the next twenty years with a little help, and had graduated with honors from Sophie Newcomb. She'd intended to be a CPA. Then she'd married Gatledge, and all her mild ambition had been consumed in Catledge's flashy brilliance. Ellen had told me she'd been happy when their sons had been young, and happy when she worked at the bank for a few years while the boys were in high school; but Catledge had wanted her to quit when he'd been elected mayor, and she had. At one time, when we'd had to work together on the board of a charity, we'd felt rather close. But after our year on the board was up, it had seemed harder and harder for us to meet, and our brief closeness faded. "Roe, you just get prettier and prettier!" Ellen gushed.
"Oh, Ellen," I mumbled, embarrassed at her strange manner. Ellen's eyes had a glaze to them, and her hands moved nervously up and down the skirt of the dark blue-and-gold dress. The colors were becoming, but Ellen had lost even more weight and looked almost painfully thin. "What do you hear from your boys?" I asked.
"Jefferson's tenth in the senior class at Georgia Tech, and Tally is ... working on a special study in Tennessee." Despite her hesitation over nineteen-year-old Tally's current occupation, Ellen was like most mothers in her pleasure in talking about her children, and my questions kept our conversation rolling along until Mrs. Esther came in to announce dinner. Martin and I exchanged discreet glances.
Lucinda Esther is a notable personality in Lawrenceton, and the fact that the Lowrys had hired her to produce this meal surprised us. This was not a dinner on which some important deal depended; this was not a crucial social event. Hiring Mrs. Esther always signaled that the meal was significant, perhaps when the parents of the bride entertained the parents of the groom for the first time, or when an important newcomer was welcomed into an affluent home. Maybe, in this instance, it meant the hostess was not capable of producing a suitable meal.
Standing with massive dignity in a starched gray uniform with a white apron, Mrs. Esther said, "Dinner is served." She did not meet our eyes or wait for a reaction, but strode back into the kitchen, her dark face still impassive, her chin proudly up. The heavy gold hoops in her pierced ears swayed as she walked. Mrs. Esther didn't serve. She placed the food ready on the table and remained in the kitchen until it was time to clean up. And she almost always prepared a menu she'd decided on herself. Tonight she'd picked chicken baked in a white sauce, green beans, homemade rolls, sweet potato casserole, and a tossed salad. Calories and cholesterol were not considerations in Mrs. Esther's catering business.
After we'd all passed the dishes around, which was a pretty effective icebreaker, Martin asked me to tell Catledge what had happened in our backyard that afternoon.
As I turned it into an amusing vignette, without the element of anxiety that had given the incident its edge, naturally I glanced from Gatledge to Ellen and back. Catledge was at the end of the table to my left and Ellen was opposite me. Their reactions were more intriguing than the story. Catledge was shaken, visibly upset; Ellen thought the whole episode was vastly amusing. I'd have sworn Catledge would laugh and Ellen would worry. This reversal was very interesting.
To my further fascination, Catledge cut the ensuing discussion off at the knees. I was just sure as sure can be that ordinarily Catledge would spend a good fifteen minutes speculating about who'd "spiked" Darius Quattermain's acetaminophen. Yet here he was, trying to shunt the conversation into the ongoing battle between two factions of the library board. I shot a significant look at Martin while Ellen was fetching more tea from the kitchen and Catledge had excused himself.
I can't let puzzling behavior go by without picking it apart to discover its cause. Suddenly I wondered if Ellen had been the unnamed woman who'd been sabotaged by the medicine switcher.
I was pleased with the idea, the more I hammered it out. Twitchy Ellen was very likely to have tranquilizers in her purse. She was certainly abnormally serene tonight. Perhaps Catledge feared staying on the subject of Darius Quattermain because he thought Ellen likely to reveal her own little episode of similarly bizarre behavior? He would hate it to be known Ellen took "nerve pills." The silence