The policeman guarding me, if that is what he is doing, goes into the street to calm everyone down, but his presence seems to do the opposite.

And then, with the exception of a gasp or two, all sound stops abruptly when a car marked Medical Examiner pulls up to the curb.

I reach into my handbag and fish around for my cell to call Bobbie Lyons, my business partner/neighbor/best friend. When I turn on the phone there are several messages waiting for me. The officer returns to me, probably to tell me I’m only allowed one call, and I show him that two of the messages are from Elise.

“Do you think it’s okay for me to hear them?” I ask, thinking that I don’t really want to hear Elise’s voice from the other world and realizing that maybe in her moment of need she was calling me for help.

The officer, I suppose thinking the same thing, tells me to wait and ducks inside the house.

The crowd, which had turned into one of those living tableaus, comes to life and closes in. Before I can answer any of their questions, a strong arm yanks me back into the house.

“Whatcha got?” Drew asks me. His partner is nearby, examining some of the sports memorabilia that I’ve creatively placed in the hallway I expanded to accommodate it. A sort of Hall of Fame, if you will, which allowed me to move the stuff out of the living room to please Elise and still keep it in plain sight to please her husband. I hand Drew my phone and tell him which keys to press. He gives me a look that says he didn’t make detective being stupid, and I back away from the phone.

I am still close enough to hear Elise’s excited voice as she tells me how much she loves the new look. Do I think she should reconsider my suggestion that we do the back wall in deep Chinese Red? She’s thinking that the new, mustard-color upholstered bar stools would look great against the red, just as I told her they would. Look, we hear her say (my head is now inches from The Handsome Detective’s and I notice he smells good, too).

I press the button that lets us see the picture Elise has sent. I touch the screen lovingly. Yes, Elise, the wall would have looked perfect in a vintage claret wallpaper with a small golden-mustard accent design. And the bar stools, as I can see in the picture, actually looked better where I placed them than where they are now.

Drew says they’ll need to confiscate the phone and bring it down to the lab to examine the picture for any possible clues—which I totally understand. I mean, Bobbie’s sister Diane is a rookie cop and she’s always reporting that they confiscated this or that.

On the other hand—and I don’t want to seem petty here—this is my phone, my link to the outside world, my security blanket. I tell him we can just send the photo to the precinct via e-mail. Nelson says he’s already got Elise’s phone and sees that the picture is saved in there. Just as I ask if I can have my phone back, there is a commotion outside and Jack Meyers, Elise’s hot-shot sports agent husband, pushes his way in.

All my nasty thoughts about how he doesn’t know “jack” about decorating evaporate as his face goes gray and he tries to grasp what the police are telling him.

He keeps asking what they mean by dead, as if there are different types or degrees. Probably like he thinks there are different degrees of fidelity or marriage. “Hit on the head,” he repeats over and over again. “A blow to the head.”

“It appears that way,” Nelson tells him. “We won’t know for sure until we see the autopsy report.”

If there’s a color grayer than gray, Jack turns it. I force myself to forget what I know about him and guide him to the “Martin Crane” chair in the living room, the one he refused to let me recover, never mind replace, and I help him sit. I open the antique armoire I’ve had retrofitted to accommodate a bar and pour him a straight Scotch.

After a healthy belt, he collects himself and tells us all how he wasn’t home last night because he was out fishing on his boat with a client and they got caught in rough seas and had to spend the night in Connecticut. Now, Jack’s a very successful agent and I know he hooks his share of big fish, but I’m willing to bet he doesn’t do it with a rod and a reel from his boat. Considering that most of his clients are women athletes, I’ll concede a rod, but not a reel.

At any rate, all of us know it’s a fish tale, but wouldn’t you know that Nelson takes down all his details, which are sketchy at best. He’s so awed by Jack’s circle that he just nods when Jack, with a nervous glance at me, assures him he’ll have the office call with the client’s number later.

As Drew is walking me out, I hear Jack tell Nelson he won’t consent to an autopsy. He says it’s against his religion. I have the utmost respect for religion and religious traditions, but how religious could he be with no mezuzah on the door frame? I kind of tap the doorjam where the little prayer holder ought to be, but, not being Jewish, Drew probably misses my subtle hint. I don’t believe that Jack doesn’t want that autopsy on religious grounds. I think he’s hiding something, or wants to, and I’m suspicious.

Oh, hell, let’s face it. I’m suspicious of every husband, and Jack’s no prize. Still, that doesn’t make him a murderer, does it?

Alone in my car I carefully back out, listening to my own breathing, and I realize that Elise will never breathe again. In my chest I feel my heart lub-dubbing. My blood is pounding relentlessly in my veins. A headache has settled into my left temple and my ankle itches where my jeans tease it. It seems I am taking inventory of everything that makes me alive.

Halfway down the street I realize I can’t see through my tears and I pull over. The thing that bothers me most about Elise’s murder—beyond the obvious—is that it happened in her own home. I don’t know about you, but if I ever get murdered I want it to be in some dark alley that I should have known better than to go into in the first place. Home is where you are supposed to be safe. And I wouldn’t want to get murdered there.

I wipe my cheeks with my bare arm but the tears continue to stream down my face. I think about calling Bobbie, but I don’t know what I expect her to do. I don’t want to talk. I just want to crawl under the covers and cry.

If only I hadn’t used up all my Go Back To Bed Free cards last year….

CHAPTER 2

Design Tip of the Day

Fabric is the self-decorator’s best friend. Done right, a couple of coordinating fabrics can pull a whole house together. Just by covering a pillow in the living room, a bench in the hall and a couple of kitchen bar stools in one fabric and making a dining room tablecloth, a photo mat and a second pillow in the living room in a companion fabric, you can move items from room to room and have them look as though they always belonged there.

—From TipsfromTeddi.com

I can’t help crying. I may be woman, I may be strong, but at the moment I’m not roaring. I’m just grateful that no one can see me. I cry until I hiccup, and I hiccup all the way down Jericho Turnpike, where I hang a right into the parking lot of Precious Things because I don’t want to go home. Who wants alone when they can have hot coffee and a sympathetic ear?

“Did he call you?” Helene, who owns the shop where just yesterday I picked up Elise’s custom-covered bar stools, asks before I’ve got one foot in the door. “I told him to call you last night. If he didn’t, he’s in big trouble.”

He is her brother, newly single, just squeaking past the Dr. Joy one-year rule. According to Helene, he is my soul mate. In fact, he did call and he does sound nice. And if I was the least bit interested in ever allowing a man into my life again, I would consider him.

“Elise Meyers was murdered this morning,” I say just as the phone rings. Helene tilts her head slightly, as if she is having trouble processing what I’ve said, and chirps a greeting into the phone. While she talks, she keeps one eye on me, rearranges some ebony candlesticks on the counter, and weaves a stray strand of her highlighted brown hair into her French knot at the same time. Her makeup is flawless and her short nails sport a perfect deep red manicure. In the last week I have popped two acrylics, which makes my left hand look like it’s missing the ends of two fingers, and the last time my makeup looked as good as hers, I was leaving the Bobbi Brown counter at Bloomingdale’s.

She points at the receiver, gives me a knowing glance and then says into the phone, “Well, Audrey, I could certainly sell it to you direct, but it will cost you the same thing as paying for it through your decorator. I can’t very well undercut her and expect her to keep doing business with me, now can I?”

Audrey Applebaum. Just yesterday she told me she changed her mind about redecorating.

“I’m not saying I charge people who come in off the street more, Audrey. I’m saying I charge decorators less. It’s how business is done. You redecorate one house every few years. They redecorate several houses every month….”

Helene rolls her eyes at me while she points to some new glass-and-wrought-iron stacking tables she thinks I might like.

Only I’m more interested in her telephone call than her telephone tables. I grab the phone out of her hand and shout into it. “Don’t you feel any obligation to your decorator? Don’t you think you ought to pay for her advice, her expertise? You think she can pay for her kids’ braces with your thanks?”

I want to slam it down, but portables don’t give you that satisfaction, so I just hit Off and throw it toward Helene, who barely catches it. For a minute Helene doesn’t say anything.

And then she begins to laugh, saying between the bursts how she can’t believe I did that.

I can’t, either. I don’t know what the connection is to Elise’s murder, except that it pushed me over the edge. When I don’t laugh, too, Helene studies me.

“Teddi, what’s wrong?” she asks, leading me toward the only piece of furniture in the shop not covered with swatch books or cords of trim. It’s a red plush chair in the shape of a spiked heel and it has a big Sale sign on it, marking it clearly as a mistake in judgment.

I sit on the instep.

“I told you,” I say flatly. “Elise Meyers is dead.”

“Oh my God!” she says, covering her mouth. There’s a silent beat. Another. Then, “Which one’s Elise Meyers?”

I remind her that Elise is the customer who couldn’t wait for Gina, Helene’s assistant, to arrange for the delivery of her furniture. Elise is the woman who had to have everything yesterday, always, all the time. I don’t mean to make her sound difficult. She was, but still, that doesn’t mean she deserved to be murdered.

“Murdered?” Helene whispers, as if not saying it aloud gives it some dignity. I think of Elise in that hot-pink satin job and dignity goes out the window.

I start at the beginning because, except for the police, I really haven’t told anyone, not even Bobbie. I tell Helene how I’d just hung up with Bobbie—whom she knows almost as well as she knows me—turned off my cell phone and got out of the car, when I noticed the dog on the lawn. At this point in my story, Gina, the twentysomething young woman who works for Helene, comes out from the back of the store with some swatches of fabric for Elise that have just come in. Helene tells her about Elise and she says how awful it is. They want to know everything, not so much because either of them care but because there’s something about being the first to know, to know before it’s on the six o’clock news, that appeals to people. I tell them everything I know and then Gina asks if I’m going to the funeral.

“How can she not?” Helene says as if Gina has asked if Helene wants to sell the high-heel chair.

You should be warned that How Can You Not? is the national anthem of Long Island. It explains the Perrier-filled water glasses at the bar mitzvahs, the catered first birthday parties, the BMWs for seventeen-year-olds, and the four-carat diamonds given to wives who have found out their husbands are cheating. There are a lot of large diamonds on Long Island.

Don’t let me give you the wrong impression. How Can You Not? also applies to allowing your neighbors to run a one-hundred-foot extension cord from their refrigerator to the outlet in your house because a storm has knocked the power out on their side of the street. It means letting some kid move into your house for the last three months of his senior year because his parents have found the perfect house in another state and you can’t imagine the poor kid transferring with only months to go. It means inviting a couple you hate to your daughter’s bat mitzvah because they’re friends with a couple you love. The rules are complicated, but they’re a comfort, too. Like in Tevye’s shtetl, everyone knows what’s expected of them.

Okay, not everyone.

It is my firm belief that somewhere there is a Secret Handbook of Long Island Rules and that certain women are given copies. My mother has one. Actually, she may be its original author. Bobbie has one. These women have been sworn to secrecy and refuse to admit it exists, but there just isn’t any way they could know all the rules without it.

I’m still waiting for mine to arrive in the mail.

Men don’t seem to know the rules, or maybe they don’t care. They surely don’t have to live by them. Which brings us to Gina’s question.

“So where was Mr. Meyers when Elise was bludgeoned to death?”

It seems wrong to tell Gina about the sham of a marriage that Elise and her husband had. First off, who am I to judge how blind Elise was or wasn’t? I mean, Rio, my ex, pulled the wool down over my eyes so far that I didn’t know what I was doing, never mind what he was up to! Second, Elise was one of those Long Islanders who would have been appalled if I aired her dirty laundry in front of anyone beneath what she perceived as her social station. I don’t really know how she’d feel about my sharing it with those above or within her circle, but since I’m from the Plainview side of Syosset, and not from Woodbury, I don’t really swim in her social pool.

And while I don’t subscribe to it, I do understand the hierarchy because I was born in the Five Towns, that area on the South Shore of Long Island where the nouveau riche have riched their limit, and clawing your way to the top of the social ladder while appearing not to care (or even notice) is not simply an art form, but a requisite survival skill.

As luck would have it, I married out of it. Just ask my mother. It’s hard to know which she and my father view as more of a disgrace—my marrying out of the faith or out of the neighborhood.

Besides, Elise is dead. And everyone knows that you don’t speak ill of the dead.

At least not until after they’re buried.

“Jack Meyers claims to have an alibi,” I tell her, but still, my money is on him. When I admit that the police seemed to suspect me for a minute, Helene stops me and flips the Back in Ten Minutes sign on the door, then locks it. She and Gina lead me back to their offices in the rear of the store and Helene puts on a pot of fresh coffee.

Gina doesn’t really have an office, but a corner of the storeroom seems to belong to her. She works there at a computer surrounded by a bunch of Snoopy paraphernalia and some family photos. There’s the requisite picture of two little tow-headed girls on an outdated Christmas card with “Season’s Greetings from our house to yours!” Pinned to the same bulletin board, held in place by a fuzzy little yarn ball with goggly eyes, flat feet and a tag that says Have A Great Day! are two Charlie Brown and Lucy comics cut from the newspaper. A Snoopy tack holds a comic from the Internet about computers. Another holds a picture of a guy in a camouflage outfit somewhere in the desert.

“Is that your husband?” I ask, because it’s better than talking about finding Elise bleeding on her floor, or about Elise’s husband screwing some client while his wife bled to death. Or concussed to death, or whatever it was that killed her.

Anyway, Gina’s in love. I remember the feeling well.

Okay, vaguely. I remember thinking I was in love. For twelve years.

“Not yet,” she says, and she waves a darling little chip of a diamond under my nose. I think of Elise and her rock and what a terrible marriage she had and wonder if the size of the diamond is inversely proportional to the happiness of the marriage. Of course, it’s not, but for the moment, for Gina’s sake, I wish it were. “We’re getting married the day he gets back.”

The picture looks like he’s in some desert so I ask if he’s in the Army or the Marines. People from the Five Towns (that would be Lawrence, Hewlett, Woodmere, Cedarhurst and Inwood), where I was raised, don’t join the service. Neither do people where I live now, in Syosset, so one uniform tends to look the same as another to me. It’s the boys and girls from Wyandanch, from Roosevelt, from Freeport, who mow the lawns and clean the gutters of those who live in the Five Towns, who don’t have trust funds to pay for college or even a used car, who sign up and serve.

But Gina says that Danny is in construction and that he goes all around the world building things like dams and bridges. “He was in Iraq for a while, and Saudi Arabia and now he’s in Qatar.”

And Helene adds that Gina was late this morning because she had to go to the post office to get off a letter to Bob the Builder. Then she offers me Valium for my nerves, Percocet for the throbbing pain in my head and the number of her masseuse, who, she assures me, can make the world go away. I’d be happy if the phone would just stop ringing.

Helene answers it, placates the person on the other end, explains that the shipment was held up in customs (shrugging at me as she wonders if the customer will buy that excuse or if she’ll have to come up with another) and finally hangs up.

“Sorry,” she says, “but you of all people know how my customers are.”

I know all too well, and, if there was another way for me to give my children all the material things I want for them and that they need without sacrificing my self-respect (assuming that Rio even could or would pay child support if I allowed him to, which is a big assumption, a huge assumption), I’d be in some other line of work. Maybe I’d still be painting custom designs on furniture or, if money were irrelevant, giving art lessons to old ladies who wear funky hats and feed squirrels in little pocket parks in Forest Hills. Unfortunately, my father knew what he was talking about when he said that money doesn’t grow on trees, and I have three kids, a mortgage, a toilet that drips, a freezer that won’t freeze and a pledge to myself to finish repaying my parents for my final semester at Parsons (where I finally got a degree in interior design last spring after quitting to marry Rio thirteen years ago).

The point here being that Helene’s customers are my customers. Bobbie and I call them Type S women, as in spoiled, self-indulgent and self-consumed. All those commercials you see on TV where people lounge by private pools while wild jaguars race by? The ads in the New York Times for thousand-dollar designer purses? They aren’t talking to you and me. They are talking to the S’s, for whom Long Island is apparently a breeding ground. Here they thrive in our strategically located gated communities, which they only leave in their GPS-navigated Lexuses (with the individual DVD players in the backseat) to cut off normal Toyota-driving people like me as they head for the South Shore in pursuit of Princess In Training T-shirts for their off-spring. Off they go, weighing less than their jewelry and dressed in the latest hot designer fashions as they foray out into the real world armed with attitude and determined not to be taken advantage of, not to be overlooked and, most certainly, not to be ignored.

For some people, worse than being seen as a bitch on Long Island is not being seen at all. This, I don’t have to tell you, makes it hard on the rest of us, who spend our lives worrying we’ll be mistaken for one of them.

Helene begins to mother me, pushing the hair out of my eyes, handing me a tissue. “Come, sprinkle some cold water on that pretty face,” she says, taking my father’s cast-off BlackBerry out of my hands and leaving it on the chair I’ve vacated. She leads me farther back in the shop and parts a velvet curtain for me. “Don’t tell a soul I have a bathroom in here,” she says dramatically. “They’ll be coming in here in droves to use it if the word gets out.”

She is not joking. Small shops save their bathrooms for people spending over five hundred dollars. You think I’m kidding? Ask if you can use their restroom and they’ll tell you to go next door to Carvel or down the block to Burger King. Now put several costly items on the counter and tell them you’ll be back for them after you find a restroom and they’ll act as though the carpenters just finished installing the fixtures in theirs. Please, be their guest.

The bathroom, no bigger than a broom closet, is outfitted for her big spenders, with a hand-painted porcelain pedestal sink that matches the wallpaper and the paper hand towels. There are no toothpaste smears on the basin, no strands of hair clinging to the neat little brush that sits on the glass shelf below the mirror. Beside the toilet there is no book turned over to hold the reader’s place, no ratty magazine with free samples of moisturizer ripped out. There are no chocolate-smeared towels piled on the floor, no pots of flavored lip gloss left open on the tank behind the toilet.

This is the kind of guest bath my mother expects to find in my house, despite three children living there and me working full time. It’s just one of the gazillion ways I disappoint her. Thank God she can’t see what I’m seeing in the mirror—a very ugly, bedraggled version of me staring blankly back. I have dark eyes anyway, only now, below them, my mascara and all that liner I carefully put on and then smudged to perfection has formed dry river beds that resemble a map of the Finger Lakes. Very attractive—perhaps in a few weeks, for Halloween. My nose, ordinarily an acceptable size and color for my face thanks to the nose job my mother insisted I have at sixteen, now rivals Ronald McDonald’s in size and hue. My very dark hair, which usually has a sort of just-got-out-of-bed come hitherness, looks like I washed it last for New Year’s Eve. And my white T-shirt looks like it needs to be laundered just to become a rag.

As I try to wash up without messing up Helene’s House Beautiful powder room, the cell phone in my purse begins to play The Looney Tunes theme, which signifies my mother is calling. (Hey, some call it sick. I call it survival.) While dear June doesn’t know her theme song, she does, of course, know I have caller ID, and rather than argue about whether I chose to take her call or not, I flip the phone open.

“On the television,” she says without any preamble. “I have to find out that my daughter escaped from the jaws of death by moments on the television? You discover a dead body and you think…what? That because we have problems of our own, real problems, you and the children aren’t still the most important thing in our lives? Roz Adelman called and I had to pretend I’d already heard it from you…. And your father! Your father is beside himself with worry.”

“There’s nothing to worry about,” I say, and I ask her how she knows about Elise and the fact that I was there.

“You’re on the news. The phone hasn’t stopped ringing. Your father is forgoing the back nine and we’re coming over as soon as he gets home so you shouldn’t be alone.”

I tell her that they don’t have to do that.

“What kind of parents would we be if we didn’t come?” she asks. “Besides, he’s losing anyway. You want me to bring you some Xanax?”

I’m thinking that the only way I’ll need Xanax is if she comes over, but I don’t tell her as much because she’s insisting that the kids and I shouldn’t be alone in the house.

She and my father will pack a bag.

And I will shoot myself.

My call-waiting clicks. I tell her to hold on, but she is on a roll about the food she will have my father stop to pick up along the way and she ignores me. Since she’ll keep talking without me, I hit the button and cautiously say, “Hello?”

Detective Scoones identifies himself and asks how I’m doing. He leaves the g off doing, and it comes out sort of intimate.

“I was thinking that possibly I could come over tonight to discuss a few details regarding the case,” he says.

I can’t think of a thing to say. For some inexplicable reason I’m seeing David Caruso’s naked butt.

“I’d hate to drag you down to the precinct to—”

“Am I a suspect?” I stop fussing with my hair, trying to fix the unfixable in the damn bathroom at Precious Things, where no one, least of all Drew Scoones, can see me.

“Nothing like that,” he says. Is that the same as no? “I’m just curious about Mr. Meyers and I thought that you, working with the two of them, and knowing Mrs. Meyers pretty well…”

I ask about Jack’s alibi and Detective Scoones says they are checking into it. Helene knocks on the bathroom door and asks if I am all right.

“So about seven, Ms. Bayer?” he says. It seems that only the time is in question. “I’ll come by your place.”

And then he clicks off and I hear my mother’s voice.

“I said, ‘Does Jesse like chocolate or regular rugelach?’”

“Oh, he likes them both,” I lie, planning to eat the ones with the raisins while Jesse, ten, and Alyssa, six, gobble the chocolate ones. (Dana, the stick, will no doubt makes noises about how she’ll be fat for her bat mitzvah while scarfing down the rainbow cookies my father always brings for her. At twelve, she is old enough to watch the other two, and I could tell my mother not to come, not to bother. But rugelach sounds like exactly what I need at the moment. And I do, after all, have a date with the police. So in the end, as always with my parents, I fold and tell her that sure, they can come over to look after the kids. And yes, I add, they can pick up some pastrami and knishes as long as they are stopping at Ben’s Deli.

I exit the bathroom to find Gina staring at me like I’m an ax murderer, clearly on the road to the electric chair.

She hands me my BlackBerry. “Your reminder went off,” she says apologetically.

Today is a day I’m not likely to forget.

As if none of this has happened, Helene returns to the subject of her brother, Howard, and reminds me that he is a food critic for Newsday. “You’d never starve,” she says with a wink as I gather up my belongings. I smile and wave, opening the door without comment. “The divorce was his wife’s fault,” she shouts after me. “His ex-wife!”

Yeah, yeah, my wave says. I bet that’s what Rio tells every woman he meets.

My phone rings again as I am getting into the car, and of course, it’s Bobbie. The neighborhood grapevine has already begun to produce fruit. Or is it whine? She apologizes to me fifty times for refusing to come to Elise’s with me this morning. When her sister, Diane called Bobbie from the precinct to tell her what happened, she couldn’t believe it. And then, after we dispense with all the oh my Gods! that we both need to get our of our system, we start hypothesizing about who could have killed Elise Meyers.

I didn’t mention it to the police, but between you and me Elise Meyers was a little off her rocker—not that I’m one to talk, which is probably why I didn’t say anything to them. Still, she was. Here’s an example: once when Rio called me on my cell at her house to yell at me for refusing to sign our joint tax return before my lawyer looked at it, she told me I should keep a list of every obnoxious thing he ever did. She said it could be very therapeutic. Then she told me that she kept lists, tons of them. She had brightly colored, leather-bound Kate Spade journals of every injustice ever done to her, every slight, every nasty glance thrown her way. She said she had a whole book of every bad thing Jack had ever done and why he deserved to die. At the end of it, she even had a list of what she’d do with his money after he was gone.

She had a separate list that Bobbie knows about and that creeps us both out, and another one in a slim, lime-green book that Bobbie doesn’t know about, at all. In that one Elise claimed she had cataloged the indiscretions of virtually everyone she knew, and she made a point of saying that I was probably the only woman she knew who wasn’t in it. The way she said it made it sound like just maybe Bobbie was, like she knew about Bobbie’s one mistake.

“What do you suppose the police would make of the How I’ll Spend His Money After He’s Gone list?” Bobbie asks me. I’ve never told her about the lime-green volume because she would totally freak, and it could be that Elise was just bragging. Maybe she told every woman she knew that she was the only one not in it.

“If Jack was the one who was dead, it wouldn’t look too good,” I say. “But I don’t suppose it will matter now. One of the other lists could be important, though. I mean, someone on one of those lists could have been the murderer.”

“My money’s on the husband,” Bobbie says.

I tell her about his “alibi.” And then I mention that there was something weird about Elise’s house, something out of place or something that should have been there and wasn’t, or shouldn’t have been there and was.

“Uh…” Bobbie says “…I guess that would be Elise’s body?”

CHAPTER 3

Design Tip of the Day

The windows in your house are your eyes on the world. They frame the view of your house from both inside and outside and demand treatment. They should reflect your house’s style, be it formal, casual or eclectic. Would you let the world see you without mascara? Don’t let it see your windows without prettying them up, as well.

—From TipsfromTeddi.com

Okay, before you meet my family, there’s something you need to know. I was switched at birth. My parents insist this is not the case, but there is no question in my mind that I am an alien child. Now, by alien I mean either that my real parents were here illegally from some foreign country and there is no Long Island blood in me or that I was switched by body snatchers from another planet.

Either way, I don’t belong here. Never have. This fact has escaped my mother (who, at sixty-eight, is still sure that with enough pressure she can convert me into a real Long Islander) and is irrelevant to my father (who is three years her senior and who I am convinced will love me even after my third eye makes its appearance).

My parents clearly intend to take up residence in my house, judging from the number of suitcases and amount of food my father has schlepped in. I will argue them out of this later. I hope.

At the moment, I am watching out the front window of my front-to-back split level home, the one I shared with Rio, while my father paces behind me repeating that he’ll call Mel Rottman—the best lawyer on the South Shore—to talk to the police with me. Each time he says it, I assure him it isn’t necessary.

My mother, however, isn’t so sure that the innocent always go free. This is why she is telling me about a friend of hers who tried to get through customs by sewing undeclared jewelry into her brassiere and claiming it was her underwire bra setting off the metal detectors. It doesn’t matter to June that the woman wasn’t actually innocent. The point is that if a friend of hers could get frisked at JFK, I could wind up on death row.

Even when her stories are tedious, it’s still amusing to watch my mother tell them because of all the cosmetic surgery she’s had since my father’s long-term affair with our housekeeper put her in the sanitarium and him in the dog house. He’s footed the bill for more Botox, collagen and Gore-Tex than Joan Rivers has tried to deduct from her taxes. What’s really amazing is that even though the woman can’t actually frown, grimace or pout, she can still give me “the look”—the one that says “you’re a disappointment, Teddi. You’re such a disappointment.”

At the moment, I’m ignoring the look and wishing that one of my lovely children would entertain their grandmother long enough for me to finish filling out all the forms I need to send in for the decorator showcase at Bailey Manor before Detective Scoones shows up. Bailey Manor, for those who don’t know, is a decorator showcase. Every year there’s a benefit showcase and each lucky decorator or decorating firm that gets chosen gets assigned a room at a fabulous old mansion on Long Island that—provided they don’t destroy any of the existing architecture—they can decorate however they think will best show off their talents. Bobbie knows someone who knows someone who is sleeping with the brother of the guy who is married to the woman who doles out the spaces, so I am doing the breakfast nook. I can’t tell you how excited I would be if I had a stick of furniture that I thought was good enough to go in there or a way of getting some before Halloween, when it opens.

Oh, the irony of the timing of my father’s retirement from the furniture business—just months before I opened my decorating business. And months after Rio’s patience for being second in command there was exhausted and he began his scheme to drive me crazy so that he could put up our house as collateral for a loan to open an outlet center right next to my father’s store.

“Maybe you should do the dining room,” my mother says as she watches me fill in the forms. This despite having told her several times that I am lucky to have a room at all and that peons don’t get to pick. She plucks a piece of lint off my sage-green silk sweater and adjusts the chunky necklace I made myself, telling me I look very nice, considering. I am going to assume that she means considering my day and not pursue it.

She and I both keep looking out the tall bay window of my living room, watching to see if it’s a squad car that pulls up. A family of bikers rides by, all in helmets, the smallest on a pink bike with streamers and training wheels. I think they are the new people who bought the Kroll’s house.

I remember riding around with our kids and, unlike Plastic Woman, it must show on my face since she says, “It’s not too late for you to find someone decent this time and have another…”

“Way too late,” I say, and then yell upstairs for Dana. “Come down and recite your portion of the haf tarah for Grandma and Grandpa.” I realize that bringing up Dana’s bat mitzvah is dangerous territory, where my mother has set minefields regarding the flowers, the food, the dresses, and hurry on. “Jesse, show Grandpa…” Nothing comes to mind, but I see that my father is fishing around in his pocket, which no doubt means he has some new techno-gadget he wants to show me.

“Wait until you see this, Jesse,” he says as my ten-year-old bounds down the stairs. “I got a new phone for your mother to try.” From his pocket he pulls out a PalmPilot, a key chain that beeps when you clap your hands and a spanking new phone.

“Dad, you have to stop doing this.” I try to look annoyed with him, but it’s hard. I mean, is it so awful for a man to spend his days in Best Buy, Circuit City or on the Internet buying the latest whatever? When you think about what else he could be doing? And he can afford it, so really is it so terrible that he shows up at my house a few days later with whatever he’s bought, saying it a) doesn’t work, b) isn’t user friendly, c) doesn’t do what the guy in the store—or the pop-up ad on the Internet—promised it would or d) isn’t worth what he paid for it?

My it’s-too-small-for-anyone’s-fingers-to-use BlackBerry is Bluetooth. (He didn’t even know what that meant, but before the salesman was through with him, he was convinced he needed it. I tried to make him understand it was a way computers and handhelds and phones could all communicate with one another and it worked like infrared, but when it didn’t work for him on the first try, he lost interest.) My you-take-it laptop is Wi-Fi. (No, he doesn’t know what that means, either.) My absolute-piece-of-crap phone sends photos across the country or across town so that my clients can see potential pieces of furniture or room settings as soon as I do.

“Video,” he says, showing the new phone to Jesse. “That’s what they told me, but I got home and thought, who the hell am I gonna send video to? It’s not like I have the store anymore to watch how they waste my money.”

“The store” is Bayer’s Fine Furniture (The Home Of Headache-Free Financing And Hassle-Free Furniture Buying), which my father opened in the late 1950s after he married my mother. I think he’d have actually kept it if only I’d agreed to come work for him. But there comes a time in everyone’s life when they need to grow up and stand on their own two feet. At least that’s what Ronnie Benjamin, the psychiatrist who helped me prove I wasn’t crazy last year, says. She’s helped me a few times since then, and it seems to me she’s always right.

“Oh,” Dana coos, her purple-polished nails reaching out for the phone while she confirms that someone at school has one that does indeed send streaming video, and her brother Jesse adds that the kid got it confiscated for broadcasting from the locker room before gym class.

“You can give the other one to Danala…” my father suggests “…if you can get this one to work.”

“Mom can do it,” Jesse, ever my champion, says. “And then I get Dana’s phone, right, Grandpa?”

“And then there’ll be one more person who won’t take my calls,” my mother accuses.

“I’ll take your calls,” little Alyssa says, smiling coyly at my mother. “If I get the phone I promise to never say, ‘Oh shit, it’s Grandma June.’ I’ll say ‘Oh good!’ I promise.”

I’m supposed to yell at Alyssa for using the S word, but pointing that out will only lead to who she may have heard saying it, and I don’t want to go there.

There is silence and then Dana starts to giggle. Jesse swats at her and then we all give up and laugh, except, of course, Grandma June, who huffs a bit before saying how we’ll all miss her after she’s gone.

If that sounds like a threat, don’t be alarmed. I’m ashamed to admit that not only don’t we take my mother’s suicide comments to heart anymore, we don’t even hear them. The days of her feeble attempts are, thankfully, behind us, or so we try to believe. My father gently gives her hand a pat, and I shoot her a not-in-front-of-the-children look. And just as I am about to try to video the kids with the phone, a car pulls into our driveway and my three children rush to the window like it’s Trading Families and their new mother is going to get out of the car and come strolling up the walk.

The car is low and sleek and if I knew sports cars the way I know SUVs and minivans, I’m sure I’d recognize what it is. Detective Scoones, Drew, gets out of the car and adjusts his sunglasses. He has on pressed jeans and a casual sports jacket over an Izod sort of shirt in deep green, a favorite color of mine. I know it’s not just me who can’t breathe at the sight of him because my mother gasps and my daughter’s jaw drops.

June beats me to the door, proving that when she wants to she can move like lightning, and introduces herself, establishing immediately that 1) she knows all about everything that happens in my life and 2) that she is staying over to protect her grandchildren from whatever he might have in mind. Marty, his protective instincts in full gear, manages to mention the best lawyer on the South Shore twice before the man has both feet in the foyer. The good detective makes a point of taking note, nodding his head and muttering something about the lawyer’s reputation.

He bothers to murmur compliments as he looks around at my house, noting that the dark green walls make the place look cozy and the salmon color of the bedroom, which he can glimpse from the hall, looks inviting. Yes, that is the word he uses. He says I look nice, too. A lot better might be what he actually says.

Dana and Jesse bound down the stairs, Alyssa lagging slightly behind, and he introduces himself to them, assuring them this is just routine and that their mother is in no way a suspect (as in: your mom’s just helping the police out) and this is not any sort of date.

There are now seven of us occupying approximately four square feet of floor space in my foyer. I invite him into the living room and the group moves like we are bound by bungee cords. I motion for him to sit but after the kids jump onto the sofa and my parents take the club chairs, he remembers that he actually hasn’t had a chance to stop for dinner and wonders if I would mind if he held the “interview” in a restaurant.

“Isn’t that a bit irregular?” my elder daughter asks. Her tone hints that she thinks the handsome detective is up to no good.

“A bit,” he admits with a smile that appears to win her over. “But pretty soon my stomach will be talking louder than my voice can cover.”

When Alyssa starts to list all the Yu-Gi-Oh cards she has, I acquiesce because going to dinner with Drew Scoones is not exactly abhorrent. And because the alternative—spending an evening with my mother—has the potential of landing both of us back at South Winds Psychiatric Center. And then, too, there are a few things I’d like to tell the good detective that I don’t want my kids to overhear.

Somehow we extricate ourselves, my father yelling down the walk after us to have a nice time and my mother fussing at him that we should do no such thing. Drew opens the car door for me, waits while I pull in my flowery skirt and wrestle with the seat belt. Then he closes me in.

As he slides into the driver’s seat, he says, “I just wanted to check up on you and see if anything else might have occurred to you now that you’ve had some time to come to yourself.”

“And you can’t get in trouble for this?” I ask.

“For what? Eating?” he says, trying to push me into defining it as something more than that.

I fumble with a few words and then, more forcefully, say that I don’t think there’s anything else, though I have thought about what might be important. I don’t tell him that I’ve also thought a lot about what might not be, like the rants in Elise’s journals.

“Well, let’s just grab a little something to eat, have a couple of beers, talk it out a bit,” he says. “Sometimes a little memory jog can produce the smallest thing. It’s always the smallest things that solve the biggest cases, you know.

“And you’re sharp,” he says. “Like about the dog knocking over the pills, and the alarm.”

“You knew all that,” I say, not about to be swayed by flattery. “Why pretend otherwise?”

He smiles shyly. “You never know. Sometimes it pays to be dumb.”

“Play dumb,” I correct. “Like on Columbo, when he asks all the murderers ‘Why’ and they come up with explanations that innocent people wouldn’t bother with?”

“I’ve got a wrinkled raincoat in the trunk,” he says with a shrug.

He pulls out of the driveway, his hand on the seat behind me as he backs up. If I sit any more erect, I’ll be kissing the windshield. He drives up to Christiano’s, a little Italian place in town that is supposedly the little Italian restaurant that Billy Joel made famous. Actually, I heard that after they’d put it on their menu and everything, one night Billy did a concert at Nassau Coliseum and refuted the whole rumor, just like that.

Everyone still believes it though. Sometimes people have a hard time letting go of mythology.

Anyway, they are nice to the regulars there, and I’ve been going there for years. The hostess’s eyebrows rise when she sees me without the kids or Bobbie. I suppose it’s Drew that’s raising her eyebrows. She says something like, “Don’t you look nice?” and gives me a covert thumbs-up behind Drew’s back as she takes us to a secluded table in the corner.

On the way, we pass half a dozen families I know, and they all notice Drew, and frankly I enjoy every minute of it. They don’t know that Drew isn’t interested in me, but only in what I might know.

For that matter, I don’t know that, either. I don’t stop at any of their tables and I know that at least three of the women will call Bobbie before I get home and just casually mention that they saw me. Is that Teddi’s cousin from L.A. I saw her with? So what are you having for dinner? I was just at Christiano’s. Yeah, I saw Teddi there…

He asks if I have any more pictures of the Meyers’s place, and I tell him that they are in my computer and that I can forward them to him at the precinct. He tells me his e-mail is on the card he gave me yesterday. I offer to give him my e-mail address, but he says he’s already got it.

Once we’ve ordered (linguini with clam sauce for him, a salad, which I won’t touch, for me), I ask if he ever thought I really was the murderer. He says they aren’t sure yet that there’s even been a murder. That’s the second time he’s evaded answering me about whether I’m a suspect.

“Do they know anything?” I ask.

“Well, they do know that she took a blow to the side of the head, just above the ear, and that the blow is what caused her death.”

“So then they do know she was murdered.” A waiter fills our water glasses and deposits a basket of warm garlic bread that smells divine and that I won’t touch because who wants bad breath? We are silent until he leaves, and then Drew says that she could have hit her head on the edge of the counter.

When I look at him skeptically he adds, “Okay. The M.E. says it’s consistent with being struck by a blunt object, like a metal pipe, or—”

“—a faucet.” So then, it’s true. I’m the one who bought the murder weapon. I paid for it. Well, technically, I suppose Jack Meyers has the bill, but I carried it in, I left it just where someone could pick it up and whack it into a living, breathing person’s skull. Elise’s skull.

“You okay?” Drew is half out of his seat, a hand on my arm. One of us is listing badly to one side. Apparently, it’s me.

I put my hand on my chest. “My faucet killed her.” I don’t want to think it’s amusement I see in Drew’s eyes, that cops really are as hardened to matters of life and death as Jerry Orbach always made them seem. I think it is.

“I don’t suppose you were wearing gloves when you brought it in?” he asks.

“Oh my God,” I say, as I realize that my fingerprints are on the murder weapon.

He tells me to relax—as if that’s possible—and explains that my prints will serve to show whether or not anyone touched it after me, and whether they then wiped my prints off along with theirs.

“Not that we’ve found it,” he says. “Yet. But we will.”

I ask if he’s going to fingerprint me, hiding my hands because of those two missing nail tips.

“Got ’em, sweetheart,” he says. I’ve never been fingerprinted, not even after the whole Rio fiasco, and it must show on my face. “The bottle of Scotch,” he says. “Can you believe the maid must have dusted the bottle? Yours were the only ones on it. They matched the ones on the glass you gave Jack Meyers. Of course, now we’ve got his, too.”

I decide that they did that to isolate Jack’s prints, and not because they suspect me. To be sure that this is the case, and because this is a murder investigation and there are things I know that the police should know, I decide I need to fill him in on a few things.

I take a deep breath. I do not like to carry tales, but… Our dinner comes and again we are silent until we are alone.

“You should understand…” I tell him off the bat “…that I am not a fan of cheating husbands. And that I might be overly suspicious and prejudiced, because of…well, my experience.”

“I know,” he says, and I get the feeling that this murder wasn’t the only investigating he did this afternoon. He nods, like yeah, I saw your file. I nod, too. Fine. I have nothing to be ashamed of, except my naiveté.

“Okay, so you know that I think Jack probably did it, alibi or not. I mean, even if it checks out, which I doubt it will, he could have hired someone, right?”

Drew’s elbow knocks his knife off the table and he bends down to pick it up. He makes a fairly big deal of getting the waiter’s attention to replace it, and it seems to me that it’s all some sort of diversionary tactic. I think about how you’re always hearing about hit men.

Only if Jack had hired a hit man to kill Elise, wouldn’t he have put himself center court at a Knicks game where a gazillion witnesses would have seen him? And wouldn’t the hit man have taken Elise’s ring and some other stuff to make it look like a robbery? When I ask him this, Drew appears noncommittal.

“So you’d say that their marriage was not exactly made in heaven?” he asks.

“Elise got along with maybe three people, and Jack wasn’t one of them. I don’t know who started the cheating, but it was like they were in a competition. I know she slept with one of their neighbors, a man who Jack owed money to. And I know that he slept with one of Elise’s friends.”

He waits for me to continue, sensing that there is more, and of course, there is.

Not able to look him in the eye, I tell my salad that, “She kept a score sheet. I saw it once—”

His eyes are penetrating and I refuse to look at him. I’m not guilty of anything, but I feel like he’s thinking that if I’d be friends with someone who would do that kind of thing, maybe I would. I suppose it’s no more of a stretch than me thinking every man has the potential to do what Rio did. And yes, I know there’s a lesson in here, but frankly I’m not really interested in it. My wounds haven’t healed yet, and I’m not about to start picking at the scabs.

He asks if I know where she kept the list, but I don’t. It wasn’t in the notebooks.

And then it occurs to me what was missing in Elise’s kitchen.

He asks if I can remember any names on the cheat sheet. “There were initials,” I say, but I’m trying to decide if I should tell him about the notebooks.

He asks if that’s all. There must be something about the way I say things. People always pick up vibes. He knows if he waits long enough I’ll divulge more.

“There were grades,” I say. “A, B…I don’t know if they were for performance or you know, like importance or something.” I have a feeling that my cheeks are redder than the checks on the tablecloth. I excuse myself to go to the ladies’ room while he ponders what Elise’s criteria might have been.

In the bathroom I dial up Bobbie on my old cell because I still haven’t programmed the new one my father gave me. “I think all her Shit Lists were gone,” I say.

“What are the bets Teddi Bayer and Bobbie Lyons are on them?” Bobbie asks.

“Seriously, Bobbie, there’s incriminating stuff in there. People’s darkest secrets.”

“Just Elise’s,” Bobbie says. “Right?”

“Wrong. She had plenty of dirt on other people. She had stuff that other people did that somehow she knew about. People who bought clothes at Saks, wore them and then returned them. People who left restaurants without paying.” Bobbie wants to know who, but instead of telling her I throw out a line to see if she’ll bite. “People, happily married people, who had affairs.”

Bobbie and I never ever mention her mistake. I don’t think we could be easy around each other if we acknowledged it. I don’t know who she cheated with and I don’t want to know. I know she felt she had to even the score after Mike had the affair and that she did.

“So how did you wind up with a friend like that?” Bobbie asks. Does she mean a friend who was happily married and had an affair, or does she mean Elise? “Teddi? You there?”

“Elise wasn’t a friend, she was a client. And I don’t know if I should tell Detective Scoones about the notebooks. I mean, I’m pretty sure she made some horrible accusations that could ruin people’s lives. Everyone would hate her for the rest of her—” I stop myself.

“—and even after that,” Bobbie adds.

“They could just all be lies,” I say, “but they could still do an awful lot of damage.”

Bobbie asks if I’m sure the notebooks are gone. “Only one way to be sure,” I say.

“You aren’t thinking of going back there?” Bobbie asks, and there is a slight quiver in her voice. I don’t know which one of us she is scared for.

I tell her I’ve gotta go, the detective is waiting, and I close the phone while she’s warning me that I could get into trouble.

When I return to the table Drew asks if everything is all right. Remind me never to play poker.

“So you were telling me about this list,” he says. This is my chance to come clean.

“What would you do if you found it?” I ask.

He gives me that intent look that demands that I tell him the truth. But first, I demand an answer.

“Up to the Department, I guess,” he says. Is that a warning? That he’d have to turn it over and it would be out of his hands?

I’ve already told him about the Jack and Elise Scorecard, so I reiterate that there were grades on it.

“And you said the grades might have been for importance?”

I explain that, first off, Jack had powerful clients and friends. There was a celebrity element. And then there was a one-upmanship sort of thing, a what-would-hurt-the-most, be-the-most-vindictive thing. Because I feel I’m withholding information, I wind up fumbling for the right words, hoping he won’t ask me for an example, which, of course, he does.

“I’m not saying she did this,” I say, making myself clear. “But like if Jack had a brother and they were sort of rivals and she were to sleep with the brother…”

He asks if Jack has a brother. I remind him it was just an example. He asks if Jack knew about the list, but I have to admit that I don’t know. He gives me a little smile and asks who was winning, and I’m not sure if he is joking or not.

“So your theory is that he was losing? Or maybe tiring of the game?” It’s a good question, except I don’t really have a theory. Just a suspect. And a burning need to get myself into Elise Meyers’s kitchen one more time.

“Maybe it was the only way he could win,” I suggest.

“Maybe,” he agrees. “But why hit her on the head when there are so many less traceable, less obvious ways to do her in?”

I ask what he means.

“Well, poison, for one,” he says. “A slow, untraceable poison that he could have, for example, put into capsules that she was taking anyway for some other condition.”

I ask if they found poison in the capsules that were on Elise’s floor.

“It was just an example,” he says.

Yeah. Right.

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