A Bone to Pick Page 0,35

would be saying the same thing if she could. Actually, this was rather interesting. Would Madeleine mind if I watched? Apparently not, because she didn't hiss or claw at me when I sat on the floor just outside the closet and kept her company. Of course Parnell Engle had been fully aware of Madeleine's impending motherhood, hence his merriment when I'd told him Madeleine could stay with me. I pondered that for a few seconds, trying to decide if Parnell and I were even now. Maybe so, for Madeleine had had three kittens already, and there seemed to be more on the way.

I kept telling myself this was the miracle of birth. It sure was messy. Madeleine had my complete sympathy. She gave a final heave, and out popped another tiny, slimy kitten. I hoped two things: that this was the last kitten and that Madeleine didn't run into any difficulties, because I was the last person in the world who could offer her any help. After a few minutes, I began to think both my hopes had been fulfilled. Madeleine cleaned the little things, and all four lay there, occasionally making tiny movements, eyes shut, about as defenseless as anything could be.

Madeleine looked at me with the weary superiority of someone who has bravely undergone a major milestone. I wondered if she were thirsty; I got her water bowl and put it near her, and her food bowl, too. She got up after a moment and took a drink but didn't seem too interested in her food. She settled back down with her babies and looked perfectly all right, so I left her and went to sit in the living room. I stared at the bookshelves and wondered what in hell I would do with four kittens. On a shelf separate from those holding all the fictional and nonfictional murders, I saw several books about cats. Maybe that was what I should dip into next.

Right above the cat shelf was Jane's collection of books about Madeleine Smith, the Scottish poisoner, Jane's favorite. All of us former members of Real Murders had a favorite or two. My mother's new husband was a Lizzie Borden expert. I tended to favor Jack the Ripper, though I had by no means attained the status of Ripperologist.

But Jane Engle had always been a Madeleine Smith buff. Madeleine had been released after her trial after receiving the Scottish verdict "Not Proven," wonderfully accurate. She had almost certainly poisoned her perfidious former lover, a clerk, so she could marry into her own respectable upper-middle-class milieu without the clerk's revealing their physical intimacy. Poison was a curiously secret kind of revenge; the hapless L'Angelier had deceived himself that he was dealing with an average girl of the time, though the ardency of her physical expressions of love should have proved to him that Madeleine had a deep vein of passion. That passion extended to keeping her name clean and her reputation intact. L'Angelier threatened to send Madeleine's explicit love letters to her father.

Madeleine pretended to effect a reconciliation, then slipped arsenic into L'Angelier's cup of chocolate.

For lack of anything better to do, I pulled out one of the Smith books and began to flip through it. It fell open right away. There was a yellow Post-it note stuck to the top of the page.

It said, in Jane's handwriting, I didn't do it.

Chapter 7

SEVEN

I DIDN'T DO IT.

The first thing I felt was overwhelming relief. Jane, who had left me so much, had not left me holding the bag, so to speak, on a murder she herself had committed.

She had left me in the position of concealing the murder someone else had committed, a murder Jane also had concealed, for reasons I could not fathom. I had believed the only question I had to answer was Whose skull? Now I had also to find out who put the hole in that skull.

Was my situation really any better? No, I decided after some consideration. My conscience weighed perhaps an ounce less. The question of going to the police took on a different slant now that I would not be accusing Jane of murder by taking in the skull. But she'd had something to do with it. Oh, what a mess! Not for the first (or the last) time, I wished I could have five minutes' conversation with Jane Engle, my benefactress and my burden. I tried to think of the money, to cheer myself up; I reminded myself that